It’s hard enough just to read this. It must have been so very difficult to write it. Story by story, sentence by sentence, detail by detail, what stays and what remains of your research in one article.
Very enlightening about how the devil’s in the details and how pervasive and organized their destruction of our protections is in their agenda against women, the poor, the non-white. Thanks, Tom, for an excellent revelation about how they are systematically implementing the reversal of women’s rights/freedoms/protections and the ethnic cleansing underlying their agenda.
Jackie, thank you so much. It was hard to write,because of what it meant for the people living it, and because every detail left out felt like a betrayal. But you nailed it: it’s in the accumulation, in the slow grinding down of rights under the guise of policy and procedure. I’m grateful you sat with it. And I’m even more grateful you saw the pattern for what it is,not accidental, not misguided, but deliberate.
Your writing is heart-achingly important Tom. The loving articulation of each micro-moment of this systematic cruelty and the double binds of ubiquitous complicity. I really believe this detailed descriptive documenting of how the systemic dominance works is essential to understand. Because that is also where the potential for resistance lies. Otherwise we think of it all as abstract systems. But the systems require bodies doing their work, and making choices in each moment to move in the direction of cruelty or towards something more life enhancing. The more we see the micro and embodied, rather than the macro abstract the better.
Plus I had a sudden image of all those forms being collectively doctored — like erasure poetry — towards what they should express. People in cahoots with each other editing the forms again towards love.
Thank you. Your words landed with the kind of precision that makes you stop breathing for a moment.
I keep returning to the forms,not just as symbols, but as objects with weight. The literal heft of them: stacked, stamped, stored in sagging file drawers. And the figurative weight: how they reduce a life to categories, force pain into predefined shapes, demand performances of suffering just to be believed. They don’t just document the system,they are the system, in paper form.
That’s why your image moved me so deeply,the idea of rewriting them together, like erasure poems. Quietly, collectively undoing harm in the margins. Turning tools of control into small acts of care. That’s where I see hope living now,not in slogans, but in the slow, human work of redaction and revision.
Thank you for reading with such attention. It matters more than I know how to say.
Yes! The forms. The boxes. The categories that tidy up the mess of us. The prescribed “choices”. The careful curation of what is possible. The translation of our visceral human ecology into grids and data points that can be controlled and manipulated. Those forms ARE the violence of dehumanising and decontextualising and reducing us to what is legible to power. Maybe they can also be sites of resistance and rewilding…
Damn you, Tom! Now my keyboard is soaked in tears!
"… sometimes the most important thing you can do is refuse to participate in your own moral destruction."
That's why I've been voluntarily living in poverty for over three decades, hoping that my savings last out my health… or that things will change, so I can in good conscience support it with my taxes again.
Jan, I hear every word in your tears, and I honor the sacrifice you've made. Refusing to participate in moral destruction is no small act,it’s a life’s work. What you’ve done takes staggering courage. You shouldn’t have to choose between conscience and survival. But you’re not alone in this fight.
That means more than I can say. Sometimes all we can do is hold on to the truth long enough for someone else to feel it too,before it disappears like everything else. Thank you for seeing it.
Excellent article!! Poingnant & Enlightening. Focusing on where one stands in their own morality vs the elimination of people by our current administration.
Thank you for this raw, powerful and gut-wrenching truth about what happens to real people. The light of humanity will prevail, but it’s a dark world that seems to either have forgotten what humanity is or has decided it’s expendable.
I worked public health in the 90s and early 2000s. While we didn’t have the moral compromises to deal with, we did experience women disappearing due to both their abusers and the system. People who get forgotten while they’re right in front of us.
Women who had to resort to prostitution to make money to feed their kids, but who had to stop showing up for STD treatment because they feared being arrested or snitched on by workers.
A co-worker and I drove around looking for a woman, found her on the street, got her into the backseat, and gave her the antibiotic she needed. She fled as soon as she took the medicine.
