My previous piece for Bylines Scotland described life in the United States one week after the inauguration of our 47th president (I cannot bear to name him.) It felt like being trapped in a log cabin whose timbers were burning and falling on our heads; the exits blocked. Since January 2025, every week, every day, and every hour has brought new outrages and affronts, illegal actions, and deranged insults to every aspect of our American constitutional democracy.
But rather than repeat what any minimally literate world citizen already knows, I’ve decided instead to describe the America I remember and am nostalgic for; the one inching towards achievement of our aspirational ideals – not the days of segregation and discrimination against minorities and women so wistfully recalled by the goons in the MAGA cult.
Praising the diversity of America
In my free public school in Greenwich Village, our teacher showed our 5th grade class a grainy short film (a sort of public service announcement) starring Frank Sinatra, singing to a group of street urchins, called The House I Live In – praising the diversity of America, and cautioning against bullying or religious discrimination of any kind. You can find it on YouTube; it won an honorary Academy Award in 1946.
Yes, I saw it in New York City in the early 1950s. Yes, there was institutional and violent racism in America at the time. But that film stayed in my mind. In 1954 I won First Prize ($25) in a contest about the meaning of ‘Brotherhood Week’, jointly sponsored by a Greenwich Village church and a local synagogue. This observance began in 1936 and was championed by Presidents Roosevelt and Reagan; it was promoted originally by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
For me, this competition was another early reinforcement of the concept that all men are created equal under the law; that skin color has nothing to do with character. These were not radical ideas in New York City, and they shouldn’t be radical ideas today. The sooner children are exposed to these ideas, the better.
Hope for America’s prosperity and highest values.
During the televised Watergate Hearings into illegal behavior by Republicans working to elect Richard Nixon, I breastfed my daughter and watched as culprits were held accountable for their crimes. I rejoiced when Nixon resigned.
In the 1990s, when Nelson Mandela was freed from imprisonment, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, I truly felt that a new epoch in human history was unfolding. The Cold War was over; American prosperity and our highest values could be shared with the world. I would not have believed a word you said if you described the litany of inhuman and illegal events that would be perpetrated by American politicians to date in 2025.
The night Obama won the 2008 election, I was again living in Greenwich Village. The streets erupted in joy, horns honked, people streamed into the streets, parties were held in art galleries and in homes. I still have a champagne cork in its little cage, found on the street the next morning. The next 8 years weren’t easy, but I never felt that my elected representatives wanted to starve and torture the poorest among us.
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America’s dreadful administration – how to exercise optimism
The night of DT’s victory in the 2016 election, I was in extreme shock, as were many of my friends. Although a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton (If only she hadn’t called Republican voters the “deplorables”…). The next 4 years of DT’s leadership were dreadful, but almost pale in comparison to the days since January 2025.
Will we be able to have free and fair elections in the coming months? Will DT start a war to justify canceling the 2028 election and stay in office to avoid jail? Will another pandemic sweep the world because of our cruel, self-imposed ineptitude?
To stay sane, I exercise the muscle of my natural optimism. I am donating to new, progressive candidates – see the excitement in my home state of Maine about Democratic candidate for Governor Nirav Shah (formerly the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 2019-2023), and Social Democrat Graham Platner (“I thought Graham Platner was finished. What I saw in Maine Changed My Mind” by Michelle Goldberg). Also, I’m counting on younger voters across America to bring energy and optimism to the table as they vote candidates like NYC-Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani into office.
I’m not going to give up on the American experiment. As someone who was at both the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam, I believe in public protests and demonstrations. I will continue to join the pro-democracy vigil in my small Maine town every week, which began with two of us in March 2025 on a rainy Saturday. More people are joining us; more drivers wave and give us friendly honks. Inaction and silence are not options.
Keeping citizens informed on America’s current issues
And, encouragingly, many states are stepping up to fill the information void left by the current administration’s policy of withholding and/or suppressing crucial information about a range of vital issues. In October 2025, a nonpartisan coalition called the Governors Public Health Alliance (including 15 states: California, NY, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, NJ, North Carolina, Oregon, RI and Washington) formed to keep citizens informed about current threats and solutions to public health issues, as the administration continues to decimate staff and shut down websites.
Future historians of this epoch may well wonder if some kind of self-destructive elixir was funneled into the water supply to cause the public to turn against vaccines and cancer research, vote for candidates who support withdrawing university funding and the trashing of decades of studies into causes and cures for innumerable chronic diseases, as well as preparing safeguards for future pandemics.
As someone trained with government funding as a biochemist, from a family of engineers and scientists – my Great-Uncle Oscar Riddle discovered prolactin (the hormone responsible for lactation) and was on the cover of TIME in 1937 – it simply boggles my mind that the American public has been fiendishly manipulated into rejecting life-saving scientific research. I believe it has something to do with the rise of right-wing religious groups, but that’s a subject for a whole other column.
Americans seem to be waking up
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s presence’s at COP30 in Brazil means the United States will be represented by one brave American, if not by our pitiful excuse for a national leader. It may be the harbinger of more concerted action by state officials in lieu of a sane national approach to public health and climate change solutions. Until we elect a president who will take seriously American responsibility to promote both public and international health, individual states will have to continue to marshal their own forms of support, cooperation, and information sharing.
Time is running out, but Americans may slowly be waking up and realizing that they do indeed have the power to shape this generous, perverse, diverse country – and their own lives.
With many small currents of resistance forming and joining one another, creating larger and larger streams, I am strongly inclined to believe, with Abraham Lincoln, that “government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
More on world.
