I don’t want him to die, you understand. Of course, he is going to die before long, no matter what I want. He’s an octogenarian with an extremely unhealthy lifestyle. His ankles are massively swollen, and the rest of his body is swelling up as well. His veins are bruising. He’s sundowning more and more visibly by the day. He keeps dozing off at random intervals. And I’m not looking forward to when he just doesn’t wake up. His death, when it happens, will mean breaking news and commentary, montages of his face on every television channel, his body in a casket in the rotunda. I don’t want to see him over and over again. I don’t want to hear newscasters desperately trying to say bland things about him and whitewash what he’s done. I don’t want his remaining followers united in their grief. I just want him to go away.

I don’t want to have to think about what that sociopath is going to do next.

I never again want to go to bed cringing, afraid he’ll start a war on another country that’s done nothing to us just to boost his ego.

I never again want to wake up and open my phone, still cringing, afraid to see what he posted at three in the morning.

I never again want to wonder what historic monument or beautiful piece of land he’s going to destroy next.

I am sick to death of finding out there’s another traumatized sexual abuse victim who never got justice when he groped or raped her. I am sick to death of hearing all the hideous things his administration has done to immigrant children and their families. I don’t want to think about the irreparable damage to the environment. I don’t want to have to help my poor neighbors get by because so many government programs have dried up while he was funding his ballroom.

I don’t want to grapple with the fact that a third of our country LIKES this swine and cheers him on as he gets worse and worse. And it’s just as terrible to realize that a sizable number of people, enough to swing an election, didn’t particularly like him, but still voted for him because they thought he’d fix grocery prices. They were willing to change world history, for grocery prices. They didn’t care about their immigrant neighbors and they didn’t care about the women he destroyed. They didn’t care about the countries he might bomb or the way he’d ruin the environment. They didn’t care about preserving our democracy. They just wanted cheap groceries. And grocery prices are skyrocketing. It serves them right, but the rest of us have to live in this country as well.

That’s really the worst part of the last ten years: finding out how few good people there are in this county. And that is not going to end, when he goes away.

Still: I want him to go away.

I don’t want to look at his self-satisfied Cheshire cat grin, ever again.

I don’t want to see a video of his ranting, incoherent speeches, ever again.

I just want him to wander off somewhere and disappear into obscurity.

I’m exhausted.

And I can’t imagine I’m alone.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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It’s time to have the talk about “small government.”

This is coming from someone who once thought I liked small government, a long time ago. I was raised a conservative. I once assumed the United States’ government was a terrible, gigantic bloated bureaucracy with far too many expensive programs nitpicking at everyone, and that the government needed to mind its own business so we could mind ours. I think it’s about time we thought about “small government” quite differently, because government cuts are hurting all of us, and it’s going to get worse.

Yesterday, I was sitting down to eat my own lunch when I saw that there had been another food recall this summer.

In this case, the culprit was hot peppers: jalapeño peppers grown by Coast Citrus Distributors had caused hundreds of cases of salmonella poisoning in several states. Two fast food restaurants had voluntarily recalled the peppers before the government realized what was happening. I found out about this because a friend on social media was panicking that he’d recently eaten fast food jalapeño peppers, and he hoped he didn’t get sick. I felt guilty, looking at all the stock photos of peppers on the news articles about the outbreak. Adrienne and I are growing our own jalapeños this year and we put them in the vegetable wash, so we haven’t bought restaurant peppers. Most people who like peppers aren’t that lucky.

No, this is NOT going to be a sanctimonious and self-important article about how everybody should grow their own food and stop patronizing supermarkets that get their produce from a great big factory farm. Don’t get me wrong: I think the world would be a better place if many more people with the ability to do so grew their own food, and if more neighbors grew food for each other. Growing and processing your own food is great for your mental health. It’s great for physical health, because it encourages you to go out in nature, be active and try new things. It’s good for the environment because you quickly learn how much you need pollinators and how to make wonderful compost to enrich the soil. And it helps you learn an appreciation for the food you eat and how much work goes into it. But the vast majority of Americans don’t have the ability to grow and raise their own food for the whole year. It’s just not going to happen.

We all need to buy food. Even people on farms who grow a lot of their own crops end up at the supermarket and restaurants, a lot of the time. Yes, even the Amish. I see Amish families at my Aldi and Walmart all the time, and sometimes the buggies go through the drive thru for a meal. You’re simply going to get most of the food you eat at the supermarket and at restaurants if you live in America in 2026. And that means the food in the supermarket and at restaurants has to be safe to eat, or people are going to die.

We know that in 2025, the Trump administration proudly announced that they were cutting all kinds of government red tape, shrinking the bureaucracy, and firing people to save money. Elon Musk was on TV waving a chainsaw around and boasting about this. We were going to get rid of the nanny state and save on our taxes. Small government would win the day. Of course, $2.2 trillion were added to the national debt that year. Government spending has increased, not decreased. But it’s still true that lots and lots of government programs overseeing all sorts of things were cut.

In addition, we got RFK Junior, who acts like an animal-torturing psychopath, looks like death warmed over, and admits he’s got brain damage from parasitic worms, running the CDC into the ground. He, too, insists that we’ve got to get government bureaucracy out of our food supply and start living closer to nature, to be healthy.

The results haven’t been so great. It turns out nature is dangerous and wants to kill us.

