Moving Beyond ‘Whaddya Gonna Do’

I WAS STANDING at a bus stop in northern Virginia this spring with another dad putting his kids on the bus. He is a federal employee coping with the sudden precarity of the career he pursued to support his family. President Donald Trump’s executive order in February that directed federal agencies to submit plans for “large-scale reductions in force” may leave this dad out of work.

President Trump’s deployment of billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle the federal government fulfills a long-held dream for some. Since the mid-1980s, certain far-right Republicans have wanted to enact political strategist Grover Norquist’s mantra: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Well, “government” is “people.” Real people. There are 2.4 million federal employees, not including the military or the postal service. Under the Trump administration, they wake up each day not knowing whether the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man will decide that they no longer have a job.

Federal workers are only one sector in Trump’s bull’s eye. This administration is attempting to erase the existence of transgender and other gender-diverse people: A day one executive order proclaims that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable.” Trump has banned trans people from women’s sports and the military and now is attempting to eliminate gender-affirming medical care for people under 19. Immigrants are also facing a terrifying crackdown. Immigration enforcement officials arrested more people in the first 22 days of February this year than in any month for the past seven years, according to The Guardian. Green-card holders have been deported for their political activities. Immigrants accused of gang membership were flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in open defiance of court orders.

All these targeted groups have communities of people materially and emotionally impacted by what happens to them. For many Americans, our sense of safety, well-being, or control over our lives and futures has become precarious. Government should provide stability for the governed, not chaos.

At the bus stop, we talked about the feelings of powerlessness and the temptation to just throw up our hands and check out. I joked: “It feels like a world-historical case of ‘whaddya gonna do?’”

Yet, there are more productive and faithful ways forward. I’m learning to let go of control and lean into hope.

Much to my discomfort, Elon Musk and I share a favorite author. Musk has tweeted that The Lord of the Rings is his favorite book. He told The New Yorker in 2009 that he admires its protagonists because they “always felt a duty to save the world.” I’m more interested in what author J.R.R. Tolkien writes about the power of hope when it seems hardest to come by. In wizard Gandalf’s words, “despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”

Even in this difficult time, one solution given to us and bolstered by our faith is to decide to hope. I can’t avert every bad political decision that damages those I care about, but I can abide in hope and remain engaged in the struggle to bring a better world into being. That struggle looks different for each of us — and that’s a good thing. We all have different gifts. Taking action for good, alongside others, is the most reliable generator of hope that I know. I’m inspired by stories like a church in Atlanta that has prepared a mutual aid fund to help parishioners as they lose their jobs at the Centers for Disease Control, as well as nonprofits like Civil Service Strong, which compiles resources for federal employees to organize and fight back against executive overreach.

In The Lord of the Rings, hobbit Frodo Baggins tells Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” — a thought I’ve had often about the authoritarianism we face in the U.S and abroad. Gandalf’s response is what I need to hear right now. He replies: “So do I — and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

So, “Whaddya gonna do?” can’t be an exasperated surrender. Instead, it must be the earnest question we ask ourselves — and then listen and act on God’s answer.