From Beth Macy: Mobilizing for truth, turnips, and my forth coming 'manifesto'
Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her June 6, 2025 post. Subscribe to her Substack here.
While the drugged-out man babies turned on each other after stealing our data, making life hell for trans kids, and trashing the government programs most aligned with what Jesus would do, I had lunch this week with a mild-mannered civil servant who’d recently ended a 40-year career because he was tired of being apolitical and not choosing sides.
Dan O’Donnell, 65, was Roanoke County’s longtime administrator, directing a budget of $201 million and overseeing 1,040 employees in a largely affluent Republican district—the same one I wrote about in a recent newsletter, where right-wing activists managed to take over the school board so they could outlaw the posting of rainbows in classrooms, ban books, and increase teacher turnover, all under the guise of so-called Christianity. Roanoke County was also home to some of the main characters in (and the cover photo of) Dopesick.
O’Donnell pondered retiring early when he realized the return of Trump 2.0 hinged on the goal of replacing a once-apolitical federal bureaucracy with woefully biased and underfunded local and state versions. His first clue? Five years ago, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, he got his board of supervisors to informally approve moving a Confederate statute near the county courthouse—only to be told from one of his supervisors at the last minute: “The party in Richmond said we can’t.” The statue remains.
The son of a professor dad and a school-teacher/librarian mom, O’Donnell said the January 6 riots pushed him over the edge toward early retirement. He’d already been recommending his employees read the works of Berlin CBS correspondent William L. Shirer, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germanyand The Berlin Diaries, as well as Eric H. Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, about the fall of the Bronze Age, “because that’s what’s coming.”
“I just realized, we’ve got to speak out, frankly,” O’Donnell said. “If you’re not taking sides, you’re taking sides. All my career, I’ve been a professional local government manager and a moderate, but I’m watching this, and it’s just nuts.”
So, for the first time in his adult life, O’Donnell is participating in rallies, starting with the President’s Day one organized by Roanoke Indivisible as well as some of the weekly Monday events outside No Show Congressman Ben Cline’s office, organized by Roanoke Social Circle and with help (collecting food and diapers for low-wage folks) from DoGood Virginia. With free school lunches and SNAP food stamps and millions of folks who rely on Medicaid for health care now on the chopping block, he could remain silent no longer.
Trump and Musk “are moving so fast, doing so many irrational, dangerous things, you don’t even know how to complain,” he said.
But O’Donnell and other folks from Indivisible will be showing up next Saturday June 14 at 10 a.m. in Roanoke’s McCadden Park and will participate in the nearby Juneteenth Family Reunion walk at noon. The NO KINGS Mass Mobilization, held in communities across the nation, will take place the same day as Trump’s birthday celebration in Washington, a military parade estimated to cost taxpayers $25 million to $40 million dollars.
I encourage you to take part wherever you live because, as O’Donnell puts it, “I’m not an activist. But I’m just watching these basic human rights disappearing, and I keep asking myself, ‘How can this keep going on?’ I’m all for a good economy, but for the price of eggs to be the issue when people are being disappeared by ICE agents in masks? Come on!”
As he said this, a group of citizens were surrounded masked ICE officers dressed as if they were in a tactical war operation who were trying to raid local restaurants in San Diego. Neighbors videoed the confrontation while chanting “Shame!” and “Nazi cowards!” They walked toward the agents until they got in an unmarked ICE van and drove away, an example of nonviolent protest at its finest.
“I hope it’s not too late,” O’Donnell said. “Some people think it is. And some friends tell me ‘I’m just too tired’ to participate.”
I hear them, but now is not the time to be tired. As John Bassett, the titular main character of my first book, Factory Man, once told me, “When you’ve bit off more than you can chew, you have to keep chewing.”
Now is the time to act—to register new voters, to knock on doors, to speak about what’s happening openly to friends and relatives, to give to those who are hurting most, to run better candidates, to keep making your five calls and showing up outside your No Show Congressman’s office. Last week, the protesters made a second appearance outside a low-income Roanoke school while Cline was inside reading to children—but, again: no one saw his face coming or going. “We think he was groveling on his floorboards,” one participant told me.
Roanoke resistance leaders held a hilarious town hall recently, with a cardboard cutout of Cline and a cartoon AI version of him spouting his tired party-line remarks—my favorite of which was “my office is always available” to constituents.
“Change isn’t comfortable,” the Democratic state legislature candidate Lily Franklin told the packed library meeting. She described her work knocking on doors along rural backroads, talking to people who’ve never met a political candidate before, including some who’ve never voted. She’s running for the 41st House District seat in hopes of turning her Virginia district blue. (She lost in ’23 by just 183 votes.) “What we have to do is bring more people into the fold.” Amen, sister, and keep chewing.
WHAT I’M READING, NOSHING ON, AND OTHERWISE LOVING
Turnips. That’s right, turnips. For the first time, my husband and I bought a half-share in LEAP, a local agricultural partnership that helps local farmers and underserved communities and took a hit when Trump slashed USDA programs earlier this year. What I love about it most is not only trying things I’d never pick up in the grocery store but also the weekly exchange of it: chatting up the LEAP folks, meeting the farmers, learning that cut-up turnips doused in olive oil and kosher salt and baked to a perfect crisp in a 400-degree oven are pure delight.
My husband just returned with our latest batch. When I excitedly asked, “Are those garlic scapes?” he said, “I have no idea!” forgetting the time I made a life-changing batch of garlic-scape pesto.
Also, joining a CSA reminds me of the great Kurt Vonnegut, who liked to buy one envelope at a time, even though his wife objected, telling him, “ ‘You’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, I don’t know. … I have had one helluva good time, and let me tell you we are here on earth to fart around and don’t anybody ever tell you any different.”
The cartoons of the quirky, kind, Appalachian-style resistance of my pal, the illustrated novelist Robert Gipe, who floats through the world with the perfect combination of edge and lightness. Follow his cartoons on Facebook and, if you like what you see, then read my Oxford American profile of him, and then you should definitely buy all his books. We’ve been swapping storytelling how-to’s for years, Gipe served as a consultant on the Hulu Dopesick show that was based on my book, and, apparently, I can no longer write the ending of a book without him reading it and telling me to rewrite it. . . and rewrite it. . . until I’m actually saying what I feel in that bodily place where the soul meets the bone. I’m incredibly grateful to have such an astute and hilarious and big-hearted friend in my corner.
The editors of Kirkus Reviews gave my forthcoming Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, out October 7, one of their rarified stars, calling it a continuation of my “noble work as a truth teller.” And the Pulitzer-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, whose latest book, Memorial Days, was recently announced one of the best books of the year, very kindly had this to say about it:
Want to know why America is fractured? Read Paper Girl, an indispensable account of how things got so ugly here. Beth Macy grew up poor, with an alcoholic dad, in Urbana, Ohio, yet through education she made the jump to the middle class. Returning to her homeplace, she probes the factors that make a move like hers almost unimaginable for the kids who sit in the same classrooms as she did. Heartfelt, intimate and enraging, it is more than a memoir; it’s a manifesto.
The fine folks at Penguin Press will be announcing some fall book tour dates before too long—with important stops in my hometown state of Ohio and my adopted home state of Virginia, and hopefully I’m coming to a city near you!—but in the meantime if you’d consider pre-ordering it, this paper girl will be in your debt.