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In December of 2025, 21 Republican Senators in Indiana’s General Assembly did the most patriotic thing they could do: They put country—in this case, State—over political party. Despite forceful pressure from President Trump’s administration to strong-arm them into drawing a new voting map, they joined with 10 Democrats in refusing to commit an unethical, mid-term gerrymandering of districts in order to gain two more Republican seats in the U.S. Congress.
With the 2026 elections looming, and the possibility of the U.S. House of Representatives losing its Republican majority, the president’s followers went into high gear. There were threatening phone calls, texts, swatting, and even emails to the grandchildren of the defiant Republicans saying that their friends wouldn’t like them anymore if their grandparents didn’t vote for the redistricting. But the steadfast Senators stood their ground despite the onslaught. As one government official put it, “Hoosiers don’t cheat.”
Their choice wasn’t, in my opinion, just putting State over Party. It was putting right over wrong.
After losing the gerrymander battle, Donald Trump is reported as saying he will “primary” the defiant State Senators by Blitz-Kreig-financing their opponents the next time they’re up for re-election.
How can Indiana Republicans defend their principled politicians? Simple. By voting for them in the next primaries. As the president’s followers are fond of saying, “Elections have consequences.” Indeed they do.
There were many other instances of courage this year. For example, when Chicagoan Baltazar Enriquez began blowing an orange whistle to alert immigrants in Little Village—a largely Mexican community–that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents were in the area. There had been a series of brutal deportations of nonwhite immigrants in a number of cities including a bizarre nighttime Black Hawk helicopter raid on a Chicago apartment building in September, which evacuated the residents into the streets and secured even children with zip-ties.
I don’t think anyone objects to removing undocumented immigrants convicted of felonious crimes. But it’s apparent that ICE is mindless and heartless in rounding up Spanish-speaking and/or nonwhite immigrants even if they’re not criminals.
Being “undocumented” is a civil infraction, by the way, not a felony. And many of the undocumented immigrants have resided in the United States for years, have been working and paying taxes like anyone else, and/or are married to U.S. citizens.
Appalling videos have been circulating on television and the Internet of ICE agents physically tackling men and women for removal to so-called “deportation centers” and third-party countries without a warrant or evident legal justification or any care for the humanity of the detainees.
Does this sound like 1930s Germany?
Perhaps. But America isn’t Nazi Germany and we’ve learned that the way to oppose injustice is to refuse to give in, and to voice opposition in ways large and small.
For example, week after week, city after city, ordinary people are demonstrating their outrage against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Executive. These citizen protesters have formed a grassroots’ “No Kings” movement against the excesses of the Trump administration.
But each individual can also make an impact.
To help his hard-working neighbors and their children evade this snatch-and-grab, Baltazar Enriquez came up with the idea of the warning whistle—because “it’s analog” he explains, and it can’t be intercepted electronically. The so-called “whistlemania” has now spread throughout the country.
The through-line of all these overt actions is resistance and persistence.
We live, I believe, in an Age of Dichotomy, as extreme as any in American history, short of civil war—and there are some insurrectionists who threaten even this. Dichotomies not only of right and wrong; but of tolerance and bigotry; morality and immorality; white and nonwhite; rich and poor; good and evil.
Yes, good and evil—how else would one characterize the sins of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? And those who have protected, supported, and affiliated with Epstein and Maxwell in sexually victimizing countless young women and girls? And held no abusers to account.
Terrible dichotomies.
But we’ve been here before.
In the Spring of 1954, when I was 12 years’ old, I would come home from my 8th grade class in Jr. High and sit cross-legged on the living room floor to watch the Army-McCarthy Hearings on television.
As much as I then understood the sinister proceedings at that age, it scared the bejesus out of me. Communism was frightening enough but what Senator Joseph McCarthy was doing to American citizens was even more frightening. So, the following year when the FBI showed up in my 9th grade class to demonstrate the technique of fingerprinting, I declined the offer as my classmates went up one by one. (The FBI apparently has more than 160 million fingerprints on file now– including mine.)
