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Our Vulnerable Freedom

Words fail me – but they’re all I have, or so it seems as I sit here at a table in my new apartment. They ain’t enough! Not as I read the news and feel . . . something . . . rise, politically and socially, and presume to be the American future.

Is this the rise of fascism? I use this word with uncertainty. I have never lived within its brutal purview and do not live within it now, as I write about the increasingly bizarre – and terrifying – presidency of Donald Trump. I feel no constraint as I write, no need to be cautious with my words. I feel no eyes on me, ever-assessing the loyalty of  the opinions I express. I feel no fear, only outrage, as the snarky and bumbling “supreme leader” wannabe tells us who our enemies are. Can’t someone shut this fool up?

But then I read the news and, often enough, learn there’s a further Trump transgression today, a further grab for authoritarian dominance. And I have to look deeply at this freedom I think I have and acknowledge that it’s vulnerable. If others – other Americans, other human beings – can lose it, so can I. I can become the enemy.

An anti-worker administration

Brad Bannon nails it in his Sept. 10 report: “Jobs are down, prices are up and Trump is in trouble . Brad Bannon is a national Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democrats, labor unions and progressive issue groups. He hosts the popular progressive podcast on power, politics and policy, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon.    

Bannon refers to a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “paint an astonishingly bleak picture of the Trump economy.” He continues. “The nation created few jobs in August, and BLS added to the grim portrait by taking off the board almost a million jobs that had supposedly been created over the last year.” 

And the economy is still affected by inflation. On this, Bannon points out that 

My First Post-Trump Substack

When the escalator at the United Nations came to a wrenching and sudden stop this past Tuesday as soon as Trump stepped on it, I would like to believe that future historians will record that as the pivotal, split-second moment which marked the beginning of the end of the Trump Reign of Terror.

A Terror that began — and ended — on an escalator.

June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower — to September 23, 2025, at the United Nations.

When the escalator at the UN came to that sudden and unexpected halt, was that the sign we had been waiting for? The escalator! Is it possible that the escalator’s complete loss of power, its instant paralyzation, its seemingly abrupt and total collapse meant that this too was the end of the Reign of Donald J. Trump?

Go with me on this. I want us to imagine what life might look like in a Post-Escalator, Post-Trump World.

But you’re asking, how can I say we are in “Post-Trump” when right now you can turn on any TV and see him pouring the final load of concrete over the Rose Garden?

4 members of Lebanese American family killed in an Israeli airstrike

The Israeli Death Forces (IDF) is using some of America's most advanced bombs on children in Gaza and Lebanon as of this writing. Crime Minister Netanyahu and much of the Israeli public assert that no child in Gaza or Lebanon, including three Lebanese American children who were massacred in Lebanon along with their father last week in an Israeli drone strike, should be immune. On September 21, 2025, an Israeli drone aircraft bombed a car in Bent Jbeil – South Lebanon – resulting in the killing of the Lebanese American engineer Shadi Sobhy Sharara (from Michigan) and his three children; Celine, Hadi, and Silan (who are 18-month-old brother and sister twins), all of whom are American citizens. The eldest daughter, Asil, on the far right and her mom are in critical condition. Please pray for their full and speedy recovery. Shadi Charara, a car dealer, was killed while driving home to the southern seaside city of Tyre with his wife and four children after having lunch at his father-in-law's house in the town of Bint Jbeil, a few miles from the border with Israel.His children hold American nationality and were brutally and deliberately killed by the IDF with American weapons.

The Mideast Road to Nowhere

‘Stop writing about the Mideast or we will throw acid in your and your son’s faces.’ Such was the threat shouted through the front door of our New York City apartment where my mother and I lived in the 1950’s. Then there was frequent pounding on the door at 3 am with further threats and obscenities. My mother’s offense? Being one of the first female journalists to cover the Mideast, a region barely known at that time to most Americans. My mother, Nexhmie Zaimi, was born in Albania, a former province of the Ottoman Empire. She was the first girl in Albania to go to high school which was run by Presbyterian missionaries. She was also a natural born rebel. She scandalized the capitol, Tirana, by refusing to wear a veil and speaking of emigrating to the United States.She managed to get to the US and somehow was enrolled at the prestigious Wellesley College. There, she wrote a stellar book, ‘Daughter of the Eagle,’ about growing up in semi-feudal Albania. It became a national best-seller.Mrs. Zaimi then attended Columbia University Journalism school – when it was still a bastion of free speech.
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