I can’t possibly keep track of all the food-borne illnesses we’ve had to contend with this summer, but here are the ones that have been on my radar. Besides the Jalapeño incident, we now have at least twenty-two thousand cases of Cyclospora parasites in forty-seven states causing severe, explosive diarrhea, with at least two deaths. This seems to have begun with shredded iceberg lettuce sold by Taylor Farms, but it’s entirely possible there’s more than one cause. Cyclospora is spread when human feces come into contact with the food supply, in case you didn’t know. It usually begins because a farm tries to cut corners by irrigating the fields with dirty water, or because farm workers are treated so poorly they can’t take a bathroom break or have a moment for basic hygiene. The government scaled back monitoring of Cyclospora parasites in the food supply in July of 2025, to save on bureaucracy.

There are now New World Screwworms infesting the cattle in Texas and New Mexico for the first time in sixty years. Thousands of cattle and some other animals are now infected, including a family’s dog. A New World Screwworm is the larval stage of a certain type of parasitic blowfly, and they eat living flesh. They can spread to whole herds of cattle, animals, and even people, causing horrific injuries and eventually death. We had eradicated screwworm attacks in America by having scientists breed sterile blowflies that couldn’t breed new generations and releasing them into the wild, but the Trump Administration cut funding for that kind of thing because it seemed so silly.

There was recently a recall of 1.5 million cartons of eggs from one producer Texas, which were contaminated with salmonella. This has caused 98 infections and 28 hospitalizations so far. Salmonella gets into chicken eggs if the chicken herself is infected, or if the germs are growing on chicken droppings that are left on the eggshell and then work their way into the egg through tiny cracks in the shell. Eggs that come right out of the hen have a coating of beneficial bacteria called a “bloom” on them, which makes it less likely that salmonella will pass into the egg if the shell isn’t broken: that’s why many people with backyard hens don’t get sick if they store their fresh eggs on the counter. But the bloom comes off during the washing and packaging process for commercial eggs, and that washing and packing can cause tiny cracks in the shell which introduces germs into the egg white, so farmers need to be careful when they process eggs. The USDA is supposed to ensure that farmers are careful enough, by routine inspections. Some salmonella inspection programs have been cut by the Trump administration.

There has been a recall of 12,000 pounds of imported bacon, which somehow got into the country without passing any inspections so it’s impossible to say whether it’s safe to eat or not. It could be perfectly fine, or it could be completely rancid, but we don’t know because it wasn’t inspected. Nobody seems sure how the bacon got here without inspection. But we know that the government drastically cut foreign food inspections in 2025.

This is all going on while vaccination rates are dropping because the CDC is encouraging people to be afraid of vaccines through logical fallacies. Measles rates are skyrocketing. Thousands of Americans are getting sick with all kinds of preventable illnesses. And I think things are only going to get worse before they get better.

It turns out that that great big bloated government bureaucracy, doing silly things like pushing vaccinations, breeding sterile flies, and checking lettuce for poop, was keeping us safer.

It turns out that the smallest possible government to keep a country the size of the United States running, is a pretty big government. The smallest possible government is a government big and complicated enough to regulate food and medicine and keep people so safe that we don’t have to think about the government very often. If you take away that complicated bureaucracy, you get this kind of chaos in our food supply chain. And suddenly all of us can’t just mind our own business, because we’re too busy trying to protect ourselves from government mistakes.

I don’t know how we’re getting out of this. But when we do, never let anyone gaslight you about big government again. The correct size of government is the one where we’re not eating flies and parasites whenever we go to the store.

Enjoy your lunch.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

If you follow my other blog, you know that, for several years, I had a stalker.

This was a neighbor, Kim, who was not well. She had spent most of her life randomly deciding one person or another was the cause of all her problems and attacking that person. She had a string of convictions for menacing and domestic violence. We were the last in her chain of victims.

Kim bought the house next to ours and started harassing the neighbors on the other side while telling us weird stories about how the neighbors had harassed her. Then, like a light switch, she befriended those neighbors and started attacking us. She would burst out of her house to yell threats when I went outside. She would vandalize our garden and our car. She liked to pace around between our houses muttering scary threats. She menaced us with her dog. She threatened civil suits and once dragged us into court and yelled lies at us in front of a judge. This got worse and worse as her health failed. Towards the end, she was having full blown hallucinations that she blamed on me: I would wake up at five in the morning and hear her screaming “I SEE YOU, MARY!” at an imaginary version of me who had appeared to her again.

By the time she died of metastatic cancer in 2023, I was exhausted. I was extremely anxious all the time. I had nightmares and night terrors, and I jumped in shock whenever I heard the jingling of a dog’s chain. Sometimes I would see a person who looked like her and jump out of my skin. It’s no exaggeration to say that I spent the subsequent three years just healing from the experience.

I guess you could say I had “Kim Derangement Syndrome.” But the proper name for my condition is post traumatic stress disorder.

Mental illness doesn’t make you a bad person, of course. I’m mentally ill myself. Most everybody has mental health struggles at one time or another. Even people with “cluster b symptoms” like Kim had been experiencing can learn to cope with their terrible struggles and be good neighbors. But that specific type of severely mentally ill person who lashes out at others to hurt them in order to soothe their own feelings, can drive their victims crazy.

If you are that victim, you constantly have to think about what the aggressor is doing. You have to grow eyes on the back of your head and monitor the aggressor so that you can take evasive action. You can’t even sleep without a certain part of your brain being wide awake, listening for trouble. You consciously learn to leave your house by the side door, to park your car on a different block, to give up things you love like a backyard garden. Your sympathetic nervous system, that isn’t in your conscious control, learns to launch itself into fight or flight mode in an instant. It’s exhausting. You can’t turn it off. The thing you want most of all, is to just stop thinking about that person. But you can’t. And you start to lose your mind.

