Dear ones,
My springling sent me a link to Ezra Klein’s extraordinary interview with author Richard Powers. We both recently read his newest book, Bewilderment. Klein calls it the ‘inner story’ (in contrast to Powers’s The Overstory) because it offers a deep exploration of empathy.
What a delight to discover that the coherence, complexity, and poetry in Powers’s writing come through when he speaks. Klein and Powers discuss Marshall McLuhan’s idea of how media, rather than message, is what’s transforming us.
Let the sentences of Richard Powers go to work on you.
Powers and Klein have a lot to say about our relationships to other beings and to so-called nature — because the idea that nature is separate from everything else is a boneheaded bit of binary bullshirt. [Note: I’m rewatching The Good Place, which explains the faux swearword.]
The discussion will not give away too much story if you haven’t yet read Bewilderment AND it will give you hope — grounded in what Powers calls the ‘humble sciences’ —for us and other beings and the planet we live on.
Then, perhaps, you will be inspired to join a conversation with a legislator about what we can do.
Lobby NYS legislators for Climate, Jobs, and Justice with NY Renews
The organizers at NY Renews know that messages from children have a special power. They are
collecting letters from kids, youth, and caregivers (parents/guardians, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, babysitters, etc.!) all across New York State to deliver to our elected leaders in December. We hope to have a giant stack of letters to deliver in-person, demonstrating the commitment of our young people and caregivers to ensuring a livable planet and a just future for all!
Here are all the details for putting the heartbreaking power of youthful earnestness into climate action. The deadline is Dec 5.
And here’s one more climate action from NY Renews. The purpose is to let the New York Climate Action Council know that decommissioning fossil fuel infrastructure is a priority, starting with power-generating facilities that already pose a disproportionate burden in low-income and BIPOC communities.
Take 15 seconds to submit a public comment to members of the New York Climate Action Council. You don’t have to be a NYS resident!
The assassination attempt on the former prime minister of Pakistan rattled me. I was already worried for Obama’s safety.
Make no mistake, democracy is on the ballot for all of us. We must remember that democracy is a covenant. We need to start looking out for each other again, seeing ourselves as we the people, not as entrenched enemies. This is a choice we can make. Disunion and chaos are not inevitable. There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.
It’s not accurate to say that we’ve never given up on the American experiment before. We fought an extremely bloody civil war, from which we appear not to have fully recovered.
Nonetheless, his larger point is that we are all harmed by the current polarization and that it is dangerous to give up on one another.
Shannon Hiller runs Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which tracks and strives to mitigate political violence. She is less concerned about the potential for violence on Election Day than on the days that follow.
Hiller expects the field of locations where threats of violence are most pernicious to narrow fairly quickly. Her team is specifically keeping an eye on races in the swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, where false claims of past election fraud have been embraced not just by many voters, but by some political leaders as well.
"They're [states] where there are senior leaders, specifically in the Republican Party, that are already calling into question the results of the election or have a history of advocating for violence or condoning violence around it," she said.
At the same time, Hiller believes that the success in 2020 of the systems — the courts, the recounts — is encouraging.
On Thursday mornings, I facilitate an English conversation group through Brooklyn Public Library. This morning, participants who Zoom in from Brazil were describing coercion, vote buying, and the use of police to block voters from the polls. Bolsonaro lost anyway, but it was closer than it would have been.
I still think about the Biden/Harris bus that was ambushed by a Trump convoy in late October 2020. The threats in Arizona are less dramatic, but troubling.
Contact your Congressional delegation today to call for the immediate passage of legislation to prevent people from carrying weapons at or near polling sites. This action has been updated.
I have been thinking a lot about how we go forward.
Read about the power of levity.
At the end of my conversation group this morning, I asked for topic suggestions for next week. Someone suggested the midterm elections, and I pointed out that we were unlikely to have results by Thursday morning. I believe I may also have groaned.
And then, Carolina, a Brazilian poet, suggested that we talk about love. We will.
with love,
L