When Minds Meet on Substack

A political-moral-human thread of deep insight and glorious prose that deserves to be shared

Photo by Iwona Pytlowska on Unsplash

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What we’re called to now is something far more difficult than outrage—it is a collective reckoning. One that begins with remembering that no one’s humanity should ever hinge on usefulness.

— Jay Siegmann

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This special free post is for subscribers to all sections of MFA Lore. It is a testament to the power each of us holds every time we write with deep consideration and honesty, from an open heart and mind, to connect and inform and move our readers. Thank you, Jay, for affecting me in all these ways. I’m grateful for your words, and for your trust in allowing me to share them here.

Aimee

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Oh, for the days when writers conversed in long, thoughtful letters that took hours to compose, trailing archival treasures for future literary historians to peruse with wonder. Today’s literary correspondence has devolved into bits and bytes designed for no more longevity than digital smoke. Not only is there no virtual attic where they’ll be found, but the attention that frames most of our missives has all the focus of a strobe light.

And yet, in recent days and weeks on Substack, I’ve felt a tug back to that earlier era of writerly communication. There are some seriously thoughtful people here paying close attention to these dark days and responding to what matters most with eloquence and grace. I’ve found extraordinary souls in the notes that pass through the slipstream of online shouts and whispers. Although I’ve never met them in person, I’m honored to count

Amy Brown

,

Laura Davis

,

Lily Pond

,

Ramona Grigg

,

Lisa Maguire

,

Lisa Rogak

, and so many others among my new virtual friends.

But one set of recent communiques stood out among the rest. I’d already had several exchanges with

Wild Lion*esses Pride from Jay

that filled me with awe. Jay’s verbal elegance and wisdom on issues related to trauma, identity, and legacy are quite simply breath-taking. Last week, in the midst of our collective paroxysm over the passage of Trump’s Murder Bill coopting America’s Independence Day, Jay and I started trading notes that contained political and historical insights too important not to be shared. Notes that culminated in Jay’s arresting and essential observations from Germany on America’s always dubious but now obliterated claims of moral authority.

So we’re going to try to recreate our thread in a way that you can follow. I do believe it’s worth your time to join us. We can all stand to think a little more deeply not only about what’s going on “out there” in Trumpian Dystopia but also “in here” where our hearts must guide our own choices going forward.

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What’s happening in the U.S.—this collapse of solidarity, this war on the “unproductive”—isn’t just fascism dressed up as law. It’s the inevitable consequence of a culture that has replaced care with competition, and human dignity with performance metrics.

— Jay Siegmann

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A Thread For Truth

Our back-and-forth began when I shared one particularly potent argument for imagination and courage as the product of personal longing— this post by Liberatory Change innovator

Lucinda Garthwaite

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A Reliable Pocket of Hope

Jay responded:

Lucinda, your reflection opened a space that feels already well-walked in my life. For the past five years, I’ve been meeting myself again and again. Longing was never a distraction for me. It was the compass. Every time I turned toward it, something real began to unfold. And healing, for me, only ever became possible once I honored that deep desire beneath the surface—the one that spoke of integrity, of aliveness, of belonging on my own terms.

So when I read your words, I didn’t feel inspired in the usual sense. I felt affirmed. Seen from a parallel path. What I’ve been practicing all this time—steadiness, grace, curiosity, and deep accountability—has always grown from the same soil.

I’ve often felt outside the current. Yet what you describe here gently reminded me I’m right where I need to be. And that others are walking, too.

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This response so bedazzled me that I shared it with this note:

Jay is one of the most profound, truthful, and gorgeous wordsmiths I know. Each day I’m startled by the truly astonishing and valuable conversations we are having here.

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Jay wrote back:

To feel this kind of recognition—clear, generous, and rooted in shared language—moved something deep in me. Gratitude doesn’t quite cover it. These threads we’re weaving here—your reflection, Lucinda’s wisdom, and the lived truth I carry—they don’t just connect. They affirm. I’ve walked much of this terrain alone, and now the echo feels shared. I carry this moment with care.

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Meanwhile, in a different but related thread, Jay was responding to this note by

Gloria Horton-Young

about the savage cruelty about to be federalized by Trump’s Murder Bill:

Jay wrote:

I no longer wonder. I see it clearly.

They are not planning to stop with Medicaid. This is not just about “budget cuts” or “immigration enforcement.” This is a systemic machinery of removal. A fast-accelerating purge.

They are coming for anyone considered “unworthy,” “unproductive,” “undesirable.” First BiPOC. Then trans people. Then queers, dissidents, intellectuals, naturalized immigrants, those with disabilities, those who refuse to kneel.

