EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.

Recently, I spent two weeks visiting friends in England. We had not been to the United Kingdom in eight years, and here’s my embarrassed confession: We were a little worried about getting back home.

Bear with me here: My ego is showing, and I won’t blame anyone if you think I was inflating my own importance. I feel that way myself. Far from being a big fish, I’m more of a baby minnow.

Now, on the one hand, I’ve travelled abroad many times in my life without difficulty at the borders. I am a white, gray-haired woman with a last name that isn’t Dutch, but neither is it Latino, African or Asian. English is my first language. I’m heterosexual. I don’t have a single tattoo. One traffic ticket is the extent of my criminal record. I’m not famous for anything.  

On the other hand, for eight years I have written opinion essays that are distinctly liberal, first in The Holland Sentinel, and then on Ottawa News Network. I’ve written about gun regulation, voting and voting rights, book banning, political doublespeak, freedom of religion, and the way culture wars divide and distract us from the real business of government. I have been critical, mocking and dismissive of both Trump administrations.  

Why on earth would I worry about being stopped when I returned to the U.S.?  

Well, why would a woman graduate student in Massachusetts worry about being grabbed on the street by masked men, transported to Louisiana, and imprisoned by our government for more than six weeks? Why would a Canadian woman with an irregularity in her visa be detained for 12 days in ICE detention first in California and then in Arizona? How could the Black woman who was the Librarian of Congress imagine herself being fired in a two-sentence email with no warning? Why would the mayor of Newark be jailed by ICE for protesting outside an ICE detention facility? Why would Trump pardon the Jan. 6 rioters? Why would America want Greenland? Why was Elon Musk given so much power to cut federal jobs?

You see where I’m going with this? Everything is topsy-turvy. The unthinkable is not only happening every day all around us, but it is being normalized as we come to expect outrageous changes to decades-old norms and institutions of American life. 

Measles? Back again. Vaccines? Maybe if the research is funded, but you might have to pay for them this time. The search for cancer and diabetes treatments? On hold, as grants are cut and even clawed back. FEMA for disaster relief? Well, it might depend on whether you live in a red or blue state. Roll back environmental protections? Sure, if it enables more drilling and logging. Head Start? Who needs it? Same for school lunches and for those pesky food safety inspectors in the Department of Agriculture.

All of these things were on my mind as we set off for England. And I’m happy to report that my paranoia was needless. Not only did our flights take off and land on time, but our experience with customs and immigration were absolutely normal. We were, in the end, safe.

However, our British hosts and friends had lots of questions for us once we established that we were not MAGA supporters.

During our visit, the doctored image of Trump in papal robes appeared on TruthSocial.com and then was shared on official White House social media accounts. Our friends didn’t believe the story: Surely it was a satirical joke in bad taste. They were incredulous when we assured them that, yes, our president or his people had sent the image out into the world.

The conversations continued. Why wasn’t Congress exercising its power of the purse? How could Trump and his people ignore court orders and get away with it? We agreed that the balance of powers in our government was failing.

Where, they wondered, was public protest? It turns out that the widespread marches on April 5 and 19 didn’t get much international coverage. For that matter, our local Sentinel didn’t cover the April 5 march along River Avenue. The Sentinel briefly mentioned the march on April 19, but only two days later. We assured everyone that people were protesting, writing emails, pushing back, but it was hard to see if anything was changing.  

The Brits were puzzled. Why levy tariffs to make things more expensive for ordinary people? Who would replace deported immigrants who labor in health care, agriculture and construction? Why hurt American farmers by ending food aid distributed through USAID? Why break a well-functioning economy? They couldn’t see the sense in any of it.

One grandmother, herself a Ph.D. in Biology, had been urging her grandson to do his doctoral work in physics in America. No more. Too many horror stories about the perils of being an international student here: Visas revoked with no notification, ICE raids on dorms and classes, not to mention the drying up of federal research money.

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Many of the people we met had spent time in the U.S. Two had owned condos in Florida. One had two daughters living in the states — both naturalized citizens. Many had travelled to American cities and national parks. Most of them had loved being in America and meeting Americans. They admired our highways, our beaches, our grocery stores, our culture.

And so, on top of incredulity, there was a thick layer of disillusionment. Where was the America they had experienced? What had become of the bulwark of democracy? They worried that they would never want to visit again. For them, it was like finding out that your favorite cousin is secretly a drug dealer or assassin.

At the end, we assured them that Americans had not changed — only their leadership. If the values of freedom, justice and a diverse democracy were lacking in our elected representatives, they could still be found among ordinary Americans. We share, after all, the incredulity, puzzlement and disillusionment of our British hosts. 

Unlike them, however, we had to come home to an America that is hellbent on discarding its constitutional underpinning in order to serve the interests of a wealthy minority who lack empathy for anyone outside of their tight circle of privilege.

— Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Holland. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.