Gone in 60 Seconds

A bear on the porch, a stolen package, and the brazen theft of everything we hold dear

The other morning, a bear stole a package off our porch. Three items had been delivered before dawn—two bags and a box. This was verified by our doorbell camera. But an hour later, when I got up and went to the front door to retrieve the three items, the box had vanished. Both bags were still on the stoop.

There was no record of the theft on the camera. It was a mystery! I couldn’t imagine that it had been a person practicing porch piracy, given that we live in the foothills of the Rockies and it’s a long drive for a box bandit hoping to score from pre-dawn deliveries. It would hardly be worth it even for a passing stranger to take the risk of coming up our meandering driveway to pinch a parcel of unknown contents. And besides, wouldn’t a package snatcher take all three items, not just the box? My husband quickly figured it out: it had to have been a bear. And there was a reason why a bear would take just the box: it contained the sole edible item in the delivery—kitty treats.

Many bears roam around our place in the summer, but we suspect the yearling we call Koda for this theft. He’s a little guy without a mama, and he is too thin, too hungry, too familiar with humans, and looks just like the character we named him after—the adorable animated cub in the film Brother Bear. All the neighbors know Koda, and we’re all pulling for him to find enough food to fatten himself up to survive through the winter. And we’re also hoping he will learn to be more fearful of people so he won’t end up getting euthanized for raiding someone’s garage or breaking into a house for food. Because of his innocence and hunger-driven lack of aversion to humans, it seemed sound to peg Koda for stealing the box containing the kitty treats, even though he evaded being captured on camera during the heist.

The pinched porch package incident occurred just a day or two after I had written a lament for what had just been stolen from me and all Americans—indeed, all citizens of the world: Bears Ears.^[1] Three million acres of public land containing sacred antiquities and indescribable beauty were gone in 60 seconds when Trump ceremoniously scrawled his name on a poison presidential proclamation. He and the thieves in his cartel yucked it up in the Oval Office about the inestimable treasure they were looting right in front of the country’s cameras.

They looked into those lenses and they lied and they laughed as they robbed us blind. It was big time crime carried out in clear view.

Those of us who were awake and paying attention felt it keenly, and are still caroming somewhere between seething rage, uncontrollable sorrow, and feeling ravenous for revenge. I somehow manage to sustain all three states simultaneously. I am stuck there and have not moved on.

The bear box-theft event revealed itself to me days into this disposition, and at a time when I was still a little groggy from sleep…not yet fully awake to what has lately become our shared daily nightmare. Suspended between these two worlds, I couldn’t help but see some synchronized symbolism right then in a bear coming to steal something from me in the night.

So for me, this fast porch theft by a bear has now become the entry point to a darker story about corruption, public loss, and the open plunder of everything we hold dear.

While too many citizens have been sleeping, this regime has stolen millions of acres of public land and handed them to their oligarch bro-buds to ravage, rape, and pillage. And of course, it’s not just Bears Ears and Grand Escalante. This treasure-jacking ring of kleptocrats has stripped more than a hundred million acres of public lands and waters of their protections, rolled back environmental regulations, ripped designations from sacred cultural sites, laid bare our delicate marine sanctuaries to industrial extraction, and hot-wired and popped the lock on every federal agency and regulation so they could boost every ounce of wealth and resources Americans once shared.

This larceny extends from the Pacific Marine National Monuments to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to Big Bend National Park on the southern border. The syndicate has signal-intercepted every state accord and environmental protection to repeal the Roadless Rule for National Forest and Park Watersheds...and BLM Public Lands rules: robbing conservation of its status as a priority equal to mining, drilling, and logging on federal lands. They have gutted the Endangered Species Act, purloined threatened grizzlies’ habitats, evicted the American bison from public lands, and broken the National Historic Preservation Laws. They are chop-shopping this country for parts, and selling them to the highest bidder among their broligarchy bros.

The theft spree goes even beyond the land and our natural resources. In just over 18 months, the junta recruited by the Heritage Hacks and run by the Project 2025 Flash Robbery Mob has taken apart our government, dispatched an army of ogres to frighten and kill citizens, created concentration camps, destroyed norms, devoured tax revenues and redirected them into the pockets of their plutocrat pals and into plans for personal monuments for their Necrotic Nero.

⏱️ Once Trump was sworn in on January 20 of last year, our democracy was gone in 60 seconds.

