Another Desperate Plea

Dear Senator and Staff--

I write to advocate for starving people in Gaza. Yesterday, on-the-ground reporters for the New York Times told of doctors and nurses there charged with treating malnourished infants and children. These medics are having trouble, says the report, because they themselves are fainting from hunger and thirst. Gaza is starving. Israel's continued stranglehold on aid is unconscionable. The US should withdraw support and press Israel to allow food and other aid in.

In both the Biden and Trump administrations, the US has poured arms and money into Israel, especially after the vicious October 7 attacks by Hamas. Israel had the right to defend itself. But its actions since then have been disproportionate and ruinous. It has leveled Gaza. It's destroyed infrastructure. It's forced the relocation of millions of people. It's killed nearly 60,000 people, mostly women and children. It replaced UN-run food distribution with the US-Israel "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," a group so badly conceived and inadequate that its own executive director resigned. 

That Mr. Netanyahu claims "no starvation" in Gaza underlines how untrustworthy his government has become on this matter. Under him, Israeli solders have been ordered to fire on civilians. Aid workers have been shot by Israeli forces. Mr. Netanyahu seems intent on waging an out-of-control, no-end-in-sight campaign against not just Hamas but the Gazan people as a whole. President Trump seems willing to assist. It must stop.

The least the US can do is stop enabling Israel's de facto use of collective punishment as a weapon of war. We have supported Israel more than any other country on earth has. But we did not sign up to assist Israel with ethnic cleansing or mass starvation. It's past time that the well-being of Gazan civilians take priority over Mr. Netanyahu's politicking. Food aid must be allowed into Gaza--at once.

I urge you to do all in your power to stop the US from assisting Israel in perpetuating this humanitarian crime. I urge you to advocate shifting our support to coalitional, international, and effective aid for Gazans.

 Thank you. 

The Shorter the Letter, The More Desperate the Pleas

 Dear Senator [] and Staff--

Since you get a lot of letters and calls, I try to limit myself to one topic at a time in my correspondence. Regretfully, I can't do that now. There are just too many alarms going off all at once. I want to make sure you, my elected official, know my strong feelings and values regarding this week's issues.

I am against the "Big, Beautiful Bill," which by every neutral analyst's measure will increase our deficit, transfer wealth from poor to rich, and gut vital social services like Medicare. 

I am against all the overreaches of state authority in the name of deporting immigrants. There are countless news stories and videos of people being harassed, attacked, and kidnapped by masked, armed men who refuse to show any official badge, ID, or warrant. Some of these turn out to be ICE agents. Others are apparently just costumed vigilantes. But how are citizens supposed to tell the difference? We are the USA. We do not support a secret police force. 

I am also against curtailing or cutting off legal avenues for people to enter our countries, especially asylum and student visas. Such targets are well beyond the Trump administration's stated rationale of securing the southern border. It is especially bad faith for us to cancel in-progress applications and procedures for people already here in the US, thus rendering them vulnerable to deportation. We made promises to people such as Afghani translators and people fleeing life-threatening oppression. For us to break those promises is reprehensible. 

I am against mobilizing our armed forces against US citizens peacefully protesting in cities. As so many current and former service members have attested, this is not what our armed forces are for.

I am against joining Israel's wars of choice against their neighbors. I oppose further supporting Israel's destructive campaign against Palestinian people (e.g., indiscriminate bombing that have killed tens of thousands, cutting off supplies, firing on aid workers). 

I am against the Executive Branch's abuse of concepts like war or invasion to accomplish an end run around Congressional authority to set monetary policy, initiate war, or bloat the state's police powers. Rule by executive order was rightfully criticized during the Biden administration. It is no less objectionable here.

I am against clawing back federal funding for science research, which sabotages our long and proud tradition of intellectual strength.

I am against purging our government agencies and departments of expertise and installing TV personalities or early twenty-something interns in their place. It's shocking that the new director of FEMA didn't know there was a hurricane season. It's unacceptable that the HHS Secretary seems to question the very germ theory of disease. It's embarrassing that the Secretary of Defense seems so ill-equipped to do the job he was appointed to do. 

