Spending More Money on New Nukes Is a Moral Obscenity

The world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge.


Four service members pose at Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station in Colorado on February 15, 2024
(Photo by US Air Force)

William Astore
Dec 02, 2025

TomDispatch

It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new chief of staff of the Air Force. Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)

In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: It will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.

At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.

I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite

My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.

Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.

I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation, and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded—perhaps too crowded.)

It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal.

Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.

Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.

That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.

Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the US and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.

Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.

If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.

My Date With Trinity

After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.

And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends,” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.

Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.

The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons

That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the US military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.

Take it from this retired officer: You simply can’t trust the US military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:
I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.


I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.

Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.

Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense—even world-ending—power.

The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.

© 2023 TomDispatch.com

William Astore
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), who has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and he taught History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
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Trump Commands Venezuela’s Heavens Closed

by Roger D. Harris / December 1st, 2025

US President Trump ordered the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela “closed in its entirety” on November 29.

Yet the US has as much legal and moral authority to shutter the skies over Venezuela as the Venezuelans have to close the putting greens at Mar-a-Lago. Yes, that’s ridiculous – but not any more so than Washington’s phony pretext of drug interdiction for their deadly regime-change offensive against Venezuela.

To date, the Yankee military has murdered over 80 people in alleged “drug boats” in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific but has yet to confiscate a single milligram of narcotics from Venezuela. The Venezuelan authorities, in contrast, have seized 64 tons of cocaine this year that were being transited through their country and have done so without killing a single person.

However, Venezuela’s interdiction pales in comparison to the 400 tons of cocaine smuggled into the US enabled by one Juan Orlando Hernández, according to the US Department of Justice. Hernández is a former Honduran president and right-wing Washington ally. He was convicted in a US jury trial for running his country like a narco state, taking bribes from Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

The day before Trump “closed” Venezuela’s airspace as part of his so-called “crackdown on drug cartels,” he announced his intention to pardon convicted cartel-enabler Hernández, who is serving a 45-year sentence at a penitentiary in West Virginia.

If Washington succeeds in blocking air travel to Venezuela, the action has an added cruelty. It coincides with the winter holidays, when overseas Venezuelans would return home to visit family. Many of these migrants are economic refugees, driven from their homeland largely by the US’s unilateral coercive measures designed to asphyxiate Venezuela’s economy.

The CEO of America’s empire has ambitions for vast powers and now claims dominion over the firmaments. Yet the US Congress has not approved his no-fly zone, nor has any international authority such as the United Nations – and certainly not the host country, which under international law has sole control over its airspace. Even David Deptula, the retired general who enforced a no-fly zone in Iraq, questioned Trump’s declaration.

Such an act constitutes a blockade and, as such, is considered an act of war; more precisely, an escalation of an ongoing hybrid war against Venezuela.

The offensive has taken many forms – unilateral economic sanctions, coup and assassination attempts, a dual government, diplomatic intrigue, election interference, an astroturf opposition, and a psychological pressure campaign by compliant corporate press. The hybrid war is as deadly as a hot war, having taken over 100,000 lives by denying essential food, medicines, and fuel to the most vulnerable, according to a United Nations special rapporteur.

But Washington’s quarter-century siege of Venezuela has “failed” in its objective of regime-change. For the imperial hegemon, the success of the Venezuelan resistance has led it to push its campaign to the brink of military invasion with the no-fly zone declaration serving as an ominous harbinger.

The political leadership of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution includes President Nicolás Maduro, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. These officials are distasteful to Trump and Rubio. The US State Department State Department designated them as leaders of a “foreign terrorist organization,” the Cartel de los Soles.

But then again, the current US president is distasteful to 60% of his constituents. And the so-called Cartel de los Soles doesn’t exist.

In 2002, the US backed an abortive coup that attempted to overthrow then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who was restored to power by a spontaneous uprising of the people. That event had a century-old precedent, as Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist María Paez Victor recalls:

In 1902, English and German gunboats attacked Venezuela and their marines invaded. The Europeans were demanding payment of outrageous loans their banks had forced upon the country. The president, Cypriano Castro, had no money and hardly any armed forces. But he appealed directly to the people in a Proclamation that became a historic monument to the love of Venezuelans for their country.

