So just when we thought the chaos couldn’t get much worse, the federal government is shut down. Whatever that means, right?
If your level of disgust has reached the place where you just want to tune out, I don’t blame you. But I can’t. I oversee the local agencies that deliver essential services to 600,000 people, and we can’t just shrug off the fact that the federal government, our partner in the work, is broken.
So all week I’ve been meeting with our state leaders, our federal delegation, and our county agencies, planning strategies to protect our people. Governor Moore and his team have been doing the same.
If you are a federal worker, or work for a federal contractor, please know that this county government and the people who live here overwhelmingly respect you, value the work that you do, and want to protect you from the cruel consequences of the administration’s dismantling of our federal government and its services.
Our team has put together a website with links to county and state services, organized by category of impact, including food, healthcare, jobs, housing, childcare, mental health, and more. The state of Maryland has a similar site.
The contrast between the empathy and professionalism at the state and local levels with the cruelty and deliberate chaos coming from the Trump administration is stark.
Just yesterday, at the hastily convened gathering of 800 military commanders from across the world, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who Trump now calls the Secretary of War, told our generals that it’s time to stop adhering to military rules of engagement. He declared, “…the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living.”
President Trump applied Hegseth’s directives to cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
The commanders stayed mostly silent during the Trump and Hegseth speeches. We don’t know what they were thinking. Will they comply with orders to fight wars against the American people on American soil, or will they adhere to the laws that prohibit them from doing so?
That was always the question when I was a student of Latin American history and government at the University of Chicago. Which side would the military take?
In Chile, the military led a coup, killed off the opposition, created a dictatorship, and invited the “Chicago Boys” from our university’s school of free-market economics to dismantle the country’s social programs and turn over the economy to foreign investors. Manuel Garreton escaped to the Catholic Church after that coup, and a decade later taught a University of Chicago class about democracy and authoritarianism that inspired the rest of my life.
To me, this shutdown is simply a part of the performance that the administration acts out to turn Americans against their government. It’s a part of dismantling what they call the deep state: the democratic institutions, the rule of law, the communities and the values that hold them together.
The value that threatens their strategy more than any other, in my view, is empathy. Wannabe dictators tell us that empathy is weakness, because empathy builds community and threatens their rule.
Empathy in Anne Arundel County is alive and well. On Tuesday, I participated in a CRICT demonstration session. CRICT is Community Resource Initiatives Care Team, where representatives of health and human service agencies meet online with representatives of families facing major struggles. You can watch that session here, and learn just how powerful empathy is when offered by professional service providers.
On Tuesday evening, I attended the annual gathering of Anne Arundel Women Giving Together (AAWGT). It started in 2006 as a dozen women who pooled resources to help some local nonprofits. It has grown to nearly 400 women who have made a cumulative $2.1 million in grants to 60 organizations.
Most of those women showed up on Tuesday night, and the organizations that they funded this last year reported to them on the impact of their support. It was as it should be - the practice of empathy empowering leaders to improve the lives of the people they serve.
When people like Manuel Garreton write about the vulnerability of nations to authoritarian takeover, they measure the strength of civil society as protection. Things like AAWGT, CRICT, county government, and state government build that strength when they are effectively delivering for their people.
So let’s keep growing and supporting the good work.
Until next week…