I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now.

By Free Republic | Created at 2024-11-20 21:43:33 | Updated at 2024-11-21 16:57:29 19 hours ago

I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now.
The New York Times ^ | Nov. 20, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET | Lydia Polgreen

Posted on 11/20/2024 1:38:33 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic with the thought ‘Where is Mom’s passport?’ What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always overblown. Panic and alarm: These are feelings that a lifetime of observing the world from a sanguine, journalistic remove, always taking the long view, had taught me to extinguish the moment they flared. What good can come from such strong emotion?

After all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Trump was president once before, and even though he managed to enact a great deal of cruelty and bungle a pandemic, most of...

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

TOPICS: Humor
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Thank you very much and God bless you.

My mother hoped Kamala Harris’s promises to take on corporate landlords, to lower prescription drug prices and protect Medicare and Social Security would help her live a better life.

Attention, Lydia:

Be advised; the reason Democrats are able to make the same promises election-after-election is because they never keep any of them.

To: E. Pluribus Unum

2 posted on 11/20/2024 1:40:35 PM PST by Frank Drebin (And don't ever let me catch you guys in America!)

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Is everyone at the New York Times a bunch of limp wristed pansies?

3 posted on 11/20/2024 1:40:48 PM PST by caver ( )

To: E. Pluribus Unum

I LIKE democrat panic, smellz like victory!

4 posted on 11/20/2024 1:40:56 PM PST by doorgunner69 (Your oath of enlistment has no expiration date)

To: E. Pluribus Unum

slim but decisive margin????

5 posted on 11/20/2024 1:41:05 PM PST by rdl6989 ( )

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Oh for crying out loud! Pick the most preposterous scenario and hint it might be common practice. 🙄

6 posted on 11/20/2024 1:41:52 PM PST by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped)

To: E. Pluribus Unum

So what I just read was a lazy coldhearted child unwilling to care for their own mother expecting the government to do it for them.

What a horrible heartless child. Liberals are just bone deep ugly and nasty, selfish jerks, wow.

7 posted on 11/20/2024 1:41:56 PM PST by Skwor

To: E. Pluribus Unum

“She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.”

Best to forget you ever had a passport than to go to that ‘country’.

8 posted on 11/20/2024 1:42:00 PM PST by BobL

To: E. Pluribus Unum

slim but decisive margin?

It wasn’t even close.

9 posted on 11/20/2024 1:42:16 PM PST by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion, or satire, or both.)

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

At least Trump will ask for papers. The FBI never does under Biden when they knock down doors of conservatives.

10 posted on 11/20/2024 1:42:32 PM PST by 1Old Pro

To: E. Pluribus Unum

What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country?

Why would she “suddenly” have to prove her citizenship? Doesn’t she have some other documentation available? Trump never once said he would deport U.S. citizens. What a jackass. That’s a terrible strawman.

11 posted on 11/20/2024 1:43:08 PM PST by FoxInSocks ("Hope is not a course of action." — M. O'Neal, USMC)

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