The Homefront Report: Seven Miles Uphill, Somehow Still Easier Than Washington

We’re carrying babies and memories while the administration carries on with oil deals, election chaos, and public health delusion.

Washington is spending the weekend trying to turn Venezuelan oil into a century-long answer to expensive gasoline, rewrite the mechanics of mail voting while ballots are nearly ready to move, and explain away a measles outbreak with enough suspicion to make public health sound like a message board. It’s a particularly American kind of chaos, where enormously consequential decisions arrive wrapped in administrative language, press statements, and the faint suggestion that everyone else should simply trust the people currently kicking the machinery.

My husband and I spent several hours in the attic last night trying to cleanse it of years of dust and memories. We uncovered treasures, got emotional, laughed, cried, and had the kind of experience that probably sounds strange if you are the sort of person who thinks cleaning is only cleaning. For us, it felt like excavation. There were pieces of the past tucked between the rafters, reminders of who we had been and how much life had happened in the meantime. It was wonderful, which isn’t a word people often use for attic dust, but we’re a unique pair.

Ezra decided, once again, that sleep was a conspiracy against him. He was tired, obviously tired, but unwilling to surrender to rest on principle. Now, I am old and battle-worn enough as a parent to know exactly what this is. A power grab. If a baby learns that crying extends the evening, you are no longer raising a child, you are negotiating with a tiny union boss who has no respect for the limits of the human body. So we did what experienced parents do. Big hugs, firm boundaries, sleep music, and a refusal to let the smallest member of the household seize control of the republic. It worked, luckily, I have to admit I was close to breaking.

Sometimes children fight us not because they’re bad, but because they’re little people waiting for guidance. They want the safety of structure even while resisting it with their entire souls. That’s parenting in a nutshell. Today, we are traveling for something more serious. I am the youngest of six on my mom’s side, and my four older brothers had a different dad than I did. He lost a battle with cancer, and though I was not technically his, he always treated me like I was. That mattered to me more than he probably knew, especially when my own father wasn’t exactly a portrait of paternal devotion. My brothers are scattering his ashes in a place he loved, and even though the trip involves a seven-mile round-trip hike with a thirty-pound baby on my back, I will make the trek for the boys. My husband will make the trek for me, despite two back surgeries and the fact that much of his left leg and foot still lack normal feeling. My daughter will make the trip because she loves her cousins and her family and is thrilled to see them. Ezra will make the trip because he is a baby, and his primary civic contribution at this stage of life is being strapped to my back while the rest of us do our best.

Traveling is not my favorite thing. I like my home, my routines, my peace, and my sense of control over my tiny corner of the world. My husband is not a big fan of traveling either, partly for the same reasons and partly because his social anxiety is real. Which means that the fact he is taking this trip at all says a great deal about the kind of man he is. He is a special man, and I am lucky to call him mine. So while the rest of us are making space for the people we love, taking trips that make us uncomfortable so we can be there for the ones who matter, the administration is making space for oil deals, election chaos, and public health delusion.

First, there is Venezuela, where Trump announced what can only be described as an extraordinarily ambitious and suspiciously imperial arrangement. The United States has entered a deal involving seventeen Venezuelan oil fields with an estimated sixty-five billion barrels of proven reserves. The basic sales pitch is simple enough. Gas prices are high, the Middle East remains unstable, the Strait of Hormuz has been a mess for months, and Americans are angry every time they stand at a pump. So now the administration would like everyone to believe that the answer is a century-long stake in Venezuelan oil.

There are, however, two problems with this fairy tale. The first is practical. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is badly degraded, which means this isn’t a quick fix for working families watching prices climb. Even if everything went smoothly, which would itself be a miracle in a region and industry where nothing ever goes smoothly, substantial gains could take years and enormous sums of money. The second problem is that the private partner behind the venture is no longer anonymous. Reporting now identifies the key Venezuelan figure as Alejandro Betancourt, a businessman investigated in multiple countries over alleged money laundering and the subject of a Swiss arrest warrant, though he denies wrongdoing and has not been charged in the jurisdictions mentioned. In other words, the administration’s latest grand solution to rising fuel prices is to cozy up to a deeply controversial oil operator and call it strategy.

That is one way to run a country, I suppose, if your long-term vision is to turn foreign policy into a clearance rack full of morally discounted transactions. The administration is effectively saying that while American families absorb the costs of inflation, instability, and an increasingly absurd cost of living, Washington will solve it by shopping for oil fields in a country it has spent years denouncing. It’s less energy policy than it is an estate sale for empire.

Then there is the mail-voting mess, which remains one of the most consequential stories in the country and one of the easiest to underestimate if you are exhausted by the endless stream of legal trench warfare. Trump’s executive order attempting to reshape the rules for mail voting has been partially blocked by a federal judge, and the administration has now appealed. This matters because the first general election ballots are set to go out in a matter of days. State election officials are essentially being told to prepare for a legal and logistical knife fight while trying to run a national election at the same time.

This is one of those stories that sounds dry until you remember that nearly a third of Americans vote by mail. Then it stops sounding dry and starts sounding like the federal government is casually kicking at the support beams right before people are asked to cross the bridge. It is hard to escape the feeling that the point isn’t order, confidence, or election integrity. The point is pressure, uncertainty, and making the process feel unstable enough that trust begins to rot before a single vote is counted. We are now litigating the machinery of democracy like a nation that keeps taking apart its own brakes to see what happens on the highway.

And finally, because this administration apparently cannot resist the temptation to turn public health into theater, the measles story has gotten even uglier. Pennsylvania is facing its worst outbreak in decades, with hundreds of confirmed cases across dozens of counties, and the state has reported its first measles-associated deaths in thirty-five years. There is legitimate medical debate over whether measles directly caused or contributed to one of the deaths, which is a question for doctors, pathologists, and epidemiologists. In a sane government, that is where the matter would stay. Instead, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested the deaths may have been fabricated.

This is what makes the story bigger than one offensive remark. It’s not merely misinformation, though it is certainly that. It’s the systematic replacement of expertise with suspicion, evidence with insinuation, and governance with vibes. If every uncomfortable reality can be waved away as fake, manipulated, exaggerated, or invented, then leadership no longer has to lead. It only has to cast doubt. Children get sick, families bury loved ones, vaccination rates fall, outbreaks spread, and the secretary of health plays internet detective from a position that was once meant to protect the public.

Sometimes children fight the structure that protects them because they don’t understand yet what it’s for. Adults are supposed to know better. That is the thing tying today together for me. Family, love, and parenthood all ask something of us. Showing up for the people we care about often means doing hard things, inconvenient things, tiring things, things that interrupt our routines and strain our bodies and ask us to think of someone besides ourselves. That’s what it means to belong to other people. That’s what it means to be part of a family, or a community, or a country.

And yet the people running this country continue to behave like obligation is for other people. They want the benefits of leadership without the burden of care. They want the appearance of strength without the discipline of truth. They want the machinery of government to serve power, profit, and paranoia, while the rest of us are left to carry the weight uphill.

Today my family will carry what we can for the people we love. Washington, as usual, will carry on like love has nothing to do with governing at all.