Its opening sentence is a call to defend the land from invaders: “Venezuelans, the insolent foot of the Stranger has profaned the sacred soil of our Homeland.”

People rushed with whatever arms they could lay their hands on. Even our newly sainted doctor, José Gregorio Hernández, a veritable man of peace, rushed to give aid to the wounded. The foreign marines were routed – they had never expected such a firm, unbeatable stand. They thought it would be a piece of cake; they were deadly wrong.

Washington now stands at a crossroads of its own making. Having failed to crush Venezuela through sanctions, coups, diplomatic isolation, economic strangulation, and psychological warfare, it now toys with measures that violate the Zone of Peace, proclaimed by the 33 members nations of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

The US attempt to impose a no-fly zone exposes a desperate imperial drive for domination. The Bolivarian Revolution, having endured more than 25 years of siege, remains rooted in the same collective resolve that once repelled foreign gunboats and reversed the 2002 coup. Should Washington escalate further, it will not confront a compliant colony, but a nation prepared to defend its airspace, institutions, and sovereignty – joined by a genuine international community in solidarity.

Meanwhile CNN reports “massive disapproval” of Trump’s Venezuela policy, and the Simón Bolívar Airport is operating normally.

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Roger D. Harris was an international observer for Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. He is with the US Peace Council and the Task Force on the Americas. Read other articles by Roger.

On Being Female in a Potentially Fascist Country

Andrea Mazzarino

 December 1, 2025

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Image by Jørgen Håland.

It’s strange so many years later, in the United States of America, to feel as if I’m living in a country threatening to become like the Russia of Vladimir Putin that I spent years experiencing earlier in this century. To start, let me tell you a little something about that.

For decades as a young adult, I lived and traveled in Russia. I was an anthropology doctoral student and human rights worker, studying the effects of President Vladimir Putin’s centralizing policies and that country’s Christian nationalist media on the everyday lives of Russians. In one of my last projects, I investigated the government’s practice of separating kids with disabilities (and poorer kids generally) from their parents and detaining them in closed institutions. My report detailed how much changes in society when the government excludes swaths of the population from basic services like healthcare, education, and even just access to city streets. The answer? Everything.

That marginalization was part of a governing process aimed at further enriching the wealthiest few and those in power. It reflected the leadership of figures lacking a basic understanding of what all people need and deserve. I consider that a hallmark of a fascist regime.

One of my last evenings in Russia was a chilly November night in 2014 in the northern city of St. Petersburg. Mothers and children, grandparents and teenagers alike stepped with care to avoid slipping on black ice and bumping into (and possibly falling thanks to) large plastic advertisements for fast food, clothing, cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery, and even IVF treatments sticking up like weeds on the cobblestoned sidewalks of the city’s center.

Those glowing placards seemed to replace what had once been a slew of different kinds of people when I first traveled to Russia as a college student in the late 1990s. In the same central train stations of that city, old women then sold carrots and beets from cardboard boxes they had lugged from their country homes. Young women could sometimes be seen in bikinis and stiletto heels (even in that weather!) with beer advertisements scrawled across their chests. Uzbek and Tajik men scrambled to finish construction on new stores, restaurants, and apartment buildings before winter set in. Roma mothers, their babies strapped to their backs in jewel-toned scarves, begged for money for food and housing.

Sometimes, when traffic grew too congested for their liking, Russia’s newly rich — aptly dubbed “New Russians” in the country’s popular press — drove their luxury Mercedes and BMWs onto the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians like me, along with mothers pushing strollers and a few wind-worn men and women hurrying to work, to scatter in panic. Despite the chaos and a significant amount of deprivation (more on that later), for many I met then, much seemed possible, including working for ever larger companies, migration, and new luxuries. Electronic remixes of Western songs like “If I Were a Rich Girl” and Cher’s “Believe” blasted from vendors’ tinny sounding boom boxes on repeat.

