Collection: Resist Rebel Revolt
Cross-Collection: Some Other Beginning’s End

Format: Article
Length: 3,000 Words | 12 Min
Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana
Date: Oct 28, 2025

Tags: Natural Disasters, SNAP, Empathy, Grief, Mortality

§

Resist Rebel Revolt is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Women's Rights Activist, & Philosopher.

To receive new essays about the absurdity of our current political reality, and the activism we can do to combat it, consider becoming a free or paid member.

Hurricane Melissa is upsetting me more than I expected it to. There are three reasons for that.

First: they gave it my name. I had hoped my namesake hurricane would be small, but in times of extreme ocean heat, nothing the Atlantic produces is small anymore.

Already, at a Category 5, it has become the strongest hurricane to make landfall in Jamaica’s record-keeping history.

At sustained winds of 185 mph (295kph) and 892 mb, it’s tied with two records for the strongest Atlantic storm to make landfall.

Yesterday, they recorded Hurricane Melissa giving the second highest gust of wind on record at 241 mph. (The strongest gust of wind was in Australia, at 253 mph).

I’ll be honest, I don’t like my name being used for historically destructive purposes.

But that’s not all.

Many of you have heard me mention that my beloved 3-year-old Dalmatian, Athena, contracted an illness and died last year. What you haven’t heard is that she hit her peak illness as a hurricane was passing us.

We’d already had Hurricane Debby a month and a half earlier. It was a tropical storm by the time it reached us in Coastal Georgia, but it hovered over us for days, circling around, bringing flooding rains to the region.

I’ll be honest, I sometimes think Hurricane Debby killed Athena.

Athena was exposed to a fungus called aspergillus, that can be found in compost and other humid areas. Most dogs survive aspergillosis infections, but some dogs are born without the antibodies that recognize the threat, so their immune systems can’t tell that they’re being attacked.

While it’s pure conjecture that Hurricane Debby caused mold to accumulate from all of the debris and dead plants she wreaked havoc on, it does fit with the timeline. Athena began to feel bad a week later.

She was ill for a total of 6 weeks, but had virtually no symptoms until she became partially paralyzed in one back leg. Though she had already had multiple visits with the vet, we realized the illness was more severe than her lack of symptoms suggested.

In other words: yes, she didn’t even have a fever. But the paralysis told us there was definitely a serious illness happening underneath the surface.

The emergency vet tentatively diagnosed her with meningitis and put her on antibiotics and steroids. But told us that if she became paralyzed in both legs, we would need to get her into surgery within 24 hours.

Hurricane Helene passed by the evening Athena lost the use of both of her legs.

All the emergency clinics were closed.

That evening, we had multiple tornado warnings, so we spent a couple of hours huddled in the hallway, holding our little baby, now helplessly paralyzed from the waist down. Knowing she needed immediate surgery.

I stayed up all night with her, giving her water, flipping her over so she wouldn’t get bed sores, crying, and feeling the most dreaded fear I’ve ever felt in my life.

I was right to feel it. Because losing the use of her legs wasn’t the worst fate. As well as a spinal infection, she was already in kidney failure.

Aspergillus is known to spread throughout the body and cause multi-organ failure.

But thus far in the story, nobody knew she had it.

As I listened to 70 mph winds whip outside the window and tried to talk down my dread, I did an audio recording where I listed every good memory I had of Athena.

You see, I knew if she died that it would be so painful to remember her that I would lose all of those good memories. I would repress them. So I made a recording where I listed all of the beautiful qualities she had. All of the things that made her wonderful and special to me. So that I would have them on record.

A recording I still haven’t listened to one year later, but I’m so grateful I made.

By 9 AM, the hurricane had passed. But the emergency vets were still without power. We live on the border of Georgia and South Carolina. We found a private, well-funded emergency clinic in South Carolina that had generators and an MRI machine. Large facilities.

They prepped her for an MRI when they found out she had kidney failure. They couldn’t even put her under anesthesia. Though she was put on an IV and her kidney numbers did drop over the next few days, ultimately, she died 10 days later.

In 6 weeks, she only received the correct diagnosis of aspergillosis a few days before her death. She’d received nearly 10 different diagnostic suggestions before then.

Although in a tragic irony, they did successfully give her spinal surgery and remove the infection that caused her to have paralysis. At home, I was doing rehab on her back legs and tail—and she WAS beginning to get feeling in them again. (A small glimmer of hope).

But the kidney failure returned, and then she got pneumonia. We couldn’t keep up with it.

We said goodbye to her the same day as Hurricane Milton was passing through Florida.

As always, we never know if it will come our way in Coastal Georgia but I was terrified that I would have another sleepless, powerless night watching her die with the winds whistling outside my window—and once again, having all of the emergency clinics out of power.

