Dear friends,
I failed on Saturday to meet up with the marchers with March for Our Lives at Cadman Plaza. There was a dearth of information about timing and it was partly my fault, as I was running late.
My friend and I hung out near Cadman Plaza and met Pia, below, who had traveled with her mom to Brooklyn — where they had lived until recently — to participate in the march. They also missed it, and were pretty disappointed, especially since Pia had worked hard on her sign. Pia is eight.
Pia talked to us about the need for people to get counseling and told us that a ‘feelings doctor’ had really helped her to find her voice.
Recently, John Oliver did a segment on policing in schools, and reported that
14 million students are in schools with police, but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker.
Furthermore, Oliver cited an article from Journal of Adolescent Health, which studied 179 school shootings and found “no evidence. . . that resource officers. . .lessened the severity of school shooting incidents.”
Sign the petition from the National Campaign for Justice to demand investment in school communities, counselors, and services, to combat gun violence.
The deal aims to make the juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks. The suspects who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde were both 18, and many of the attackers who have committed mass shootings in recent years have been young.
The agreement would offer money to states to implement “red flag” laws that make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, and to bolster school safety and mental health programs.
One analysis of Connecticut's red flag law, in place since 1999, found that for every 10 to 20 guns removed by a risk protection order led to one averted suicide. Another study found intimate partner homicides dropped in states where authorities can prohibit people convicted of "nonspecific violent misdemeanors" from possessing firearms.
A baby step is better than no steps at all.
Sign the message to the Senate from Everytown for Gun Safety to support the bill.
But these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, friends or teachers. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him.
Categorically eliminating assault weapons as a consumer product would be far more effective than red flag laws at reducing the number of mass shootings.
Check to see if your state has an assault weapons ban.
I’ve been thinking about the violence and divisions in our society, as I think we all have in the midst of the January 6 hearings, the wave of mass shootings, the persistence of racist violence, and the escalating threats against LGBTQ people.
Two friends attended an early morning protest at Chelsea Piers yesterday to protest the inclusion of Ron DeSantis as a speaker at the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership conference in Chelsea, of all places. One told me that she was alarmed to find herself among people on the left who seemed as angry and out-of-control as the folks who stormed the capitol.
Her observation was echoed by local coverage:
Assembling at the entrance to Pier Sixty between West 19th and 20th Streets, the group brought signs, chants, and unbridled rage.
In so many ways, we are a society at the breaking point. I used to ask my students if they thought the subways would be safer if everyone had a gun. Never once did a teenager attempt to make the case that arming people under pressure was a good idea.
Yesterday morning, a woman in my meditation group read Billy Collins’s poem, “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House.”
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his batonwhile the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
She introduced the poem by saying that it reminded her of meditation.
Each day, I try to increase my capacity to sit with what is. I do try.
And then I read that Jay-Z is going to ‘give back’ to the community by launching ‘Bitcoin Academy’ at the Marcy Houses, where he grew up. (A friend recently affirmed that it is possible to be affronted and taken aback, simultaneously.)
While offering free classes on financial literacy would be uncontroversial, the academy’s focus on bitcoin has drawn heavy criticism. The world of cryptocurrency is littered with financial scams, hacks, and fraud, where unsuspecting investors are encouraged to buy in to various coins with promises of fast returns, only to find the rug pulled from underneath them and their savings destroyed.
If you are on Twitter, please weigh in against Jay-Z’s misguided effort.
As I have written before, I don’t understand why cryptocurrency should exist. If it’s going to exist, however, economically vulnerable investors should be warned off of a volatile industry and everyone who breathes must be protected from the environmental impact of crypto mining.
Call or write Governor Hochul to tell her to sign the moratorium! This takes 30-seconds!
The Jan 6 hearings start again at 10 this morning. Keep calm and carry on.
with love,
L