What I Did on My Summer Vacation. Woke Up.

Christine Merser, July 21, 2025

I’ve never been one for vacation time really. The procrastinator in me means that I can break up my day, every day, where I work in spurts, waste time in chunks, do daily chores hither to and yon, and so work days and weekends and weeks off sort of meld together.

But I think the hold your breath kind of stress since January (has it really only been six months?) made me treat the last week or so when my family came to stay, and then I headed to New York and the Hamptons for some business but mostly R&R, as actual time off. I truly checked out, both from America Interrupted and from my client work.

Driving back from the Hamptons, I was on the phone with a close friend and she said she didn’t ever remember me taking a vacation in all the years we’ve known each other. Decades.

I marinated a lot while I was gone, and I think I accepted the fact that the country that I thought was the skeleton, the foundation, on which I built both my pride of identity (was it cultural identity?) and my loyalty to country, was never what I thought it was. None of it. It was smokes and mirrors. A house of cards. Misplaced patriotism.

I have come to believe it is a good thing it has fallen. In the long run. And, devastating for so many right now, but overall, it had to happen.

If you want to be an ICE thug where you can cover your face so no one knows your name and drag innocent people off the streets, away from their sobbing families to possible death but surely dehumanizing conditions with impunity, you can get a $50,000 signing bonus from your country and a $100,000 annual salary plus benefits.

And, you can tell yourself and your MAGA kin that you are doing it for love of country.

But a master’s degree, or even a PhD and a desire to teach high school or elementary school students caps out at $50,000 because supposedly that’s all the country’s budget could pay. For decades we fell for this ruse.

It was a lie. We had the money. White men in high places that we put there, and wealthy men who never were accountable for losing the Civil War and were allowed to erect statues as if owning people because they have a different color skin than you should’ve been OK, never wanted most of America to be too smart. Too educated. Too knowledgeable. That would’ve been dangerous. That would’ve been too equal.

And, worse yet, these men who sit in leather chairs in Washington D.C. high in the white columns made of marble, are not smart at all. But they sold their souls to the devil while we were living pretty fine lives, not paying attention to what they were doing in our names.

I could go on and on, not about the Bill of Rights, but about the bill of goods that I bought into without question or personal internal debate, which would’ve shown me the truth had I taken the time, about how I turned over my agency to mostly white men all through my American life. And so here we are in July 2025, with me taking my first ten days off and doing a lot of thinking. And, seeing the truth in every direction of government I looked at this past two weeks.

Part of my panic and sheer exhaustion has been based on the fear that my life as I saw it is over.

It’s not. Nothing bad is happening to me. I’m a white 72-year-old woman who will not likely suffer under this regime unless I continue to write this column and it takes off in a way that threatens those white men who happen to be in power for now and things get worse and I get arrested or something. It could happen. Or not. But nothing bad is happening to me now.

I went to someone’s birthday party last week in New York City. It was a diverse group of wonderful people around the table, people of color and all kinds of backgrounds. I’m not sure they were all citizens by birth either. But either way, I don’t think any of them were illegal immigrants. The birthday girl asked everybody to go around the table and talk about how they’re coping with this terrible time in our country. It was her birthday and she’s a very positive person, and has done so much in her life for many humans, and if you read this column at all, you know I can race to the dark side really fast, which I didn’t think was really appropriate during this dinner.

Everyone went around the table and they talked about how they were coping, and I’m not sure they saw it the way I did, but what I saw was that everyone went into self, and the things they were doing personally to make themselves feel better. No one mentioned activism, which data suggests is one of the best ways to feel better as a method for relief. When I push send on this column and I see the statistics of how many people read it, and that maybe, just maybe, some of them do some of the things that I am learning will make a difference in today’s world, I know I feel better. When I take action, which I do every day - one thing a day, I know I feel like I am doing something. I know it keeps me grounded. Like I did something today that might make a difference tomorrow. Some said they did things in nature. Took walks. One said teaching his classes and dance helped.

