To the followers of this blog:
Monday Evening — I am writing this just moments after I read the news that the president has fired the acting Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates, in the aftermath of her announcement that she would not defend his executive order to ban immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The consequences of this radical decision are playing out as I write these words.
We are caught up in a severe and onrushing national crisis. This fact has become clear to me, as it has to millions of our fellow citizens. The crisis threatens our constitution; our historic system of governance with its checks, balances, and principles of justice; our economic stability along with that of all nations; our earned posture as a moral beacon to the world; and even our assumptions of insulation from abrupt and fissioning warfare, which most of us have grown accustomed to taking for granted.
The crisis carries enormous implications for the welfare of the mentally ill, which is the subject of this blog. Yet the velocity of civil destabilization has subsumed these implications into larger questions of national continuity, public safety, and cohesion in our communities.
I believe it is a moral imperative for each of us to turn our attention and our energies to the preservation of all that we hold sacred in the nation.
As the days roll on, it might be possible to discern and address critical challenges in the preservation of mental health-care under this administration. Conversely, it might be necessary for all Americans to place their particularized interests and agenda on hold, at least temporarily, and concentrate on monitoring (and trying to intervene in) an unprecedented threat, from within, to the very concept of “America.”
I hope and expect that soon, I will be able to join the leading activists and chroniclers of mental-health issues in framing these in the context of federal policy. As of the moment, there seems to be no coherent national policy–on this issue or any other. We are all conscripted into a mission we did not choose, a mission of witness and resistance.
Until–God and the fates willing–we consummate this reluctant mission in reclamation and redemption, this blog is suspended.
