How to Stay Engaged When the World Gets Loud

Some weeks, the world feels too heavy to ignore—and too important to stay silent about. This post grew out of a talk Jean recently gave to her dinner conversation group, a gathering that has quietly become a lifeline for those of who still believe civic engagement matters. What follows isn’t a rant but a practical guide for anyone wondering how to push back, stay informed, and stay hopeful.  AI…...

It’s been thirteen weeks since I’ve written a political post, and if you’re not a fan of those, you might want to skip this one. But this isn’t a rant—it’s a road map for how to push back against the administration’s disregard for the rule of law. Most of what follows began as a speech I gave to my Tuesday night dinner conversation group, formerly known (tongue firmly in cheek) as the Secret Society for Liberal Ladies. We used that name until the resident in charge of our Social Committee here at my Continuum Care Campus pulled us aside. She didn’t think politics belonged in our “harmonious” community, so we backed down and changed our name. Sometimes pretending that all is right in the world is the only way you can get up and face the day.

We started the group because any time someone brought up something happening in the news, someone else would immediately shut the conversation down. (If only I had the power to shut down the endless discussions about college basketball and football. And it’s not just the men here who follow the games religiously.) My best friend since kindergarten recently moved into a CCC in New York, and I found it interesting that every morning they have an hour dedicated to discussing world events. She has no interest in joining. As I’ve said before, if you’re looking at CCCs, read their calendar and/or newsletter. We have game‑day viewing parties; she gets political conversation. My friend likes sports; I do not.

Anyway, last night it was my turn to give a presentation on a topic of my choice, and here is the text of my speech:

Now, I’m a writer, not a speaker, so forgive me for reading from my notes rather than pretend I’m capable of speaking off the cuff.

Every week we gather here, and most weeks we find ourselves talking about the same thing: how upset, shocked — or frankly disgusted — we are by the Trump administration’s ongoing abuses of power. And without fail, at some point [the Art Professor] asks the question that hangs over all of us: “What can we actually do to change things?” 

For my presentation today, I decided to take that question seriously and I researched the phrase: How do we fight back against an administration that shows such disregard for the rule of law?

I’ve put together a handout with practical actions we can take on one side, along with contact information on the other side to make those actions easier. I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting that each of us needs to do everything on the sheet. But imagine this — if each of us devoted just one hour a week to taking action on the issue that matters the most to each of us, we would feel far less hopeless and far less helpless. 

And let’s be honest: if we don’t fight back now, if we don’t use the tools we have to defend our democracy, then future generations — your children and grandchildren — will pay the price. 

On the handout, I’ve organized the most effective ways to push back into three key areas where we can make a difference:

1. We can support the groups challenging the administration in the courts.
On the front of your handout, you’ll see three organizations that have been especially effective, with several more organizations listed on the back.

For example, Democracy Forward has brought 150 lawsuits in 2025 and has already won 100 of them. If you saw Rachel last night she mentioned some of those recent wins. These groups are doing the heavy lifting in the legal system — and they rely on public support to keep going. Donate. If you can. Become a member. 

2. The second way we can help turn things around is to recognize the importance of the upcoming midterm elections.
If we can flip the House, we can restore meaningful oversight, change leadership, and use the power of the purse to block harmful parts of the administration’s agenda.

The most effective way we, as individuals, can help is by supporting candidates in high‑stakes districts — especially in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York. These are the places where small efforts can make a big difference. As we get closer to the election the Democrat Party will identify these high-stakes districts. 

3. The third way to push back is by taking part in public action — rallies, protests and especially rapid‑response alerts. 

Showing up matters.  And if you sign up for ‘Action Alerts’ from groups like Indivisible, you’ll get timely updates about who to call or email when something urgent comes up in Congress. Right now, for example, they’re calling for action related to ICE and Venezuela.
And there’s a major event coming up on January 20th, the First America Walkout. It’s going to be a call for impeachment. The idea is to leave the place you’re at and take to the streets at 2:00 local time, to “walk out on fascism.” 

In closing:
I’ve only highlighted a few ways we can help save our country. I hope you read the handout when you have time. We don’t have to do everything. But we each should and could do something. One hour. One issue a week that pushes back against the abuses of power going on every day in our country. If we each commit to that, we will not only feel less helpless — we will actually make a difference. Thank you. 

The ladies seemed to like my presentation and appreciate my handouts. In the end, what keeps me from going postal over what is going on in our country is belief that ordinary people like me, you and my Tuesday night group, can still make a difference. We may not be marching in the streets every week, but we’re paying attention, staying informed, and refusing to let silence become complicity. If that’s all we can manage on some days, it’s enough. And on the days when we can do more, we will. ©

P.S. In full disclosure I used AI to help me identify those three key ways to push back and to compile my contacts list on my handout. 

