A New Reality

Chaos, Destruction, Resilience

For 71 days, between the election and the inauguration, I dreaded the daily and constant WTF now? moments that now litter our lives. I have been stunned into silence, and now I don’t know where to start.

While life goes on for now—I’ve celebrated my 80th birthday, I greatly enjoyed a visit from my son, I had a minor back surgery, I attended a granddaughter’s winter concert, I’ve weeded my garden to see new growth emerging, we hosted excellent friends from Massachusetts in our home—there is a dread of what is to come. When I read what the “Department of Government Efficiency” is doing, and moreover, what it is now capable of doing, it is not possible to think, “Well, I’m not a government employee, I can’t be fired, I’ll be ok.” When planes are falling out of the sky after the president fires the Aviation Security Advisory Committee and continues to fire FAA personnel from an agency already understaffed, I don’t really want to fly anywhere. When DOGE has access to my social security number and to my bank routing numbers, I can’t be sure my social security and my pension benefits will automatically appear in my bank account each month as they have for the past 15 years or so. Am I going to have to prove I am a citizen and alive through some portal owned by X—since Musk is orchestrating all this—in order to receive my duly earned money? And no, there aren’t any 150-year-old social security recipients still drawing on the “entitlement” program. When you’re looking for fraud, you sic forensic accountants on the suspected perpetrator, not Zoomers who never heard of COBOL. When laws are being broken and ignored by our president—with the express support of our Supreme Court who gave the president immunity for “core powers” (what the hell is that? the Constitution doesn’t apply to him?) of the presidency while in office—how can I trust that anyone will carry out the duties to which they were assigned? How can I trust that anything will proceed as normal, as expected? I can’t. WTF now?

The American public (not me) voted for a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist for president. He would have been convicted for insurrection had our DOJ not dragged its feet—all for fear of seeming politically motivated if it moved too rapidly—for two years and allowed justice to be delayed to the point of not being served. We have an amendment (14.3) in our constitution that forbids an insurrectionist from holding any elected office. For that matter, we have both insurrectionist senators and congress people who continue to serve the Insurrectionist-in-Chief. I can’t say I understand why.

And now we have the statements by our Vice President and Secretary of Defense at the Munich Security Conference last week suggesting there will be no more help for Ukraine from the USA and Europe should give its right-wing parties more respect. The statements shocked Europe. And me. Although I should not have been shocked. I’ve long sounded alarm bells about what a second Trump administration will do to Europe. The right-wing parties in Europe—the AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, the National Front in France to name a few—are watching America gleefully as they gain more and more parliamentary seats. With our Vice Predident’s help, they’re more confident than ever.

Half of my immediate family lives in Europe. My mother died in 2015. She would have sounded the alarm bells even more urgently than I did. She lived under Nazis. She was not Jewish or Gypsy or Black or disabled or Lesbian. But she followed orders. She knew she couldn’t feed me, an infant in 1945, if she didn’t. She bartered for food, knitting sweaters for a kilo of butter. She made ghee from the butter because then it would last longer. Americans at home suffered, too, during that time. So did the Czechoslovakians, and the Poles. Hell, the whole of Europe suffered with millions dead. And why? I know why. A sickness befell them. A virus infected them, the Nazi virus. There was a guy, an arrogant, ignorant psychopath who told the German people still reeling from the Great War that he alone could fix it. That he alone could make the fatherland great again. Too many people believed him. Those who didn’t and spoke out loudly against him—the professors, the political scientists, the educated—disappeared. Dead. Many fled to England and America.

