Beautiful people,
This will be the last post this week, in honor of the holiday and the fact that beloved young people will be staying in the room I use as an office. We’re all pretty excited about the first semi-normal Thanksgiving since 2019.
We all tested negative this morning!
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, argued that early voting was not allowed that day under Georgia law, which bars it on the second Saturday before an election if the preceding Thursday or Friday are state holidays. Thursday is Thanksgiving, and Friday is a Georgia holiday that once honored Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.
I don’t want to get into the weeds of Georgia law. I am too aghast to comment on Georgia’s state holiday. The ruling to allow voting this Saturday is beneficial to Warnock’s reelection effort. Yay for voting!
Our relationship (yours and mine) has kept me going through these pandemic years and the threats to democracy, humanity, and the planet that we face together. I love when you send actions, ask questions, and bring my attention to issues might not otherwise be on my radar.
As the readership has gotten bigger, I have mostly stopped shouting out personal friends. I have not stopped appreciating you. Three of you bailed me out this week when I overcommitted to send postcards to Georgia voters with Reclaim Our Vote.
I am grateful to the many organizers and activists whose hard work we build on. Work from home shares many actions generated by others.
Phone bank with the Environmental Voter Project or make a small donation to help get out the vote in Georgia.
I wrote last week about the Green Wave analysis of the midterms, and recommend this article, in which Nathaniel Stinnett, the founder of the Environmental Voter Project, said this:
“Climate voters were the silent surprise of election night. We weren’t loud, and nobody saw us coming, but we showed up to vote in huge numbers.”
You have been showing up for justice in growing numbers.
In 2020, I wrote about Tracy McCarter, who was charged with murdering her abusive husband and held at Rikers. Alvin Bragg has been reluctantly prosecuting the case, which he inherited from the previous Manhattan DA.
Thank you to those who wrote to Tracy McCarter when she was in detention and have supported her legal defense. Hopefully, the judge will accept Bragg's request to halt the prosecution.
The judge responded scathingly in his injunction, making a reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13,’ and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom,’” he wrote.
The freedom to teach everything is one I hold very dear.
Get schooled by Jon Stewart, who takes on anti-semitism and free speech in this serious and funny conversation with Colbert.
The members of my Thursday morning English conversation group — from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, South Korea, Spain, and Uruguay — were excited about the election of women as chief executives of New York and Massachusetts.
They pointed out that the US is behind much of the world in this regard (so true). This January, the US will have 12 governors who are not men. Almost half-way to half-way.
The people in the morning meditation group I participate in have sustained me in ways that I cannot fully express. I start each day looking into their faces; after a poem or a chant and a sit, we clasp our hands in front of our hearts and wish each other a good day, often only with a nod of the head.
This poem, which we have read a number of times in the last 25 months, is a reminder to me of how much meaning we get from our connections with others, even when they are fleeting.
Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
with love,
L