It’s not just an individual hero journey, though. We’re born into a family story, and spend our youth trying to find our own. We’re told that adulthood provides the opportunity to author our own story, but are then confronted by the ways that our individual story is constrained by the vast interlocking stories of community, country, and culture.

Every story has central and secondary characters. Then there are the extras, the set-dressing people, if you will. There was a movie that came out the year I graduated from high school, 1990, called Slacker. It would be easy for many to discount, being a low budget indie that featured a host of random stoners, weirdos, and ne’er-do-wells in Austin, TX. But it did something narratively that, at the time, was radical and important. It followed a central character for a certain amount of time as they moved through their day— walking down the street, talking random people, scoring a dime bag. Then, all of a sudden, someone in the background— walking on the opposite sidewalk or passing the central character going the opposite direction through a double door— would capture the story’s attention and become the central character, the camera now trailing behind them.

It did feel, for me anyway, like the attentional equivalent of that dog from the movie Up! who keeps getting distracted, yelling, “Squirrel!” But if you could give into the ebb and flow of it, there was something deeper going on. It offered up the realization that we’re surrounded by people in the midst of their own story. We may be the center of our’s, while simultaneously background in someone else’s. Everyone we pass on the street is the center of an epic narrative. Every face in the window of the bus is a doorway into an endless stream of stories we might never know. But not knowing them doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or matter.

This is why fascists burn books, and why fundamentalists seek to ban them, because reading, particularly fiction, teaches people about the power of story. How everyone has one, and if you can read someone’s story, then you can see not only all the ways that you’re different from them, but also all the ways you’re the same. Reading stories humanizes us, teaches us empathy, which is anathema to anyone wanting to maintain strict boundaries of us and them.

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Family mythologies are our first taste of collective story. How and where did our parents meet? Were there children before or after us? Did we always live in the same place, or was there a set change at some point that changed everything? Were there characters that died or were exiled? Were there tragedies that brought us together, or did they break us apart?

Some of us are born into family mythologies that resonate and uplift our own, giving us our first taste of true belonging. Some of us look around and wonder if we got accidentally dropped into the wrong story entirely, forcing us to set out and find our belonging elsewhere.

Moving outward from family, we enter into community story— town or city, religion, school. And all of those stories exist within an even wider national and cultural story. These stories often aren’t explicitly chosen. They’re matters of happenstance or fate, depending on your philosophy. But they affect and infect our own, regardless. Whether we like it or not, we’re in relationship to that fractal, fun house mirror-like, narrative network.

Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus purportedly wrote “as above, so below” to explain our relationship to the heavens. But when it comes to stories, it’s “as within, so without.” We enact our interior state as story in our lives, and we absorb the stories around us, which changes who we are and what we believe.

There are some folks who maintain that stories aren’t “real”, so we should divorce ourselves from them, whittle them away until we are naked of any history or attachment. Maybe there is something to be said for the experience of stepping out of time or connection. But I can’t help but notice that, in the West anyway, those arguing most strongly for this detachment function within a story that is largely built around them due to gender, race, ability, or class. They don’t need connection and community to survive the collective story. History holds them tenderly.

Individual enlightenment? Individuality at all, really? Also a story.

June 19th, perhaps the day you’re reading this, is Juneteenth. If you don’t know it, the story of Juneteenth is the following: the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared an end to slavery in the United States, went into effect on January 1, 1863. The Confederate states, in the midst of war with the Union, rejected the Proclamation’s authority. Additionally, most enslaved people didn’t read, and their access to information was strictly controlled by their enslavers. So, despite the Proclamation, many enslaved people didn’t know that legally they were free for years.

Freedom for over 250,000 enslaved people in Texas (the far edge of the Confederacy) was finally announced by Union troops in Galveston Bay on June 19, 1865.

Did each of those 250,000 enslaved people have a story that preceded the Emancipation Proclamation? Yes. Were their lives irrevocably changed once the change in story dictated by the Proclamation finally made its way to them 161 years ago? Also, yes.

And also no, because despite a change in the narrative about them, the federal government offered little to no resources to them to enact change in their daily lives.

It’s one thing to tell a different story. It’s another thing to enact a different story, for good or ill. The current administration is working very hard to enact a regressive and oppressive national story as we speak. They’ve set aside billions of dollars to fund an army to force submission to that story, spent years rigging elections in their favor. But the numbers, population-wise, aren’t on their side, so they’re struggling to manifest their story.

