Hazy Shade of Winter

    Hi! If you're here for a recap of some Ovid this week, you're going to be disappointed. I haven't picked up Metamorphoses since last Sunday because apparently, my adult life will be lived entirely in unprecedented times. I've heard tell of times that weren't just one compounding crisis after another. That must have been awesome. 

    To recap the crazy of the first week of 2026: our president sent the military to Venezuela to extract their dictator president and his wife to bring him back to the United States to face charges of narco-terrorism. Nicolás Maduro Moros was a brutal dictator, and I'm not arguing that he should have remained in power in Venezuela. I do, however, find it hilarious that Trump would think such an intervention was necessary when he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez (former President of Honduras) last month. Hernandez, who was convicted of conspiring to bring cocaine into the U.S. in 2024, was pardoned less than two years into his 45 year sentence. 

    Wait! What if it wasn't about the drugs at all? What if it wasn't about ridding the world of a brutal dictator? What if...just follow me for a second...it was about oil? Not to sound like the jaded middle-aged woman that I am, but haven't we done this one before? Twice in my lifetime, in fact. If you think this is about narco-terrorism, I have a WMD that miraculously turned up 23 years too late for you.

    So, yeah. Our president decided to go ahead and create a power vacuum in an unstable region because historically, the U.S. loves to force regime change in unstable locales the world round without a clear plan for how to move forward. Also, he's pretty freaked out that the majority of the U.S. population wants to know what the hell is in the Epstein files, so this is quite the distraction. No one can clearly explain who is in charge in Venezuela at the moment, but I'm sure that it's fine that the U.S. oil companies knew that this was going to happen before Congress did.

    This, in any normal year like 2003, would have been sufficient news for a week. We'd have at least a week of every other leader of a sovereign nation going on the record to tell us how dangerous and stupid a move this really was. We'd have at least a week of think pieces in the New York Times wondering if this isn't some masterful 4-D chess of diplomacy we can't understand because we're a nation of panicky idiots. We'd have some televised address during prime-time in which the president explains to us that we will be greeted as liberators in a bedraggled far off land that doesn't even have the good grace to have a McDonald's on every corner.

    However, this is 2026, and we can't have one moment to synthesize one piece of terrible news before we have further terrible news shoved in our faces. Coming as a surprise to no one who's been paying attention, another ICE agent killed another American citizen on Wednesday in Minneapolis. I say another American citizen, because on New Year's Eve, an off duty ICE officer killed 43 year old Keith Porter in Los Angeles. You can read more about his death here.

    There have been at least 16 documented shootings involving immigration enforcement officers since Trump took office last January. You can read more about that in The Guardian here.  32 people died in ICE detention in 2025. This ties 2004 for the deadliest year for ICE detainees. You can read about each of the ICE detainees who died here. Who'd have thought that creating a band of masked vigilantes out of a bunch of barely-trained neck beards would turn out to be such a terrible idea? 

    I saw the video. You probably did, as well. I also saw the video taken by Jonathan Ross himself, which disproves everything our president, our vice president, and Kristi Noem want us to believe.   I saw a woman murdered in cold blood from all different angles on a street in Minneapolis. I saw her denied immediate medical attention from a doctor on the scene. I saw the man who murdered her take an entire video of the incident on his own phone, and walk away only to mutter "f**kin' bitch" as he went. No one stopped him. Not one of his fellow agents disarmed him or rushed to check on the woman he shot. 

    If they were so confident in the bullshit they're spinning at the moment, they wouldn't have any problem with the state of Minnesota conducting the investigation into Renee Good's murder. Instead, the FBI has taken over the crime scene to lead the investigation. Because, you know, the FBI has been remarkably capable at investigations under Kash Patel (see also: the manhunt for Charlie Kirk's murderer, the manhunt for the Brown University shooter). When you need a poorly executed "investigation," call your podcaster buddy, I guess.

    I wonder how many more people are going to have to die before we abolish ICE. Is this the new version of school shootings? Are we going to try to thoughts and prayers our way through another disaster of our own making? 77 million Americans voted for this, after all. It's easy to think of that number and get discouraged about what's to come. I spent all of last year depressed about everything that happened. It's clear that I can choose to live another year in that way, or I can choose to approach 2026 differently. 

    So, this year, I'm going to try and live more in line with this quote from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien:

"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."