I admit I’ve taken refugee since the election. I am working hard to preserve my mental health. I grew up the child of a solider killed in America’s most contentious war – Vietnam. I grew up ignored by my nation, neglected by my rightfully grieving mother, and left to figure it all out on my own for the most part. It took years of therapy, and even more years of writing about it all. I am still writing about it obviously, because here’s the thing – the child in me is never ever going to forget how this nation made me feel in the aftermath of my father’s death. It doesn’t matter how old I grow or how much understanding I bring to that loss. I look at friends whose parents are living well into their 90s or 100s and while I don’t envy the decisions they’ve had to make, the sacrifices they make daily, I do envy the years they’ve had with their parents.

I always knew my mother would die at a young age, too. She was bound to because of the stress raising three children on her own put on her body. I knew she would because even as a nurse her way of coping with all that grief was never healthy. She never made her own mental or emotional well-being a priority. So, in many ways, my father’s death robbed us of years with her as well.

The anger I felt as a teen growing up in a nation that mistreated Gold Star families like ours is always simmering on a back burner in my life. I have to work to keep it from boiling over. You know what they say about people who don’t heal their wounds just end up bleeding all over everyone else? Yes, well, that’s true, but it also true that some wounds can never be healed because your abuser continues to abuse.

When it comes to Vietnam, the abuser is my own country. We had no business going into Vietnam. Congressional leaders and our presidents sacrificed the lives of thousands of men and women, both on the battlefield and off for their own selfish ambitions and propagandized reasoning. Same as they did in Iraq.

When your own country is your abuser, it is a daily struggle to be in a good head space. That becomes even more of a challenge when you see your fellow citizens climb atop the nation’s capitol building and replace the flag like the one that draped your father’s casket with one of allegiance to a rapist as we all witnessed on Jan 6th, 2021.

That it happened to be the very day the grandson named for my father was born makes it even more of a challenge for me. The day Davey was born I could not be with my daughter due to Covid restrictions. I could not hold Davey for months aftewards. But MAGA supporters could march through the capitol, defecate in the halls of Congress, and carry guns while threatening to murder the Vice-President and other members of Congress.

And yet, our Attorney General failed to do his job, failed to keep such treasonous men from rising to power yet again.

So here on my grandson’s 4th birthday, a day I celebrate this beautiful child named for the father I loved so, I am in a quandry again. Beset with the parallel emotions of joy over this child and grief over what has happened, is happening in this country that I love.

Trump is a cancer upon this land. Elon Musk is evil embodied. Those who embrace them are traitors.

And the only way I can deal with all of this is to leave it behind. So on this my grandson’s 4th birthday I am packing to go abroad, where even there Musk has set about to try and take over the world & those motivated purely by money are willing to let him.

I promise to send you dispatches that will encourage and cheer you as well. As vice-president Harris showed us all today, we must find a way to do the right thing even in the face of those who continue to do the hateful thing, the treasonous thing.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of the forthcoming The Devil’s Pulpit (March, 2025, Mercer Univ. Press).