Becoming unrecognizable

My husband and I currently live part time in Michigan in a small town “on the shores of Lake Michigan” where we have a little house. We hope to make that our home base when we retire and I have been spending more and more time there because it’s peaceful and lovely and a respite from the daily bad news. You can’t escape though. Yesterday I drove up here alone, a four-hour ride, with a stop for dinner with my youngest son at his college (also in Michigan). I forgot to load anything new to listen to on the trip so I went to my (expired) Audible bookshelf and chose Bad Blood, a book about the Theranos scandal.

I have listened to Bad Blood before so I know how it turns out. A coalition of courageous low level Theranos employees, brave federal regulators and a crusading reporter beat the wealthy and entitled Theranos CEO and the greed-addled tech bros and government and legal elites who promoted the company.

In the course of the reporting, the author finds out that the Obama Administration has been promoting Theranos and that the CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, is a Hillary Clinton supporter and a friend of Chelsea Clinton. The reporter worries that Theranos is hugely politically and socially connected - is this company and CEO unstoppable because so many powerful actors have an interest in it? However, the reporter’s cynicism turns out to be unwarranted- federal regulators and prosecutors do their jobs and neither Obama nor Clinton interferes. The CEO is charged with a crime, convicted by a jury (with all due process protections) and she goes to prison. A happy ending.

Courageous and ethical private sector actors who aren’t insane, solid, mission-driven federal regulators who work for the public (and not Obama or Clinton), a reporter who hasn’t been captured by monied interests and a prosecutor who goes after white collar bad guys – that’s what we needed and what we had for Theranos. That’s unimaginable in the new and much worse world of the Trump Administration, where corruption and pay to play runs rampant, any federal regulator who actually does their job will be fired by an unelected South African billionaire, the Department of Justice works to protect white collar criminals and every private sector actor from universities to fancy law firms are bowing down to the far Right.

This happens to me again and again since November - I’ll read or watch or remember something from the years prior to the rise of Donald Trump and the far Right and I’ll realize how much we have already lost, how the country is becoming unrecognizable. Is this happening to anyone else?