I am against the massive, random, and generally inefficient cuts by DOGE and others to core federal agencies and services. Entities like NOAA, NASA, FEMA, the NWS, the FAA, and yes even PBS all perform invaluable functions. There are no backup systems ready to take over the services they provide. 

The President won his office fair and square. Elections have consequences. I get that. But thus far, the White House's domestic, economic, and foreign policies have seemed hopelessly random. Tariffs get announced, reduced, increased, and rescinded in the space of a week. DOGE promises increased efficiency and yet hires college-age hackers instead of experienced professionals--and still fails to provide any net savings. Deportation is for only the violent immigrants, then it's for all immigrants (and visa holders and asylum seekers), and then it's for all of them except for those in agriculture or hospitality. Massive shifts in policy get enacted by social media post. We're against regime change--and then for it, and then against it again. It's chaotic.

This note's list-of-grievances format is a response to that chaos. It's one small attempt to meet the White House's stated attempt to "flood the zone." A flood's rushing can often drown out the electorate's voice. I'm voicing my concerns here as one of your constituents.  

I appreciate your attention and service.

Thanks. 

 

 

Letter-writing time again.

Dear Senator _____ and Staff--

I write to ask you to stand up to the Executive Branch's defiance of the separation of powers and the rights of due process for all people.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in custody in the brutal El Salvador prison that President Trump's ICE sent him to thanks to an "administrative error." Mr. Garcia has been neither tried nor convicted of breaking any law. He was here legally under a withholding of removal order issued by a judge in 2019. The Executive Branch could have challenged this order in court through well-established procedures. They chose not to. Now they claim--implausibly--that they are powerless to correct their errors and that Mr. Garcia is where he deserves to be.

Circuit judges and all nine Justices of the Supreme Court have disagreed. In response, the Executive Branch issued threats about impeaching judges and defunding federal courts. Every day, White House spokespeople spread misleading, unproven, or simply false stories about Mr. Garcia and his case. The Vice President has ridiculed those who dare criticize the Administration's actions, suggesting that due process is too cumbersome an obstacle to surmount in immigration matters. Most chillingly, President Trump himself has affirmed that he is looking for ways to send "homegrown" criminals--U.S. citizens--to foreign prisons.

The Executive Branch's stance is surreal and frightening. Today the Fourth Circuit forcefully turned back yet another attempt by the White House to dodge its responsibilities. In his decision, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvey Wilkerson summarizes the situation well: "The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done." Judge Wilkerson continues, "This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."

As an American "far removed from courthouses," I agree completely with Judge Wilkerson. I am shocked at the speed and ferocity of the administration's blitzkrieg attack on Constitutional norms. More than that, I'm scared. A government that can disappear anyone it wants to simply by declaring them "really bad people" is the stuff of nightmare regimes we used to fight against.

Due process for everyone protects everyone. Suspending due process for "really bad people" threatens everyone. Declaring due process too inconvenient or too time-consuming threatens everyone. Due process for all is elemental to any democratic republic worthy of the name.

At this moment, April 2025, we apparently need the other two branches of our government to reinforce that lesson to the Executive Branch and its supporters. Circuit Judges like Wilkerson are doing their part. I ask you, my Senator, to help Congress do theirs. Stand up for the democratic good of due process. Reclaim the Legislative Branch's power to check the Executive. Publicly refute suggestions that the Executive branch can ignore due process. Rebut notion that the Judiciary or Congress is bullying the Executive by expecting it to abide by Constitutional norms. Affirm--loudly and often--that you stand for our system of checks and balances, not government by royal whim.

In his conclusion, Judge Wilkerson writes, "We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe
our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American
ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the
best that is within us while there is still time."

I am asking you to summon the best that is within you--the best that is within America--to stand up for basic democratic rights.

Thank you.

Back to Dwelling on The Awfulness

 I skipped some writing days, ignoring the inner voice last night that said I really needed to write something. But here I am now, writing, so.

I suppose I should compose another letter to my GOP senators. The SAVE act, which threatens to add enormous hurdles to voting in this country, has narrowly passed the House. The Senate is likely to pass it. It's depressing. 