What I’m going to say is analogous. I don’t think that every American who is feeling exhausted and helpless every time they look at the news right now actually has PTSD. But I think we’re all worn very thin, because we’ve been dealing with an aggressive and abusive mentally ill person for ten years now and there’s still no end in sight.

Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, and he always has been. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a mental illness that has many different subtypes, but the malignant type is the one that crosses over with sociopathy the most. His grandiose self-importance is legendary. He is obsessed with garnering unlimited power and wealth. He believes he is entitled to special treatment. He is desperate for attention: admiration is a preferred source of attention, but fear will do if fear is what he can get. About a third of the United States supports Trump and a smaller number really admire him. The rest of us, he keeps paying attention by fear.

Trump is good at putting on a show that makes you look, though he’s losing his showmanship skills as he fades into dementia. He’s got great showmanship skills for throwing you into a state of chaos so you’ll have to pay attention when you’re desperately trying not to. He’s an expert in doing something chaotic and dangerous at just the right moment that you have to jump up and pay attention so you won’t get hurt. This was bad enough when all he was doing was terrorizing contestants on a reality television show. But for the past ten years, he’s been terrorizing all American citizens, in and out of the Oval Office.

I’m not saying that the government was fine or even very good before Trump. But Trump has been using the levers of the government, or the threat of what he’ll do if he’s elected to grab the lever, specifically to draw attention to himself since 2016. We can’t count on anything or feel safe for a moment. This has been going on for so long that it’s our new normal.

Will you get your food stamps or social security payment this month? Will you be able to rely on the government safety net and the grants they gave to local charities in your area, to keep the homeless housed and to keep kids from going hungry? You can’t count on it, and you’ll have to figure out how to live if you don’t. That’s how Trump wants you to feel.

Will the drastic cutting of government bureaucracy cause a rash of food poisoning or a respiratory pandemic this season? Better check the bar codes on every type of produce in your crisper drawer again. Isn’t it fun?

Can you trust a bank, a financial institution, a place where you’re spending your money on the internet? Not if the president keeps pardoning fraudsters who pay him a bribe.

Did you make a plan for how you’d afford your mortgage payment and still have money to eat in 2024? Too bad, it’s all out the window now, because the One Big Beautiful Bill act changed the terms of your student debt payment and you need hundreds more to keep from being homeless.

Will masked agents drag your pleasant Mexican neighbor to a detention center because they refuse to believe his green card is real? Better get a whistle and learn to scream “LA MIGRA!” Maybe you are the brown-skinned person who worries and looks over your shoulder every time you see a van lately. Maybe you’re the neighbor who might try to intervene, and get run over or shot. Maybe you’ll go to prison for exercising your first amendment rights in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Do you have a disabled relative you’re caring for, and their SSDI and Medicare was how you managed to keep both of you alive? Too bad, they’re changing all the rules. Your relative might end up in an institution!

Do you have a transgender child? Get ready to fight for their life! You have no idea what kind of violence against them the government is going to come up with next. And hey, you might get accused of child abuse just for supporting your child’s mental health as well.

And then there’s that little matter of billions of dollars and most of our munitions going down the toilet in a war no one asked for that’s further destabilized the entire Middle East, doubled gas prices, and is only going to get worse. Thousands of Iranians have been killed. Trump keeps threatening to commit war crimes, and then chickening out, and then bombing again. The entire world is in danger of what will happen next.

Meanwhile he threw a hissy fit over the Kennedy Center. He tore down the East Wing of the White House one day without getting a permit. He tore apart the lawn for a helipad and then tore up the helipad. He ruined the reflecting pool and blamed an imaginary vandal. Which of Washington’s beautiful monuments, which belong to all of us Americans instead of to him personally, will he trash next? No, those aren’t anywhere near as important as things like wars and ICE agents that actually kill people, but they’re sure frustrating. They make you look. They’re another thing that keeps you constantly worrying about somebody we never want to think about again.

And all this time, we have to think about Trump’s cultists as well. This isn’t the same as having normal political differences with neighbors and family. That’s awkward enough. I mean you have to wonder if your grumpy aunt from Silver Spring or the family down the block was at the capitol hitting police officers with fire extinguishers in 2021. You have to wonder if there’ll be another xenophobia-inspired mass shooting in your town. You have to worry if the MAGA families in town will stop vaccinating their kids, and you’ll get sick.

If you are feeling exhausted this summer. If you feel like you’re going to go crazy. If you’re burned out and angry and jump whenever you get a push notification on the phone. If you want to crawl out of your skin every time you hear that man’s voice or see his nasty face: I think you might have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not because you’re making up a threat where there isn’t one, but because he’s actually damaged your mental health.

I don’t know how we’re getting out of this. I don’t know how to fix the damage that’s been done.

But I just want to tell you guys that you’re not crazy. Or, at least, you have a right to feel a little crazy. It’s not you. It’s him. You’re being abused.

I feel the same way about Trump that I felt about Kim. I just want him to go away.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

Let’s talk about the CDC’s new warning on vaccine safety.

If you didn’t know there was a new warning on vaccine safety, you can thank your lucky stars, because this is intensely stupid. But RFK Junior’s Center for Disease Control did make a change to their page on vaccine safety.

The page now proclaims the following warning at the very top:

“The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

It goes on to explain that the possible link between vaccines and autism has been “ignored by health authorities” despite the fact that it’s been thoroughly researched and debunked. But look at that sentence again: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

Now look at this one: “The claim 'Mary Pezzulo did not ride Godzilla to Aldi during the Trojan War' is not an evidence-based claim because it is not possible to rule it out from scientific evidence.”

