Susan Dixon

Things look bad right now.

The worst of the high school bullies are destroying as much as they can and they are doing it with a sadistic grin on their faces. There comes a point—and I have reached it—when it is pointless to lose sleep over trying to save things that are already gone. Even if scattered structures remain standing when this is all over, they will have lost whatever supporting context they had and will have to be rebuilt, along with everything else, to a new rhythm.

In Celtic thinking the time between one thing and another is sacred. “Sacred” here is something fluid, organic, changing, but also treacherous, unknowable, and wild. It is dusk and dawn, mid-summer and mid-winter, summer and winter solstices. These are times that are neither one thing nor another. Not really both at once or neither but some other thing: time out of time.

On August 20, 2025, White House factotum Steven Miller railed against demonstrators opposing the occupation of Washington, D.C., calling them “stupid white hippies” and saying the regime was going to ignore them. Failing in that resolve, he elaborated, “All these demonstrators you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been. And by the way, most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black.”

Ah! So that’s why he was crashing out about the protestors: they were white. If they had been Black, out there in the streets, he could have gotten the violence he longed for. But elderly white hippies, “that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old”? His hands were tied and he hated it.