Over the past few days I’ve been appreciating political satire as medicine for mental stability. The Borowitz Report shared a series of great artworks redrawn for these hard times, of which this last was my favorite.

I became familiar with a grassroots nonprofit from North Carolina, American Muckrakers, when they took on ‘not-my’ western Colorado representative Lauren Boebert during her first term. Their motto is “holding terrible politicians and people accountable since 2021.” Their efforts, I believe, helped drive her out of CD3 where she would likely have lost reelection, but drove her into CD4 where she won in 2024. CD3 didn’t fare much better last November, with Jeff un-Hurd hurting his constituents from the get go by casting the swing vote that pushed the Big Bad Bill over the edge. As congress debates the must-pass budget bill this month, we can all let our senators know that we oppose it.

Meanwhile, another under-the-radar threat looming is the regime’s plan with the delusional Dr. Oz to require more pre-authorizations for Medicare patients, and to have AI be the decider about who gets what procedures, regardless of doctor’s orders. Indivisible has a petition that explains the dire implications of this AI Death Panel (remember who coined that phrase, death panel?).

So old people won’t be able to get the treatments they need to thrive or even to survive, and meanwhile Florida has decided it has too many children, as Alexandra Petri points out in this lucid satirical essay in The Atlantic about the state’s elimination of all vaccine mandates.

“Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.”

The biggest threat to American public health is without doubt the delusional Health and Human Services secretary. His anti-science anti-vax platform is the first step to killing more children across America, but all this makes sense if the GOP goal is actually to decimate the population of the country.

Old people, poor people, children, everyone really, will suffer much more, and many of us are already suffering from the ramifications of Project 2025, which is what’s really at the heart of this campaign of cruelty, this great undoing of America’s carefully built societal infrastructure.

Setting aside all the insanity “out there” for awhile this evening, it was lovely to zoom with friends from coast to coast in a Grateful Gathering where we talked about pilgrimage as a metaphor for life, with gratefulness as a guiding light.

And then it was lovely to step out into the glorious light of a clear autumn evening and stroll til the sun set, grateful for another day.