By the time of my last trip to Russia in 2014, however, shiny buildings had been built, older ones renovated, and developers with close ties to Russia’s political elite were even richer, thanks to the country’s growing oil wealth. Roma (or gypsy) families were no longer anywhere to be seen, as St. Petersburg’s government had conducted “purges” of the city’s informal Roma settlements. Nor were old women selling their wares on the streets, while Central Asian migrants from poorer countries to Russia’s south seemed ever fewer and less visible during the busiest times. Indeed, local authorities were rounding them up and detaining them without warrants, based on appearance and language alone. (Sound familiar?)

Having spent years interviewing families who could no longer access this new cityscape with their kids who used wheelchairs or were blind or deaf, all I could think was:  I’m lucky to be able to go home to the United States.

That last night in 2014, I was also nearing the end of the first trimester of my first pregnancy. I rubbed my still barely visible baby bump as I spotted an old friend from St. Petersburg who was waiting to meet me for dinner at a nearby cafe. As I sat down with her, a waitress approached our table. She noted my American accent and told me with gentle, motherly scorn that I shouldn’t be traveling while pregnant. As if on cue, stomach cramps made me double up. After a trip to the restroom revealed that I was bleeding, I started to wonder if the waitress had been right. Was it possible that my relentless travel had caused me to miscarry — and in a country where I knew women sometimes faced withering criticism and blame for poor pregnancy outcomes? Just stay with me until I go home, I implored the baby I carried.

At least, my friend understood. Before she gave birth to her healthy son in the 1990s, when Russia’s newly privatized healthcare system included few viable options for working-class women, it took exhausted, overworked doctors weeks after she started feeling sick during her first pregnancy to determine that the baby inside her had actually died. She had an abortion without anesthesia and returned to her teaching job right away to make ends meet. And stories like hers were anything but unique then.

Politicized Reproductive Health

By 2014, urgent-care clinics and hospitals were plentiful enough in large cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow, but many were exorbitantly expensive even for young Americans like me. Worse yet, the attitudes of medical workers toward women who couldn’t or wouldn’t have babies had not exactly softened under a president — Vladimir Putin, of course — known for describing women as “guardians of the hearth and linchpins of large families with many children.”

Fearing the worst, my friend snapped into action, calling around to several acquaintances until one located an obstetrician she trusted who traveled from her home on the outskirts of the city to a clinic downtown.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet empire, the International Monetary Fund and other international lenders pushed Russia to slash public spending and rapidly privatize state functions as part of the deal for their crucial loans to a society then in trouble. In the end, such changes dismantled the Soviet Union’s social safety net, including universal healthcare.

Well-connected elites carved up many of the remaining state assets and used them for their own private gain. Included in Russia’s newly privatized healthcare system were private clinics for the ultra-wealthy offering hotel-like amenities, including private rooms, hot tea, and soft background music. Ordinary Russians who couldn’t afford such ritzy private services used the remaining state clinics, though they were often overcrowded, undersupplied, and understaffed in the austere new world so many Russians had no choice but to navigate, especially outside the big cities. What’s more, as anthropologist Michele Rivkin-Fish has pointed out, private healthcare facilities didn’t mean better quality care, as medical workers and all kinds of public figures tended to encourage married, racially White (Slavic) Russian women to have more children, no matter the dignity and long-term health of women in Russia more broadly.

It would be an understatement to say that, by the time I left there in 2014, politics infused every aspect of Russian life. I’ll never forget, for instance, that a colleague of mine, who researched military abuses against ethnic minorities in Russia’s southernmost republics, had to leave the country to give birth after she received threatening anonymous text messages claiming that she and her unborn child were linked to Islamic insurgents in that part of the country.

While I had some reason to be afraid myself in that context, I wasn’t nearly high profile enough to truly worry and I was lucky as well. After all, my friend had a friend who indeed had a doctor she trusted. So, in the end, I was able to get an ultrasound, which showed that I still had a healthy pregnancy.

I traveled back to the U.S. and gave birth to my son the very same day that Donald Trump descended that golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president of the United States (claiming that thousands of people were awaiting him below when only a few score were there) and launched his bid on the claim that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the United States.