 GOVERNMENT CONTACTS

WHITE HOUSE
Comments Line: 202‑456‑1111
Switchboard: 202‑456‑1414
Address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Find your Senators here:   https://www.senate.gov/general/contacting.htm

Find your Representative here: https://www.lcv.org/blog/how-to-call-your-members-of-congress-in-3-easy-steps/

KEY LEGAL & CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS

Democracy Forward
Email: info@democracyforward.org
Press: press@democracyforward.org
Phone: 202‑448‑9090
Address:
P.O. Box 34553
Washington, D.C. 20043
Website: democracyforward.org

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Phone: 212‑549‑2500
Membership: 888‑567‑2258
Address:
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Website: aclu.org

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)
Washington, D.C. Office:
700 14th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202‑682‑1300

Website: naacpldf.org

Sierra Club

Focus: Environmental protection, climate policy
Website: sierraclub.org

Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC)

Focus: Human rights & environmental issues in border regions
Website: southernborder.org

Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC)

Focus: Constitutional law & separation of powers
Website: theusconstitution.org

The Great Sleep Campaign of 2026

Navigating the healthcare system can feel like a full‑time job, especially when long‑ignored symptoms finally get the attention they deserve. This post chronicles Jean’s journey through a growing lineup of medical specialists, a parade of diagnoses, and a few treatments she never imagined discussing with doctors half her age. With humor and honesty, she explores the strange, hopeful path toward a full night’s sleep. It’s a story about persistence, aging with grit, and the small victories that make the whole medical circus feel worth it.  AI….

The past few months I have accumulated a few new doctors—specialists, because apparently our bodies are too complicated for one doctor to learn it all from the tops of our heads to our toes. I now have an ears, nose and throat doctor, a sleep specialist, an urogynecologist, and a gastroenterologist. I shouldn’t complain, because it wasn’t long ago that I didn’t feel like anyone in the medical field was taking me seriously. My internist has been my primary care doctor for 20 years and if I’d been in the medical field as long as he’s been I’d be tired of listening to people complain all day long about stuff that we’ve probably brought on ourselves. “You broke your toe? It’s those extra pounds you’re carrying around.” “You have a hang nail? Loss some weight.” He’s not really that bad, but between the two of us there’s been no follow-through with things like my stage three kidney disease and the lack of sleep I’ve been complaining about for five years. I only see him once a year, so you do the math—I’ve complained five times.

The recent turnaround happened during a visit to my primary care’s PA for a UTI—a young woman who actually listened and immediately sent referrals to both a sleep specialist (with a sub-specialty in general psychiatry) and a urogynecologist. I can’t get in to see the latter until April, but I’ve already seen the sleep doctor, who sent me to an ear, nose and throat doctor, who is now sending me to a gastroenterologist—also booked until nearly April. The end of January I’m set up to do an in-home sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. 

The Sleep Doctor suspected I have silent acid reflux and the ear, nose and throat doctor confirmed it. The gastroenterologist appointment is to see what is causing it. Silent acid reflux can wake you up at night. The Sleep doctor’s diagnosed was partly based on the fact that I wake up sometimes moving my lips like I’m blowing bubbles. He also prescribed a sleeping pill with the side effect of making a patient hold their urine—which, in my case, is a welcome side effect. Since I started taking that, some pills for acid reflux, and using the below mentioned cream I’m only getting up 3 to 5 times a night instead of 7 to 10.

And since most of my readers are women, I’ll mention the most astonishing treatment for nighttime over‑urination: vaginal estrogen cream! When the young PA mentioned it and put me on it, I couldn’t believe it was a real thing until I got home and Dr. Google confirmed that it’s a common treatment for night time urination. Apparently we get “thin” up there (or down there—take your pick), and the cream helps “restore the health of the tissues, which become thin, dry, and less elastic due to declining natural estrogen levels after menopause.” That wall is close to our bladder and it puts pressure on it. But imagine my embarrassment when my new, very young, cuter-than-Tom-Cruise Sleep Doctor explaining how vaginal estrogen cream can help me get a better night’s sleep. When I checked the MyChart app a few weeks later, I looked at the notes he wrote and I discovered ten pages of my medical history—going all the way back to my tonsils being removed at three months old! AI must have been working overtime to compile our complete histories all in one place. I was shocked. 