They do excel at breaking shit, though, I’ll give them that.

At the same time, the Democratic party has been known to embrace a hopeful story but then abandon it (and the people who voted for it) when faced with the difficulty of enacting it. Transformative stories require vision, but they also require work by everyone in the story to embody it. Stories don’t transform from the top down just because you told them once. They transform from the inside out and the bottom up, through repetition and labor.

In other words, we have to decide what our story is going to be, rather than waiting for some politician to tell it to us. Then we have to build that story into a tangible reality. Tell, build, tell again, build some more. The building can be joyful (it has to be joyful), but it will also be work— mundane, repetitive, boring work. It will take time. Maybe way more than my lifetime. Maybe more than yours.

Did you have other plans?

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I’ll confess that I’m deeply unsettled these days. All the stories seem to be dissolving so fast it makes my head spin. My personal story is approaching a cascading series of crossroads as my kids and I age. Our national stories are being actively dismantled in an orgy of hate and corruption. It’s hard to find any ground, or even a tether.

I’m trying to find my feet in my town and relationships, on my land. To stay connected, attentive. and open, so when the story rises up, in me or around me, I can rise to meet it. But for now, it just feels like existing in a threshold place, neither here nor there, and with no idea where there is.

Are you also feeling this? If you’re managing to stay grounded, how are you doing that? Where are you finding your feet in these times?

Call me naïve, but I really did spend most of my life thinking there was some future in which I would be done with all this learning. Not book learning. I’m good with that. Give me new and interesting information all day long. But the emotional learning, hopefully leading to more alignment with myself and my beliefs, both in my parenting and my relationship to my family of origin? I truly believed at some point I would have put in the work, making these foundational aspects of my life…easy.

In reality, self-driving cars scare the crap out of me, but in my hopeful imagination the central relationships of my life would, once I had achieved a certain level of mastery, drive themselves.

Writing this down, it’s so obviously delusional, a wish born out of having to work very hard just to *have* these foundational relationships at all, much less have them be healthy and safe. Maybe most people have to work as hard for these things, but part of me– the adolescent part who’s still pretty angry about having to fix so much she didn’t break– assumes they don’t. That if I could somehow crack the code on whatever *those* people have, or are, or do, I could become one of them. Then, magically, all of this seemingly basic stuff about being human would cease to always require more of me– more learning, more capacity, more understanding, just…more.

I’m sure you can imagine where I’m going with this, which is that I was utterly and completely wrong. Not about there likely being people who don’t find parenting and family a minefield, but that *I* was ever going to be done figuring out how to navigate it. Whoever may have had a say in the matter (my soul, God, my ancestors, some trickster spirit that just wanted to see what would happen) didn’t sign me up for that life. They signed me up to be an endless student.

Let me not refuse responsibility for my own choices, however. I’ve made them every step of the way, and they’ve cumulatively afforded me a beautiful life. Not easy, but beautiful. Full of wonderful kids, good friends, and an ever-expanding love for my family of origin, the last of which I never, ever expected.

There aren’t many of us left at this point in the family I was born into. Just my mother, my brother, and me. But we’re family, finally, in the way I’d always hoped we could be, supporting, admiring, and loving each other as well as we can. And I don’t think I’m wrong in saying I’ve played a big part in helping us get there. Like any good gardener, I kept showing up and turning the compost– of our history and personalities, strengths and failings, so much back-breaking, emotionally exhausting work, prompting both of them to do their own work in response– until the soil of us became nourishing and alive.

So, I shouldn’t be surprised, having prepared the ground, that new and unexpected life would show up asking to be tended. Like dandelions pushing out of cracks in the pavement, grabbing any bit of fertile soil they can, life mysteriously asserts itself when and where you least expect it.

Last Thursday, to stop beating around the metaphorical bush, my niece flew into Ithaca at midnight with multiple suitcases and, unexpectedly, a cat in a carrier over her shoulder. Her arrival was fourteen hours later than she was originally scheduled to appear due to having missed her original flight. Those fourteen unforeseen hours reminded me of waiting to go into labor– being forced to cede control to something much larger and more powerful, knowing it would change me irrevocably.

She arrived, finally, because she’s moving in with me to finish high school and get her life back on track.

