By nature, I am an optimist and always have been throughout my life. I’ve always felt that life is good and that positive thinking is the best way to face life.  Fortunately, I have not suffered many tragedies or insurmountable setbacks, so it has been easy to remain optimistic.

More and more, faced with the political and cultural turmoil in our country, maintaining that optimism has become harder and harder. We are barely five months into the Trump presidency and it seems that the forces of autocracy, greed, and graft are riding high.

This week our imbecilic but powerful president has tried to normalize the presence of our military in American streets to maintain “law and order.”  Such actions by the English monarchy in the 18th century was one of the main reasons leading up to the American revolution. We wanted no king then, and we certainly don’t need one now.

Trump and his minions have complete control of the executive and legislative branches of the government, and we can only hope that the third branch, the judiciary will save us and the world, from this madness. This president and his MAGA minions are completely within their rights to enact laws that set forth their retrograde agenda.  (They won the election!) They can promulgate a budget that will bankrupt this country and make the superrich in this country even richer, while making the rest of us poorer and sicker.

One aspect of this complete takeover and decimation of our government which is most incomprehensible to me is the war on science and education–how can any 21st century educated person doubt and question the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge in order to understand our world and what we have done to it over these last two hundred years of the Industrial Revolution.

All of this was brought to mind recently as I began reading a story in the New York Times about the Atlantic Hurricane season which began on June 1. We are completely unprepared for it because of the decimation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by DOGE–the so called Department of Government Efficiency.  Elon Much may be gone, but his henchmen and the damage that they have and will inflict on the government and the nation remains.

NOAA has lost more than twenty percent of its personnel, and the vast majority of that lose is made up of senior scientists and experienced  administrators.  Local offices around the country have been closed or have had to reduce their hours of operation for lack of budget and personnel.  This year, NOAA’s fleet of hurricane hunters are likely to be grounded or inoperable because of budget cuts rather than patrolling the storm clouds above the Atlantic and Gulf.

Twenty years ago, we had to wait for tropical storms to actually form before we could begin to study them and predict where they might strike and with what intensity.  But because of modern computers and science, coupled with experienced and talented administration and staffing, we can now predict with incredible accuracy the first indication, development, path, and intensity of hurricanes.

Explosively developing super storms used to happen only once a decade in the recent past, but because of climate warming, they are now almost a yearly occurrence, and they are inflicting an incredible amount of infrastructural damage, but because of accurate early warnings, storm death tolls are usually small. This could all change with the emasculation of NOAA and the National Hurricane Center, many more lives might be lost.

It is much the same story with our National Institutes of Science and Medicine. Researchers and scientists have been fired, retired or resigned.  Grants are not being dispersed to our major universities to study disease and epidemics–work that takes good minds, sound research, and dedication.  Thanks to the charlatans who now run these agencies, the American population has lost confidence in vaccines; we could see thousands of people die because of this, many of them children. Measles is one of the more virulent and deadly of diseases, but as a society we now seem to be saying—who cares? The parents of children who die from this an other childhood diseases will care.

And yet our biggest cultural worry is that a “trans girl”  might be allowed to compete in girl’s high school sports or use a woman’s bathroom. Is that really the most important issue of out times?

But back to the US soldiers and marines patrolling our streets. It now seems that this government only worries about “illegal aliens” in sanctuary cities; if they are working on farms or in the hotel and tourist industry, then they are OK.  This campaign against undocumented immigrants is madness.  We need these immigrants to take care of our old people and mind our children. We need them to build the millions of houses and apartments we so desperately lack. Who’s going to build and repair our roads, bridges and other infrastructure?

We don’t have to spend billions of dollars to round up peaceable, hard working, law-abiding people with storm troopers.  We can spend that money and effort on enacting better immigration laws and creating the administrative structures to deal with people who are seeking a chance to live and raise their children in a better place.