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(https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1xbj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F72906958-5076-4137-b4f7-119512147743_2120x1414.jpeg) () Crispy hash browns with bacon and onions in a cast iron skillet (Credit: Lauri Patterson/Getty Images) Cards on the table: I am writing, today, with a heart full of hate. Longtime readers here know that I’m not going to pretend I’m better than you. I mean, if I am better than you, so be it. I’m not above celebrating that fact. But if I’m not, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Therefore, I am perfectly willing to admit that I, a transparent specimen of fallen man, have hate in my heart for those who still insist, at this late date, on loving Donald Trump. () () () () (subscribe-widget) (220275553) (Type your email...) Subscribe Mind you, I don’t hate them as human beings. We are all God’s children, even if some of those children are more delusional and dimwitted than others. But I do have hate for them as reality-deniers, people who are unwilling to admit that Trump’s myriad incontrovertible failures have bitten even them in the ass. (Though their ranks are thinning, as Trump’s approval ratings are now right around those of asbestos, lead paint, and that annoying guy from the Ethos Life Insurance SiriusXM ads.) What few Trumpster readers I have left like to tell me that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Which I have long inverted, definitionally, as: I tell them the truth about Trump, they become deranged. But taking their criticism seriously (not literally), how deranged is it to want to deeply disparage the man who wakes up every day deciding not how to help the American people, who are genuinely hurting, but how to attack your media, your judicial system, your late-night comedians, your historic buildings, your history itself, your private sector, your public sector, your elections, the once-sound minds of your friends and family, your common sense, your sense of right and wrong, your immigrants, your religion (if your church is dumb enough to desecrate itself by subscribing to Pete-Hegseth-style Christian Nationalism), your pocketbook, your grocery bill, your gas bill, your morality, your reality, and just about anything else that you hold dear? Attacking the person who attacks all these things, and who has enjoyed way too much popular support while doing so, doesn’t seem like derangement, but due diligence. () () () () (subscribe-widget) (220275553) (Type your email...) Subscribe So I admit that this man I once documented (back in the nineties) as a silly trifle, (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/449574/a-chump-on-the-stump/?srsltid=AU7gw4U5_qr7rVJm0Usr9YC-Y4qFXipMmERk0apC9gFSTlm75-7zSriY) a low-comedy foil , I now regard as something of an existential danger, even as he coasts into presumed lame-duckhood. (Since the more power he loses, the more desperate/unhinged he seems to become.) Sure, he might be a civil rights pioneer as our (https://substack.com/@mattlabash/note/c-359983602) first gay president . But I admit that I hate him because he is more stupid, more corrupt, more greedy, more insane, and more orange than any leader we have ever had. Not that I’m necessarily biased against the orange population. Growing up, I was a big fan of the Oompa-Loompas. (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!J1-w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12c53e38-53d8-4892-9d6b-6c8b1c7775be_411x242.png) () Oompa-Loompas, the “good” orange people. And yet, with all the abominations Trump is responsible for just this week , which I’m not even going to link to — cause why give his evil handiwork the ink, ink and airtime being the only things he ever truly craves besides easy, dishonest money — something landed on me the other day that cut through all the noise, that re-balanced my accounts, that took the hash that is our current world, and made hash browns out of the same. It didn’t give me hope, necessarily. Just perspective, which is sometimes better than hope. As hope expects to give tribulation the slip, whereas perspective just makes what must be endured more bearable. It came by way of a letter from Father Rick Frechette. Who is no stranger to readers here. I have written about him in these pages numerous times. I won’t belabor his background. But for the uninitiated, I met Frechette 16 years ago in Haiti, profiling him while covering the aftermath of the quake that killed a quarter million or so of the people in his mission field, a place where he has seen the most extreme strains of violence, dysfunction, disease, and corruption known to man. (A profile that I (https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/love-among-the-ruins) reprinted here , if you skip the first thousand or so words of introductory jibber-jabber.) Haiti is a place where despite the darkness that constantly surrounds him, he does strange and wondrous things. Like starting a hospital in the middle of all this carnage (going back to school to become a doctor, instead of just resting on his missionary laurels). Or burying the unclaimed dead each Thursday — heaped like slaughterhouse animal entrails in the Port-au-Prince morgue — in homemade cardboard coffins at a place called Titanyen (which translates from Creole as “the fields of less than nothing”), which are planted in giant pits dug by his men. A place where Papa Doc Duvalier’s goons used to plug political prisoners in the head, tipping them into their mass graves. (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b9VV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79c94acd-95b3-4e6b-92d6-3e5bceae4211_800x532.jpeg) () Father Rick Frechette, blessing the dead at the Port-au-Prince morgue Photo credit: André Lucat If you think the Haitians who are here are having a hard time of it, with JD Vance falsely accusing them of eating cats, and Trump looking to send refugees back to the “shabby land of terror” as Graham