The world needs more daymakers

 Nov 19, 2025

Fairfield Daily Republic 

The Other Side 

The world needs more daymakers 

By Kelvin Wade

The other day I was parked outside a CVS waiting for Cathi to come out. She came out and immediately went to the back of my truck, fumbling around in the backseat.

She told me to wait just a minute and was off racing down the sidewalk. She’d seen a homeless woman and came and got a blanket and tent that we keep just for these purposes and gave them to her. The homeless woman was so overcome that she hugged her.

That's just the kind of heart Cathi has.

Last week, I got a phone call in the evening from an elderly friend who was in tears. Her roommate had left town for a couple nights and she had no food. She asked if I would go shopping for her. Slipping into my shoes I headed over and took her shopping list, went to the store and bought everything and even stopped by a restaurant to get her something to eat for dinner that evening. She hugged me and apologized for calling, but that was ridiculous. That’s what you do for people in need.

This basic kindness was modeled for me by my parents. I’ve told the story of the time I came home from Armijo High one day and told my mom that a classmate of mine had nothing to eat for lunch. She was so disturbed by that that she gave me extra lunch money for him or had me pack extra in my lunch for him to eat.

For years my brothers and I thought of our dad as a tightwad. He could be rather generous as long as you didn’t actually ask him for something. It both saddened me and moved me that at his funeral in 2003, people told me and my brothers that our dad would pay for kids’ school supplies and pay for them to go to camp.

It saddened me that I didn’t know this while he was alive. But the thing I loved most was that they did these things with no fanfare, seeking no recompense. It was just who they were.

This spirit of giving was also modeled to me by complete strangers. Years ago, one of my first jobs was picking strawberries at a farm in Vacaville. It was a blazing hot day and there we were picking strawberries, a bunch of probably undocumented Hispanic people and a fat black American kid.

It was backbreaking work under an oppressive sun. At lunch time, we all sat together and even though I spoke no Spanish and they spoke no English, they accepted me. They shared their food with me. I’ve never forgotten it. (I only lasted on that job a day so I have mad respect for what these hard workers do for us.)

Too often these days we look at who is deserving of help. For a lot of our fellow Americans there’s an empathy gap. Empathy is like a muscle and if it’s not used, it will atrophy.

A lot of people ascribe their giving nature to their religion and I can respect that. Some people feel the need to give back after achieving a certain amount of success. Some just have a philosophy of helping their fellow man. And me, well, if you’re a long time reader, you know my life’s philosophy comes from a Peanuts comic strip where Linus brings his sister Lucy a bowl of ice cream just to make her stay on the planet more pleasant.

I don’t know why that strip so profoundly moved me. Perhaps it was because Lucy was a mean sister yet her brother still wanted to do something nice for her. We all find ourselves alive together at this time and place in history, with hopes, fears, dreams and desires. Why not make someone’s stay a little nicer, a little happier?

I’m not going to tell you all of the little things I do for people because that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about keeping score or getting a pat on the back. I’m encouraging you to do the same. Be a daymaker.

For me, I’d radically changed my life in the last two and a half years through a pretty massive weight loss. It’s such a contrast for me thinking back to staying up late in the ICU scribbling my final thoughts in a notebook convinced I wouldn’t survive the night to now where I wake up every morning and look in the mirror and think, “I get to be here!”

So I get to do nice things for people and it makes me feel good. Sometimes I feel like a thief, like I’m stealing joy through making someone else’s day.

I’m thinking about this because Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching and we’re living at a time of maximum division. People are at each other's throats. People are struggling to make ends meet and there’s so much uncertainty in our country and in the world. There’s compassion fatigue and an empathy deficit and it seems like we’re all sitting on a powder keg ready to blow.

I don’t have all of the political, sociological and economic answers for people. But what I can do is do a small gesture for someone to improve their stay on the planet. Sometimes all they need is an ear to listen to them, a shoulder to lay their head on or a hug. Little things mean a lot, especially when you’re not keeping track of their immigration status, race, gender, religious or political views and just seeing the human being in front of you.

Give thanks by giving of yourself. I don’t even need the turkey and stuffing. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Peace.

Kelvin Wade, a writer and former Fairfield resident, lives in Sacramento. Reach him at kelvinjwade@outlook.com.

