Socca + chopped salad, Trump's poll #s drop, Tesla's earnings plummet, a powerful poem & a request
Delicious chickpea flour flatbread from Southern France, a powerful poem from post-WWII Germany, a humble request, and lots of good news amidst the bad news.
Hi folks,
This week’s post was a bit delayed due to vacation/travel, needing to focus on work after a week away, and trying to recover from the COVID I caught while on vacation last week. Cooties aside, coming home to full-on spring with the trees leafing out, flowers blooming, sun shining, and warm temperatures has been lovely. Our wild ramps are up and our asparagus patch has started producing - it’s shockingly early for both things but I’m trying to enjoy the warm breezes and delicious veggies while also acknowledging my fears about our changing climate. Warming planet = bad; roasted just-picked asparagus from the garden eaten in the sun on the deck = good.
Since Trump was elected, I’ve been trying to find a sustainable space between hope and despair, joy and anguish, beauty and ugliness, love and hate, forgiveness and anger, energy and exhaustion, engagement and retreat.
I started this Substack as an attempt to balance my fear, sadness, and outrage with hope, activism, and self-care (anyone else find the term “self-care” cringe-inducing?) My hope is that these posts help you do the same. On that note, here’s some tasty food and some food for thought.
RECIPE | Socca: Savory Chickpea Pancake & Chopped Salad
I was thrilled to discover socca last summer. This big savory chickpea flour pancake is tasty, versatile, nutritious and vegan, to boot. It’s also easy to make! Although you can keep it bare bones with just chickpea flour, water, salt and olive oil, this pancake is more than happy to take on anything else you want to throw at it. Possibilities include caramelized onions, garlic, cooked mushrooms, fresh herbs, rosemary, oregano, za’atar, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and Parmesan cheese. I like to serve it with an herby cucumber yogurt sauce and a nice chopped salad.
Hopeful Updates
Trump’s approval ratings are falling and, just 100 days into his regime, there are signs that things are going south. His polling numbers on immmigration - a topic he tends to poll more positively on than other issues - have declined since February. “A majority of Americans, 53%, disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, with 46% approving, a reversal from February when half of the public voiced approval of his approach.” Read more from the Washington Post (gift link).
Tesla’s first quarter earnings were TERRIBLE - the stock dropped 71% in value over last year’s first quarter earnings. F-Elon, indeed! (Side note: I’m still selling magnets - get yours here.) Also, it’s not too late to urge your state to divest its pension fund from Tesla Motors - send an email now.
Proudly defiant news from Harvard. Not only has the University refused to comply with the Trump administration’s ridiculous requests, it has now filed a lawsuit over the freezing of its funds.
The first Republican (Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska) has joined the chorus of Congressional Democrats in calling for Trump to fire the ridiculously incompetent Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. So that’s one down.
David Hogg, one of the five vice chairs of the DNC (he got into gun control advocacy after surviving the Parkland highschool shooting) has announced a plan to back truly progressive challengers of tepid Democrats in the primaries of safely blue districts. The DNC is, of course, absolutely losing its shit about this but I think Hogg is 100% right that complacent do-nothing Dems have got to go. After losing to Trump (again), it would be incredibly stupid not to make the visionary changes needed to make the Democratic party stand for something meaningful again. Read David’s Bluesky thread about this and chime in to tell DNC Chair Ken Martin you support these primary challenges.
Former Republican Congressperson (and compulsive liar) George Santos was sentenced to 7 years in prison today. At least one Republican is getting their comeuppance in court.
This Powerful Poem Is An Important Reminder
This poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller has been echoing in my mind since Trump took office. Initially a Nazi supporter, Niemöller’s views eventually changed when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp for speaking out against Nazi control of churches (they rewrote the Bible to get rid of Jews, y’all!) and he later encouraged Germans to take responsibility for Nazi atrocities. Niemöller wrote this poem after WWII as a form of apology for failing to oppose the Nazi party and it’s wildly relevant right now.
If you’re lucky enough to be privileged here in America, it’s tempting to believe that your citizenship, skin color, money, religion, etc., will protect you, but as the poem above so eloquently demonstrates, if we don’t stand up for each other, we’re basically doomed.
If Trump and co are allowed to seize a completely innocent young woman like Rumesya Ozturk outside her dorm for merely co-authoring an opinion piece criticizing her university’s tepid response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and lock her up in a freezing, stinking hole of a privately run detention center in Louisiana without due process of law (and in clear violation of the court’s order), if they can deport innocent people to prisons in El Salvador and refuse to bring them back even after admitting that they’ve made “a mistake”, if they can order an “investigation” of ActBlue (the main grassroots fundraising platform for Democratic candidates) for no legitimate reason, if they can routinely break the law in hundreds of ways that violate our constitution and our judicial system, none of us is safe. We have to stick together and refuse to remain silent. Which brings me to our action for this week! 👇
ACT: Share This With Your Friends, Family & Neighbors 📩
I have a favor to ask of you — please share this Substack.
There are currently 157 of you wonderful folks subscribed. I am grateful to have your ears and eyes once a week or so. And I’d like to reach 100 times that many people, if not more. Our resistance must keep growing in numbers and strength.
You can restack posts, you can share them with a note, you can forward this email to others, you can share this Substack or my website (https://www.feedyourfight.org) on social media:
And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, too.
Thanks again for all you do and I hope that you have a great weekend.