Out came the DOGE demons who hacked apart agencies and displaced all the watchdogs and qualified federal workers. The new wrecking crew stripped off all pretense of decency or dignity as they proceeded to publicly plunder. The chainsaws came out, and the Trump Tyranny Thieves took down our democracy in an American minute.

And then they went to work on the rest of the world, cutting ties and supplies and allies. Within seconds, they began selling off pieces of the presidency, its powers, and the public’s welfare.

Whatever metric we might have used to measure the health and vitality of our nation before, there is now no device to determine the depth of this depravity. This crew is so confident that they don’t even try to cover up the corruption. They are brazen, they are fast, and they are efficient at dismantling an entire country, its integrity and good standing, its resources and riches, and its life support systems—like its economy, its military readiness, and its intelligence networks. By any account, this is a crime ring as adept as the one in the classic film about the car thieves who evaded the police, stole every asset on their target list, and did it fast.

Though the two events seemed synchronous to me, they are distinctly different. While my neighbor bear Koda stole a box to survive starvation, he is innocent of crime. I am sorry he found food on our porch which might encourage him to come again to the house instead of seek nourishment elsewhere. I am also deeply worried because a late May freeze killed the wild plums, acorns, and chokecherries on which he would normally dine, so there is little food for him from natural sources. He is desperate to survive, and as summer wears on, he is running out of time to fatten up before winter comes. And my neighbors and I all know that we must not intervene; putting out food for a bear will almost certainly lead to trouble for the animal, if not death.

There is no real parallel between the bear and what the thieves in this administration are doing, except that winter is coming for the MAGA mafia, too.

This fraternity of fat cat kleptocrat Epstein Class crimers wants to stay in power and starve the rest of us of our rights, resources, and individual and collective riches. This can only go on so long, like summer. One day, a crisp cool wind blows and there is nothing left in the national oil reserves because of a needless war. One afternoon, the sun vanishes behind a cloud and the shelves of the supermarkets are nearly empty, and there is no way to move what food there is to market. One morning we wake to heavy snowfall as the support beams of the stock market that have been holding up the economy are revealed to be made of ice, cold and hollow, and beginning to crack. We have already frozen our productivity and we no longer manufacture here. Farmers have watched their ability to produce food at a fair price for a reasonable return disappear. The for-profit prisons are full, but the coffers that kept them running have run dry. The rivers of wealth that once flowed through a booming economy heated by producing clean energy have dried up. The earth seeks revenge for our cold indifference to the changes we have caused to the climate: floods are now tsunamis and fires are infernos, and the crime syndicate has frozen the funds and the forces to fight them. Our former allies now huddle up with nearby nations to militarize together to strengthen and protect themselves from tyrannies like us. Europe eschews all commerce with our formerly flourishing military contractors, who now whisper to the press about our spent stockpiles of patriot missile interceptors, citing concerns that a global superpower might attack us in our depleted state. The whole world can see that we are weak. The dollar starts to skate on thin ice; it may slip and fall.

With our alliances chilled and our nearest neighbors giving us the cold shoulder for our insults and assaults, we won’t be able to borrow a blanket from the country to the north, nor buy a burrito from the one to the south, let alone buy Greenland from a disgruntled well-winterer like Denmark.

Today, even though it’s still summer, we know the coming season is going to be hard for many of us, if not all. It’s already difficult as more Americans are facing hardship each day from the cost of gas and groceries, rent and childcare, vanishing jobs, and the skyrocketing price of health care.

While I weep for the loss of the wild and our nation’s greatest treasures, and I work with others to create the best democratic defenses we can muster, I also try not to forget to celebrate the gifts and blessings we still have. And our neighborhood bears are a blessing. Others visit, but Koda comes and goes frequently, sometimes twice in the same day. We see him on the wildlife cams. Just today, I thought he looked a bit bigger and maybe not quite so thin. Maybe he’ll make it if summer holds on for a while and he finds some safe sources for food. Although I have no illusion that the stakes are high for that little guy, I have to believe in a bear who—though orphaned too early and left hungry and alone—took the risk to rip off a package of kitty treats so he could live to fight another day.

And maybe that’s how we will make it through, too. One day at a time, one scary step at a time, doing what it takes to get ourselves through.

We’re the lucky ones. We have each other.

Here’s a little video for you that our cams caught of Koda:

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^[1] Sandi Ault, Bury My Heart in Bears Ears, Sandi Ault—Reporting from the WILD, Substack, July 12, 2026, https://sandiault.substack.com/p/bury-my-heart-in-bears-ears