I didn’t know anything about J. Edgar Hoover, but I knew I didn’t want to be in any government database.
What if I needed to flee from tyranny some day? Live off the land. Be incognito. (Remember, I was only 13. Heavily influenced not by reading any political manifestos, but by the self-sufficiency of no-less-than Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan – despite my being female.)
By that time, we students had already been through the 1952 “duck and cover” fear of the atomic bomb in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In New Jersey, we lived only minutes away from Manhattan and well within the designated “blast radius.” We had posters of the bomb on the wall and instructions to hide in the basement of our homes when the sirens sounded.
And most of us were “war babies” growing up with memories of WWII’s deprivations—belt-tightening; saving tin cans and tin foil from gum and cigarette wrappers; victory gardens (my grandmother had one in our small row-house backyard); ersatz butter made from lard and yellow coloring packets (that you squeezed together); shoveling coal into the basement furnace to heat the house on cold days. There were canned vegetables and fruit salad; frugality of window boxes to store food in winter; and fear for servicemen and women in Europe as we watched the Pathé war news in movie theatres.
I never became an activist—life always intervened—but in college I did support the turbulent Civil Rights movement and attended the Youth March for Integrated Schools in 1959 in Washington D.C. to hear Martin Luther King, Jr.—somewhat poorly because of the cheering crowds. After that, I did nothing political other than sign a petition against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, shortly after which I was audited by the IRS for the first and last time–without any penalty.
When I was 21, a year after I graduated college, I registered as an Independent voter…and have remained so for the succeeding 63 years. Told myself that I’m not a ‘joiner’. Took satisfaction in voting for both Republicans and Democrats according to their character, policies, and performance. I maintained that stance until Donald Trump’s second term as President.
It is his intention, evidently, to dismantle the U.S. Constitution and devour all our foundational institutions for his own insatiable appetite for dominance.
We especially see attacks on the First Amendment (freedom of speech), the Fifth Amendment (due process), and the 14th Amendment (birthright citizenship). It seems, as well, that Trump would like a third term in contradiction to the 22nd Amendment. Why? Yes, the elixir of power has its drug-effect. But so, too, has the smell of money. Never has a U.S. president apparently culled more grift in so short a time. Maybe we do have a king…King Midas—gilding everything in gold with his cheesy taste in décor.
What is especially concerning is that our dichotomies…our divisions…may have the same consequence as the Confederacy versus the Union: the Blue versus the Grey. Only in this instance, the Blue versus Red. Or at least, the result may indeed be the very tyranny that this 13-year-old once feared.
We can’t let that happen. Not only for the 250th anniversary of our national democracy, but also not to weaken our role internationally, or even weaken our independence from malign foreign states.
Republicans and Democrats need to find allegiance to a higher Power—the concept of unity in adherence to what is Right, Good, and Sane. If we don’t fight for our unified democracy, we shall indeed lose it.
Don’t think it’s not possible.
Since I initially wrote this podcast, President Trump activated our military to execute an incursion into Venezuela to remove President Maduro (and his wife) and transport them to the United States to stand trial for drug-trafficking and assorted other charges. Trump announced that he was going to run the country and appropriate Venezuela’s oil…with a little help from his industry friends.
Trump then went on to suggest similar consequences to other countries in our hemisphere—Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba, for starters. He also resumed his intention to annex Greenland from Denmark. I guess he forgot all about Canada becoming our 51st state. Sacre bleu.
In light of these developments, I’m revising my conclusion that, for Donald Trump, it’s only about “follow the money.” It is that, in part, but I think the essential motivation now is about conquest…as a demonstration of power.
And because President Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the American military, he has the resources to effect his hegemonic will.
Where this Julius Caesar-ish or Putin-esque appetite for subjugation may lead us, we have now seen it play out both domestically and internationally.
But perhaps…down the line… some general…or some private…may simply refuse to carry out an illegal order.
And then maybe, just maybe, Congressional Republicans will find their Hoosier moment.
Time will tell.