It’s Over, Dad

My father’s dying prediction has come true, at long last.

Courtesy Clara Jeffery

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We had just told my dad he was about to die. He didn’t have years. Or months. “A few weeks,” his oncologist offered as the most optimistic course. Further intervention would not help. It was time to go home, and then to hospice. “Weeks?!” “I’m afraid so.”

My dad processed. And then he said, “I have a prediction: Trump will lose.”

What happened next was both excruciatingly slow and way too fast. It was not the last real conversation we had, but close to it, as mitigating pain and news of the virus crashing the world became overwhelming, as we said our goodbyes and he gradually lost the ability to speak.

In the almost eight months since, I’ve thought about that a lot. He wanted to live to see Trump lose, and he didn’t. He couldn’t have imagined the overwhelming magnitude of chaos and death that Trump has since unleashed on the country. He couldn’t have known that hundreds of thousands of American families have had to say goodbye—if they were lucky to be able to say goodbye—to a loved one because the president was too consumed with personal grievances and a desire to cling to power to do his damn job. But by then the oppressive awfulness of Trump, the cruelty, the racism, the corruption, the contempt for every supposed American value, was enough to have my father—a journalist, yes, but not a political animal; a Democrat who still heard the call of split-ticket voting, at least when it came to Larry Hogan—make this utterance within a few minutes of coming to grips with the fact that he had only a short, and painful, time to live.

When he flew in a day later, I didn’t tell my brother—a Trump supporter—about this conversation. I don’t think I’ve told anyone. Then and since, my brother and I have mostly abided by a largely unspoken agreement not to talk politics, though sometimes he texts me things out of the fever swamp, and I beg him to find better sources of info, and he dismisses me. And I’m glad, in a way, that my father hasn’t been around for all that, and that we held it together for the last week of his life, and since. And while I’m not a particularly superstitious person, recounting this conversation to anyone seemed to be tempting fate. Of course I know I can’t jinx the country, and yet…

But it’s time to say: “Daddy, you were right. It’s over.”  

Courtesy Clara Jeffery

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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