Nah, I thought, as I watched the cooing baby in my arms. Probably won’t happen. I took my boy home and, being a military spouse, struggled with the military health insurance system, Tricare (aka Try-For-Care), to get coverage for basic costs like a breast pump. (No such luck, because, as an insurance rep told me, I was supposed to stay home and breastfeed him directly.) As for medicine for a common mouth infection in newborns, I got it but only after multiple appeals. I was then in an America plagued by privatization, ongoing foreign wars, and a lack of corporate accountability, but at least, my family would be okay — for now.

Back in the U.S.A.

And here we all are.

I wish I could say that my family — and yours — live in a reality that’s different from the one I left in Russia when I took my pregnant self home in 2014. I look around at what’s happening in our country and worry that we may already be on a superhighway to the sort of class- and race-stratified autocracy that it took Russia so many years to become after the Soviet Union collapsed.

In particular, in the years since the Supreme Court overturned the right of American women to have abortions in 2022, 41 states have put abortion restrictions into effect, including 14 with outright bans. Some 40% of women now live in states with such bans or significant restrictions. In a handful of states like Idaho and Texas, women and expectant parents have had to cross state lines to get routine miscarriage- or pregnancy-related healthcare because doctors can face criminal or civil liabilities for providing it. (It may not be coincidental that in states with severe abortion restrictions, infant mortality has gone up significantly, particularly among people of color.) I could go on about the ways this administration and its allies on the Supreme Court and elsewhere are denying poor and middle-class women basic healthcare, but I’m sure you already get the picture.

Maybe since most Americans haven’t lived under an actual dictatorship the way many Russians have, state capture here is faster and easier, especially in a country with a resurgent Evangelical right (After all, didn’t Jesus say, “Suffer little children…”?)

New Americans?

These days, many people in my community and in my day job as a psychotherapist have lost hope that Donald Trump’s government could change things for the better. Many now tell me that they might not even vote in an upcoming election because government can’t be trusted to tell the truth and act on behalf of ordinary people. I’ve heard folks say that they can rely only on themselves (and maybe loved ones) to help them in crises like driving across state lines for healthcare. Among some of the highly educated parents I know in my DOGE-stricken D.C. suburb, I see not mass outrage or the urge to mobilize as much as a desire to homestead and foster a post-apocalyptic self-reliance, much in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Well, good luck, and thanks for helping Trump consolidate power.

But for now, the one thing I think we still do have that Russia doesn’t is mass demonstrations like the recent No Kings Day ones where a record seven million Americans turned out nationally and a (relatively) free press, which is not to be taken for granted or let go easily. To show up in public as fully human and speak out for others is itself a sign of hope and possibility. Rage-filled political leaders and their minions would not invest so much time in intimidating those who speak out if free speech didn’t matter so much. (Think of that Trump-ordered military flyover while Epstein abuse survivors held a press conference in Washington recently.)

In days marked by so much uncompromising confrontation, I’m reminded of anthropology’s insight that, during a period of upheaval and movement, the people going through it can change significantly, though usually with some risk and pain. Migrations, mass demonstrations, even pregnancy — all of them hold the potential for self-transformation, particularly when people accompany one another on their journeys. The reason we should show up at demonstrations, write op-eds, and protest in any way we can imagine is to stand in solidarity with one another, even if we don’t change the minds of the people watching us. (We might, though!) In other words, collective action is its own form of social transformation. It is a way to forge, if not a new America, then new Americans who will not let democracy die without a struggle. Without it, I fear we’re likely to end up with Donald Trump’s version of Vladimir Putin’s Russia — at least, the one I left in 2014.

That’s why what we all do next matters so much. Remember that, in a democracy, we the people are the government. Whether we’re finding a service for someone who needs it, offering a friend in need a ride, warning of federal police or National Guard in the neighborhood, speaking out against abuse, or just meeting friends for dinner, the exercise of our civil rights is a thread from which our democracy hangs. Such actions also alter the landscapes we hold in our imaginations, whether we like it or not. Simply put, as long as there are more people than military in the streets, the message to those who are scared is simple: this might feel like a foreign land, but you’re not alone.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Andrea Mazzarino co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She is an activist and social worker interested in the health impacts of war. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of the new book War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.