On Showing Up, and Meeting the Moment

Steps toward defending our institutions. An extension from personal to public life.

Downtown Los Angeles, June 14, 2025. A protestor stands his ground, for the flag and what it should represent. (Photo Sahab Zaribaf/Middle East Images/AFP/ Getty Images )

This post will start out about “policy” and veer to the personal. The connecting theme is the power of showing up, and about the overlapping time lines on which we all play our parts.

On the national level: We are living not simply with public corruption and cruelty unprecedented in my lifetime. We’re also being propelled face-first into chaos at a speed matched only during times of actual war.

Seven days ago, in a post “The Powers That Were,” I laid out why American institutions have become the crucial front in determining the country’s future. I argued that our governing “rules” and antiquated¹ checks-and-balances system have revealed their vulnerability, in the face of united, amoral interests who cared only about power itself.

In the single mid-summer week since then we’ve had many decades’ worth of terrible institutional news.

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has begun its shutdown. For longer than most Americans have been alive, the CPB has been an institutional center of American civic information. Under its auspices both PBS and NPR developed and flourished. Now all three are under DOGE/MAGA assault.

• The director of the Voice of America, the institutional heart of America’s public face to the world, was officially fired, by former right-wing TV personality Kari Lake.

• The director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, was abruptly fired by former right-wing TV personality Donald Trump. The BLS had been the institutional center of non-partisan, reliable, warts-and-all data about the largest economy in the world. Thus it had been an institutional bulwark of the credibility of the US economy and US markets as a whole. Gone, and very hard to re-create.

• Team Trump expanded its war on institutions of higher education from private institutions like Columbia, Brown, and (of course) Harvard, to publics, notably (surprise!) some University of California campuses And, less publicized but at least as institutionally damaging in the long run, MAGA has intensified an assault on America’s crucial network of community colleges as well.

• Representing leading institutions of the private sector, Tim Cook, of Apple, yesterday nauseatingly groveled in person to Donald Trump in the Oval Office, presenting him with a tribute-trinket made of pure “24 karat gold.” It was a moment worthy of Elon Musk.

• Trump celebrated the paving-over of the famously gracious Rose Garden at the White House, and announced grandiose plans to expand the East Wing of this historic residence into something out of his failed Atlantic City casino.

• Meanwhile we have the institutions working on advanced mRNA vaccines (including against deadly pancreatic cancer) defunded, on an RFK Jr whim; norms and institutions of justice mocked as Trump’s former personal lawyer calls on Ghislaine Maxwell, before she is transferred to a more comfortable prison; Trump flat-out saying that the Texas GOP should gerrymander its way to an anti-democratic an edge in the House.

• And of course the insanity of world-trade disruptions, via tariffs, damaging and estranging America’s closest allies all at one man’s whim.

This is obviously just a partial list. And, again, it is from the past one week—during the usual news-doldrums of August. Almost any of these items would have been the stuff of impeachment in other eras, and of Hamilton’s and Madison’s nightmares in the 1780s. These are not pressures their system was designed to withstand almost 250 years later.²

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Examples of showing up, personally and politically.

That’s the “policy” setup to the post, concerning our nation’s accelerating rendezvous with destiny. Here I’ll add as tersely as I can the promised personal note:

My wife, Deb, and I have been blessed beyond measure to have two wonderful sons. Forty years ago, when the boys were little, Deb wrote a then-controversial book that (like her!) has aged very well. It was called A Mother’s Work, and it made the case for showing up at the moments that mattered in your children’s lives, even when that meant putting other ambitions on hold.

Now those boys are grown; they have wonderful wives; and between them they have six wonderful children. The youngest of these six grandchildren turned three years old last week. The oldest turned 14 yesterday.

In ways both planned and unexpected, Deb and I have had in the past six months the cherished opportunity to show up for our children and grandchildren.

-Planned: A bar mitzvah in July. And many other celebrations, birthdays, trips, gatherings, overnights, board games, carpools, school presentations, beach days, barbecues, and chances to see the two families and six cousins all together. Plus a few conferences, long-anticipated meetings with friends, one international trip, return journeys to DC, and other adventures. And all of this was in a countdown toward yesterday’s long-planned departure by the part of our family for an extended residence elsewhere.

-Unplanned: Everything you can imagine might be involved in helping close a household of people who will be away for a long time. Plus an array of hour-by-hour surprises of all varieties that were mostly positive, occasionally challenging, but all giving Deb and me the opportunity to be here now with the people we’re closest to in the world.

So hour by hour over the past months I’ve had the choice: Do I go to the computer and weigh in on this latest chapter in the national emergency? Or drop that and show up for children and grandchildren, during moments planned and unplanned that will never come again?

