On location somewhere … The Foreclosurepedia Nation generally lives vicariously through me. Love me or hate me, everyone agrees that I bring that kind of bare knuckle approach to tearing scabs off wounds. And unless you are in the top one percent of earners, not much you can point to that the Trump Administration has done for the blue collared worker. In fact, here is Trump’s very own Labor Department, this week, commenting on how bad the raids are going against everyone except violent illegal aliens,
We’d Rather Be Knitting — but They’ve Dragged Us Into This
The Shades-of-Blue elders in Roseburg, Oregon, don’t want to be here. Honestly: give them yarn, comfy chairs, and a lifetime supply of herbal tea, and they are set. But instead, here they are, meeting every week in someone’s living room—or church hall, or that place with the weird echo—scheming how to rally, protest, and resist the Trump Regime’s latest circus. They call it strategy; someone else might call it midlife activism. On August 25, they marched over the Garden Valley overpass in Roseburg—banner in hand, sore feet, voices raspy. They protested. They strategized. They grumbled about how they really ought to be home reading detective novels. Locally, they had a small victory: the Umpqua Transit District forced their CFO to resign. “Forced off” is the phrase they like—imagine them in bathrobes, brandishing knitting needles. But that kind of slap means something: even small government bodies can’t refuse accountability forever.
Across the country, what we call “governing” looks more like a reality show gone bad. The Dow dropped 878 points last Friday—its worst day since April—after Trump threatened “massive” tariffs on China. That’s a TWO TRILLION DOLLAR loss for those of you who slept through economics class in high school. Investors panicked, retirement accounts went into hiding under the couch, and the market reminded everyone that tantrums in Washington don’t stay in Washington. To salvage face, the administration is now proposing a $10 billion bailout to farmers hurt by the same tariffs. It’s the political version of burning down your own barn, then handing the cows a sympathy card. Farmers are squeezed from all sides, with retaliatory tariffs from China, higher input costs, and a government that’s been shut down since October 1 because Speaker Johnson refuses to call the House back into session. USDA functions are stalled, HUD is non-existent, payments are delayed, and the only thing moving fast in Washington is the spin cycle.
Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Health and Human Services Secretary, has taken a break from posting vaccine conspiracy memes to float a new theory: that circumcision causes autism. According to him, boys circumcised early supposedly have double the autism rate, and Tylenol use during or after the procedure is part of the cause. The scientific community collectively rolled its eyes so hard it registered on the Richter scale. Even funnier, Trump himself repeated Kennedy’s talking points while warning pregnant women about Tylenol—just days before getting his own COVID booster shot at a medical appointment, all while continuing to rail publicly against vaccines. The irony was so pure it could be bottled and sold as a disinfectant.
As if that weren’t enough, Trump’s Justice Department has been staging what could generously be called courtroom theater, with indictments against Letitia James and James Comey. James, the New York Attorney General who successfully sued Trump’s businesses, is now being accused of mortgage and bank fraud by a handpicked U.S. Attorney in Virginia. Comey, the former FBI Director, faces charges for allegedly misleading Congress years ago. Both cases are expected to go nowhere—but they make for good television, and in this administration, that’s what passes for governance. As the nation’s capital plays legal musical chairs, Speaker Johnson has left the government shuttered, refusing to reconvene the House. Apparently, if you don’t meet, you can’t disagree.
Meanwhile, in Roseburg, they are seeing the fallout in real time. People who once believed democracy was self-cleaning now realize it’s more like a garden—it withers if you don’t tend it. The tariffs that crash the global market also crash local farms. The federal shutdown pauses everything from food programs to permits. The Cabinet-level “science” debates about Tylenol and circumcision sound like bad Facebook threads come to life. Everyone can feel the cracks widening beneath our feet, even in a small Oregon town where the loudest noise is usually the logging trucks on I-5.
And yet, the knitters don’t give up. They get angry. They joke. They knit and organize. To them, if democracy is a house, local activism is the foundation, and they are the stubborn masons holding the bricks together. They would rather be home knitting, sure, but if the choice is between silence and stitches of resistance, they take the latter every time.
