There is a wrecking ball swinging through this country, and you can hear it every morning. Something else has been hit by the time people wake up. A research program. An environmental protection. A civil rights office. A woman's right to make decisions about her own body. A family trying to stay together. A scientist who spent fifteen years studying something that might save lives. A kid who just wants to go to school and be left the fuck alone. Then the ball swings back ~ and everyone knows it is coming again. Nobody knows exactly where it will land.
That's what living in America feels like right now.
A wrecking ball doesn't care how long something took to build. That's the thing about it. It doesn't know whether the wall in front of it took six months or sixty years to put there. It doesn't know who carried the bricks, who fought for the money, who drew the plans or who spent their life making sure the thing would still be standing long after they were gone. It just swings.
And sitting at the controls is Donald Trump. Around him is an entire regime keeping the machine running. They fuel it, maintain it, clear the path in front of it and make damn sure nothing gets in the way. Trump may be the one pulling the lever ~ but it takes a whole lot of fucking people to keep a wrecking ball swinging.
Science has been standing in its path. Researchers have watched grants disappear, projects collapse and institutions that took generations to build get ripped apart. People who study cancer, infectious diseases, climate, medicine and the basic fucking question of how the world works have had their careers and research thrown into chaos because the people holding the wrecking ball decided expertise itself was something worth attacking.
Then it swings toward public health, education, the environment and civil rights. Every few days there is another cloud of dust ~ and before it even settles, everyone is looking toward whatever is about to be hit next.
It takes so long to build something, and almost no time at all to destroy it. A scientist can spend twenty years studying one disease. A laboratory can take decades to build its research and reputation. Entire public health systems are built by generations of doctors, nurses, researchers and people whose names most of us will never know. Years and years of work ~ and somebody sitting behind a desk can sign a piece of paper and tear through all of it in an afternoon.
And the people swinging this thing didn't build what they're destroying. They weren't there when polio wards were filled with children. They weren't the scientists who spent years trying to understand why those children were becoming paralyzed, or the ones who developed the vaccines that eventually made those wards disappear. They inherited a country where most parents could take their kid for a shot and never spend another second thinking about an iron lung.
That's what success looked like. It looked boring. It looked like a pediatrician appointment. It looked like a parent putting a Band-Aid on a kid's arm and stopping for ice cream on the way home. Generations of science reduced something terrifying to something ordinary ~ and now the wrecking ball is swinging close enough to childhood vaccines that parents are once again having conversations previous generations worked their asses off to make unnecessary.
There are pieces of this country that became ordinary for the same reason. Clean water became ordinary because people fought over what companies were allowed to dump into it. Clean air became ordinary because Americans got sick of breathing fucking smog. Workplace safety became ordinary because workers were crushed, burned, poisoned and killed before protections existed. Civil rights became law because people marched knowing they could be beaten for doing it. Women have rights today because other women lived without them.
None of this came free. Every one of those bricks ~ the rights, the protections, the laws, the scientific breakthroughs, the institutions ~ was put there because somebody fought to put it there. And there are bodies underneath some of them. People died waiting for the country to become better than it was. People were jailed. People were beaten. People lost jobs and families. People spent their entire careers studying problems they knew they might never solve. And then they handed the next generation what they managed to build.
We inherited it without having to remember all of the pain that came before it ~ that's supposed to be how progress works.
Children shouldn't have to experience every horror their grandparents experienced just so they understand why protections exist. A generation shouldn't have to watch a river catch fire to understand why pollution laws matter. Women shouldn't have to lose control over their bodies to remember why women fought for that control. Black Americans shouldn't have to watch civil rights protections disappear to prove why those protections were necessary in the first fucking place.
We were supposed to remember ~ instead, the wrecking ball keeps swinging.
It is hitting women's rights, and doctors are calling lawyers before treating pregnant patients. It is hitting immigrant communities, where children are afraid somebody might take their parents. It is hitting queer and trans people, with kids listening to adults in the federal government discuss their existence like it is some national fucking emergency. It is hitting science, public education, voting rights, federal workers, public health, libraries, museums and universities ~ institutions and people most Americans rarely had to think about precisely because they were there doing their jobs.
And the wrecking ball just keeps hitting and hitting and hitting.
And then it turns toward the planet: That's the hit we don't get to rebuild from so easily. Even if a government agency is eventually restaffed, even if research is funded again, even if an office reopens and even if laws are rewritten, some of what they're destroying can still be rebuilt. It may take years. It may take generations. But there is still a chance to rebuild it. The planet doesn't give us that same chance. A species that disappears is gone. An old-growth forest that took centuries to grow doesn't come back because Americans elect somebody different four years later. A glacier doesn't give a shit who won the midterms ~ and the ocean doesn't care which party controls Congress.
There are things this wrecking ball can hit that by the time we realize how much we've lost, it will already be too late ~ and they are swinging it anyway.
