When Congress and the Trump White House shut the government down recently, they hit 42 million Americans right in their wallets. They took that stability away. They hit mine too, after a fashion, because suddenly my neighbors and friends had empty cards and wallets. People rushed in to help. The little libraries in our neighborhood were suddenly filled with canned goods and jars of peanut butter and jelly. All the downtown businesses started offering discounts or free things if you showed your silver card. A teenager gave out free hot dogs in a local park, and our food co-op started a drive to pay for $20 gift cards to offer struggling shoppers.
After about a week and in response to calls, emails, and letters—a clamor from so many in the Nutmeg State—Connecticut did the right thing. Hartford used its “rainy day fund” to fully fund cards for residents. Our millionaire governor, who recently announced that he’s running for a third term, insisted that he’d bill the federal government for the cost of the stolen benefits.
Of course, I want to do more than just volunteer. I want the whole system to change.
And the goodwill is still going strong. This was shaping up to be a bountiful Thanksgiving for food pantries and soup kitchens in our area, and I’m already planning my outfit for directing traffic at our local food pantry next Friday. I’ll be head-to-toe in high viz.
This is all beautiful. It’s heartening—and we need more of it. It’s an all-too-human response to the Trump administration’s assault on what was left of good government. His graft machine came into power promising to make the government small enough to drown in a toilet. He unleashed Elon Musk and his army of young bros to smash and trash the bureaucracy. In the first weeks of his new administration, a century—whoops, I mean months—ago, more than 200,000 federal employees were pink-slipped, shown the door, or simply locked out. Foreign aid to the globally needy was left to moulder. Contraception bound for the Global South was incinerated. Effective, long-standing programs were shuttered without warning.
Small Ways to Be Useful
I struggled through all of that, feeling small and far from the power centers where good people were being shown the door. I tried to keep my eyes focused on what my own community needed most and did indeed find a modest way to be useful.
On Mondays and Wednesday mornings, I bundle up, don a high-viz vest, and head out to a nearby corner. For an hour, I walk that intersection, accompanying middle schoolers across the street and standing with little kids waiting for buses. I chat with parents and wave at cars, the trucks of contractors, and city buses. People toot their horns or shout my name from open car windows, waving good morning as they head to work.
I give speeders the stink eye and, when there are lulls, I pick up garbage and think about the day ahead. And then I see more kids coming and plan to casually help without letting them break stride. I greet them with warm respect. It hasn’t taken me long to recognize them all.
You may wonder: How did I get here? Let me back up and tell you the story because it connects to how our community is bulking up its care response network in the age of Trump.
During the last budget session, our town was in a fiscal crisis. Inflation, health insurance increases, and rising costs made for major belt tightening. The People’s Budget Coalition, a network of organizations and individuals I work with, turned out scores of people to fill City Council chambers through the budget season. We signed up dozens of people to speak to the City Council and wrote emails to or button-holed councilors at public events. We had marches and rallies. We met one-on-one with school board members and city councilors. We went to Hartford and demanded more money from the state. We worked so hard!
Sometimes, my two kids, 11 and 13, came with me to those City Council meetings, drawing, reading, and shifting around constantly in those uncomfortable seats as their teachers spoke passionately about the work they did. Again and again, people made the point that it isn’t just a school budget, it’s a community budget. After all, the schools provide breakfasts and lunches, before and after care, health and special-ed services, as well as support for more than a dozen languages. And if that isn’t enough to deal with, there are 300 to 400 kids in our school system who are homeless on any given night, and our schools have to contend with the disruptions such instability wreaks on families and so the ability of their kids to learn.
We went back and forth on this for months, but sadly the upshot was that the City Council flat-funded the schools, while the Board of Education had to cut positions and shave costs. One cut was to eliminate all but one crossing guard position, pushing five guards out of their jobs. Amid the massive disruptions at the federal level, this may seem like small potatoes. But it was an obvious and impactful cut, visible evidence of the whole system under attack.
We live between two schools, and I’ve always admired crossing guards for being steady and stalwart in the heat and the cold. I was ready to help out and the People’s Budget Coalition stepped in to organize us into a volunteer crossing-guard cadre.
But It Isn’t Enough! Tax the Weapons Contractors!
Of course, I want to do more than just volunteer. I want the whole system to change. While the school board shaved positions, the city offered early retirement to people in key jobs, and everyone was called on to economize, there is a gold-plated example of a tax scofflaw right in our neighborhood. General Dynamics is the fourth-largest weapons manufacturer in the United States, with a huge complex in New London. In 2024, it reported profits of $3.8 billion, up 14.1% from 2023. Its CEO, Phebe Novakovic, made more than $23 million in 2024 (with all her stocks and options). However, the company shortchanges its workers, even as it rakes in record profits.
In 2021, General Dynamics-Electric Boat took the city of New London to court to contest its tax bill, according to documents uncovered by the War Resisters League. The city had assessed its New London office park at $78 million, but the company wanted it lower. They eventually settled in court on an assessment of $57 million. That big break saved the company $563,000 a year in local taxes! Add that up for the five years since that decision was made, and you get $2.8 million!
If our tax system were fair, New London would get $6 million more in taxes.
