Before the crows arrive at dawn, I meditate. Sometimes a green frog serenades me from a lotus tub next to the porch. I call him Frogmouth. His lazy, companionable croaks soothe me as I sit in the dark stillness and watch my thoughts scurry and disappear. When I’m done, the first bird chirps. Dawn arrives. With it comes the raucous din of the crow family. It all began with a single crow and my bird bath. About forty feet from the porch the bird bath sits on a structure made of concrete and rocks. On top, a flat surface surrounds the bowl of water. The crow allowed as how the top of the bird bath seemed as fine a spot as any for a meal. I complied. And so it began. “Crow, Crow,” I’d sing. He’d answer, “Caw, Caw!” and fly off from the bird bath with peanuts, two at a time. By and by, he introduced a mate. Now I enjoy the whole family including two bickering and complaining youngsters. The family has left me love gifts, including small cleaned white bones, and shiny tin foil. Vocal, playful, and magical, these birds are a blessing. By the time my husband and my three dogs get up I have already meditated with Frogmouth and exchanged friendship with crows. Remember what Samwise Gamgee said in The Lord of the Rings? “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” My morning ritual of quiet gratitude and love of wild things -that’s worth fighting for. It’s the passion and motivation for non-violent resistance. Indeed, moments of calm and clarity balance the urgency many feel in these disturbing times.

As I write this, Earth just experienced the hottest month on record, July 2023. Ocean water temperatures at Florida beaches topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists race to save coral reefs by removing them to artificial environments so they won’t die off. The arctic melts. In Texas, maga republican governor Greg Abbott ordered that no extra water breaks will be allowed for people working outside in 115 degree heat. In Texas state prisons people are dropping from heat exhaustion. Prisoners are taken to an air conditioned room and plied with water for an hour then sent back to population —with no air conditioning. Maui’s wildfire swept through the city of Lahaina on hurricane winds. People were incinerated as they tried to evacuate. The death toll climbs above one hundred as the dogs continue to sniff for survivors. One thousand people are missing. Three thousand pets are missing. The city’s banyan tree, planted in 1873, stands severely damaged.

The effects of climate change alone would be horrifying enough. Alas, extremist republican legislatures in red states across the country compound the bad news with harsh and unpopular new laws. I’ll start with Arkansas, my current home. Fourteen-year-olds can now work in meat packing plants and twelve-year-olds can be forced to give birth. The Attorney General wants to put librarians, teachers, and booksellers in prison for up to six years for suggesting banned books to minors. The maga legislature decided to defund black history for Advanced Placement (AP) classes. Any pregnancy that doesn’t end in birth looks suspicious to the fundamentalist Christians in charge. The Attorney General joined zealot AG’s in other red states and presented a letter to President Biden. They expressed the desire to send police to track women seeking abortion care out of state.

Alabama muzzled health care providers from even discussing out of state reproductive options with patients.

Idaho has forbidden professors at the university level from teaching about abortion, even historically.

In Mississippi a thirteen year old was forced to give birth after a rape. Her family could not afford the trip to Chicago for her care. The police say they are still investigating the rape and have not determined whether it was consensual. It’s hard to express the cruelty and indecency here.

The epicenter of right wing authoritarianism continues to be Florida, under the maga governor DeSantis. His anti-woke law allowed, for instance, a white nationalist mom to veto Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem, “The Hill We Climb” for an entire school district. Shakespeare will soon be pulled from school shelves. AP black and gender studies –cancelled. In the state’s middle schools, lessons now include the idea that enslavement provided vocational training, and was therefore beneficial to slaves. The state authorized Prager University Foundation (PragerU) to provide teaching materials to public school grades K-12. It’s not a university. It’s a right wing propaganda non-profit. On their videos you can learn how to counter pro-choice advocates. Cartoon characters blithely wonder whether the colonization of natives was really all that bad. You can learn climate denial arguments. In fact, I bet you didn’t know that climate activists have a lot in common with WW2 era nazis (yes, really!). And feminism? –it’s mean spirited and oppressive. PragerU calls itself an alternative to left wing ideology. They founder admits the videos indoctrinate kids. Florida is re-writing history. An entire generation will get dumbed-down by state sponsored propaganda. Censoring books and revising history is an attempt to shape the next generation to be more receptive to republican authoritarians. Gen Z certainly is not receptive.

Some republicans, by the way, are so afraid of Gen Z they want to raise the voting age to twenty five.