My niece, we’ll call her P, has been having a rough go of it for a while now. But things really went off the rails a year ago when her mom unexpectedly and dramatically died, just as she and my brother, P’s step-father, were in the midst of a divorce. At the end of this tumultuous year, P couldn’t stay where she was and needed a safe place to land. Without hesitation or prompting, much to my surprise, I offered to be that place.

Whatever their failings (or not), my parents raised me to share what I have. So, I’m learning, slowly, how to do that, with mindfulness for the needs of my nervous system. Practice, practice, practice.

My brother would say P doesn’t just need a safe place right now, but “a mother.” I think, with all due respect to his history with her, that’s a load of crap. We barely know each other, P and I, having met less than a handful of times over the years as a result of decades-long emotional and geographic distance between my brother and I. Still, I can tell already that what she needs is practical and emotional guidance, an open-hearted, listening ear, and some steady, consistent love. None of which are dependent on anyone’s gender or genitals.

We live in patriarchy, however, where women primarily offer that kind of care, so here we are.

So far, the complicating factors in all this aren’t anything my niece brings to the table. She’s lovely. Emotionally young, maybe, and a little clueless about how things actually work, but what 18-year old isn’t? Any complications are entirely mine.

I’ve said, and will say again, if I’d understood what having children at all would require of me, I’d never have done it. I wouldn’t have believed myself capable– of the endless labor, but also the necessary psychological and spiritual work to develop emotional skills I had no example or template for. It’s been 23 years now of faith and practice. Practice, practice, and more practice.

Then there’s my family history, growing up at the vanguard of cross-racial adoption in the United States. (P, and both her older sisters, are originally from Kenya.) It’s taken many decades for my mother, brother, and me to learn how to be a loving family. We didn’t love each other well for most of it. Deeply, perhaps, but not well. As a result, and in the face of what I perceived as my parent’s failings raising all of us, I swore I’d never adopt. It seemed like nothing but a recipe for a well-intentioned disaster.

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I’m not adopting P, it’s true. At best, I’m fostering her for a few years until she’s ready to strike out on her own. But the questions remain, regardless. How do I love and nurture someone who is likely nothing like me? How do I listen and see them truly, recognize their gifts and challenges, without projecting myself onto them? How do I hold my center, staying clear on my needs, values, and what I know deep in my bones, while also staying open to challenge and transformation?

And perhaps most important, because if my parents truly failed at anything, it was this: How do I stay humble yet unashamed about all I don’t know and ask for help when I need it?

Maybe these are always the questions at the heart of intimate connection. Maybe these are questions that serve any of us trying to reach across divides to find love, or simply common cause with each other.

I don’t know (so much!). But my instincts tell me these are the questions I need to be asking myself with P, and any answers I find will then reverberate out into how I move through the world. Maybe those answers are what the world needs from me.

Meanwhile, everything’s still on fire. I don’t want to fall prey to the (very White, very privileged) assumption that me doing my best to practice my integrity and love my people well is enough to douse the flames. Systemic change is needed– economically, legally, politically, socially. That change will require collective action, and my obligation to participate doesn’t go away because I chose to take on an enormous familial project.

Wow, does my plate feel full to overflowing, though.

I don’t have any plans to change my publication schedule in the face of all this. It matters too much to me– the conversation, and the learning that the writing requires of me (practice, practice, practice!). But a single body can only do so much. So, if I’m not here, as I wasn’t again last week, I’m probably busy dousing a fire somewhere.

I’m going to try and find some mercy for myself when that happens. I hope you’ll find some mercy for me, too.

I suspect we could all use more mercy these days.

XO, Asha

P.S. Hey! I wasn’t here last week, but I *did* have some (gasp!) fiction that I wrote published in Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe. Check it!

Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

The Heart-Centered Writing Intensive: Class Writing

In January of this year, I taught my first creative writing class through Beyond: The Heart-Centered Writing Intensive. For six weeks, we dove deep into POV, Character Development, Dialogue, Plot, The Sound of Language, Setting, Lists, Objects, and more! As my mom would have said, it did my heart good…

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16 days ago · 34 likes · 38 comments · Jane Ratcliffe

I’m talking about the Ithaca Festival, which occurs every year on the weekend right after Cornell University’s graduation. It’s explicitly, as my youngest and I were discussing with gleeful satisfaction last night, a chance for the townies to reclaim our space for the summer. Or, as I like to say, to really let our freak flags fly.