What I just said in the above paragraph is factually true, and every bit as useful and logical as the CDC’s point. You can’t prove with absolute certainty that time travel will never be possible, and that I will never possibly possess a time machine and go back in time, and that Godzilla could never possibly exist in a world with enough scientific advancement to build a time machine and give both of them to me, and that I couldn’t take an Aldi with me to the fall of Troy and and then set the Aldi on the battlefield and ride Godzilla to it. You’re justified in thinking that the possibility is so slim that my suggesting it is ridiculous. You’re perfectly safe assuming it’s not real. But you can’t absolutely PROVE it didn’t happen. You don’t have to, because you have a reasonable amount of evidence it’s impossible.

It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. You could prove something is mathematically or logically impossible, of course. You could find evidence of the absence of an object in a small space, like looking carefully into the fruit bowl to prove their are no bananas in the fruit bowl. You could weigh the evidence in a court case and decide that someone is innocent of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, but not usually beyond any possible doubt at all— for example, you can decide you believe the defendant is innocent based on ten people confirming his alibi, but there’s always a chance they’re all lying. But for many things, you can’t provide absolute incontrovertible proof that something DOESN’T exist or DIDN’T happen. You don’t have to. You just need to find a reasonable amount of evidence that it’s extremely unlikely.

When I was in undergrad, I took a course for non-scientists on the history of AIDS and HIV. I was the furthest thing from a biologist. I was an English major. Our teacher, on the other hand, WAS a biologist. One of her first jobs, more than a decade previously during the worst part of the AIDS pandemic, had been answering questions at the AIDS information hotline. I would not be in this women’s shoes for all the money in the world. Many times a day, when she answered the phone, she spoke with a panicked person who was afraid they may have been exposed to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). They would describe to her, in gruesome detail, the way they feared they’d come in contact with the germs: the needles, the bizarre accidents, and the sex acts. They would say “does that mean I’m HIV positive?”

And this poor woman wasn’t allowed to say “no,” because that’s not how medicine works.

If the scenario the person described was a likely way to contract HIV, she was allowed to say “You may be HIV positive. You need to get tested, and here’s how to get a test.” But if what they said was not at all a way to contract HIV, she had to say “It’s possible, but it’s not very likely.”

It WASN’T possible that these poor people had HIV, by any reasonable everyday standard. But the only answer she was allowed to give was “it’s possible, but it’s not very likely.” Because it WAS, theoretically, physically possible that maybe HIV would mutate and become airborne. It WAS, theoretically, possible that there was a single HIV germ on the toilet seat, and the person had a cut in their skin they didn’t notice, although that’s never happened before. You couldn’t prove beyond any possible doubt that those things DIDN’T happen. But you could prove they were so unlikely that nobody needed to worry about it. That’s how medicine works.

So, here’s what we can say about vaccines and autism: lots of people believe that vaccines cause autism. That doesn’t mean anything in itself. Lots of people believe all kinds of silly things. In the 1990s, some research was put forward that was purported to suggest a link between vaccines and autism, but that research and that theory have been debunked. It is now the medical consensus that there is no reliable evidence that vaccines cause autism. If you are lucky enough to be autistic like me, you probably inherited it from your parents.

Sure, there may be some evidence out there that could one day make us revisit the link between autism and vaccines. But no scientist has found it yet, despite decades of trying. There may one day be some evidence out there that autism is caused by something else, like too many carbohydrates or space lasers or being a changeling. But no scientist has found that either. There could also be a time machine in my basement next to the 400-foot-tall doggie cage and the Aldi store I stole with my helicopter. But you’re pretty safe assuming there’s not.

So I guess you could say that it’s possible, but not very likely, that vaccines cause autism. But it’s also possible, but not very likely, that I rode Godzilla to Aldi during the Trojan war.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go feed Godzilla.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

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I love a good mystery, but this is getting ridiculous.

On June 14th, the elderly former Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, suffered some sort of medical emergency in his Washington, DC townhouse. Paramedics were filmed carrying the octogenarian out on a stretcher, where he was barefoot and looked unresponsive. The medics did not look to be in any hurry, and the lights weren’t on on the ambulance.

Since then, rumors of all kinds have been swirling. It was said that McConnell had stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. It was reported that he may be brain dead and on life support. Workmen were seen coming and going from his house to replace the floors and carpeting, spurring rumors he was never coming back. His wife, Elaine Chao, reportedly flew to China after he was hospitalized, spurring yet more rumors that there was no reason for her to stay with her husband because her husband was no longer with us. Personally, I joked that Mitch had traveled with her in an urn. And through all of this, McConnell’s team never told the press what was going on. Of course, this refusal to explain made all the rumors even more believable.

It was suggested, by more people than I can count, that this was all a ridiculous conspiracy for the GOP to hold onto Mitch’s Senate seat for a few months longer instead of having to hold a special election, at a time when the Republican hold on Congress is razor-thin and expected to get worse. They couldn’t admit he was dead. They had to keep the charade going until August.

Yesterday, Sunday the 12th, McConnell himself spoke up, publishing a note to his constituents explaining that he’d had a fall and was briefly unconscious, and also suffered a spot of pneumonia, but he was in a rehab facility now. There was even an additional note from the “attending physician” who was not named. And Mitch also posted a photo of himself sitting awkwardly in a hospital room with his smiling wife.

This did the opposite of quelling the rumors of his demise. For nearly 24 hours now, people are pointing out suspicious aspects of the photo and trying to prove that it’s AI or heavily photoshopped. The situation is sillier than ever.

I am not going to speak to the veracity of the photo, because I don’t know if it’s real or not. All I’m going to do right now is run down the list of suspicious things and tell you what I think of them.