On New Year’s Eve I had two glasses of champagne, slept for ten hours without a sleeping pill, and only got up once during the night. How’s that for a heavenly way to start out a new year after dealing with this issue for at least five years. But in case you haven’t figured it out, my next few months are going to be consumed with a hit‑it‑from‑all‑fronts campaign to get me sleeping like that every night—without the champagne. I have a spreadsheet to track my sleep, weight, blood pressure, bowel movements, nighttime urinations, what I drink, when I eat and what combination of sleep meds I’m taking and at what time. He wants me to cut down on over-the-counter Melatonin. And reading my history reminded me that back when I broke my ribs, a doctor who came to see me in Assisted Living told me that if I took an hour every afternoon to lie down with my legs higher than my heart, it would help cut down on how often I get up at night to pee. So I’ve been doing that again while enjoy old West Wing episodes on Netflix. It’s the strangest New Year’s resolution I’ve ever written—working on my sleep issues—but I’m hopeful it’s a resolution I can achieve.

New topic: Our New Year’s Eve celebration here in the CCC started at 5:00 with a plated dinner, a slide show of all our 2025 events and ended at 8:30 with a ball drop. Yup, I know—that’s crazy. Six of us did extend the official party until 10:30 by playing cards, and all but the white snowflake headband pictured up above were won in that card game. The white headband I wore to the party. Everyone else here recycles their old holiday sweaters but I never wore them during my work-for-a-living days, so since moving here I've accumulated dollar store headbands for each of the holidays. 

Below are photos of our plated dinner—all but the first course, which was a roasted beet arancini with a goat-cheese cream sauce. I thought the chefs made up the word “arancini,” but it’s actually a traditional Sicilian fried rice ball, and it was yummy—as were all five courses that followed.  ©

Our second course was a pear-endive salad of port poached pears, braised endive gorgonzota, toasted walnuts, lemon shallot vinaigrette.

Our third course was a pan seared sea bass with roasted red pepper, lemon coulis, wilted greens and vegetable blend. Everyone was looking for a four-leafed clover during this course.

 

Our forth course was mango sorbet in champagne. "A palate cleaner." It was really good!

 

Our fifth course was grilled lamb chops with mint pesto marinate, pomegranate, balsamic sauce, lemon rice pilaf, and blistered tomatoes. I don't normally eat baby lamb or baby beef but I have to admit this very good.

 

I dove into eating our sixth course before I snapped this photo. It was a chocolate lava cake with peppermint stick ice cream and chocolate sauce. Our chefs do a wonderful job with plated meals which they only do twice a year. This one cost $30, a five dollar increase since the last one.  

(I apologize for the poor quality of the photos. I have a new phone and while that's a handy excuse, the truth is I got in a hurry and didn't notice how "yellow" those white plates turned out before I posted the photos. By then it was too late to edit them and still make my dateline for posting.) 

Post Script:  Related to not sleeping well is Dry Mouth which comes from sleeping with your mouth open. I found a product that helps with that, a tablet that sticks to your gum, above your teeth, and it lasts about five hours. I find my tongue touching it when my mouth needs moisture and I can go back to sleep without getting up to rinse my mouth with water.

 

 

The Universe Plays Jokes: My White Elephant Déjà Vu

In a senior living community where serendipity often masquerades as coincidence, one resident found herself at the center of an uncanny holiday repeat. During the annual White Elephant Exchange—an event known for its chaos, comedy, and questionable gifting—Jean once again unwrapped the only religious icons in the entire pile. Two years, two angels, two crosses, and one agnostic wondering whether the universe was nudging, needling, or simply having a laugh. What followed is a blend of skepticism, curiosity, and the kind of communal mischief that proves older adults are far from done having fun.  AI....

 
It's spooky, sometimes, how the universe seems to speak to us—how it always seems to know that we need to hear to break through the silence or fears in our lives, or to touch bases with our innermost thoughts, dreams and memories. I have a theory, though: those messages are always out there, but we don’t tune into them until we’re ready to hear them—ready to see the serendipity, coincidences and recurring symbols at play.

I wrote the above paragraph over ten years ago when I was a newly minted widow and if my theory is true, what message do you think the universe was sending me last week? The continuum care facility where I live hosted a resident‑driven White Elephant Exchange on Christmas Day, and twenty of us attended—about the same as last year. If you’ve played the game, you know the randomness of the gift you finally get to open and take home. At least six gifts passed through my hands before I opened the one I was destined to keep. This year and last year, I got the same gift: a pair of religious icons to hang on a wall—an angel and a cross. They weren’t identical, but their purpose, color, and sizes were the same. Both years, these were the only religious icons in the entire exchange. What are the odds that an agnostic would get that gift—twice?