The immigrant is the sum of all MAGA fears

 December 3, 2025

Fairfield Daily Republic 

The Other Side 

The immigrant is the sum of all MAGA fears

By Kelvin Wade

“Caste” author Isabel Wilkinson was at a party years ago when a white conservative political consultant told her that the 2016 election was about 2040.

Census data has indicated that around 2040 the United States will become a majority minority country. And if you view MAGA in this context, everything we’re seeing makes sense.

MAGA is the confluence of a New York conman, white Christian Nationalists and a majority of white Americans upset at a changing country they no longer recognize. It’s been a backlash to the first black president, the marriage equality decision, trans rights and the feeling that nonwhite immigrants were devouring an even larger piece of an undeserved pie.

Millions of Americans felt they were losing their country, their culture and identity, and in came a New York grifter who exploited this division, surrounded himself with white Christian Nationalists and here we are.

Why else is immigration MAGA’s main animating feature? Why did ‘build the wall’ and the Muslim ban resonate so well?

Why did he call African and Central American countries “s***hole countries” and opine that we needed more people coming here from Norway? Why has President Donald Trump said immigrants are “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of the country” if this isn’t the corrosive beating heart of MAGA?

Since 2016, more white Americans die every year than are born. More black and Hispanic Americans are born every year than die. Also, Asian and Hispanic immigration is helping drive our population growth. This is why there are “MAGA accounts” in Trump’s big ugly bill.

Every eligible child born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028 will receive a one time $1,000 deposit from the government in an investment account to spur native born American birth rates.

This desire to combat the browning of America is why Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on Jan. 20, basically overturning the 14th Amendment saying children born here from undocumented mothers were not citizens. The Constitution disagrees.

Trump’s mass deportation was supposed to focus on getting bad people out, yet ICE’s own recently released numbers show that nearly 75% of detainees have no criminal record and only 5% have violent criminal convictions.

They’re not solely after violent offenders. but all undocumented brown people. 

He’s terminating temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans, 330,000 Haitians, as well as other places black and brown people come from.

This is why Trump is exploiting the murder and attempted murder of National Guard members in Washington D.C. last week by an Afghan national who the Trump administration granted asylum to. Trump proclaimed he’s permanently pausing immigration from “Third World countries.”

But he goes a step further posting “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security recently tweeted, “Remigration now.” The term remigration is used by far right European groups who not only want to deport undocumented immigrants but legal immigrants, naturalized citizens and people born of foreign parents who are deemed insufficiently assimilated.

Trump has said he plans to strip citizenship away from naturalized citizens who “undermine domestic tranquility” and those determined to be “non-compatible with Western civilization.” Wait until he finds out federal law and the Supreme Court says he doesn’t have such power.

Last week, Trump announced he would be pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) who was convicted of drug trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S., enough doses to get half the population of the planet high. JOH was sentenced to 45 years in prison by an American court. Why would Trump, who has been extra-judicially murdering people off the coast of Venezuela supposedly to save us from drugs, be pardoning a drug trafficker? When JOH was president of Honduras he was very helpful in stifling immigration to the U.S. To this administration the one thing worse than drugs coming into the U.S. are minorities.

It’s no accident that part of achieving the aims of making America white again is erasing nonwhite history, resurrecting Confederate monuments that have been torn down, extinguishing diversity, equity and inclusion, banning books by and about minority groups, pushing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, restricting reproductive rights and promoting traditional families and the manosphere.

The authoritarian playbook isn’t unique. The Nazis and other regimes have used it. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary are using it. And it’s happening here right now in America.

Trump didn’t cook up this plan. Trump is motivated by greed and grievance, but his bigotry and xenophobia appears to have dovetailed nicely with plans dreamt up by the Heritage Foundation and people like political theorist Curtis Yarvin, Project 2025 author Russ Vought, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Thiel’s disciple JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Christian Nationalist Paula White and of course, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

The goal is to replace democracy with a wealthy ruling technocratic elite class keeping minorities in their place. That elite class pits us against each other so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets and eroding our rights.

Judging by Trump’s 36% approval rating in the latest Gallup Poll, millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that they’ve been suckered by a conman. Instead of rubbing their faces in the fact that we were right about Project 2025, extend a hand. Join with us to help fight it.

2016 and everything since then has been about 2040. Isn't it obvious by now? Peace.

Kelvin Wade’s column has appeared in the Fairfield Daily Republic for more than three decades. Reach him at kelvinjwade@outlook.com.