They are preparing for mass deportation, detention, and erasure. What ICE is about to become—if this passes—is not law enforcement. It is a paramilitary force with more power than the FBI. Their purpose: to jail and disappear bodies.

Gloria Horton-Young puts it plainly:

The Uniform is Iron. The Intent is Ash.

They’re building a machine. Right now. As you read this.

A force not tasked with solving crimes, but hunting bodies.

This isn’t deportation. This is ethnic cleansing—packaged as policy.

20 million people are in their crosshairs.

Entire families repackaged as budget lines.

And yes—they’re selling hats. Turning terror into a brand.

This is this day, this hour, this country.

And I believe the number might grow. I believe this system is prepared to rid the country of half its people—anyone who dares to live differently, love differently, speak against empire, refuse to bow.

If you ever wondered when to take this seriously—this is that moment. If you belong to a target group, this is the time to act, not to postpone.

ICE has become Trump’s SS.

From where I stand, this is not theory. This is how it starts. And this is how we name it—before the knock.

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And that’s when our exchange kicked up a gear, like a true conversation.

Aimee:

Yes. ICE is Trump’s SS. And their assignment is the ethnic cleansing of America in his image. Everyone who is not a white “Christian” nationalist male thug will be in danger sooner or later unless we all rise TOGETHER NOW TO STOP THIS ASSAULT ON AMERICAN LIFE, VALUES AND FREEDOM.

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Jay:

Aimee, well—I surely do hope more and more of his base is beginning to wake up. You might disagree with them on many things—maybe always have—yet isn’t that the foundation of democracy? That community still functions, somehow, for the greater good of all? I believe this regime, and everyone who actively supported it, can only be dismantled if at least part of his former base turns against him. All those people who have been—or will soon be—thrown under the bus. Who will lose the last bit of livelihood or support they once depended on. And from what I’ve heard, that’s a large portion of “We the People.” And maybe they along with others start to ask if it has to be like this and what actually caused it. Maybe. I’ll sure as hell let my American heart in this German body fight for and with you in this.

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Aimee:

100% The Dems that blame the gullible and the brainwashed are wasting their breath and our time. Those duped people need to be persuaded, not persecuted. We will not win without at least some of them waking up to the reality of their self-execution.

Also we have got to acknowledge OUR OWN COMPLICITY in lording over “poor white trash” and “red necks” and denying them the dignity — over decades— that we supposedly set such stock in. We set the table for Trump with our arrogance.

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Jay:

Aimee, I read your words slowly this morning, letting them settle not just in my thoughts, but in the body where fear often lives first. What you name here—the machinery, the complicity, the need for collective awakening—mirrors what has begun to unravel inside me too.

From where I stand, as someone raised in Germany and shaped by a country still haunted by its own silence, I see echoes that many in the U.S. are only beginning to feel. I know what it means when systems begin to sort people by utility. When belonging becomes a privilege. When the gap between being right and receiving protection becomes a chasm.

The regime you describe is not simply rising—it is revealing what was always embedded in the architecture. And yes, I think you have a point there: this cannot be stopped by division, superiority, or righteous shame. It will take a dismantling that includes those once deceived by the light. Those who now feel it burning them.

What I’ve come to understand is this: cruelty doesn’t need consensus to spread. It needs exhaustion. Disbelief. And disconnection. What we’re called to now is something far more difficult than outrage—it is a collective reckoning. One that begins with remembering that no one’s humanity should ever hinge on usefulness.

Thank you for speaking the truth plainly. I stand with you—watching closely, listening deeply, and no longer wondering.

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Aimee:

Oh Jay Your voice is so beautiful. I’m slayed by your prose and your wisdom. I can only imagine how bizarre it must be to witness this America from an evolved Germany. Like watching your teenager make your worst adolescent mistakes— the suicidal ones— and not being able to warn, reason, or stop them.

💙🙏🏼💙

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Jay:

Aimee, your words reached me deeply. Reading your beautiful in reference to my voice—you, whose writing I so admire, who hold such sharp, sophisticated clarity in language—felt like being seen in a way I rarely allow myself to hope for. Thank you for that. Truly.

And yes—at times it does feel like watching a beloved adolescent spiral, reckless and raw, convinced of their invincibility, unable to hear the warnings of those who’ve lived the ruin before. Yet I wouldn’t call Germany “evolved”—not fully. That would be too easy, too clean.

What I witness, both out there and in here, is something more entangled.