1. Grok says it isn’t real. This is the first objection I saw people throwing up. They asked X’s irritating AI feature whether the picture is real or AI slop. And, at least some of the time, Grok says it’s AI. The rest of the time Grok says it isn’t AI, or that it’s hard to tell. I don’t put any credence in an irritating AI feature’s ability to spot one of its own kind, but I’m just putting it out there. A robot said the photo was made by a robot, about a third of the times it’s been asked.

2. McConnell looks ten years younger. It’s been pointed out that in the photo, after a month in the hospital with pneumonia and being “briefly unconscious,” Mitch has thicker hair, rosier cheeks, and a more alert and responsive smile than he’s had in years. And that is true. Is that evidence that they found an old photo and tried to pass it off as a current one? Maybe. Maybe his stay in the hospital cured what’s been ailing him for months. Maybe he’s just wearing TV hair and makeup and they happened to take one photo where the severely ill man is making an alert-looking face. I couldn’t say. It’s suspicious, but it doesn’t mean anything in itself.

3. His clothes. One account on Twitter found a photo from several years ago where Mitch is posed differently and making a different face, but is wearing the same red and white plaid button-down and blue jeans. Some have taken this as evidence that the rehab photo is fake, but I just don’t see it myself. Maybe Mitch happened to own the same shirt and pants for three years. Maybe he liked the shirt and pants so much that he bought two, or had a servant sew him an identical outfit when the old one wore out. Sometimes rich men own many of the same pieces of clothing. Think of Trump’s omnipresent wrinkled blue suit.

   But I DO think it’s extremely suspicious that an octogenarian is in a rehab facility after weeks in the hospital, wearing jeans and a button-down in his hospital bed. Do you have elderly relatives with mobility problems? Do the nurses dress them in stiff denim with lots of buttons and fasteners before putting them to bed? There’s a reason elderly people often wear elastic pants and tops that are equally easy to get in and out of.

4. The newspaper. Mitch is delicately holding a newspaper with a color photograph of a baseball player on it, as if he’s trying to prove what day of the month it is while at the same time trying not to look like a hostage in an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. It’s a page from The Washington Post from the day the rehab photo was allegedly taken. Some people have attempted to blow up and clarify the photograph so it’s easier to see the text, and they’re claiming the text is half in Spanish and half in some language that can’t be identified. I don’t know whether these images are real or a hoax. What I do know is that there’s a strange smooth blank patch under the finger that’s holding the newspaper, where you’d expect to see a shadow and some blurred text. That doesn’t prove anything in itself, but it keeps catching my eye. It looks to me like his finger is resting on the call-the-nurse button on the hospital bed, and they photoshopped in the paper. Or maybe the paper is just wrinkled in a funny way.

5. The bruise. The backs of Mitch’s hands have been bruised black, even worse than Trump’s hands, for months. You can see the discoloration in every photo of him in his wheelchair. In the rehab photo, the bruising still appears on his hands. But it cuts off suddenly at the wrist, showing an inch of perfectly clear skin the same color as his rosy cheeks. That’s not how a bruise works. Some have said that maybe he’s wearing a flesh-colored bandage on his wrist. Others have said it’s evidence that the photo isn’t real. I could go either way on this one.

None of this is definitive proof the photo is fake. But if it’s real, that doesn’t answer everyone’s questions either.

If Mitch only suffered a fall with no broken bones, why was he in the hospital for weeks?

If he was only “briefly unconscious,” why didn’t he release a statement from the hospital after he regained consciousness? Why were we kept in the dark for so long? Mitch has been in the Senate for four decades. He ought to have a PR team that can get out ahead of a rumor, yet this was all handled so sloppily, as if they deliberately wanted to make a mystery where there wasn’t one.

And in the age of AI, when it’s so easy to fake a photo, when his press team finally decided to address the rumors that had been getting more and more out of hand for almost a month, why did they choose to do so with a written statement and an awkward photo? Why didn’t they at least get out a camera and make him talk on video, or invite a reporter to the hospital to interview him on camera?

I don’t generally believe conspiracy theories. I’m not saying I believe this one. But if a dying politician’s inept press team wanted to cover up that he’s so frail he can no longer function as a Senator, posting a still photo of him smiling with his wife, and then photoshopping in a newspaper and less pallid skin, might be a tactic they’d use.

Or maybe everyone in this mess is just incredibly stupid.

One thing’s for sure: it’s really a shame that we live under a government so crooked and dishonest, that it’s completely within the realm of possibility they’d do something like this.

The Republican party lies constantly. It’s all they ever do anymore. There was a time when you could be a Republican just because your views on economics or “family values” differed from the Democratic party, but that’s all been gone for a decade. Now, all the Republican Party does is lie. They love to foment rumors about other people, as they did with the Haitian Immigrants in 2024. They tell transparent, easily disproven falsehoods about events that were caught on camera, as if daring anyone to disbelieve them. And of course, they’re currently in the process of trying to throw the 2026 midterm elections. We have gotten to the point where I’d be shocked if they DIDN’T lie. So of course no one will believe them if they post an awkward photo and a canned statement.

The rule of thumb for conspiracy theories, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But we’ve gotten to the point where everything they say requires extraordinary evidence, because they cannot be relied on to tell the truth.

I am more convinced than I was last week, that McConnell is still alive. I don’t think we’ll ever see him on the Senate floor again, but we might.

I am certain that our democracy is on life support, because you can’t have a democracy if you can’t rely on the information you’re being given.