So when her cough developed and I suspected pneumonia, we left for the emergency clinic as quickly as possible.

We said goodbye to her in the middle of the night.

I had an important realization when Athena died: this planet we live on is cruel and unfair.

It’s harsh and devastating and ruthless.

I realized that it’s an illusion that we own our bodies. We’re just renters of them. Renters of the living, existing on borrowed time.

And then Mother Nature takes back what was never ours to begin with—this meat sack we exist within. And we cease to exist.

Grief, while impossible to sum up in a few paragraphs, makes you confront the cruelty and inescapability of mortality.

That she became fully paralyzed while we were sheltering from tornados and hurricane winds (which led to tremendous devastation in Asheville, NC)—made me all the more certain that her death was part of a widespread cruelty that exists on this planet.

But the contrasting parallel of Trump’s political coup happening side by side (he won 3 weeks later, and I was suffering grief beside his coup for 10 months to come) really created a devastating parallel.

For months afterwards, whenever Republicans in the U.S. were vicious, vindictive, sociopathic, and cruel…

I asked myself: why?

Not for the reasons most people normally do. My question was:

Did you not think Mother Nature—at a base level—was cruel enough all on its own?

None of us escapes her cruelty. None of us escapes her vengeance.

But what I can’t understand is why anybody would choose to make life that much harder for millions of people—when life was never easy to begin with.

Do we need to punish the already punished?

Do we need to be cruel to people suffering base levels of cruelty from Mother Nature already?

We’re all at risk of genetic diseases, epidemics, cancers. We’re at risk of dying by floods, fires, tornados, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, heat waves. There are animals that hunt us, bacteria that feeds on us, viruses and fungi that use us as a host. And of course bizarre and tragic accidents.

Cruelty is inevitable. We’re all on borrowed time.

In fact, I’m now incapable of crying when people die in their 80s and 90s—because I realize they’re the lucky ones. And that’s EVEN THOUGH, old age is brutal, painful, and cruel decay, in itself.

As if, it’s lucky to suffer longer than those who had the opportunity to suffer taken away from them.

You can’t make this shit up.

And yet, despite all of this, it doesn’t satiate a portion of humans—so poetically displayed in the Trump Administration—whose need for destruction and cruelty outpaces the ruthlessness of Mother Nature.

So we have evil people actively working to make life harder and crueler for the American population, in every way possible—because life isn’t cruel enough to satiate them.

This coup is not a coup of power or money, it’s a coup of destruction and cruelty.

Each action they take is intended to wield more violence, more fear, and more destruction of anything that has a positive impact on American lives.

It’s punishment.

Punishment towards the vulnerable, the elderly, children, immigrants, the sick, cancer patients, women, pregnant women, veterans, and even farmers. It’s cruelty towards other countries who received USAID for food, malaria, or aids.

I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one asking this, but what do they really get out of this? What prize do they win? What battle have they triumphed over in their campaign of pure cruelty?

Elon Musk was already the richest man in the world without the harm he inflicted on others this year. He was perfectly capable of making money without inflicting cruelty.

So money isn’t the reason for it.

The cruelty is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The destruction is not a means to an end—it’s the end.

The power to be cruel, the ability to be violent, the addiction to destruction IS the end.

Letting the ACA tax credits expire harms the sick and vulnerable.

I’ll be honest, in some twisted irony: in 35 years, I’ve never had health insurance. Not once. But I got the ACA the week before the election.

Actually, I got it, specifically after realizing how much Athena’s healthcare costs were. Did you know her MRI was about $7,000 out of pocket?

That’s just healthcare for our pets.

And now I’m not even sure if I’m going to renew.

But ripping away people’s healthcare isn’t enough to satisfy the cruelty of the GOP.

So what have they done next? They decided to rip away SNAP benefits… food stamps that help 40 million people afford groceries. Families with elderly, children, disabilities.

Right as another devastating Hurricane kills and maims hundreds of thousands of people, pets, & wild animals.

And that’s not an important connection for most people. But for me?

As Hurricane Melissa rips through Jamaica, I’m just viscerally back in that moment, holding Athena as the wind whips outside and asking:

Isn’t Mother Nature cruel enough on its own?

Why must we add to it?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if humans were each other’s support system AGAINST a common enemy: Mother Nature.

I’d like us to have predators and saboteurs external to our societies and communities. I’d like the enemy to be outside of our tribe.

Instead, she’s just not cruel enough to satiate the sadism within.

So you have people who accumulate wealth and power and wield that power to harm MORE people.

It’s utterly baffling.

And the most important thing to realize is that SNAP benefits don’t have to run out on November 1st. At best, they have enough emergency funds for 3 more weeks.