All the while we were speaking, there was somebody who was serving the bread or taking the plates away, who was clearly here illegally. No one seemed to notice him. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him wondering how he was coping. The fear he must be feeling. When I went to the ladies’ room, I asked him how he was doing, and he told me he was fine, but I could tell he wasn’t. He told me he takes the subway back and forth to work and that his wife and his mother are at his apartment. He told me he’s not afraid … yet. He told me he hasn’t seen people being picked up, but I saw the fear in his eyes. I gave him my card and said if I could help him, he should call me. I gave him a few hundred dollars I had with me, and I told him I would think about him and that I wanted him to know that a lot of people would stand up for him if we happened to be where he was, if he should be in trouble. He thanked me.

When I got back to the table, I did say that nothing bad has happened to any of us. I also mentioned that we should be asking the man serving us how he was coping with the fear of what’s happening because he was in danger. We were not.

I worry that we Americans, and I definitely include myself in the pack, are not equipped with the toolbox we need to stand up at this moment in history. I hope I am filling it now. I am working hard to be that person. Finding my line in the sand. I will not order from Amazon. Ever again. I am paying cash wherever I can, rather than give Bank of America 3% when a local restaurant or farmer’s market should get all the money rather than filtering some to the one percent that have done nothing to earn my hard-earned cash. I’m beginning to see how this all comes to pass, and I’m developing the discipline to take away their power one nickel and dime at a time, which is what it’s going to take.

I realized something else while I was away. This had to happen. If not now, at some point. But, the price these wonderful humans are paying, these immigrants who have picked our food for pennies on the dollar when they should’ve been paid dollars on the corn cob, is heartbreaking. The Americans who do not have financial resources. They do not deserve what’s happening. And please please please let me believe that I can stop it, not myself but collectively with my fellow Americans as soon as possible. And that my vision for America, where we can look at these amazing people, the immigrant workers, the teachers, the restauranteurs, the elderly on Medicaid, and everyone else who deserves to be making what their products and services are worth rather than what the 1% can get away with paying them, minimally, to keep them in their place, will be the new country I call my own. Where we all have healthcare. Where we invest in roads and education and museums. Where we take that Everglades Alligator Alley Alcatraz concentration camp and make it into a museum where we walk in shame and remind ourselves that we could never go back to where we were for hundreds of years, where we hid it well enough that we didn’t have to acknowledge it openly.

We will never be able to hide our past again. Because by doing that all these years, we allowed the ‘south to rise again,’ so to speak.

In the meantime, I’m not afraid of them. They will never change who I am. I need the courage to not hide it. I really don’t think they’ll win. I think Stephen Colbert will move on and do something better, just like Terry Moran, who got fired from ABC, whose column on Substack is so much better than whatever he did on ABC, which I never saw anyway because I don’t watch network television. And he’s making more money, I think, as well. And he can be himself. And there’s no middleman.

Everyone gets to stand on their own now and build their own path to success without having to use the vehicles owned by the 1% that never had our best interest at heart. We get to give our dollars directly to the person we are purchasing from more and more, and that is back to the basics from which our country was built.

We can stop spending where it doesn’t serve us. We do not need what they are selling. We can get it elsewhere. And, yes we can have the discipline to do away with the instant gratification they are counting on us needing. And as soon as we start doing that, we will take our power back. And we can find the strength to be brave. Courage is needed now.

So I’m back from vacation. Rested. Sure footed. With the fog of six months of shock and awe and fear gone. I know who my people are. I know who they’re not. And whoever is not, never gets one ounce of my agency again, or my money, or my support. And if there are enough of me around, those people will go away.

By the way, there may not be free elections in the next midterm elections. The less time we spend trying to make this change from the top down, the more successful we will be. It’s one on one time. Where you spend every single dime. And making sure you give your number to people you might’ve passed by before, but who might need your help in the future because they are the ones who deserve to have America’s treasure.

And, giving cash to individuals, who you know might need it. Cash … who knew?

I highly recommend taking a vacation before summer is over. We all need it. Look around. Figure out who your posse is. My posse is actually smaller than it has ever been. But that’s a good thing. I have cleaned house. And now there’s room in the mansion of my heart to add the people who should’ve been there all along.

From Terry Moran’s column yesterday… Greatness is in us all. Courage and greatness is needed now. Who among us? I hope I will show up.

From Terry Moran…

That’s the title of this week’s poem: “The Truly Great.” It’s by the 20th Century English poet Stephen Spender. What I love about it is that Spender understands that greatness in life isn’t material or martial or political success or prominence. It’s passion. That passion is always there in each and every one of us, and it is what we must bring to this fight to save America.

The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

.

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.