The Distant Shore

Looked at the calendar the other day when March crossed over into April and was hit with the realization that I hadn’t yet done my taxes and time is starting to run short. April 15 is licking its chops. 

As a newly retired guy, I don’t pay attention to dates and details the same way I did for the thirty-year stretch I just finished. My life moves to different rhythms now, and mostly this new timeless way of living life feels like the daily gift of freedom and focus on work I get to choose to do, except when a forgotten IRS deadline looms and with it a stiff financial penalty. So, I made the mental note to get my taxes done.

And then I got pissed. 

I am going to sit and do my 2024 taxes as I do every year, and I’m going to write a check to the US Department of Treasury as I’ve had to do for the past several years, and I’m going to make sure it’s on time and done accurately, responsibly, and with a sense of civic duty. And then I’m going to mail it to the federal government so this new administration has the resources they need to continue to absolutely fuck up so much in this country that I care about, and so that their first priority is fully financed: that my middle-class taxes support the lifestyle of the ultrarich who are in line for a tax break and can write off yachts and private jets and thoroughbred horses as I pay an even higher percentage of my income to this madness as a middle-class retired public school educator and pray the people I love don’t lose a public sector job, or need health care, or struggle to buy eggs.

What does it mean to make America great again when it doesn’t mean protect the very people who make this country great? 

Liberty Obscured, April 2025

What even does America mean when it doesn’t mean the public square, and Main Street, and the public school, and universities, and national parks, and preschool programs for poor kids, and social security for the greatest generation, due process, civil rights, human rights, and the cornerstone of alliances that have helped protect and provide a measure of global peace and prosperity in the 80 years since World War 2 ended. 

I had a project to do in New York City on Monday last week, so on Sunday Loriann and I visited the 9/11 Museum and memorial built from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, to observe in quiet presence the memories of a day neither of us will ever forget. We were immersed for hours in the enormity of it, the twisted metal of skyscrapers and the concrete bones of buildings presented next to the small, personal artifacts of grief: eyeglasses, fire helmets, and high-heeled shoes. The stories of loss and the stories of heroism and humanity woven together in memoriam. One video showed tributes that came in on September 11, 2001, and September 12 and 13 and for days and weeks and months after from around the world – messages of love and support and peace and solidarity for the United States of America, a moment when global unity could have been the legacy of our leadership for a generation or more, making America truly great again.

And then I got pissed. 

This clown show of an administration has decided to fuck up global unity for trade wars and imperialist fantasies of taking over Greenland, and cancelling programs like the United States Agency for International Development that responds to natural disasters, and spreads and protects Democracy across the globe, and feeds hungry people and vaccinates poor children and works to spread peace and humanity which is so much cheaper than war but not nearly as profitable. The global unity that was so close in September, 2001 has never felt farther away in my lifetime, a distant, unreachable shore. 

And this is to say nothing of the damage this administration is doing to any dream of national unity, a ship that has long since sailed. They excel only at chaos and declaring war on the most vulnerable: immigrants, trans kids, and the poor, and war on expertise: books, thought, free speech and expression, academic freedom, and progress, as if there is anything to be feared from the values of Diversity, or Equity, or Inclusion-- from e pluribus, unum we have been moved to e pluribus, divisio: out of many, division.

After our visit to the 9/11 sites, Loriann and I walked from the memorial pools the few blocks of the financial district to Battery Park to catch a glimpse of Lady Liberty standing watch in New York Harbor as she’s done since 1886. It was a grey, rainy day in the city, and Liberty was obscured. She was there, still, but hard to see. A fitting metaphor as we wrapped ourselves against the cold wind.

THE IMMIGRANTS (Battery Park, NYC)

A large bronze statue in the same New York City park dedicated in 1983 provided yet another metaphor of our current situation. Titled The Immigrants, the inscription reads “DEDICATED TO THE PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS/WHO ENTERED AMERICA THROUGH CASTLE GARDEN…” Castle Garden was the first American facility dedicated wholly to the processing and welfare of immigrants to America, and the statue shows humans from different countries arriving in America despite struggle and strife they left behind them and yet still also carried along with them to the hope of America: hope, perhaps the most distant shore of all. 

But in the first months of this administration the statue sits locked in a cage of fencing and ensnared in orange mesh. There is renovation taking place at Battery Park so doubtlessly it’s a protective measure, but the image and symbolism of immigrants in a cage did not escape Loriann and me as we walked past it.

In a few months I will visit Toronto for another work thing, a city I’ve always wanted to see. I was excited to buy my airline ticket to the city and to see the familiar airport code on my reservation, YYZ, also a song by Rush, my favorite band since childhood, musicians who still call the Canadian city home. When I’m on the east side of our state I love to stand at the Riverwalk in Detroit on the American side of the Detroit River and wave like a crazy man across the short distance to the large maple leaf flag of Canada waving back at me from the other side. It has always felt like waving at my neighbor and good friend. 

Last week Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told 41 million Canadians and everybody else watching that the old, long, stable friendship and alliance with the United States is over because of unreasonable, wrong-headed tariffs that are creating a global trade war, and because our current president prefers to support Putin and Russia instead of friendship and trade agreements with other countries that are necessary to any strength we think we have as a nation. As a proud American, I find it all embarrassing. 

In a smaller, more personal variation on this theme I talked to a colleague in Canada two weeks ago I had intended to meet on the American side of the border this month for some work we shared, but he shut the plan down telling me he’s hearing from friends of the nightmare now of Canadians crossing the border into Michigan and their treatment by US Customs/Border agents. He’d rather not run into a hassle at the border and will just stay in Canada and we will collaborate remotely. 

And then I got pissed.

I told him I owed him a beer later and an apology now. America is fucking up the easiest good will there is, and the shore I love to wave at from Michigan has never felt so distant. 

In their 1991 song Heresy about the fall of Communism when the USSR finally broke up, Rush asks over and over again about the relationship people around the world have to where we are and what’s next with the question “Do we have to say goodbye to the past?” and its only answer, “What else can we do?” And I find myself asking the same question with the same answer, though in reverse: then it was about the opening of borders in Russia for a promising future and now it is about the closing of borders in the United States for a future that looks bleak. Do we have to say goodbye to the past? And What else can we do?

What else can we do? 

One of the most important answers to that question is to do something to test the fiber and foundations of this country as established in our Constitution—assemble, speak, protest, and cause good trouble—and to do that in community with others who have also summoned the courage to make a sign and head to a public space to display it. If the Constitution is to have any muscle, like any muscle it has to be exercised: stretched and flexed and put to use.

So today I joined my wife and daughter and hundreds of other citizens in downtown Paw Paw at the Hands Off! rally against the madness of this moment in American history and governance. It was small, but it was something. It was small, though organizers reported twice the number of people showed up than were expected, and it was amplified by more than 1000 other rallies taking place across the nation today, some small, like Paw Paw, and some enormous, where thousands and thousands and thousands of people will have chosen to do something rather than stay silent and passive today. 

Getting pissed is the easy part. 

But that doesn’t get you far, and certainly not across to the distant shore.

What else can we do?