I love a good mystery, but this is nothing like a good mystery. This is more like a really bad dystopian novel, and no one wants to live in one of those.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

In case you haven’t seen any news: at the end of last month, authorities raided a small house in rural Vinton County, Ohio, where they found and evacuated sixteen people, ranging in age from an 18-year-old disabled adult to two sets of toddler twins. All of these were victims of severe neglect and have been described as “feral.” Several had to be taken to the hospital. The investigators who talked to the media were sparse on details and looked shaken; they mentioned feces and bacteria, and conditions not fit for livestock. The parents and grandparents of all of these children, the Siders family, were immediately arrested and charged with child endangerment. The neighbors have reacted in horror, claiming they rarely saw the Siderses with children, never saw the children playing outside, and didn’t know anything about the people living in the house.

The mother of all of these children is 33-year-old Elizabeth Siders. Siders seems to have had a total of twenty children, two of which were conjoined twins who died after being born premature. Many in the media are suggesting Elizabeth is a victim instead of a perpetrator in this terrible abuse. Time will tell if that’s true. It’s know that Elizabeth was first pregnant at age thirteen, when she lived a few doors down from the Siderses in a trailer park in Gallia County, Ohio. At fifteen, she was taken across the border to get married in West Virginia, where there was no minimum age for a marriage certificate at the time (Gallia County is right on the West Virginia border). She seems to have been doing nothing but have babies for the Siders family ever since. Her relatives say that they’ve barely heard from her and not met the children. Siders’ lawyer has said that when he met her, Elizabeth’s very first question was when she could see her children.

Elizabeth’s brother has said on social media that she was “indoctrinated” by the Siders family before her marriage. And her brother-in-law has stated that Elizabeth was escaping a difficult home life, when she got married at such a young age. It has been said that Siders’ own mother was a teen mother and she’s not the only teenage mother in the family, but I can’t find information officially confirming that.

I don’t have any information that isn’t public about the Siders case. I’m gutted and sick at the thought of all of that suffering, and I hope there’s justice, and that’s all I can add to the conversation. But I have learned quite a bit about generational poverty and abuse in Northern Appalachia. That’s what I want to talk about today.

(The whole discussion, free without a paywall, can be found at my other blog…)

My neighbor struggles with schizophrenia.

Whatever you’re picturing now, that isn’t it. This isn’t TV schizophrenia. People with very noticeable mental illness also deserve your respect, but you wouldn’t know my friend had schizophrenia if she didn’t talk about it. She’s an ordinary person who’s suffered her whole life from depression and anxiety. At puberty, she also began to have the symptoms of PMOS which can make your mental health worse. Then, as a young woman, after a traumatic event, the hallucinations began, and that’s when she got a diagnosis. She doesn’t hallucinate all the time (and most people who hallucinate aren’t dangerous anyway). She is stable when she’s medicated, although the PMOS caused diabetes, hypertension and chronic pain which can make her life tricky. She did manage to get a job, however, and she was good at it. She worked hard, to support her mom and her younger siblings. She was promoted through the ranks to a shift lead.

This is what Americans are supposed to do. We are told from the time we’re children that we shouldn’t wallow in self-pity; we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and work our way to a promotion, even when we’re disabled. She did that.

But in my friend’s case, the promotion was a problem. It meant she was making a bit too much money, and she lost her Medicaid.

Medicaid benefits are tied strictly to your income. This is a story I know well. I was fortunate to be able to be on Medicaid for years, but now only my teenager is on it, because Michael started making a little too much money at work. I was sore that we still didn’t make enough to make ends meet, and far too little to buy health insurance, but suddenly I had to go on an expensive payment plan to see a dentist. That was tricky for us, and could well get trickier. What happened to my neighbor is much, much worse. She needs her medication daily just to stay safe. But now, she couldn’t have it.

This poor woman spent the last several months trying to find other insurance so she could keep up with doctor appointments and stay healthy enough to go to work to support her family. But there wasn’t anything affordable. Eventually, she had to wean off her medication: first the diabetes and blood pressure medicine, and then the schizophrenia drugs.

Have you ever tried to wean off psychiatric medication? It’s no fun. That withdrawal has quite a kick.

Meanwhile, my friend’s employer told her that she had to start working nights. Before, when she could keep up with her meds, her doctor wrote her a note that she couldn’t work the night shift because of her sleep aid. But now that there was no medicine, according to her boss, there wasn’t a problem. My friend felt that she couldn’t work at ALL, let alone overnight, but she showed up to give it her best try like a good American.

I just found out that she got fired.

Her mother had to pick her up at work, where she was in severe withdrawal. And again, whatever you think about a schizophrenic person in drug withdrawal, that’s not what was happening. This was a terrified young woman, shaking in her work uniform, with clammy skin and a racing heart. Her mother took her straight from work to the emergency room where her blood pressure was 200 over 100. She’s still in the hospital now. Lord knows how they’ll ever pay the medical debt. And they can’t possibly afford to continue all her care once she’s released.

I feel ridiculous to even have to say this, but this is no way to run a country.

Conservatives are always ranting about poor unemployed people leeching off government money. Here’s a woman who was meeting her work requirement. She was fully employed, despite being disabled, an exemplary hardworking American. And her reward for that was to lose everything. She lost her access to the medical care she needed SO THAT she could stay employed, her life was endangered, and then she lost her employment.

Medicaid is NOT a handout for lazy people. Medicaid is essential SO THAT people can work and earn money. It ought to be the stodgiest, most fiscally conservative position in the world that everyone must have access to healthcare so that the economy can grow. Of course, I’m a filthy commie pinko rat who thinks that people who are seriously ill should be allowed to rest and go to therapy INSTEAD of working, but since America has decided the highest value in the world is work, let’s at least create the necessary conditions for people to work.