It could have been even more. As local Patch news site reported, General Dynamics bought the complex for $55 million in July 2010—a fire sale price, given that the previous owner, pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, had spent $300 million to build it less than 10 years earlier. When General Dynamics moved in, the fair market value for the property was $309 million, putting the tax assessment on the property at something like $216 million. So, the company’s fair tax burden to the City of New London should be nearly $6 million a year! How different life would be for New Londoners if General Dynamics were paying that annually.
After laying that out before the City Council, I concluded (all in less than three minutes) by saying: “I offer for your consideration that you stop cutting positions, stop threatening to flat-fund the schools and our kids, and that you tax General Dynamics with the same resolve that you tax the citizens. They can afford it, a lot more than we can.” There was some applause for that last line, even though many people are afraid to criticize General Dynamics, fearing that (no matter the real finances) the goose could stop laying what still passes for a golden egg.
Sandwiches, Not Submarines
The People’s Budget Coalition has begun looking into how we can take this issue on, especially because so much of our housing boom and the gentrification that goes with it (and pushes poorer people out of our area) is related to the US Navy’s massive contract (a whopping $132 billion) with General Dynamics-Electric Boat for a new class of nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable submarines. I mention all of this because it’s the kind of thing I think about while waiting for the next cluster of middle schoolers to arrive at my intersection.
At the end of the school year, as they cut school positions, proud parents put up lawn signs advertising where their kids were headed to college. One common sign was for Electric Boat, not a college. But most of the positions they’re filling with new grads aren’t actually high-paying, fast-advancing ones that will provide future stability for those young people. A recent report by the War Resisters League found that entry-level wages at Electric Boat, even after signing bonuses, were low enough that workers also often qualified for state healthcare and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits!
Imagine that, if our tax system were fair, New London would get $6 million more in taxes. Of course, then there’s the question of what it would be like if we Americans weren’t investing $132 billion for those 12 new nuclear-armed submarines capable all alone of destroying the world. Why is there money for those submarines but not for sandwiches (and other food), housing, and medicine for people who truly need it?
How can companies like General Dynamics-Electric Boat make insane profits with plenty of money left over for stock buybacks and CEO bonuses, while people in my world are digging through their pantries to find cans of food to share with their neighbors?
Planting Figs on the Strangest Planet Around
Only recently, when SNAP ran out of its federal funding during the government shutdown and the Trump crew decided to force millions of low-income people to reapply for their food stamps (supposedly in an effort to stop “fraud”), my social media filled up with images of World War II victory gardens and videos of how to replace such federal support with your own labor and ingenuity. And yes, it made a certain sense to me on one level, though it also couldn’t have been more tone deaf or unrealistic on another.
Here’s what I mean: I grow food in my yard. I devote three or four hours a week to watering, weeding, reseeding, and harvesting. Right there I’m way ahead of the curve, since I’ve got the space and time, two significant privileges. I had a great garlic harvest this year. My blueberry bushes and strawberry patch were both prolific. I lost all my hazelnuts to the squirrels during an ill-timed road trip. Our mushroom patch never came up. My care for the fig tree paid off—finally—and I got a tidy little fig harvest for a week or two in September. An asparagus patch I’ve been developing for a few years took off and, for a few weeks, we ate so much asparagus that we all got a little sick of it.
I can barely share a handful of figs with my neighbors and can’t solve anyone’s food crisis by my occasional neighborly drop-offs of a dozen backyard eggs.
Parsley, basil, collards, kale, and lettuces all did great, and we ate pesto and salads and slaws from May to October, almost turning green in the process. Last year’s jack-o’-lanterns took off in spiky abundance, and I let them take over a whole part of the yard. Eventually, I found five beautiful feral pumpkins that we carved up again, roasting the seeds with tamari and garlic powder for a messy and delicious treat. I grew corn but didn’t water it enough for it to be anything but chicken food. And yes, we have enough chickens to meet our egg needs, but we’re far from being self-sufficient.
You see what I’m getting at, I hope. Gardening is a lot of time and work, while the outcomes are anything but guaranteed. A handful of missed days, a few missteps, and all your work is for nothing. Still, this summer, there were weeks when my family could skip buying vegetables and fruit. That felt good and was nice for our bottom line, but even that depended on my having some free daytime, a luxury all too many of us don’t have.
Our true food system is all about commandeered water and stolen land, subsidized fertilizer and exploited labor, shipping and storage. Every little way I opt out from all of that is undoubtedly a good thing, but I can barely share a handful of figs with my neighbors and can’t solve anyone’s food crisis by my occasional neighborly drop-offs of a dozen backyard eggs.
Maybe it’s different in places where more people grow more food and aren’t dabblers or amateurs like me. But as I think about how to contend with the acute crisis and widening fissures in our whole international food system, with its Trumpian tariffs, excise taxes, and systemic abuses, I wonder how long this can go on.
How long can we live in the strange world of President Donald Trump and his version of what might be thought of as Defeat Gardens before we figure out a better way—how to truly feed and care for ourselves and one another? What are the systems that we need to build to replace the distinctly broken and shattered ones in this world of ours?
Those are some of the questions I ask myself daily as I wait for those schoolkids to get to my corner. But I can’t ask them alone or answer them by myself. Still, it feels meaningful to at least pose the questions and explore how, in this Trumpian universe of ours, not just I but we can try to answer them together.