The stock market rallied yesterday in reaction to Trump's "pause" on tariffs (which really wasn't a complete pause, just a reduction of all of them to 10%--still an unimaginable high). Today's stock market erased those gains as people realized, variously, (1) the US/China trade war is still very much on; (2) Trump appears to decide day-to-day or moment-to-moment about tariff policy; (3) the US is unreliable as a trade partner since it seems happy to elect Trump and allow him his whimsy; and (4) there is no plan.

That was Isaac Saul's takeaway from Trump's backing down on tariffs:

I wanted to understand the Trump administration’s grand plan, and it turns out they didn’t have one. When they said they were rolling out global tariffs to negotiate new trade deals but also said the tariff rates weren’t a negotiation tactic, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they said the plan was to end up with zero tariffs and total free trade and also said they wanted to raise tax revenue, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they warned about the need to be “tough” and “take our medicine” and promised that under no circumstances would they back down, and then backed down, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan.

There is no plan, no master strategy, no "art of the deal" genius. There's only Trump's ego, according to Jamelle Bouie:

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

Other countries must pay us tariffs (as Bouie notes, Trump "genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the United States") because that proves we're dominating them. Anything else is us being dominated, which is inconceivable. That his take on tariffs--and international trade--is so ludicrously, maladaptively wrong is, well, just our problem to deal with. I cannot blame the rest of the world for giving up on us.

It is disappointing that so many Republican voters seem ardently to believe exactly what Trump, Fox, and rightwing radio/web tell them: that these tariffs are a tax cut for Americans, that they'll bring back good times (i.e., times good for stable bluecollar jobs and secure retirements for white, straight, cis, conservative Christian, patriarchal people).

It's especially disappointing that so many politicians and justices who could check Trump seem completely unwilling to do so. The House just passed a measure preventing its members from challenging Trump's expansive tariff prerogatives. House and Senate majorities seem committed to passing Trump's budget, which adds to the debt via tax cuts for billionaires while repealing the ACA. There is no replacement, of course. That's been the M.O. for most Trump II "reforms"--get rid of vital services. Replace with nothing, or at best "concepts of a plan."

Sigh. 

I'm just not sure what comes next. 

This Week's Letter

 It's so difficult to do something rather than curl up into a protective ball. It's time to write my two Republican Senators. But what about? 

The insane tariffs Trump has threatened to impose on the world Wednesday? The gutting of vital federal services? The ongoing war against people and organizations he deems as insufficiently subservient to him? The disappearances of migrants, including some here legally, with no due process?

Let's take that last one, I guess.

Dear Senator and Staff--

It seems every letter I've written to you over the last few months consists of me begging you, begging Congress, to check President Trump's flouting of the rule of law. 

I'm writing another such letter now. Over the weekend, CBS News reported on the Venezuelan deportees summarily picked up and deported to a notoriously violent El Salvador prison with no due process. Contra the White House's assertions, their reporting found only 22% of the men had any kind of criminal record in the US. The more evidence that comes out about the government's process of identifying gang members, the shakier their case becomes. They seem to have made life-changing determinations about guilt or innocence based in many cases on evidence as flimsy as tattoos and hearsay. 

Maybe the government is correct. Maybe these are violent gang members simply posing as hairdressers, fathers, and artists. Maybe CBS and other investigators are mistaken. But how would we know? The government has declined to offer evidence in court, claiming wartime powers from an obscure eighteenth-century act. 

If these men are guilty of crimes, arrest them, try them, and let the system we have in place convict and sentence them. But carting them off to a dictator's brutal prison with no chance for them to see or challenge the evidence against them? That's barbaric.

I hear other stories of people like Rumeysa Ozturk, people legally here on student visas or even green cards, being "disappeared" right off the street. These people aren't even being charged with a crime. They just did or said something the government didn't like. I used to think such occurrences existed only as story beats in tales of dictatorships. I'm stunned that such stories are happening here in the US. I had thought that was impossible. 

I am not at all comforted by Secretary Rubio's insistence that such acts are legal. The government's punishing people for nothing more than exercising freedom of speech is wrong regardless of whether it's technically allowed.

