How Little Are The Little Stories?

 

The biggest and most outrageous actions of the Chaos regime and their enormous consequences are often almost too big to wrap your brain around, too huge and extreme to feel anything beyond a now habitual anger and fear.  Followed by numbness, until the next announcement, the next news revelation, the next Court decision.

But individual consequences can still be understood and felt, like the individual victims of the immigration Gestapo.  The high school boy kidnapped on his lunch break.  The scholarship college student and long-time resident on her way home to visit family at Thanksgiving, suddenly deported  in chains over a removal order she knew nothing about, and once again the victim of legalistic sleight of hand to avoid a court order to keep her in the country.

Or the Washington state man lured out of his house on false pretenses, immediately set upon by an attack dog and seriously injured, by the unidentified ICE Gestapo.

Too bad we don't have news media that can put a name and a face to one of the estimated 600,000 people in faraway lands, most of them children, who died for lack of promised US food and medicine aid, much of it locked unused in warehouses.

But it is heartening to me that people across America are defending their neighbors, and agitating against the Chaos Gestapo reign of terror against mostly people of color.

The Chaos racism is definitely out in the open now.  An Axios report begins: "President Trump's Cabinet applauded him this week after he described Somali immigrants as "garbage" who "contribute nothing.' He unapologetically condemned an entire community, with no fear of political backlash."

Yet there is something more to learn, at least about the depth of this current hatred and the Orwellian impunity of relentlessly applying it, in a small and even petty act that gets lost in the chaos of larger outrages.  It's difficult to think of anything more petty--and more telling--than this little story about National Parks.  NPR reports that for 2026 the Chaos administration has stricken two days off the usual calendar of days when admission to National Parks is free.  Those two days are Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth.

But they have added one new day: you can now get into a National Park for free on King Chaos's birthday.