The answer is obvious when stated that baldly (and piously). But I’m stating it to readers here, out of respect and gratitude to the many people who have followed and supported this site. And because the “fleeting golden moments” aspect hit me so hard when glimpsing this scene, a few minutes ago:

It’s the front door at the house where Deb and I have been staying. Through that time we’ve gotten used to seeing our youngest grandchild, the one who just turned three, grab his green cart and run full-speed and joyfully around the yard pushing it, whenever he and his sisters stopped by.

Today the cart is still here. The little boy who loved it will have outgrown it by the time he returns.

My point is not to be maudlin. It is to tell more about why I have not been “showing up” as much on this site as I have before, and will again. Deb and I will spend the next few days with our other beloved children and grandchildren, before they return to their home in another state and we return to DC. And to the keyboard and the fray.

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So what about ‘showing up’ in public terms?

When life intervened earlier this week, I was in the middle of a long dispatch on “What we can do next,” in defense of American institutions.

That’s still sitting in the computer, in “drafts” mode. It will emerge.

For now, let me just mention two writers who have framed the challenge, and opportunities, superbly.

1) In person resistance: ICE.

I spent half my life complaining about the “both-sides” framing of political issues, above all in the New York Times.

So let me go out of my way to recommend a NYT feature last week by Michelle Goldberg, about how local citizens in California decided to stand in the way of the ICE juggernaut.

Goldberg’s article was called “They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.” The whole thing is worth reading, but the summary is this, with highlights added by me:

If Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of the people most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it.

The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action….

“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, a co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.”

With their masked faces and their unmarked cars, too many ICE agents act as if nothing can stop them. But several times they, like other bullies, have backed down in the fact of massed civilians blocking their way.

What can we do? One step is to join or support those masses.

2) Twelve more steps: A checklist.

Robert Reich, whom I have known for decades, got ahead of me, with a “baker’s dozen” list just now of practical steps each one of us can take now. I endorse it. I encourage you to read it on his Substack site, here.

It starts with a step in sync with Michelle Goldberg’s report:

Number 1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented.

This is an urgent moral call to action. As Trump’s ICE accelerates its roundups, detentions, and deportations, many of our hardworking neighbors and friends are being disappeared. ICE is rapidly becoming Trump’s police state enforcers.

And it ends on the personal front, parallel with what I have been thinking and saying about showing up on the personal and family level:

Number 13. Beyond these, please be sure to find room in your life for joy, fun, and laughter. Do not let Trump and his darkness take you over.

Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of yourself. If you obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry, and anxiety, you’ll burn out and won’t be able to keep fighting.

Thank you for your generous support and attention. We’re all in this together.

1. Why “antiquated”? For reasons laid out, among other places, in the oft-cited “Our Common Purpose” report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For instance: the two-Senate-seats-per-state compromise was worked out when the population difference between the most and least populous states was about 10:1. Now it’s about 70:1. The size of the House of Representatives kept growing, in pace with each decade’s census, for the first 150 years of the country’s existence. Then in the 1920s it was capped at its current level. Since that time, the US population has nearly tripled.

Life tenure for Supreme Court appointees was set up when “life expectancy” meant something different. Even though a few early-era justices survived to serve very long terms, on average the Justices of the 1800s and early 1900s were on the bench only about half as long as their modern counterparts. As law professors Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren wrote back in 2006:

Although the average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice from 1789 through 1970 was 14.9 years, for those Justices who have retired since 1970, the average tenure has jumped to 26.1 years. Because of the long tenure of recent members of the Court, there were no vacancies on the high Court from 1994 to the middle of 2005.

We believe the American constitutional rule granting life tenure to Supreme Court Justices is fundamentally flawed, resulting now in Justices remaining on the Court for longer periods and to a later age than ever before in American history.

No other developed country has a life-tenure system like this for its highest courtThey have either fixed terms or mandatory-retirement provisions.

2. As a reminder of the fragile contingency of our fate:

—Even a handful of elected Republicans, in the House and Senate, could have stopped or slowed any or all of these moves. Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, their few counterparts in the House: They could actually have stood up, when it mattered. In theory they still could.

Their institution, the US Congress, is supposedly a co-equal branch. According to the rules, it’s supposed to determine how and why public money is spent. (Not zealots from Project 2025 or Doge.) Or when and why tariffs should be levied. (Not what grudge Trump is nursing or payoff he is seeking that day.) Or whether and why federal departments and agencies are created or shut down. Senator Murkowski may have revealed more than she intended when observing of today’s Republicans, “we are all afraid.”

—Just two of the six-vote MAGA/Federalist bloc on the Supreme Court could have spoken up for longstanding institutional restraint and balance, as the huge majority of “lower” court judges have done. But they’ve said: We’ll get back to you in a year or two. For now, let Trump have his way.