We never saw her again.
She haunts me even today. If I had her coat, I would keep it like Dana’s.
The anguish and pain from your words to my heart is something I will not forget. The cruelty of this regime's erasure and death sentences, in bureaucratic language, of humans whom the overlords deem undesirable, unacceptable, unqualified to even exist, is bottomless. It is a pitiless, merciless, ruthless effort to treat women as servants of men, and treat humans not "aligned" wiith their definition of gender as expendable. This regime desires to inflict as much horror by neglect as possible; it has no intention to help battered and beaten victims. People who resist the brutality suffer along with the forsaken. As your words convey so precisely and tragically.
I won’t forget your words either. You name it plainly: this is violence by design, administered through indifference and masked by process. It’s not failure,it’s intent. The cruelty isn’t a side effect; it’s the feature. And those who care, who resist, who refuse to look away, end up carrying the sorrow too. But bearing witness matters. Refusing silence matters. You matter. Thank you for standing in it with me.
It’s hard enough just to read this. It must have been so very difficult to write it. Story by story, sentence by sentence, detail by detail, what stays and what remains of your research in one article.
Very enlightening about how the devil’s in the details and how pervasive and organized their destruction of our protections is in their agenda against women, the poor, the non-white. Thanks, Tom, for an excellent revelation about how they are systematically implementing the reversal of women’s rights/freedoms/protections and the ethnic cleansing underlying their agenda.
Jackie, thank you so much. It was hard to write,because of what it meant for the people living it, and because every detail left out felt like a betrayal. But you nailed it: it’s in the accumulation, in the slow grinding down of rights under the guise of policy and procedure. I’m grateful you sat with it. And I’m even more grateful you saw the pattern for what it is,not accidental, not misguided, but deliberate.
Your writing is heart-achingly important Tom. The loving articulation of each micro-moment of this systematic cruelty and the double binds of ubiquitous complicity. I really believe this detailed descriptive documenting of how the systemic dominance works is essential to understand. Because that is also where the potential for resistance lies. Otherwise we think of it all as abstract systems. But the systems require bodies doing their work, and making choices in each moment to move in the direction of cruelty or towards something more life enhancing. The more we see the micro and embodied, rather than the macro abstract the better.
Plus I had a sudden image of all those forms being collectively doctored — like erasure poetry — towards what they should express. People in cahoots with each other editing the forms again towards love.
Thank you for this extraordinary writing.
Thank you. Your words landed with the kind of precision that makes you stop breathing for a moment.
I keep returning to the forms,not just as symbols, but as objects with weight. The literal heft of them: stacked, stamped, stored in sagging file drawers. And the figurative weight: how they reduce a life to categories, force pain into predefined shapes, demand performances of suffering just to be believed. They don’t just document the system,they are the system, in paper form.
That’s why your image moved me so deeply,the idea of rewriting them together, like erasure poems. Quietly, collectively undoing harm in the margins. Turning tools of control into small acts of care. That’s where I see hope living now,not in slogans, but in the slow, human work of redaction and revision.
Thank you for reading with such attention. It matters more than I know how to say.
Yes! The forms. The boxes. The categories that tidy up the mess of us. The prescribed “choices”. The careful curation of what is possible. The translation of our visceral human ecology into grids and data points that can be controlled and manipulated. Those forms ARE the violence of dehumanising and decontextualising and reducing us to what is legible to power. Maybe they can also be sites of resistance and rewilding…
A partial list of some of the policies listed in above story.
Policy Reference: VAWA Reauthorization Failure, 2018–2022.
Policy Reference: Executive Order 13880, Trump (2019) — Increased interagency data-sharing for enforcement.
Policy Reference: 988 Lifeline Call Center Reductions — Montana Department of Public Health, 2023–2024 Funding Gaps.
Source: Montana Department of Justice — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Report, 2021.
Policy Reference: 2018–2020 DOJ cuts to tribal domestic violence coordination.