Every ton of carbon stays part of the story. Every acre lost matters. Every year wasted becomes another year future generations don't get back. And still the ball swings. Environmental protections are treated like inconveniences. Climate science is treated like politics. Fossil fuels get another embrace while the planet keeps warming, forests keep burning and communities keep learning what it feels like to pack their lives into cars because somebody told them the fire might reach their house by morning.
Somewhere, a child is being born today, and that child could live to see 2100. Think about that for a second. The people making decisions about the planet right now will mostly be dead long before that child reaches old age. The politicians signing the papers won't be here for the hottest decades that child may experience. They won't have to explain why coastlines changed, why another species disappeared or why wildfire smoke became part of summer.
That child will. Their children will. They don't get a seat at the table where their future is being spent.
And that is why the wrecking ball feels like the perfect metaphor for what is happening right now ~ because there is a difference between neglecting the future and knowingly fucking destroying pieces of it.
We know what climate change does. We know what pollution does. We know what happens when diseases return. We know why civil rights laws were written, why women fought for bodily autonomy, why workers needed protections and why scientists need independence. We know.
That's what makes this so fucking enraging.
This isn't humanity wandering through the dark trying to figure things out for the first time. We already fought these fights. We already learned these lessons. We already built protections because we knew what happened without them. We have the records, the studies, the laws, the photographs, the court decisions, the books and entire government agencies built around lessons learned the hardest possible way. All of it carries the history of what happened before ~ and why people fought so hard to make sure it didn't happen again.
And now the people in power are taking a fucking wrecking ball to all of it ~ for their own power, their own profit and their own fucking agenda.
How the fuck are we not screaming about this? Researchers spent lifetimes building bodies of work, and now some of those programs are disappearing. Women spent decades fighting for rights they hoped their granddaughters would never have to fight for again, and now those granddaughters are right back in the same fucking fight. Communities fought for years to protect the water their children drink, only to watch those protections get brushed aside as “regulation.” People fought their entire lives believing the generation coming after them would have more freedom than they did ~ and now some of those freedoms are right back on the fucking ballot.
How the fuck are we not all screaming?
The people before us built this country one brick at a time. Scientists spent lifetimes adding to what we know. Women organized for rights they might never live long enough to fully see. Workers fought for protections. Civil rights activists marched. Environmentalists fought for clean air and water. Queer and trans people refused to disappear. None of it happened all at once. It was built slowly ~ generation after generation, one fucking brick at a time.
And now there is dust everywhere. Something comes down on Monday. Something else is hit on Tuesday. By Friday, Monday feels like it happened six months ago because the wrecking ball has already moved on. People still have jobs to do, kids to raise, groceries to buy, bills to pay, dinners to make and lives to live while all of this is happening around them.
The dust from one hit barely has time to settle before the next one comes down. Brick by brick took generations ~ the dust takes seconds.
The wrecking ball can never become background noise ~ because underneath that rubble are things human beings fought like hell to give us. They didn't build a perfect country or hand us a finished world. They left enormous injustices behind, and there was still so much building left to do. But they gave us something to build from ~ that was our inheritance.
And somewhere ahead of us are people who will inherit whatever we leave standing ~ children who aren't born yet will drink the water, breathe the air, live under the laws, learn from the science and walk through whatever forests are left. They will have bodies that need medical care, families they want protected and lives they want to live freely. They will never meet us, just like the people who built so much of what we inherited never met us.
They built it anyway ~ because that's what human beings are supposed to do. You leave something standing for the people coming next.
So fuck the wrecking ball. Fuck everyone taking a swing because destroying something is easier than understanding why it was built. Fuck everyone looking at generations of human work and deciding it belongs to them to tear down. And fuck the idea that the rest of us are supposed to get used to the sound of everything crashing down around us ~ like eventually we won't even hear it anymore. We know what is underneath that rubble ~ and we know how many generations it took to build what they're tearing down.
A Little Note From Me:
With everything I’ve been writing about, researching and seeing day after day, I’ve been feeling so enraged. I wanted to write something that actually expressed that feeling ~ not just another article about everything that’s happening, but what it feels like to watch so much of what generations before us fought for being torn apart.
And that’s when this image of a wrecking ball came into my head. Just this massive wrecking ball tearing through everything, one thing after another, while the dust from the last hit is still settling. Once I had that image in my head, the whole piece just kind of came from there.
I hope this piece gives some words to what you’re feeling too, and helps you know that you’re not alone in this rage.
And I really appreciate all of you being here with me ~ reading, sharing, commenting and continuing to show up. I’m so proud of the little community we’ve built here, especially because it’s a community that refuses to look away even when looking away would be a hell of a lot easier.
If you appreciate writing like this, along with my daily attempts to keep track of whatever fresh chaos we’ve been handed, please consider upgrading to paid for $5 a month. Every paid subscription helps get me a little closer to being able to do this work full-time. ❤️
~ Judith
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