The succession of terrible events has hit me hard. The shooting at Brown University, the attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia, and the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner combined to drive the cold, dark winter into my soul. As I lay in bed, I thought about the individuals who carried out these monstrous acts. I imagined peering into their hearts and minds, and what I saw frightened me. How does a person get to a place where they feel that this is their only alternative? How angry, aggrieved, hopeless must the person be? If it is mental illness, how does it get to that point? Is a person who commits any one of these acts, by definition, mentally ill? I don’t know how to process this.
I am always looking for solutions. I want to understand the problem and come up with a plan of action. I don’t know where to start.
I do have one idea, and that is more restrictive gun laws. As I wrote before, I would be more than willing to repeal the Second Amendment, though, despite the accumulation of mass shootings, Americans are not willing to go there. Obviously, restricting guns doesn’t address how the Reiners were murdered, but it might help limit mass shootings and suicides.
It also appears that we need to pay more attention to the intersection of mental illness and addiction. We have not successfully addressed, from either a medical or a policy perspective, how to help those who suffer from both. It appears that they feed each other and create a complex set of problems that are not easily solved despite the best efforts of parents, spouses, friends, or therapists. We need to commit resources to find answers; it is unlikely under the current administration.
None of this is helped by having a president so ill-equipped to empathize, so deficient in humanity. Every decision he and his administration make sends us in the wrong direction. In his offensive social media statement after the death of the Reiners, which struck the wrong note in every respect, he characterized someone who was murdered as having ‘passed away,’ which is just wrong. This may be a small point, especially relative to the larger issue, but using ‘passed away’ to describe what happened to Rob and Michelle Reiner is absurd. They didn’t pass away. People pass away from old age. I can accept the term in the context of illness, but when someone is violently killed and has their life abruptly cut short, they didn’t pass away. My mother passed away. She was in her 90’s, was in hospice care, and was ready. But what would one expect from our President? He is devoid of decency or insight.
I watched the movie The Apprentice. It was about Trump’s ascension in New York City’s real estate scene. It came out in 2024 and starred Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong; both were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances. I’m not sure what motivated me to watch it – probably boredom – but given my disdain for Trump, it was an odd choice. I started watching, thinking I would probably turn it off after a few minutes, but I was surprised to find it very compelling. The apprentice in the title refers to Trump himself, not his television show. Trump was an acolyte of Roy Cohn, and the film follows Trump being taken under Cohn’s wing. If you don’t know who Roy Cohn is, all you need to know is that he was the attorney who supported Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt for communists in the 1950s. Cohn subscribed to a philosophy of gathering power at all costs – he didn’t believe in right and wrong. He pursued his own or his clients’ interests relentlessly without regard for ethics or morality.
In the movie, Trump is young, still unformed – he’s stumbling, trying to make deals and impress his difficult father. He is attracted to Cohn’s power. Over time, he adopts Cohn’s approach, perhaps more ruthlessly than Cohn could even imagine. I think the movie offers insight, which may or may not be accurate, into how Trump became the monster he is now. The movie ends long before he becomes president, but you see hints of what the future will bring.
It is challenging to integrate the terrible things that are happening in our world with the love and beauty I see and feel. This holiday season, I am trying not to let the dark overwhelm the light. It felt especially important to light our menorah in the window each night of Hanukkah. I want to be a light. I can’t ignore the dark – I can’t completely turn off the news or stay off social media. To me, that feels irresponsible, but I understand that some may need to do that for their mental health.
Despite the challenges we face, I hope folks can feel the love of family and friends, see the beauty in a sunset, enjoy a good meal, smile when they see a child giggle, and hold hope for the new year—wishing everyone a brighter, more joyful 2026.
Stories I Tell Myself 