Even surrounded by the bright blue one can feel the imminent danger targeting our lives these last 100 days. The emergency signals are sparking from one side of the globe to another while we wonder exactly how to respond. This week alone the Reading Partners program that allowed me to read with several 4th graders was cut by the White House. At least 20 states are suing over this abrupt elimination of over 1,000 AmeriCorps programs. “My question to this administration is: Is nothing sacred? Is nothing worth protecting?” Philip J. Weiser, the attorney general of Colorado, one of the states that sued, said in a virtual joint news conference on Tuesday” (The New York Times).

I fear we all know the answer to that rhetorical question. Of course not. Sacred comes from an internal belief system within a person who has the capacity to show respect, but is not possible in someone bent on revenge. In fact, revenge colors the president’s every executive order to date. Perhaps if Trump read Francis Bacon he’d avoid such an apparently deadly path: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” Bacon further calls those who seek such private vengeance, “base and crafty cowards [who] are like the arrow that flieth in the dark … This is certain: that a man who studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green.” Considering the lack of any positive growth in these 100 days, only dismantling, only destruction, only bluster and ridicule, festering his wounds sounds accurate. 

All week I kept hearing Shakespeare too. His plots about greed, power, lustful and rash decisions echo around and around my mind, “These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder,” warned Friar Laurence. Try figuring out how many government agencies pertaining to foreign aid, scientific research or food safety have been curtailed or shuttered, or had their budgets slashed by the Department of Government Efficiency just in April alone. DOGE is a fast-moving train-wreck with no forethought on who will survive. And why should they care? Slash and burn is their only mandate.

May Day is a call for help. May Day is also the day to don a flower wreath and dance around the Maypole. I choose to look up at this one sky we all share and declare it a day to do both. Ask those in power to reconsider their budget cuts to such important life-affirming programs like those that AmeriCorps oversees, and rejoice in the height of Spring by filling our baskets with goodwill.