Senate Bill 458
Policy Reference: Montana SB 458 (2023) — Legal definition of sex excludes transgender identity from recognition.
Policy Reference: 988 Hotline Rural Defunding — Montana call centers reduced services in 2023–2024 due to underfunding.
https://www.ovcttac.gov/
olicy Reference: ICE–Nonprofit Collaboration Incentives — 2020 DHS memos encouraged data alignment with ICE standards in shelters.
Montana SB 458 (anti-trans law); EO 13880 (data-sharing); Violence Against Women Act performance-based funding changes, 2021.
Damn you, Tom! Now my keyboard is soaked in tears!
"… sometimes the most important thing you can do is refuse to participate in your own moral destruction."
That's why I've been voluntarily living in poverty for over three decades, hoping that my savings last out my health… or that things will change, so I can in good conscience support it with my taxes again.
Always free. The message is all that’s important!!
Jan, I hear every word in your tears, and I honor the sacrifice you've made. Refusing to participate in moral destruction is no small act,it’s a life’s work. What you’ve done takes staggering courage. You shouldn’t have to choose between conscience and survival. But you’re not alone in this fight.
Thanks. I make it sound harder than it's been. I spent fifteen years subsistence farming — they haven't figured out how to tax food you grow… yet…
And thanks also to you for allowing participation here without payment.
Agreed Jan...That sentence also pulled at me deeply. If Tom ever makes T-shirts with that on them... I'll be buying some
How do you know this ache so well? Rhetorical question only.
Beyond suffering.
I’m old.
Way more than just that.
Historical vision. And big heart. ♥️
My heart is broken. Thank you for making this so real, for not letting it slip away like the clicking in the wind.
That means more than I can say. Sometimes all we can do is hold on to the truth long enough for someone else to feel it too,before it disappears like everything else. Thank you for seeing it.
Excellent article!! Poingnant & Enlightening. Focusing on where one stands in their own morality vs the elimination of people by our current administration.
Thanks Tracy!!
You are welcome Tom! Thank you for writing this story!! I look fwd to reading more of your writing. 🤗
Thank you for this raw, powerful and gut-wrenching truth about what happens to real people. The light of humanity will prevail, but it’s a dark world that seems to either have forgotten what humanity is or has decided it’s expendable.
I worked public health in the 90s and early 2000s. While we didn’t have the moral compromises to deal with, we did experience women disappearing due to both their abusers and the system. People who get forgotten while they’re right in front of us.
Women who had to resort to prostitution to make money to feed their kids, but who had to stop showing up for STD treatment because they feared being arrested or snitched on by workers.
A co-worker and I drove around looking for a woman, found her on the street, got her into the backseat, and gave her the antibiotic she needed. She fled as soon as she took the medicine.
We never saw her again.
She haunts me even today. If I had her coat, I would keep it like Dana’s.
I can feel the weight of that moment. You did what you could,more than most ever would.
If you had her coat, I’d understand keeping it. Some people never really leave us, even if we only knew them for a breath.
The anguish and pain from your words to my heart is something I will not forget. The cruelty of this regime's erasure and death sentences, in bureaucratic language, of humans whom the overlords deem undesirable, unacceptable, unqualified to even exist, is bottomless. It is a pitiless, merciless, ruthless effort to treat women as servants of men, and treat humans not "aligned" wiith their definition of gender as expendable. This regime desires to inflict as much horror by neglect as possible; it has no intention to help battered and beaten victims. People who resist the brutality suffer along with the forsaken. As your words convey so precisely and tragically.
I won’t forget your words either. You name it plainly: this is violence by design, administered through indifference and masked by process. It’s not failure,it’s intent. The cruelty isn’t a side effect; it’s the feature. And those who care, who resist, who refuse to look away, end up carrying the sorrow too. But bearing witness matters. Refusing silence matters. You matter. Thank you for standing in it with me.