Writing about our country while mourning [it]
Originally published January 25, 2026
In recent months, I’ve been working on compiling my late dad’s research into a book: on the history of our Constitution, natural rights, and the false flag of “Originalism.” I’ve been living among the intentions of Founding Fathers (both collective and personal).
I did not awake recharged today. With my mom, I started my day by taking more ibuprofen. She probably worries, but I’m a little glad that may ground her in gravity.
I can see her wrestling with the inner crisis inherited by the Baby-of-Seven-Siblings, the 1960s Catholic girl, the Good Child whose kindness isn’t just kindness, but a coping mechanism. Everyone around her, almost, in some way, was Unsafe… but the baby needs someone to be safe, so desperately. So she drew a veil, pinkish and permanent; or something like those terrifying old-school “hard lens” contacts: casting everyone as unquestionably good to save her sanity. Once entering one ear, “four dead in Ohio” must have been swiftly ushered out the other. She had to trust in a good reason. Probably why she went into healthcare, why she works where she does. She learned she can earn safety by catering to this immutable, cloying rosy instinct… by always caring, never countering. At 65, now, her growing clarity has brought her quiet turmoil: an execution in pink still bleeds.
Alex Pretti was a VA nurse.
My already-sluggish eyes puff more with a wave of tears. My hair was probably due for washing even before yesterday’s notification volley, dispatches from the 12 o’clock hellscape. For my 4 pm news hit, I could still passably soothe it into a low & subdued twist, between angry scrawls about federal standards and Congressional purse strings.1
After the hit, I retreated to a “Buffy” tee large enough to bind my knees into something like a pet’s Thunder Shirt. I clutched my glass of wine two-handed, like a mug of sleepy time tea. Only one glass, on my peril. I saw my mom and her friend before dinner, and mentioned the Founders’ prescience:
While debating additions to our Constitution, some worried that someday (right about now), rights could be violated due to the diminished vigilance of the people or the increased audacity of the rulers.
Pulling, now, directly from Dad’s research: A writer from Maine (then a district of Massachusetts) predicted that the lapse of two centuries could see changes that would be “very unfriendly” to the liberties of future generations.2 George Washington believed that time and the revolution of ages often produced a “listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind,” and Virginia’s Impartial Examiner warned that rights could be lost when “[t]he altar of liberty is no longer watched with such assiduity.”3
There’s no triumph to being right this way. Then what?
Today, realistically, I can only urge myself towards full consciousness. I brush my hair into the calming rhythm of a braid over one shoulder, and look at the heavy unwashed color at my crown-- almost red.
Bodies, bodies. Haunting me with each laboriously gentle plait. The nurse, the reliable caretaker, the Good Guy probably so Good that he too wanted to care within a system he desperately needed to be righteous, and improvable, THAT nurse is inanimate tonight. Hands that soothed, like mom’s. A kind smile, probably so recognizable to the bereaved, stalled forever. The head and shoulders, comforting presence of a good man, like dad’s. Now cold and absent, the shell’s precious occupation vacated, aiding the steel cubby in anonymizing him.
(I’ve written Good so many times now that of course, Renee reenters the fore too. How rhetorically clear is it that the two civilian-citizens just executed in Minneapolis are named “Good” and “Pretti”…?)
I miss a strand of hair. Unwind, start again, as if it matters-- because it has to matter. Slicked down and ruddy, my hair looks like dad’s. Dad, who warned that DHS posed grave risks over 20 years ago. No triumph in predicting it. Just the kind of desperation to which the mythical Cassandra was fated.
There is, for me at least, a reassurance to objective process and routine. A reliability. Procedure lacks the drive to hurt. The capacity to care.
Last week I read dad’s autopsy, as if it would help me write anything about or with his mind.
Dad’s report, issued after he too was unwrapped, inventoried, and re-shelved, was reliably procedural. So I don’t know why it stung. “Hair: brown with white.”
No, I countered to the second page of tired, 12-year-old printer paper.
Faded family album-- 1959-- with a little grinning boy, freckles shamelessly parading across cheeks and bridge of nose (‘like a raccoon!’ he’d say with a twang), and: fire-engine hair. 1967-- a boy taller, smile much muted, but hair: unflaggingly RED. 198[?]-- a lanky man in full tuxedo, offering slices of deli meats; schtick-masking, with his un-trimmed hair: (and mustache now) decisively auburn. Without these for context, could you really not see? Hair: not brown.
Doesn’t it matter? Don’t they know him? Why don’t they know him?
How tragic it is that nobody will get to know this person again.
Notes
1 Senate will approve their next budget— which determines ICE funding— by next Friday. Call both of your state’s Senators via the Capitol switchboard, (202) 224-3121. Here’s a handy script, too.
2 Daniel Davis writing as “one of their fellow citizens,” An Address to the Inhabitants of the District of Maine, upon the subject of their Separation from the present Government of Massachusetts 12 (1791), microformed in Early Am. Imprints, First Series, Evans No. 23313 (Readex Microprint).
3 Letter from George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette (Feb. 7, 1788), in 8 Documentary History at 355-56; “The Impartial Examiner,” The Virginia Independent Chronicle, Mar. 5, 1788, reprinted in 8 Documentary History at 459, 465.