Tom Pain

On this day 114 years ago, a spark ignited a bin of fabric scraps at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. The fire spread with ferocious speed, killing 146 workers, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women. Many died leaping from the ninth floor windows, the only escape from the flames and the locked doors and the willful negligence of the factory’s owners.

When I wrote the lyrics to the song “Safe,” I was thinking about the way history repeats. How tragedies will come, and keep coming, no matter how protected we may feel. A fire will erupt in a factory. A plane will be flown into a skyscraper. A person we care about will be gone in an instant. But it is in how we live and love in the face of this terribly certain uncertainty that matters.

What I didn’t think about, what I didn’t think was possible, was that the historical circumstances that lead to the Triangle fire would repeat themselves as well. Who could imagine us returning to a turn of the nineteenth century America?

Yep. That’s my mug shot.

I don’t enjoy talking about it but I will today because: 1. it is one of the best, most badass photos I’ve ever had taken of me 2. the current battles over Constitutional law may not seem to impact you but they do.

The photo was taken when I was, let’s just say, a bit younger and I was being booked in NYC’s infamous “Tombs.” I had been arrested for marijuana possession and resisting arrest. If you know me at all, you just guffawed at those charges and you should. I had not been carrying/doing any drugs (cuz “Catholic Guilt and Just Say No”) and I had not resisted an officer of the law (cuz “130 pounds soaking wet and brother of an FBI agent”). I spent the next year of my life clearing my name in court and running up an enormous legal bill that I knew I could never pay. But, I was guaranteed the opportunity to respond to the charges, face my accusers, and make my case. What the police officers involved said was not taken as gospel; they had to prove their case and back up their lies…I mean, their version of the story. I was found “not guilty” in a trial and was able to sue the city for false arrest and get my legal bills paid. The reason I do not have a record today and my life was not irreparably damaged is because of the Due Process clause.

To my Republican Family and Their Friends,

I’m not going to talk politics. At least, not in the way you might expect or be nervous about at this volatile time. There’s plenty I’d love to discuss with you, but that’s for another time. I need you to give me this moment because you have the power to save people right now. I hope you'll listen.

I want to talk to you about a friend and former co-worker whom I’ll call John because it is not my place to use his identity publicly. When I first met John, his name was Jane and he was brilliantly funny but so shy and seemingly unhappy that he couldn’t leave his cubicle to have a meeting face to face, but instead would send text messages to you a few feet away. At some point, Jane left the office for a short time and when he came back, we were informed by our managers that he would like to be referred to as John.

What did or did not change physically at that point is none of my business. All that changed for us as a community is we switched to calling him by a new name and used different pronouns. It was as easy as if a woman had gone away and gotten married and her last name changed and we started saying Mrs. instead of Miss. We all made a few mistakes. John would shrug and we’d learn and be better next time. You know what else changed? John seemed happy, in a very John understated way, of course. John seemed to move with a bit more ease through life (though still remained incredibly shy) and made small talk about themselves in ways that we all take for granted around an office but he had never, ever done before with me (what they did over the weekend, their latest film crush, etc). That’s all John wanted; to live a life of dignity as the person they knew they were…

Snapshots from an America gone wrong. (Thank you to my teacher, FBI, and civil servant friends keeping me aware and staying in there fighting the fight.)

- In an embarrassing act of Godfather cos-play, we have sided with Putin, autocrats, and kleptocracies, making the world an incredibly more dangerous place and showing that our promises mean nothing.

- We are asking teachers to inform on each other. Did someone mention Black History Month (or snub you in the teacher's lounge)? Text the Department of Education cops!

- Thanks to the indiscriminate dismantling of USAID, 400,000 boxes of lifesaving food packets for malnourished children are sitting in a warehouse, the order canceled. Not only is this American business (and their farm suppliers) going to suffer millions of dollars in lost revenue, but children will die as the packets sit here, forever out of reach of those in need.

As a British friend of mine so succinctly put it, "You realize you are the bad guys now?" Indeed.

2/5/25

A good case can be made for more efficiency in how the government provides aid, even if it is only a minuscule percentage of the national budget. (If DOGE was serious, they would be looking instead at big defense contracts for real savings, though we know who benefits from those inefficiencies.) But the implementation of the current freeze and possible end of USAID is cruel and shows that the administration and M**k only look at headlines and spreadsheets, not human lives and long term soft power. The handy velcro tabs on their Christianity are showing.

I was calm. I tried to speak rationally and kept my political posts to a minimum for years because I have family on both sides of the aisle and thought we were going to be able to find common ground. Truth and decency would win in the end. Above all else, I was taught that vigorous, principled debate was the core of our democracy. So I tried. But I'm done. This is not the country I was raised to believe in. This is not the United States my father served in the Navy for decades to protect. This is not the imperfect but striving to be more perfect Union I proudly engaged with by voting and knocking on doors and calling my representatives and trying to follow the news with care. This is not that nation of checks and balances, where no one is above the law.

In January of 2025, I started writing social media posts about the literal pain I was feeling. I had this deep, ongoing anxiety about the direction of our country after the inauguration of Donald Trump to a second Presidential term.

I had never been one to speak up loudly. I am a Navy Brat who was raised Catholic by Midwestern parents who were politically active but more likely to be found in a corner reading a book or a newspaper than marching in a protest. I am a child of the 1980’s DC suburbs, raised on civil debates between the political parties ending in everyone going for a beer (or a root beer in my case). But something felt radically different now. I needed to put my thoughts into words and I found that my posts gradually seemed to have a specific audience. These were letters to my family & friends, colleagues and peers, who were Trump voters but whom I knew to be decent people. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t see the authoritarian slide that I saw. They didn’t see the moral rot and disregard for basic shared humanity that I kept seeing. Instead of shouting at each other or cutting off contact, maybe if I spoke in my hardwired Michigan calm and brought the situations down to very personal stories, maybe they might see beyond identity, beyond headlines, beyond the “othering,” and reach the core values we share.