At a Trump rally this summer in South Carolina, an eleven year old girl was asked why she loved Trump. “Because he tells the truth,” she said. That child’s answer brings us to the crux of the matter. The eleven year old doesn’t know better. The problem is her parents, maga cult members. They are indoctrinating their daughter to love a sexual predator, a pathological liar, an indicted criminal –a monster. The parents, probably non college educated, never learned critical thinking. They consume Fox or OANN —never any fact-checked media. These are the people controlling local school boards. They are the Moms For Liberty extremists who veto works of literature all over the red states. These are the true believers who applaud the deceptively tepid white Christian nationalism of PragerU. As Trump’s legal problems mount, some members of this cult threaten judges, prosecutors, and grand jury members —anyone they perceive is against Trump— with harm, even death. The people who beat police officers and shat on the floor of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 came from this group. We have millions of maga cultists in the US -maybe 30% of the population. And the republican politicians bow to them at every turn.

The maga movement, like the McCarthy era of the 20th century, is heartless and single minded. Knowing they don’t have the numbers to win, maga politicians seek the power of the minority over the majority. The maga citizens, in their ignorance, enforce the anti-democratic minority rule. That’s why maga leaders must be vanquished at the ballot box. The various dystopian state laws against women, transgender children and their families, and books must be struck down in courts. If not, we are looking at authoritarianism American style, with loud under-educated maga citizens controlling what we read. Right wing autocrats like DeSantis or Trump will eradicate leftists and root out the fact-checking media. Private choices about our bodies and the freedom to love who we want —a thing of the past. They will take away the right of women, nationwide, to decide when, and with whom, they start a family. We all need to resist this future. It’s not democracy, but theocracy. It’s fascism.

Now for the better news, and the reasons I’m not applying for asylum in Norway or Iceland. Donald Trump is facing four indictments with ninety one total felonies against him. The federal prosecutor Jack Smith has indicted him for election fraud in the 2020 election —as has the Georgia state prosecutor Fani Willis. These are the important cases; Trump has poisoned America with his coup-plotting lies. A few republicans have dipped a toe in the truth lake to test the water. Finally, they admit the 2020 election was free and fair, and Trump lost. They are late. And they are in the minority in their party. Anyway, some of them are growing vertebrae. In Arkansas, a literate federal judge struck down the book ban. He quoted a banned book, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.” Beautiful. Also in Arkansas, in a refreshing middle finger to magas, the Little Rock and Jonesboro school districts stated they would offer black history AP classes against the will of the state. Young people, men, women, liberals and conservatives are turning out in droves to vote for reproductive rights. So far, every ballot initiative aiming to take away women’s rights has been squashed in both red and blue states. Fox paid out 787.5 million dollars to Dominion Voting Systems for lying about the election. The maga house caucus continues to shoot itself in the foot. What a clown car ride. Senate maga Tommy Tuberville is blocking almost 300 military promotions to protest the Pentagon’s abortion policy. Veteran’s are appalled, and are speaking out. Two respected legal minds, former federal judge Michael Ludig and constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe, published an article together in the Atlantic. They believe the constitution supports barring Trump from becoming president again –even without a conviction.

Samwise Gamgee said, “But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it’ll shine out the clearer.”

The maga era will pass like the McCarthy era before it —only if we act. Freedom and democracy are no longer a given.

Pre-dawn meditation, a love of the natural world and this earthly life, and friendship with crows -these guide my choices every day. As the opportunity presents, I choose to tell the truth, kindly. By kindly I mean carefully. For instance, if I walk up to an armed maga stepping out of a Trump truck in the Walmart parking lot and say, “Hey you got bamboozled by disinformation, and the guy you think is God’s flawed emissary on earth is a narcissistic con man who has lied to you from the get go” —it won’t work. And I just put myself in danger. The truth is unkind, and dangerous to impart. So I’m kind to myself. I pick the time, place, and audience for hard truths. Also, I volunteer at the library because I love books the way crows love shiny things. Working at the library puts me on the front lines in case the state pushes the book ban law. Perhaps an underground banned book network is in my future. I keep informed using fact-checked sources, which include The NY Times, The Atlantic, and various streaming mainstream media. When I encounter a maga cultist I politely avoid them. Abortion laws make me sick and angry, but I breathe and stand ready to drive a woman to Kansas if she needs care. For opinions I listen to never-maga conservatives as well as liberals, from The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to John Fugelsang —all part of the pro-democracy coalition. I fancy myself a member. I vote. I write articles. Please pass this along if you like. And let me know what you’re doing for democracy and for our country.

Laurel Owen / August 2023