Incredible
What a time to be alive... to launch a Substack... to make up my mind?
I have something to admit: honestly, this feels like the worst time to be launching a Substack, as much as my friends wanted it.
Over the years I have written about many things- sharing my cancer experience, musing on American politics, diving in on social dynamics, providing thoughts on recent events, shedding a little light on my personal spirituality. Maybe a little history, a little tech thrown in.
All these diverse ideas are why I named this Substack, “Finding the Common Thread.”
The past few weeks have been challenging in a way that I didn’t anticipate.
Perhaps it’s something a good friend sent me today- a social media meme of two women sitting across from each other. On the right is a woman with her hands over her mouth in abject disbelief, listening to the woman on the left who is gesticulating and explaining something with fervor. The woman on the right is labelled “2020,” and the woman on the left is “2026.” Put plainly, even 2020 can’t believe what’s going on in 2026. I texted my friend back- “Apparently 2020 was just training.”
We are living through an incredible moment.
I love etymology- the genealogy of words- where they came from, how they got here. So let’s consider what it originally meant for something to be “incredible.”
Incredible:
In + credible
In + cred + ible
In (not) + cred (credere: to believe/trust) + able
Not credit-able
Untrustworthy
We are living through an untrustworthy moment.
Given the falsehoods that the president and his administration deliver daily, as well as the torrent of AI-generated fabrications that we are all faced with, we are indeed living through an “incredible” moment.
Now, about the president and his administration:
A small subset of the US population is very pleased with what’s going on. I have friends in that group, and they’re probably already drafting responses to this, to tell me how wrong I am. The majority of Americans, however, have issues with what’s going on, and I have friends who feel such a degree of abhorrence at the state of things that they will question how it’s possible I’m still friends with anyone in that small subset of support.
Up until recently, I subscribed to some far-right news and commentary sources. Not because I wanted to consume what they produced- but so I could keep an eye on the talking points. After a while, I decided: not for me.
My time on this earth is limited and I am very busy with a family and with projects that I love.
So here’s what I’m doing: I am going to continue to listen to the sources that I consider reasonable, especially from my moderate/independent/politically unhoused perspective. If a friend wants me to consider an issue from another perspective, I will always welcome that. But I am no longer accepting the idea that I need to go listen to ALL the ideas to be more informed. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. If you want to change my mind, it’s up to you to take the time to construct the argument. I’m done “doing my homework.”
1st quarter 2026 is done. Two more quarters until the midterms.
It’s going to be incredible, I just know it.
I was listening to a book today of Rachel Held Evans blog posts from the mid-2000s talking about the awful things going on in the first Trump administration and I was just thinking . . . Rachel, you have no idea how much worse things will get. The pace of this worsening is picking up too and I just wonder if we will ever come back from this. What is the point of no return. What will be be able to salvage, and what will be gone forever. And, how will we grow from this. We had a visit this week from a dear friend who lives in Minneapolis and she was talking about how just about everyone she knows is involved in helping in some way--taking food to folks too scared to leave their homes, surrounding schools so that ICE can't follow kids home to use them as bait, etc. Maybe that spirit will be what we can take forward in some way.