That shouldn’t be controversial.

I usually finish up these posts with my tip jar, but if you happen to have any money, here’s my friend’s gofundme.

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It seems that the Pentagon has decided to streamline the list of codes they use to track the religious faiths of men and women in the armed forces, so that they can provide chaplains and other accommodations to people of different faiths. The list used to be about 200 religions long, and now it only has thirty-one religions, twenty-one of which were listed as denominations of Christianity. What’s not getting a lot of press is the religions that were axed altogether. Wicca is no longer on the list, nor is paganism in general, and neither is the Native American Church. But also, some more common Christian denominations like the Mennonites and the American Methodist Episcopal Church are missing– and no, I don’t know why Mennonites were on that list in the first place, since they’re almost always conscientious objectors to the military. This removal of so many faiths has been denounced as a violation of the rights of those faithful to practice their religion, and that’s a serious matter. But that’s not what everyone is paying attention to right now.

The issue that is stealing all the oxygen from the room, is that the list DID include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly called the Mormons. But it didn’t include them as a Christian denomination.

Other denominations that worship Jesus, like the Catholic Church, had “Christian” before their name, but the Mormons didn’t. This was news to the Mormons.

Republican Senator Mike Lee, himself a Mormon and one of my least favorite people in the world, led the charge by posting an astonishing number of tweets and videos to X, which I still choose to call “Twitter.” He blustered that the Latter Day Saints are indeed Christians because they worship Christ. And that’s true, they do worship Christ. However, theologically speaking, they don’t profess the Holy Trinity or the Nicene Creed, so most other Christian sects I’ve run into say that they’re NOT Christians. I, as a Catholic, have never viewed them as Christian. I have nothing against them, it’s just that their faith falls outside the circle of what Christians are supposed to believe, just like my Jewish friends’ faith does. A lot of Mormons I saw on social media were surprised to find out we feel that way…

(and hundreds more words, free with no paywall, over on my other blog…)

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I saw on the news that Joe Negri had died.

I wasn’t exactly surprised. He was nearly a hundred years old, after all. It’s surprising that he’d lived that long. Still, I was terribly sad.

I’ve written so many times about how much Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood affected me, as a child. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the rug, uncomfortably close to my father’s fuzzy old television with the two dials instead of a remote, watching Fred take off his dress shoes and put on his puppeteer sneakers. I never missed an episode. I suppose I learned more about what it means to be a Christian from Mr. Rogers than I did from anybody else. Mr. Rogers’s joyful appreciation for the cast of characters that came and went from the television house haunts me to this day– it’s how I imagine God the Father looks at all of us. His fascination with how things are made in all those factory tours was contagious; I’m still fascinated with learning how everyday objects are made. All those ridiculous, whimsical stories in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe taught me my ethical view on the world: when someone is hungry, grow a garden to feed them. The most important things in the neighborhood are the people who live there. When an authority figure is wrong, dare to call them out. I still live by the code I internalized watching that show.

Negri was a brilliant musician who displayed his talent with the guitar on Mr. Rogers, but guitar wasn’t his only role.

I did not realize how good the music in Mr. Rogers was until I was much older. I knew that the improvised jazz that always played in the background was fun to dance to, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was an adult, showing the series to my own child. John Costa was a fantastic music director. Mr. Rogers himself was an expert pianist. And Joe Negri was amazing on the guitar. Every television visit to “Negri’s Music Shop” ended in a little concert with Joe on the guitar, and it was always excellent.

The article continues, with no paywall, at my other blog…

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There was a cheating incident at Adrienne’s school.

I was especially cross to find out about it, because it was an assignment I’d stayed up late to help Adrienne finish. Adrienne is an extremely good student and I barely ever have to help with homework. But this particular evening, we both stayed up past midnight making a slideshow and emailing it to the teacher for her to grade. Adrienne did the real work, while I read the wiki on a book I hadn’t personally read so I could offer suggestions and moral support. We got an A for our effort.

Several of Adrienne’s fellow students earned an F on the assignment, because they copied and pasted AI gibberish that wasn’t even about the text. The teacher reamed out the whole class, banned laptops until the end of the year, and announced they’d all be turning in assignments handwritten on loose leaf from now on. If I had been in the classroom for that performance, I’d have given her a standing ovation. I do not like cheating, and I do not like lazy people who use AI for an assignment. Also, the loose leaf paper meant I’d never have to stay up late helping make a slideshow again. Adrienne wrote out the next term paper on loose leaf, and got an A on that one as well. All I had to do was explain how to underline the titles of books instead of italicizing them.

The school cheating incident isn’t the only reason I’m thinking about AI and assignments right now. For some reason, young people on social media are trolling their elders by insisting that nobody has time to read the sources they cite or write a ten-page paper about them. I can’t even count the number of silly, probably rage bait social media posts insisting that studying is too time consuming.

I keep thinking about the time I was home on Thanksgiving break and the public library was closed for the holiday weekend, but I had to finish a take-home exam, so I found a Burger King with free refills on soda and sat there drinking diet Coke after diet Coke while reading the entirety of Plato’s Republic. At the end of the text, I realized the paragraph I wanted to cite was actually in the Phaedo. Thankfully I was reading a big fat anthology of Plato’s works instead of just my skinny copy of the Republic, so I got another Coke and kept reading. I don’t even like diet Coke. But I liked books, and I liked getting good grades, so I made do. I got an A.