I'm begging you to stand up for due process and civil rights protections for all. In our system, everyone, even those people that anger or scare us, have rights. They get to see their charges and challenge evidence against them. Once it becomes OK for the government to unilaterally decide someone is guilty and inflict punishment simply because they said so, we're all in danger.

Due process protects everyone. Lack of due process endangers everyone.

But I need you--Congress--to assert that more forcefully. Right now, the White House and their spokespeople are suggesting that rights and due process are only for some, not for all. That's anathema to our system. It betrays our pledge to liberty and justice for all. 

There's so much more I want from Congress: rein in DOGE's haphazard gutting of federal services, stop President Trump's market-melting tariffs, stand up to continued Russian aggression in Ukraine, tell the administration that we're not going to start World War III over Greenland or Canada. But I try to limit these letters to one ask at a time.

So please: stand up for due process for everyone. I know it's not easy or popular to do so. But it's right to do so.

Thanks.

AI Blues

 Grading, slowly making my way through a digital pile of script analysis papers. 

One newish twist is AI. It seems, more and more, I find a paper whose paragraphs are beautifully crafted but whose prose is superficial. My mode of script analysis focuses exclusively on structure. GPT and its ilk tend to prefer lofty reflections on theme and character, making (and repeating) basic links between those or that scene and this or that theme. 

Most students just don't recognize that a writer has a voice, that we can tell when they shift from their own (often error-riddled but honest) voice into the cottony vagaries of AI.

Encountering one of these depletes me. Usually I catch on about halfway through, as nonspecifics pile up. By that point I've spent time and energy crafting some encouraging intervention ("can you be more specific? Give me a 'for instance' from the text?"). 

And then I cut and paste something into gptzero or another detector, and BAM--likely AI generated. Such detectors are themselves error prone. I wouldn't use them as a first-line test. But they can sometimes tell me if and how someone has run into trouble.

I have to remind myself, as I always do when encountering academic dishonesty, that it's not personal. Dishonesty happens, as Truth Default Theory avers, when the truth becomes inconvenient. Students cheat out of desperation, not out of some desire to hurt teachers. I'm sure some may feel a certain contempt for the class or for me, but the same could be said of those who don't cheat.

Mostly there's just a mass of students who aren't (or who feel) unprepared to do the kind of reading and writing we do in class. I'm continually trying to revise my teaching to reach such students, to clarify what it is they need to make this task seem doable. 

And AI makes it harder. It feels like work to them--they look it up, they teach it about this play they may have read part of, and they have it spit out what they think I want to hear. I think some of them convince themselves it's like what they might have written. But then, how would they know? That's one of the awful things about LLMs (large language models); they prevent students from learning their own voice. They never know what they "sound" like without the filter of AI-ification. 

And it's exhausting to go through the rigmarole of reporting them to student advocacy and accountability. Each time, I'm like is it worth it? Am I doing this out of pique, or am I doing it to teach the student something? At this point, it's more a matter of consistency. I did it for this one student; I have to do it for everyone similarly positioned. And sometimes it really is a good wake-up call. My institution at this moment is pretty good about making these teachable moments. 

But. It's still rough. 

"I use GPT for lots of things," say some friends outside of academia.

I don't.

What's There to Say?

 Man. I don't have much to say. Across-the-board tariffs for all (except for Russia and a few other exempted states). Math apparently based on fundamental misunderstandings of economy. Fantasy predictions of liberation and prosperity. Global stock futures tanking. Retaliatory tariffs incoming. 

This on top of massive and stupid cuts to vital services (HSS, most recently). This on top of abandoning or even mocking the idea of due process for all and of democratic checks and balances. Just lots of open revenge and power-grabs.

Can't even write in complete sentences rn. 

And the worst thing is that I'm afraid none of this will be enough, that popular apathy, boredom, distraction, and/or ignorance that will make it seem like those sounding the alarm about all this are the unreasonable ones. Or I'm worried that the consequences, though bad, won't be severe or sustained enough to alter the opinion of low-information citizens about either (1) passionately supporting Trump, or (2) disengaging from everything.

I don't know. 

Even the comedy of Trump assigning "reciprocal tariffs" on unoccupied Antarctic islands falls flat in the face of the magnitude of damage he's done to the country and the world. 

God help us.