Dear friends,
We have achieved Friday. In spite of the gorgeous summer weather, the week has been weirdly arduous. Or, perhaps it’s flying by — especially if you and your kids are on spring break.
Either way, there are some items that need our attention.
Earlier this week, I was stomping through the park on a call with my dearest friend, talking about the peril we all face in this political climate. We talked about what Kacmyrak’s ruling on mifepristone might mean for our children and for people unlucky enough to live in places where abortion access and reproductive care is all but gone.
My friend was mad that her partner didn’t understand how upset she was, so I told her about an article I’d read about what to say when someone you love is upset. Here’s the question to ask:
Do you want to be helped, heard or hugged?
It took me a moment to come up with all three Hs. While I floundered, my friend helpfully offered,
“a hammer?”
So, I have to add a fourth H: hahahaha. I’m anti-hammer. We have to make ourselves heard and we have to remember to laugh, even though we’re angry.
Like Kacsmyrak’s ruling, it keeps the judicial branch in the business of overruling the scientists at the FDA. It also requires in-person doctor visits in order to obtain a prescription, creating additional obstacles to access.
The Department of Justice is appealing this ruling to the Supreme Court. Sorry, that’s not a punchline. Make yourself heard.
Contact the FDA about keeping mifepristone available. This action is adapted from Chop Wood, Carry Water.
Clarence Thomas is in the news again because not only did he accept extravagant vacations from Harlan Crow, but he sold real estate to him. Wait, there’s more.
Crow purchased Thomas’s mother’s home — while she was still living there — and made tens of thousands of dollars in improvements. Mama Thomas still lives there. And Crow bought two other properties from Thomas on the same block.
In violation of the law, Thomas did not report this largesse.
Please call Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary, to ask what steps he’s taking to rein in corruption on the highest Court. I wrote a script!
Tell Congress that we need a SCOTUS code of ethics. This quick action is from Demand Progress.
Yesterday morning, while I was leading a book discussion group for Brooklyn Public Library patrons, my partner texted me this article: Texas county weighs shutting down libraries to circumvent judge's order overturning book ban.
I couldn’t get past the headline until later in the day.
The banned books, which include themes of LGBTQ+ identity and race, were removed last year without public input after Llano County officials declared them pornographic and sexually explicit.
On the list is Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. I read that book many times in the 1980s. [Funny story: I had a job running birthday parties on the Upper East Side. We baked cakes with the children and then I read this book aloud to them while the cakes were in the oven and my coworker got the frosting into bowls.]
Anyway, this is how I know they’ve lost their damn minds in Llano, Texas. Pornographic and sexually explicit? It would be funny if it were not so dangerous.
Late yesterday, a federal judge ordered Llano county to restore the books to the shelves while a lawsuit proceeds. The county commissioners decided to keep the library open.
My book group had been discussing chapter 2 of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, in which the protagonist, Milo, gets lost in the Doldrums because he wasn’t thinking. The Llano county commissioners found, as Milo did, that the only way out is to start thinking again. More of that, please.
Let’s end with a quick action that you can take from anywhere, even though it pertains to New York climate law.
The Climate, Jobs and Justice Package includes six bills that would raise tax revenue on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers to fund renewable energy, support households as they transition off fossil fuels, and fund long-term planning for climate mitigation and workforce transition.
It also supports our commitment to a 20-year emissions reduction timeline, because the crisis is here and cannot be kicked down the road.
Let NYS legislative leaders know you want the whole climate package in the budget. This quick action is from NY Renews.
And because the weather and the world seemed to call for it, I leave you with Ada Límon’s poem, Instructions on Not Giving Up:
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
with love,
L