After the Nazis were soundly defeated and the psychopath killed himself, there was peace in Europe for 80 years. This is highly unusual for anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of the continent. World War II started only 21 years after World War I ended. People remembered. My grandmother cried when in September of 1939 she heard on the radio that shots had been fired into Poland. It meant war. Again. Europe had been riddled with wars since the Crusades. The Hundred Year War in the 14th to 15th century, the Thirty Year War in the 17th century, the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, the War of 1812, the Franco Prussian Wars in the 1870s, the Spanish American War of 1898, and then the assassination of an Austrian Crown Prince in Sarajevo. It seemed like it would never end. But then it did. Wise heads decided to help a defeated nation rather than punish it. Hence the Marshal Plan (and no, it was not a loan) that allowed Germany to rebuild its economy, making the country a productive member of the world community once again. And Germany, much to its credit, outlawed any Nazi activity, Nazi salutes, Nazi propaganda, in fact, anything Nazi. They said, “Never again.” And now, in 2025, an uneducated (in history) pipsqueak from America’s hinterland is lecturing them on Freedom of Speech (which is a freedom guaranteed by both the American and the German Constitutions). But Nazi activities in Germany do not fall under “free speech.” A Nazi salute is a criminal offense punishable by a prison sentence. So is Holocaust denial. The AfD is very careful to refrain from being associated literally with Nazism, but their platform, anti-immigrant, protecting German “culture” as in “Germany First,” Euroscepticism, and pro-Russian policy orientation is very much a Nazi platform.

When WWII ended in 1945, Austria declared itself independent from Germany and formed its own government. The allied forces, however, occupied both Germany and Austria. In Austria, the French took quarters in my home state, Vorarlberg as well as Tirol. The Americans were in Salzburg and Oberösterreich. The English in Kärnten and Steiermark, the Soviets in Niederösterreich and Burgenland, and the capital, Vienna, the ninth state and located in the middle of Niederösterreich, was divided into four sectors, one for each of the allied forces. This was a military occupation that lasted ten years, until 1955. I was ten years old and remember my father hanging on the radio and the happiness that washed over the country. The conditions for these four occupying forces to leave were that Austria became a neutral country. Like Switzerland. It was to have an army only to defend itself, and it was forbidden to ally itself with any other country for the purpose of aggression. Germany was, perhaps, not so lucky. The four occupying forces divided the country into four sectors with Berlin, its capital, sitting in the middle of the Soviet sector, also divided into four. When, in 1949, the French, English, and American forces left the country to govern itself, the Soviets did not leave. The country was divided into East and West Germany.¹ Both states were allowed to build militaries. The Soviet Union, under Stalin and then Khrushchev, sought territorial expansion and the spread of communism. This raised hostilities between East and West leading eventually to the Cold War. Wise heads came up with a plan: NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed in 1949 to halt the further expansion of the Soviet Union. There were originally twelve members, and their promise to each other was to defend militarily any member who was invaded or attacked by any enemy. All would come to the help of one. The United States built military bases in Germany, promising to defend Germany and other European nations (especially Austria since it was discouraged from having anything but a skeleton crew of a military).

So here we are. A Europe discouraged for years to build up a military arsenal protected by an American promise of military assistance if needed, now having to hear that they should not limit the speech of Nazis, and that they should be responsible for their own defense because America is thinking of withdrawing from NATO. According to our Felon-in Chief, Europe hasn’t paid America enough for America to defend them. Just like he thinks Ukraine should pay him back for the aid we have given the country to defend itself from Vladimir Putin.

NATO is not a business. It came to the aid of America when we were attacked on 9/11 by mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists. None of the NATO members asked America to pay for the aid. We said it was Afghanistan and later Iraq who attacked us, and they dutifully followed us to wage war in those countries.

But Germany has beaten back the AfD whom Elon Musk campaigned for heavily just a few weeks ago. It seems the German people are smarter than Americans. They can see what is happening to our country and are saying, no thanks. Their new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, a member of the conservative party, has immediately raised the alarm, before he is even sworn in. Germany should reduce reliance on American arms. He is on the same page as Keir Starmer in England, Emmanuel Macron in France, Christian Stocker in Austria, and Mette Fredericksen in Denmark. There are others. There is a new coalition building. I have much hope that they will rally around Ukraine and get Putin to not only pull out, but restore Ukraine’s borders. They know that if they don’t defend Ukraine and Putin wins this war, next will be Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And those three have been there, done that. Never again. And Poland. And right next to Poland is Germany. And who thinks that after all this time, after 80 years of peace brought about by the deterrence of NATO, by cooperation between culturally and racially divers nations, all of whom speak different languages, these people are just going to fold because some felon in America said he’s no interested—America First and all that—and let some autocrat with a hankering for more and more yachts just walk in and help himself? NYET.

1. It would take until 1990 for the two Germanies to become one country and the reunified city of Berlin to become its capital once again.