I was incredulous. “I cannot believe this!” I blurted out, embarrassing myself. “This is the same gift I got last year!” I’m ashamed to admit the disgust in my voice was probably apparent. 

The idea that the universe was shouting a message that I didn’t want to hear made me mad. What does it want me to do—exactly? If I suddenly start claiming to believe in Jesus Christ as my savior, you should assume I’m feeling especially old and I'm hedging my bets by faking an acceptance I’ve resisted doing my entire adult life. They have a group of volunteers, here, being trained to sit with people who are actively dying and have no families. Would that person be able to tell if I was lying on my death bed? 

Still, I believe in messages from the universe; I just never questioned if those messages were vetted before they are sent out. Does the universe have a sense of humor? I wonder. Or is it trying to drag me out of my secular world to blindly accept what is in the Bible, with its text that was written exclusively by men, then rewritten, edited and translated dozens and dozen of times over the centuries, not to mention entire books that have been cut out and hidden away by the Catholic Church. 

I’ve always trusted in the balances of forces that keep the world spinning in the right direction. The positive and negative, the yin and the yang. The dark and the light. Even the Republicans and Democrats—you get where I’m going here. Maybe my reaction to getting the religious icons was the universe testing my resolve, and it said to itself, “Yup she’s still coming down on the side of Humanism. The disbelievers are still balancing out the believers.”

When I got back to my apartment, I hopped on line to refresh my memory about signs from the universe. First, I clicked on a site that promised to cover twelve signs that the universe is trying to dial us up. When the site opened up the first thing I saw in big, bold fonts was: “The Universe Doesn’t Play Games.” Farther down in the article it said the universe doesn’t send signs until we’re ready to hear them. Since that directly refutes my theory that the signs are always there, that we just don’t see them until we’re ready, I quit reading and went back to the basics.

And by the “basics,” I meant I read how Google’s AI defines signs and it says, “You know the universe is sending a sign through meaningful coincidences (synchronicities), recurring symbols (like angel numbers 11:11, songs, or animals), strong intuitive feelings, unexpected help/opportunities, or even repetitive roadblocks nudging you to change direction, all accompanied by a feeling of alignment, support, or a nudge to pay attention to something specific in your life. It's less about a single event and more about the meaning and feeling you attach to repeated, unusual patterns.”

That reminded me of how quickly many widows find comfort in the appearance of a bird or butterfly that they associate with their spouse who passed. Back in the early years of my widowhood I wrote several posts about going to a butterfly exhibit at a large conservatory and having a spiritual connection with a pair of Common Morphos—the four-five inch iridescent blue butterflies from Central and South America. To this day it gives me the warm-fuzzes to think about how those two butterflies landed within arm’s reach—me, a recent widow. Whether it was truly a sign from the universe that Don and I would always be together in spirit, or it was the invention of my own mind giving me a mental pacifier it doesn’t matter. Why? Because either way, it’s amazing what our brains can conjure up and run with. And it’s amazing that we can love someone so deeply that we can feel their presence just because a particular bird or butterfly crosses our paths.

The author Carolyn See once was asked the question of, “Why do you write?” And she answered, “Because we live in a beautiful, sentient universe that yearns for you to tell the truth about it.” 

Amateur writers like me are told that Truth is in describing the details, in the moments when we’re able to expose our flaws and fears to the world—those feelings that we have and wonder if others have them, too. And Truth is in our observations—those gray nose hairs, the flat-bladed cattails and a stranger’s Mona Lisa smile. At the White Elephant gift exchange, my Truth was also in the beauty of turning my imagination loose and pretend I knew which of my fellow residents were happy with the gift they got and which ones had mastered the art of polished politeness. 

Our self-appointed mayor didn’t pretend to be happy with the jar of  ‘Roadkill Jam’ and the handmade, artsy-fartsy dish he got. I told him, and others joined me, in convincing him to secretly leave the dish at the door of the Art Professor. She would love it and people here have turned her doorway into a receptacle for handmade ceramics. She’s been trying to figure out who is leaving her such “lovely gifts.” It’s been going on now, since before Thanksgiving when the family of someone who died was cleaning out an apartment and they left a vase at the Professor's door when she wasn't home. So far she’s gotten 5 or 6 things and those of us who eat with her at the Monday Farm Table are enjoying listening to her trying to figure out who her “secret admirer” is. Whoever said old people don’t know how to have fun. 

Until next Wednesday have a Happy New Year!!!  ©