THE PLAY’S THE THING

 

By Ruth A. Sheets

December 16, 2025

Watching the news, on TV or online lets us all into a crazy world of folks in power roles in a giant game.  There is a kind of outline, but no script, “Project 2025.”  They have a kind of goal in mind but don’t seem to know what it should look like when finished.  The cast includes a set of players who think they know what their roles should be, but the rest of the cast is not necessarily in agreement.   

A challenge is that no one is clear just who the director is.  There are several candidates, but none of them has the needed skills or talent, but are all jockeying for position. 

In some ways, this is like a role-playing game in which all of us are involved in a quest related to our democracy?  The main characters are rich, white, racist, misogynistic, homo/transphobic, mostly male, and want a society where only folks like themselves have full citizenship, making all decisions, ruling families, the workplace, communities, and governments at all levels.  They have permission from no one, caring nothing for the skills, abilities, knowledge, talents of anyone unless they can use them.  For them, it’s about wealth and power.  The vast majority of the American people are supposed to be NPCs (non-player characters, to be seen and not heard, pawns to be dragged around with the party.  However, the NPCs have one tool or skill they can use when needed, which scares the leads in the cast.

So, meet the cast at this point in the production:

• Cheeto-Cheeks:  He wants to be king.  His brain is slowly drifting away through dementia, but no one around him can mention it on pain of being fired or worse.  He has no talents beyond grifting, but a lot of ambition, and no positive work ethic.
• Little Elon:  a toddler-adult who wants to rule the world.  He has far fewer skills and talents than he thinks, but has an enormous amount of money due to inheritance (rarely mentioned), and the results of investments and other ways he feeds his addiction to money and power. 
• The Unjolly Miller:  He wants to be the Lord High Inquisitor and Public Executioner too.   His hatreds are astronomical.  He shows little facial expression, no concern for anyone (as that would show weakness).  One can imagine him as the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp.
• Whitey Vought:  His partner is The Unjolly Miller although they are often found treading on each other’s territory, trying to outdo each other in the cruelties they perpetrate on others. (Both want to be director.)
• Noem Dog:  she spends a lot of time trying to prove her manhood; it isn’t working, so must do photo ops at every opportunity, which may slow the party.  She has no skills, no talent, but knows how to dress for an occasion.

• Wanton Warrior:  He likes renaming things and spends time doing that instead of actually learning his job, supposedly defending this nation, but prefers committing war crimes.

• Suzie-Q:  She is a manipulator, the whisperer for the party.  She can tell them to do things and they will just do them because they know she has information on them they don’t want shared.  She can quietly order Cheeto around when no one else can.
• Marco Little:  the appointed diplomat who found going along with Cheeto’s expectations is better than real diplomacy.
• Bonded Woman:  She is attached through an umbilical cord to Cheeto Cheeks and is certain she must do everything to protect her baby, kind of like his pseudomommy.  She too has little experience, less skill, but is so excited she gets to do as much harm to the “kingdom” as she can with impunity while Her Baby Cheeto has immunity.
• Mikey Wimp:  His job is to get things done in the party, but alas, he can’t figure out how to do that because he is incompetent and does not realize he is just the guy to be blamed when he is unsuccessful, which is constant.
• Johnny Kingmaker:  He and his band of 5 hoods want to force all the NPCs to obey, no matter what stupid thing they demand or proclaim.  The six of them make up rules, then pronounce them throughout the land.  They decide who will win no matter what is legal.

 Can you imagine this band of misfits on any kind of quest on behalf of this nation?  Any quest is entirely for themselves and those whose incompetence, hatred, ignorance are as powerful as their own. 

 They often forget us NPCs, so if we are careful, strategic, intelligent (which we are), we can stop them.  We need to give them a dungeon to survive so they won’t bother the rest of us as we work to undo the damage they have done and put in place new guardrails to keep a party with actions like theirs from forming again in America.

A DICTATOR DICTATES - WE DO NOT HAVE TO COMPLY!

by Ruth A. Sheets

Yesterday was World AIDS Day.  You probably didn’t know that and were not reminded because Donald Trump decided the United States was not going to commemorate it, as though it doesn’t exist.  I was surprised Trump even knew there was such a thing as World AIDS Day (he probably didn’t).  The cadre of hateful folks around him, Trump’s Toddler Pool spends their time finding ways to get their “boss” to demonstrate their hatreds and his.  Folks like Steve Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, mostly rich white men want us to think of AIDS as the gay disease that was around in the 1980s and nothing more. 

Donald Trump and the Pool also want to rewrite American history, science, and medicine to place white men at the center of everything, to dismiss everyone else as just burdens white men have to bear.  They decide which laws they will follow and ignore the rest.  They threaten to “hang” Democrats who remind our military and intelligence communities they are required not to follow illegal orders.  They blast small boats out of the water in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific supposedly because they are transporting drugs (with no proof), even killing survivors, all of which are against American and international law.  The Pool and its “leader” desperately want to be seen as powerful enough to dictate everything to the people of this nation, even what is truth.

Their super rich “friends” like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and a few others have bought up our media, online, in print, and on air and have been working hard to shape it to whatever story Trump and the Pool want told and with the language they will approve.  Clearly these media owners are getting something for sacrificing their integrity (if they ever had any).  I think it is being “in the room where it happens,” or rather making sure they have a hand in what happens in that room.  For that “presence, they will cover only what Trump (and the Pool want covered, a win-win for them and a lose-lose for the rest of the American people. 

They have dictated that climate change (global warming) is a hoax and threatened Republican members of Congress that they must vote for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” even though there is nothing positive in it for their constituents.  They told Republicans in Congress to cut funding for public broadcasting, libraries, museums, infrastructure programs, mitigation of climate change, and more, whose funding congress had already approved.  In short, I can’t think of a single thing Trump and the Toddler Pool have done since gaining office nearly a year ago.

We the People are not helpless.  We can communicate our opposition to our representatives at all levels and vote for those who have our interests in mind.  We have participated in significant protests, the most recent “No Kings” event brought 7 million people out to say “no” to the dictator would-be-king.  Conservative school boards around the country have been replaced with boards that do not want their curricula and practices dictated by people who are ignorant of nearly everything.  The uninvolved have stepped up to protest cuts in SNAP, Medicaid, unaffordable healthcare, issues which have touched them personally. 

People in our cities have been standing in the way of ICE as the illegal law-enforcement troop drags people from their homes, cars, and off the street  and disappears them into appalling prisons and concentration camps.  People are standing with and for neighbors they didn’t know before.

Workers are demanding unions and not accepting the treatment that current bosses are dishing out.  Young people are demanding better on the job and off.

People of many faiths, ages,  and backgrounds voted for a young mayor, Mamdani,  for NYC, and plan to work for the issues he stands on.  The idea that there could be housing, child care, and public transportation for everyone is spreading.

We must find ways to reach out to people who see the world differently from us and hear about their needs, their dreams, and what keeps them supporting a group of folks who care nothing for them and prove it on a daily basis.  We can’t impact the world view of people if we don’t  understand them, and with understanding, we can encourage them to fight with us for things we have in common, our nation for example!