Greene called it (for excellent ongoing coverage of these horrors, see (https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-cruelty-comes-to-springfield-haitians-ohio-ice-deportations-ankle-monitors-christian-church-tps) my main man Jim Swift over at The Bulwark ), they still have nothing on the Haitians back home. Where there is unrelenting terror, mounting body counts, no-joke hostage taking, complete anarchy and chaos, with nobody to appeal the chaos to. Because trying to do so would be like trying to convince the wind not to blow. () () () () (subscribe-widget) (220275553) (Type your email...) Subscribe So Frechette’s most recent letter landed like a smack across the face, waking me up from my own solipsism and self-pity, while bemoaning our own Nerf Papa Doc. And yet, his letter isn’t just a litany of horrors. But a call to be better. To wield your “grief-anger” properly. To not go numb, or to get too used to the darkness. To be constructive, and not just destructive. To let your love for justice and truth chase away the hate not just in others, but in your own heart. He titled his letter, “Cutting For Stone, And Warming Stone Hearts.” I’m going to reprint what Frechette wrote in its entirety, and let him take us out without me putting a cherry on top. It’s worth every second of the time it takes to read: Dear family and friends, We are in our sixth year under gang rule in Haiti, of violence that is unspeakable, including many massacres of innocent men and women, elderly people and children. We mourn many friends and colleagues who have known a bitter end. We have also been victims of attacks, have had to run as refugees, and have had to negotiate for kidnapped staff and friends. I am still astounded at the cruelty of the gangs in Kenscoff, and especially the cruelty that ten-year-old Lionel suffered when his mountain village was attacked a few months ago, and how he was shot and paralyzed, and left for dead. I have written elsewhere about his heroic mother, who ran to hide two smaller children during the attack, and then returned to try to carry Lionel, who was nearly her size, to find a hospital in Port-au-Prince, many miles away. (No small feat since up to 70% of hospitals have been closed because of insecurity.) She had to stop and rest often because of Lionel’s size, watch for bandits at every turn, hide Lionel and the two small children in the bushes at night as she foraged for wild beets or carrots in abandoned gardens. They slept under the cold rains. It took them three weeks of such an ordeal, to reach our St Luke Hospital. Lionel was anemic, malnourished, and had deep, infected sacral ulcers. You surely have your own experiences of tragedies as the years pass, and you also deal with very painful realities that don’t change except to get worse. It is not possible for any person to feel all these things, all the time, at full emotional throttle. Especially for us, with the depth and frequency of the tragedies that confront us. After a while, there is a numbness that sets in like armor, which is protective of psychological well-being. But it also generates cynicism, resignation, apathy, and a gradual acceptance of what is totally atrocious as normal life. Our hearts are at first terrorized and stunned, and then optimistically invest deep hope that someone will come to “right the dreadful and unbelievable wrong”, and then, as that never materializes, the danger is that the heart gets set in stone. Some 400 years before Jesus was born, and referring to gall bladder stones, Hippocrates wrote this in his famous oath for physicians: “I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to practitioners of this craft.” This was part of his pledge to “above all, do no harm.” Physicians did not have the competence to cut for stone. In Haiti, and elsewhere on the world scene, we often have to cut for bullets. This was a big issue in Lionel’s case. We invoked international consultation. We needed to get him, sooner or later, to sit in a wheelchair that he could roll with his own arms. His future possibilities depended on this. Yet we could not take the chance that removing the bullet (or ignoring it) might cause more internal harm. A wider question is, who are those skilled today in the craft of cutting for stone in hearts, to free hearts from the coldness of armor? There is the added heart-danger of vengeful anger, of outrage and hatred. These swell to radicalized levels against those who are afflicting such violence on the population. This anger is destructive to the heart, to both its physical and spiritual dimensions. It adds to the heaviness of the stone-hearted, becoming toxic and venomous. There are resounding warnings throughout the Judeo-Christian Scriptures about the grave dangers of this kind of anger. Then what is the right kind of anger? Both God and Jesus get angry very often in the Bible. It is worth understanding and imitating their anger. The anger of Jesus follows the pattern of encountering innocent suffering, sharing that suffering as grief, and then love takes the form of “grief-anger” to vindicate and restore the life and dignity of the innocent. It is not the anger of retaliation, which is to encounter harm and to inflict harm in return. It is the anger of restoration, which is the righteous awareness that this should not be happening, that the preciousness of life is violated, and that this must be set straight to restore life and dignity to the victim. This kind of “grief-anger” is motivated by love, not by hatred. It has wisely been referred to as “love under pressure”. Love takes the form of “grief-anger” when the heart refuses to become apathetic in the face of suffering. This is how the heart refuses to become stone. It is a medicine. Jesus used love in the form of grief-anger to ram up against hardness of heart in religious leaders. Reflecting on this Divine kind of anger led me, in a round-about way, to Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. It is amazing how Michelangelo looked at an immense piece of