This is an opinion column.

The messages started Saturday, from federal employees in Alabama or people who cared about them.

They got that mysterious note like 2.3 million of their peers:

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.”

Those who got it were stunned. Mortified. Angry. Like you’d be if you had such a bad boss.

It looked like spam, but was later claimed by Elon Musk, whose week included:

1. Cavorting around a CPAC stage wielding a chainsaw given him by Argentinian President Javier Milei.
2. Rolling like Scrooge McDuck in the more than $20 billion his companies have received in government contracts, an amount equal to $8,700 for every federal worker. All while arbitrarily firing government workers like Victoria DeLano, the only investigator paid to make sure Alabama students with disabilities get certainthe services. That’s a job that pays about $100,000.
3. Basking in the glow of tossing NIH grants for medical research into his wood chipper, a tough cut in Alabama, which will lose tens of millions of dollars a year – far more than average – from the cuts.
4. Sticking pins in voodoo dolls of judges who told him to hold his chainsaw on NIH cuts after a group of state attorneys general – not including Alabama’s – sued to stop it.
5. Grossly misstating the amount of money he has saved Americans, shutting off aid to pesky children, and planning a slow-moving device to plunge his enemies into a tank of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. That last bit was just a guess.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve spoken to Alabamians who are giddy about the cuts, too, who want to know how I can possibly support such a bloated government.

It’s a fair question. Here’s the answer.

I live in a city where the sky glowed orange before the Clean Air Act and the EPA started to hold businesses accountable. I live in a state that even in recent years aided and abetted the poisoning of poor neighborhoods until held to account by feds.

I live in a place that has been so locally corrupt it relies on federal agents and courts to root out the misdeeds its own systems of justice ignores. Those corruptions, crossing party lines, will continue to cost people in my county for decades to come.

I live in a metro area whose economy was salvaged by a research hospital. I live in a community enriched by those who came from across the world to pursue medical miracles with the help of federal funds. A doctor from Japan, working in that research hospital, gave me my own miracle.

I live in a state that militarized its police to stop people of the wrong hue or heritage from voting, or going to school, or having the temerity to try to eat lunch at a restaurant reserved for white people. I live in a place where police did next to nothing, until forced by the feds, to stop generations of of lynchings and bombings.

I live in a country where Social Security is a promise, where taking care of veterans is a duty that can never repay veterans for their duty.

I feel lucky to live in a place where regulators, even imperfect ones, make food safer to eat, water safer to drink, factories safer to work, medicine safer to take, planes safer to fly, cars safer to drive and homes safer to live in.

I am and always have been opposed to government waste, corruption, ineptitude and overreach, greed, tilted playing fields, threats to the free press and the Constitution, and general assholery, especially in the name of a god.

But mostly I love my country, and can’t understand the need to tear it down. Not just its mechanics, but its identity.

American exceptionalism is not who we can beat up or put down or bully into submission. It is a dream. It is striving to do better, to serve as a beacon for justice and opportunity.

Not just for kings and billionaires, but for all.

Musk’s chainsaw ripped that notion apart, too. Maybe more than the budget.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.