But sadists never run dry on ideas for more cruelty. In fact, I now see what Netanyahu was doing all along: he was using starvation and hunger as a control mechanism in negotiations.

You see, his assumption was that Hamas cared more about Palestinian lives than he did. So he could starve them strategically and force the surrender of Hamas to make the hunger stop.

The same is being done today. One expert predicts that this month could set off the greatest hunger catastrophe in the U.S. since the Great Depression.

AND IT’S BEING DONE ON PURPOSE BY THE REPUBLICANS.

Paul Krugman just released an essay that claims that Senate Republicans even have the power to waive the filibuster for this funding. Which they’ve selectively done before. They’re just choosing not to.

And even though 1 out of 4 recipients of SNAP are children, the Trump Administration is specifically choosing to cut off the 6 billion dollars in emergency funds in order to cause hunger as a leverage over Democrats.

Which is why Democratic officials from 25 states have already sued the Trump Administration for claiming the emergency funds can’t be used for this emergency.

But that’s the point. Starvation is the leverage.

As I wrote yesterday:

This is actually a very familiar narcissistic technique: Republicans are holding Democratic empathy hostage.

Their own constituents use SNAP too. Just like the ACA tax credits. But they have no empathy for their OWN constituents. So they’re trying to break the Democrats’ will via this added burden to their empathy.

They think that harming one part of America will force Democrats to surrender the protection of another part of America.

This is a really common technique with narcissists. Using empathy as leverage.

Abusers naturally have less empathy than others and are always willing to hold hostage your empathy and specifically threaten violence and harm to those you love in order to control your behaviors.

Especially when there’s a child or pet caught between the abuse—even when that child or pet is their own.

They hedge a bet that you are more willing to give in to their threats than see someone you love abused. Even when that someone you love and someone they claim to love also.

They think their lack of empathy gives them an advantage—a weapon—to use against those with empathy.

And that’s why Republicans are more than willing to use their own constituents: the elderly, the disabled, and the 1 in 4 children who will be impacted by cutting off SNAP as leverage for control…

Because they want to overload the empathetic burden of Democrats to break them and force them to give up the ACA tax credits—which hurts Americans from another angle.

But I want you to remember the most important thing:

They don’t need to harm children for children to be harmed. They don’t need to willingly cause starvation for animals and humans to starve.

They don’t need to be the arbiters of destruction, for destruction to invariably occur.

We live in a cruel world already.

We don’t have to be a cruel force within it.

They’re making the human choice to be cruel. And it wasn’t the only option offered to them.

The human choice to be kind amidst destruction. To donate to food banks. To help neighbors. To adopt stray animals. To protect people even when we don’t know them… those aren’t things that make us weak—as Republicans assert by using our empathy as leverage.

What makes us weak is the meat sack we exist within. The base level of vulnerability in our mortality.

And that vulnerability is inescapable for all living things.

But it’s once you confront that mortality—that everything you do to stall and evade and protect yourself or others from the guaranteed destruction and pain that will befall all of us at some point in our lifetimes—those are the small gestures of defiance towards the cruelty of Mother Nature.

We find our strength in defying her destruction. In surviving it. And in thriving despite it.

Survival isn’t just about being alive. It’s also about the haunting quality-of-life one can create in transient beauty. Love that absolutely CAN run out, but isn’t any less powerful in its temporary influence.

It isn’t easy to be strong when you’re vulnerable. Strength comes from finding joy amidst terror. Or kindness amidst destruction.

To choose how to respond to trauma is to defy the base level of cruelty and fear Mother Nature expects of us.

We live in a booby trapped world where nobody is safe.

So isn’t making our short lives kinder or cohesively working with others to make something impactful and meaningful proof of our defiance and persistance?

As the Republican fascists increase their rate of violence and cruelty, they don’t harm us through our empathy (as they so desperately want to)… Instead, they remind us of why we have it in the first place.

It’s the recognition that meaning is created—not in the absence of cruelty or destruction (those things are inescapable). Instead, meaning is created in the lifelines to a better side of humanity. To our perseverance and survival—despite that destruction.

They used to say, if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

I would update it.

I think if you want to test a man’s character, you should give him trauma.

Maintaining your humanity amidst trauma is the biggest test of a person’s character.

And in my view, the empathy we earn and maintain throughout our lives makes this cruel world a little more worth living in.

Empathy isn’t a weakness.

Empathy is the recognition of our collective vulnerability and the constant cruelty that exists at a base level in Mother Nature—and because of some sadistic strain of insanity… this cruelty is perpetuated by evil people on purpose.

It’s true that we feel the impact of cruelty more acutely than those who don’t have empathy. But it’s also the reason we know how to make life more meaningful in the interim.

We’re softer because we want to make this cruel world a little more bearable.