Hi friends,
There is so much going on that I find it hard to give up posting three times a week. At the same time, there is so much going on that it is difficult to write.
I’m reminding you to look at the sky to keep your bearings. I happened upon someone named Rory on my walk home on Sunday night. They had a telescope set up — yes, in the middle of the street! —for anyone who wanted a peek at Saturn. How could I not?
In addition to some repeat actions that you may have missed, I’m going to share three great things from other writers— one I read last week, one I recently listened to, and a piece from 2020 that finally found its way to me.
I learned the term health span from Dr. Dave Chokshi’s compelling essay, “Forget About Living to 100. Let’s Live Healthier Instead.”
Chokshi explains that health span refers to the stretch of time that people can expect to live in good health; in the US, he reports, people are estimated to have an average health span of 66 years. Yikes.
Other nations are taking policy steps to lengthen health span:
Singapore, with a longer average life span and an even more rapidly aging society than the United States, committed in its national health reforms last year “to prevent or delay the onset of ill health.” Britain has set an explicit goal of increasing healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. And in Japan, local programs already invest in initiatives to help older adults share their skills and wisdom across generations, such as teaching youths how to cook, make art and garden, with benefits for young and old alike.
Chokshi wants the US to invest in lengthening health spans by spending more health care dollars on primary care and disease prevention.
Achieving a target health span of 75 years would push us to think about health equity, given the lower healthy life expectancies for certain groups, such as Native Americans, Black Americans and low-income Americans.
It’s an eye-opening discussion of where we should put our resources. Chokshi discusses loneliness, addiction, and housing, as well as the value of keeping older people engaged in work, caring for others, and civic action.
Dr. Lakshmin distinguished between burnout and betrayal, pointing out that we should not accept our feelings of overwhelmedness as a personal failure. They are better understood as
systemic failures, from the stresses that come with financial precariousness to the lack of paid family leave.
Listen to Tressie McMillan Cottom’s conversation with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin.
In 2020, Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan wrote a piece about the idea of permanently organized communities. Although it pre-dates the two pieces above, it answers some of the concerns raised about health span and self-care in a society that is in crisis.
We need place-based and community-based organization because impacts — like COVID-19 — will be felt in place-based ways. Most human needs must be met at the local level — shelter, food, water, care. We can provide each other emotional support from afar but many of our basic needs must be met in place. Extra ventilators that might start to appear in China won’t help us if we’re in New York.
Mascarenhas-Swan’s words are entirely relevant. My springling, Lena, sent the article. When I read it, I remembered something I taught them when they were first riding the subway independently at age ten.
Lena did not yet have a cell phone. I pointed out that if there was a confusing announcement or the train was suddenly stuck, they would need to talk to someone who was there. We practiced getting on subway cars and looking for the sorts of people (we favored parents with children) one might ask for help.
So many of Mascarenhas-Swan’s big ideas — to keep our neighborhoods organized, to promote sharing rather than hoarding, to engage in and invest in care work — are things that are integral to the way that Lena lives their life.
And they are ideas that animate my work, even though they are arriving later in my life. One of the ideas that was most familiar to me is working to codify rules and laws “to make permanent the social gains won in the midst of this crisis.”
Read “Permanently Organized Communities.”
My reading and listening recommendations are part of the work to cultivate a more just world. I am a critic of capitalism and I’m open about that with my readers — and my students, when I teach.
The indoctrination into consumer capitalism is a feature of American life. What should not be a feature is the inclusion of propaganda from a conservative online media company masquerading as "educational" content.
[H]istorians and researchers who study right-wing media say that the [PragerU] videos spread misinformation—and are qualitatively different from other social studies materials that teachers might use in schools.
“PragerU is not a university,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “It is a political propaganda machine, and it promotes mistruths about climate change, slavery, and a whole host of other things.”
Note: I have used Prager materials to explore different views of capitalism with my students. I am opposed to censorship. The following action is about mislabeling Prager materials as educational. [Also, I asked my students to consider prager to be a verb and to wonder what the company was trying to do to them.]
End partnerships between PragerU and school systems! This quick action comes from Daily Kos.
Here are some recent, still-fresh actions that need attention:
Tell the President to declare a climate emergency. Yes, tell him again.
Make a public comment to change the rules for gun sales. Everytown for Gun Safety made it easy.
Tell the ATF to close the loopholes in federal law that allow gun purchases online and at gun shows without background checks.
We are less than seven weeks from the next threat of government shutdown, which threatens a variety of essential government services that people depend on. The rules for the budget process have to change so that we don’t layer invented crises on authentic crises.
Tell your Congressional delegation that you support the bipartisan effort to eliminate shutdowns.
[This results] in a constant need for recruitment and unmet needs of older adults and people with disabilities.
Tell Governor Hochul to make Fair Pay for Home Care a priority in NYS!
On the local level, we need to resist efforts to balance budgets in a way that harms the most vulnerable people in our city.
Contact the mayor to let him know that it’s irresponsible to make budget cuts to agencies that are failing to provide necessary services.
with love,
L