I reflected today not only on what’s unfolding in the U.S., but on my own inner landscape—how many of my traumas have roots in systems far larger than family. Systems that taught me to perform, to self-abandon, to prove I was worthy of care by being useful.

Yesterday I ended my occupational rehab program early. Not because I gave up, but because I saw clearly: it wasn’t designed to heal me. It was built to return me to function. To productivity. To the same extractive wheel that once broke me.

The deeper I go in my healing, the more I see:

Meritocracy isn’t just a lie—it’s a wound.

And this wound runs deep across nations.

What’s happening in the U.S.—this collapse of solidarity, this war on the “unproductive”—isn’t just fascism dressed up as law. It’s the inevitable consequence of a culture that has replaced care with competition, and human dignity with performance metrics.

And yet… reckoning is possible.

I feel it. In the tremble. In the refusal. In our words shared here.

Thank you for holding space where it’s not performative to feel. Thank you for naming complicity, and still choosing connection.

In this strange, sorrowing time, I find myself less afraid of collapse than of silence. So I will keep speaking. From the edge. As someone who has lived the aftermath, and still believes in repair.

💙 Jay

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Aimee:

Oh my, Jay. There is SO much here both to showcase and to unpack. I’m stunned by all the complex truths you bring up.

One is the tension between the best/worst aspects of collective cultures and the best/worst characteristics of individualistic cultures. Our myth of America features the best of both worlds — individual dignity and freedom + national unity, care, and protection. But as the culture has unraveled, we’ve devolved into the worst of both: Individualistic resentment and greed + group enmity and moral blindness. This imbalance is now vast and unchecked as Trumpco exploits it for personal gain. If we don’t rebalance now, we are doomed, and that is going to require so much more than protests and flamethrowers. Even if DT vanished today, we’d still be left with this moral inversion across the land.

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Jay:

This conversation has brought into form something I’ve long been sensing, something that had no language before. You offered it the dignity of visibility.

You see, when you wrote about the inversion—the unraveling of dignity, solidarity, and the moral grounding the U.S. once claimed—I felt something resonate all the way through. Not just in thought, in body. In the quiet of my own recent reflections, I’ve arrived at a place where I no longer believe the ideals America was founded on were ever meant for everyone.

And what startled me most was realizing just how deeply my own country—Germany—had once believed they were. How much of that belief was imported. How much of that faith in America had been projected onto its myth, not its reality.

The U.S. exported more than policy and culture. It exported a narrative. A grand story dressed in universal words:

"Freedom."

"Democracy."

"The American Dream."

"Leader of the Free World."

For decades, these phrases arrived in postwar Germany wrapped in moral authority. After all, the U.S. helped rebuild. It brought the Marshall Plan. It stood firm against Soviet expansion. Its pop culture dazzled us with color, sound, and promise.

It was the future—so we were told.

And for a long time, I too accepted that future. Even admired parts of it, believed in the version of it I wanted to see. I believed America stood for possibility. And yet now, through witnessing, listening, and seeing up close, I’ve come to understand something very different.

The myth does not match the mechanism. What was exported was style, not structure.

The words of freedom—without the conditions to sustain it.

The image of progress—without the care or community to hold it.

The promise of equality—without the willingness to dismantle hierarchy.

And I’ve come to realize: the very soil of the U.S. resists the kind of communal belonging it claims to uphold.

Competition is the norm, even within a team. Dominance is celebrated. Identity is isolated, categorized, commodified. Immigrants arrive believing they’re stepping into liberty—yet they hold onto their cultures of care despite the system, not because of it.

This didn’t happen overnight. It’s systemic. Strategic. And devastatingly effective.

In my own healing, I’ve met myself again and again through these revelations. I’ve had to face how deeply conditioned we all are—not just as people, but as nations.

Germany, too, was shaped—by force, by shame, by design—to never become "too much" again. And yet, even within that restraint, we imported a narrative that taught us to admire the U.S. while slowly losing sight of our own values.

Now, from where I stand, I see the consequences of that borrowed myth. In Germany’s quiet compliance. In America’s loud unraveling. And in the many who still believe the story, even as the foundation crumbles beneath them.

So yes—please share. If our exchange can help even one person begin to reflect, begin to question, begin to reimagine—then it’s already done what it came here to do.

With care and fierce hope,

Jay

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Reminder: Our next Loreate Salon is Saturday, July 19 at 10amPT!

All paid subscribers are welcome. As we get to know each other, these gatherings will be less meet-and-greet and more discussion of the thorny issues bedeviling our collective writing life.

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