{"id":245,"date":"2025-06-13T15:55:59","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T15:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/?p=245"},"modified":"2025-06-13T15:56:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T15:56:27","slug":"245","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/?p=245","title":{"rendered":"From Beth Macy: Mobilizing for truth, turnips, and my forth coming ‘manifesto’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ theme_builder_area=”post_content” _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” theme_builder_area=”post_content”][et_pb_column _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” type=”4_4″ theme_builder_area=”post_content”][et_pb_blurb title=”From Beth Macy: Mobilizing for truth, turnips, and my forth coming ‘manifesto'” image=”https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Paper-Girl-cover.jpg.webp” _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” theme_builder_area=”post_content” title_text=”Paper-Girl-cover.jpg” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]

Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her June 6, 2025 post. Subscribe to her Substack here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d recently ended a 40-year career because he was tired of being apolitical and not choosing sides.<\/p>\n

Dan O\u2019Donnell, 65, was Roanoke County\u2019s longtime administrator, directing a budget of $201 million and overseeing 1,040 employees in a largely affluent Republican district\u2014the same one I wrote about <\/span>in a recent newsletter<\/a>, 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) <\/span>Dopesick<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Donnell 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\u2014only to be told from one of his supervisors at the last minute: \u201cThe party in Richmond said we can\u2019t.\u201d The statue remains.<\/p>\n

The son of a professor dad and a school-teacher\/librarian mom, O\u2019Donnell said the January 6 riots pushed him over the edge toward early retirement. He\u2019d already been recommending his employees read the works of Berlin CBS correspondent William L. Shirer, including <\/span>The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany<\/em>and <\/span>The Berlin Diaries,<\/em> as well as Eric H. Cline\u2019s <\/span>After<\/em> <\/span>1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed<\/em>, about the fall of the Bronze Age, \u201cbecause that\u2019s what\u2019s coming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI just realized, we\u2019ve got to speak out, frankly,\u201d O\u2019Donnell said. \u201cIf you\u2019re not taking sides, you\u2019re taking sides. All my career, I\u2019ve been a professional local government manager and a moderate, but I\u2019m watching this, and it\u2019s just nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, for the first time in his adult life, O\u2019Donnell is participating in rallies, starting with the President\u2019s Day one organized by <\/span>Roanoke Indivisible<\/a> as well as some of the weekly Monday events outside No Show Congressman Ben Cline\u2019s office, organized by <\/span>Roanoke Social Circle<\/a> and with help (collecting food and diapers for low-wage folks) from <\/span>DoGood Virginia<\/a>. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump and Musk \u201care moving so fast, doing so many irrational, dangerous things, you don\u2019t even know how to complain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But O\u2019Donnell and other folks from Indivisible will be showing up next Saturday June 14 at 10 a.m. in Roanoke\u2019s 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\u2019s birthday celebration in Washington, a military parade estimated to cost <\/span>taxpayers $25 million to $40 million dollars<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I encourage you to take part wherever you live because, as O\u2019Donnell puts it, \u201cI\u2019m not an activist. But I\u2019m just watching these basic human rights disappearing, and I keep asking myself, \u2018How can this keep going on?\u2019 I\u2019m 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!\u201d<\/p>\n

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 <\/span>confrontation while chanting<\/a> \u201cShame!\u201d and \u201cNazi cowards!\u201d They walked toward the agents until they got in an unmarked ICE van and drove away, an example of nonviolent protest at its finest.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI hope it\u2019s not too late,\u201d O\u2019Donnell said. \u201cSome people think it is. And some friends tell me \u2018I\u2019m just too tired\u2019 to participate.\u201d<\/p>\n

I hear them, but now is not the time to be tired. As John Bassett, the titular main character of my first book, <\/span>Factory Man<\/em>, once told me, \u201cWhen you\u2019ve bit off more than you can chew, you have to keep chewing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now is the time to act\u2014to register new voters, to knock on doors, to speak about what\u2019s 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\u2019s office. Last week, the protesters made a second appearance outside a <\/span>low-income Roanoke school<\/a> while Cline was inside reading to children\u2014but, again: no one saw his face coming or going. \u201cWe think he was groveling on his floorboards,\u201d one participant told me.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014my favorite of which was \u201cmy office is always available\u201d to constituents.<\/p>\n

\u201cChange isn\u2019t comfortable,\u201d the Democratic state legislature candidate <\/span>Lily Franklin<\/a> told the packed library meeting. She described her work knocking on doors along rural backroads, talking to people who\u2019ve never met a political candidate before, including some who\u2019ve never voted. She\u2019s running for the 41<\/span>st<\/sup> House District seat in hopes of turning her Virginia district blue. (She lost in \u201923 by just 183 votes.) \u201cWhat we have to do is bring more people into the fold.\u201d Amen, sister, and keep chewing.<\/span><\/p>\n

WHAT I\u2019M READING, NOSHING ON, AND OTHERWISE LOVING<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turnips. That\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

My husband just returned with our latest batch. When I excitedly asked, \u201cAre those garlic scapes?\u201d he said, \u201cI have no idea!\u201d forgetting the time I made a life-changing batch of <\/span>garlic-scape pesto<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201c \u2018You\u2019re not a poor man. You know, why don\u2019t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?\u2019 And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I\u2019m 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\u2019t know. \u2026 I have had one helluva good time, and let me tell you we are here on earth to fart around and don\u2019t anybody ever tell you any different.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 <\/span>cartoons on Facebook<\/a> and, if you like what you see, then read <\/span>my Oxford American profile<\/a> of him, and then you should definitely <\/span>buy all his books<\/a>. We\u2019ve been swapping storytelling how-to\u2019s for years, Gipe served as a consultant on the <\/span>Hulu Dopesick show<\/a> 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\u2019m actually saying what I feel in that bodily place where the soul meets the bone. I\u2019m incredibly grateful to have such an astute and hilarious and big-hearted friend in my corner.<\/span><\/p>\n

The editors of Kirkus Reviews gave my forthcoming <\/span>Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America<\/a><\/em>, out October 7, <\/span>one of their rarified stars<\/a>, calling it a continuation of my \u201cnoble work as a truth teller.\u201d And the Pulitzer-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, whose latest book, <\/span>Memorial Days<\/em>, was recently announced <\/span>one of the best books of the year<\/a>, very kindly had this to say about it:<\/span><\/p>\n

Want to know why America is fractured? Read <\/em>Paper Girl<\/span>, 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

The fine folks at Penguin Press will be announcing some fall book tour dates before too long\u2014with important stops in my hometown state of Ohio and my adopted home state of Virginia, and hopefully I\u2019m coming to a city near you!\u2014but in the meantime if you\u2019d consider pre-ordering it, this paper girl will be in your debt.<\/p>\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dogoodvirginia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}