Personally, my most elderly-coded opinion is that every student who gets caught using AI to cheat should be locked in the library without wifi until they finish their term paper using only a manual typewriter and a stack of leatherbound encyclopedias. Mix up the order of the encyclopedia volumes first so they’re not even alphabetical. Hand them a bottle of White Out and one of those funny round erasers with a brush on the end, but don’t tell them what they’re for. If they want a book other than the encyclopedia, they have to us an actual card catalog to find it.

Maybe, as a bonus, we should give them microfiche but not teach them how to use the microfiche reader, just so we can laugh when they squint at the slides to try to read them.

If they plead for mercy for long enough, we’ll relent and bring them a computer to write on. Specifically, we will bring them a nice old Macintosh from 1994 with a floppy disc drive. See how long it takes them to figure out that you have to turn on the monitor separately from the actual computer. And then they can figure out how to load printer paper.

In all seriousness: I am not against technology. I like it. When I teach my classes at the after school outreach, I love to show them YouTube videos on the big projector screen to illustrate my lessons. But it’s really a shame that there are so many dishonest and lazy people who want to use technology to cheat and make it harder for everyone. If you don’t like to study, I wish you’d just play hooky from school.

That’s my exhausted end-of-the-school-year rant. I’ll be glad when we get to summer break and can read books just for pleasure again.

How’s everyone else’s end of the year going?

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

I want you to stop what you’re doing and look at a beautiful painting with me. I know, you’ve seen this image a hundred times, but LOOK at it.

No, look at it. If no one has taught you how to look at a painting, you might not have the knack. First, look at the painting as a whole and get a general impression of it. Then look at the moon and the nimbus of light around the moon, and notice the little flecks of blue in the yellow paint. Look from the moon down to the village and think about the buildings. Pick out which house you think would be yours if you lived there. Then look at the tree in the foreground and imagine how it might smell or feel if you were near enough to touch it. Then let the tree draw your eye up to the stars. Follow that swirl of cloudy white around in a loop. Then look at the whole painting again. Then go back and look at your favorite detail and try to think why it speaks to you so much.

Now, look at this painting of the sky. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen it. Take a minute to really LOOK at it, like you did with the first one: first the whole painting, then let your eye move in a circle taking in the details, then look at the whole again and back at your favorite part. It’s a Monet painting, so you should also have the fun of zooming in really close to see the brush strokes, and then zooming out to watch the strokes form into a whole picture again. Do it a couple of times. It’s exciting.

Now, look at this painting in the same way you looked at the other two. First impression, then let the brush strokes guide your eye in a circle, then notice the whole painting, then think about your favorite part. Zoom in and out. Turn your phone upside down if you want to. Get to know the painting.

Isn’t that fun?

Now, I’m going to show you an AI-created image which is probably copyrighted, so I’m not going to copy and paste it to this column, I’ll just link to it. Here it is on X. You don’t have to be signed in to X to see it.

It’s far from the worst AI-created image I’ve ever seen. If you didn’t tell me it was AI and said it was just a photo you took, I would think it was an odd but decent photo of a town that looks suspiciously like the one from Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

The person who posted the AI image, who is probably just a troll, was exalting that “finally AI can show us what painters wanted us to see,” as if Vincent Van Gogh who painted that first painting made it so swirly and dramatic only because he couldn’t paint very well. And I don’t really care if what he said was rage bait. Whether it was deliberate rage bait or not, it enraged me. I’ve been irritated about it for days. Because that internet troll is demonstrating one of the silliest misconceptions about art. Art is not about creating a photorealistic reproduction of a landscape or an object. Art is about the artist giving us a little piece of themself.

As I look at that first image, of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” I remember reading that Van Gogh painted the painting that way because he took medication for his mental disorder, and the medication made him see blurry haloes around the stars. I was fascinated by that because my astigmatism also makes me see haloes, not usually around the stars but around other lights at night. I was surprised when I found out that some people always see lights at night only looking like neat little dots. I thought everybody saw haloes.

I remember reading about Van Gogh’s tragic life and horrible end, and looking back at those swirling, kinetic, brilliantly colorful paintings with a different eye. He was giving us a little piece of himself, which is what artists are supposed to do. He was showing us the turbulence of his own psyche, as well as the visual disturbances he suffered from— and on top of it, the beauty and brilliance he could still see in the world, even with all of that suffering. That’s a terrible, beautiful gift.

This is why the arts are so fascinating. They are pieces of an artist. They are windows into another person’s mind, little glimpses of somebody else’s perspective. Van Gogh’s swirling paintings of the sky look totally different than Monet’s blurred and colorful paintings of the sky which are different from Cezanne’s hazy paintings of the sky, even though they all lived under the same sky, because they were different people. If I could paint you a painting of the sky that I see when I look up through my thick glasses, and do it justice, that would be a totally different painting, because I am a totally different person.

A machine can’t do that, because a machine isn’t a person.

The arts are important for many reasons. They make things beautiful, and that’s enough reason for them to exist. They can be didactic: they can help us teach and convey ideas, and that’s important. They are fun, and fun is a basic human need without which human beings can’t live. But they also show us a glimpse of the inside of somebody else’s mind. They show us what it’s like to be another person. They teach us empathy. Without empathy, the human race can’t survive.

A machine can’t teach empathy, because empathy is feeling with another person, and machines don’t feel.

I’m sure there are uses for AI, but an AI can’t do what an artist can do, because an artist is a person with an interior life. And we are people with interior lives. We need the arts.

I’m not saying you can’t look at AI images, but they’re not art.

It’s worth it to take the time to learn to look at art.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing here and following my other blog on Patheos. I keep as much content free as I can, but writing is my living so those paid subscriptions keep my lights on. And here’s the tip jar if you want to buy me an ice cream!)

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