Carrara marble and saw Moses inside of it. Faithful to his inner eye, he cut away from the stone everything that “was not Moses.” The result was so spectacular, even to him, that he allegedly shouted at the colossal image before him, “now speak!” The fact that the Moses of Michelangelo has horns, and not a halo, is because of a translation error from Hebrew to Latin about what Moses looked like as he came down Mount Sinai after meeting face to face with God. “Rays of light” in Hebrew became “horns” in Latin. But the horns also fit well, because the image is of Moses about to explode as he sees the people worshipping a golden calf instead of worshipping God. The statue completely captures what “love in the form of grief-anger” looks like, in the whole body (face, torso, hands, legs), the very second before it erupts furiously to set things straight. To the extent that any of us have not evolved in the mighty craft of wielding love as “grief-anger”, no one will ever confuse our horns for halos. Let’s go for it. Let’s cut for stone. Cutting for stone can become our way of rebelling against the evil around us. Let’s both free ourselves from stony hearts, and let’s look at people like Lionel and not so much see the heaviness and rock-fast impossibility with which life has covered him, but rather with vision, like that of Michelangelo, let’s cut away with great skill “everything that is not Lionel” and set him free. For his good, and to the Glory of God. Lionel is in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and just starting school (he is a promising student). This is a picture of him leaving our morning mass just now, getting his fan back to his dormitory! (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KjnT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F34d6faed-b752-4151-b646-1db6f1bd96c4_810x1080.jpeg) () Lionel Thank you for your friendship, and for the sacrifices you make continually, to enable us to still be here in Haiti, with and for the poor. Fr Richard Frechette CP DO Port-au-Prince October 4, 2026 Editor’s Note: If you want to see what Father Rick Frechette and his co-conspirators at the St. Luke Foundation are doing in Haiti, you can (https://www.stlukehaiti.org/) go here . And better still, if you want to make a (tax-deductible) donation to help them continue their exceedingly difficult work— work which I have witnessed/documented up close — (https://givebutter.com/Stlukehaiti) go here . It’s the best money you’ll ever spend. (Right up there with a Slack Tide subscription!) Slack Tide by Matt Labash is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. () () () () (subscribe-widget-preamble) (220275553) (Type your email...) Subscribe (https://mattlabash.substack.com/subscribe?&gift=true) Give a gift subscription (https://mattlabash.substack.com/subscribe?group=true) Get a group subscription (https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/hating-trump-more-healthily?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share) Share (https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/hating-trump-more-healthily/comments) Leave a comment B onus Tracks : I don’t know exactly what these lovely women — a church trio named Triple Braided Cord from Haitian Bethel Baptist Church — are singing in Creole in their a cappella “Bèje mwen” (or “My Shepherd”) medley. But from the looks on their faces and the purity of their voices, I agree with every word. And here is a woman named Mirtah in Monte Verde, that Talking Dog Films caught singing “It Is Well With My Soul” in Haitian French, out of pure joy. The 1876 hymn wasn’t born from joy at all, but from the opposite. It was written after its author, Horatio Spafford, was financially wrecked after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Then, his four daughters died in a transatlantic crossing after their ship collided with another vessel. Only his wife, Anna, survived, sending a telegram: “Saved alone.” So the lyrics didn’t represent cheap sentiment, but hard-won survival. Bonus Hash Browns Recipe: Unless I’m eating bacon or my wife’s blueberry pancakes, I generally detest breakfast foods. I most often skip it. Better to wake up closer to lunch. And I NEVER go out for breakfast — my idea of hell. But on the very rare occasions I do make it, I will sometimes cook up hash browns. Here’s how: Buy a bag of frozen shredded potatoes. The pros will suggest you grate your own, but I’ve done that, and trust me, they don’t turn out as well. Thaw them, lay them out, then heavily blot them with a towel. Less moisture equals more crispy. Though by no means does this have to be super-crispy. A large cast iron skillet is always good, but a big-ass electric skillet is even better. Fry up as many pieces of bacon as your skillet will hold. I generally eat low-sodium bacon, but in this dish, the extra salt of regular bacon is your friend. Crisp the bacon up, but not overly so. Well-browned and chewy is fine. But you do want to render the fat. Then remove the strips. Keep the temperature high, and lay the potatoes down in the bacon grease, in as thin a layer as possible. If your bacon hasn’t rendered enough fat, don’t be afraid of adding a little extra cooking oil. Salt and pepper the potatoes, but don’t kill them with salt, since you’re already factoring in bacon. Let them crisp up for many minutes, then flip them when they do. While the potatoes are crisping, chop your bacon into small pieces, and also chop as many green onions as you can stomach, as thinly as possible. (My general all-around green onion policy: too much is never enough.) After the second side of the potatoes is doneish, dump the bacon chunks and green onions over top of the potatoes, and add an unhealthily healthy layer of grated sharp cheddar. Adjust the heat down if you need to. But let the cheddar melt a bit. Then serve, drink a lot of water to flush out all that sodium, and take a nap when the carbs/grease load sets in. Which it will almost immediately. 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