It all kicks off with the Ithaca Festival Parade, which was last night. Did I hang out a second floor window overlooking the parade route, excitedly yelling commentary that no one asked for? You better believe I did.

”Look! The Montessori kids and SO MANY PARENTS, all playing music and dancing!”

”And now the Unitarians! But where are the ukeleles?!? Maybe that’s the Baptists? Yay, for rainbow umbrellas, though!”

”And now the Baptists! WITHOUT UKELELES! But love that sparkly jumpsuit!”

”I don’t know what Soil Factory is! But I like that thing they’re doing? Which is…A DANCING FLOWER BED?!?”

”PHYSICS BUS!”

”Why is that hippo in a tutu? To get young people to vote, OF COURSE!”

”VOLVO BALLET!! WOOT-WOOT!”

I’m not particularly prone to patriotism, or to enthusiastic affiliation with any institution. But it’s good to be reminded every year as I watch my neighbors be unashamedly silly and proud of their own associations and passions that I really, really love this town.

We have seen so clearly this last year and more, from Chicago to LA, to Portland, and the Twin Cities, what neighboring can look like at its most heroic. What is possible when regular people step up to defend each other. From a distance, it has seemed to offer a powerful experience of belonging. Even at a distance, it has offered me that, and maybe you, too.

But, man, it’s hell on the nervous system, all that terror and hypervigilance.

There will be more of both, unfortunately, before we get to whatever is next. More chances to stand up for our neighbors being terrorized. More chances to be watchful, defiant, and brave.

But allow me to suggest that engaging in your own version of hanging out a second floor window to loudly and sincerely love on your neighbors while they do whatever weird things they do is another way to find belonging. It’s not cool, all this enthusiasm and sincerity, but it feels freakin’ great.

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Does your city/town/neighborhood have an annual parade, street festival, community BBQ, block party, boat race, or 5K? Put your body there. Remember what it feels like to be in proximity to other random people celebrating.

Race if you want to, or dance, or eat. Just wander through, enjoying the spectacle. Cheer if there’s cheering to be done. It doesn’t matter if they’re “your” people you’re cheering for. We’re all each other’s people, if we want to be.

You know who’s not joyful? Authoritarians.

You know who hates a messy, creative, weird gathering of disparate humans enjoying each other in the sunshine? Fascists.

So, my friends, get out there and be your most sincere, messy, weird selves. And cheer on your neighbors doing the same. Be defiantly enthusiastic and deeply uncool.

Sometimes, that’s exactly what the revolution needs.

I’ll see you out there.

XO, Asha

I wasn’t here last week, and I want to tell you why. But first, I have to tell you about Deep Springs College.

Deep Springs is a teeny-tiny experimental college in the California desert, where students work in every aspect of the institution— maintenance, food service, on the campus farm, but also hiring professors, approving curriculum, and serving on the board of trustees. In return, tuition is free. The college was featured in a deeply thoughtful op-ed published in the New York Times this week (gift link), in which the author mused on what is missing from most modern higher education.

If you’ve been here for more than a minute, you know that I live in a college town and my day job is in the study abroad office at the university. This means I’m constantly surrounded by students and, more recently, conversations about the “fate of the American university.” I’ve always felt out of step with the culture of the Ivy League institution where I work. The students are often baffling to me, and sometimes infuriating. So, my interest in the conversation is less about abiding enthusiasm for the institution or the way it caters to students and more about what educational structures might actually work better. Not just to instill knowledge, but to help create the kinds of people who can lead us into a positive future.

Deep Springs seems to be that kind of structure.

The work that Deep Springers do for the college is not, in and of itself, what is missing from higher ed. Plenty of students do work study at mainstream universities without similar effect. The character building the work engenders in individual students isn’t exactly what’s missing, either. What matters, the author argues, is the way everyone contributing creates a culture of collective investment. The student body feels responsible for the institution and the community, both while they’re there and after they’re gone.

In contrast, she writes, mainstream university students are encouraged to approach their educational experience as customers being served by the institution (To be fair, the extreme cost of higher education contributes to this perception. Students and families want to “get what they pay for.”) Any benefit incurred by the student is for them as an individual. Any action in pursuit of ease or efficiency (AI “cheating”, grade inflation, disregard for institutional resources), as long as there is no perceived harm to the individual, is a “victimless” crime and so, fair game. They are there to get the most they can to further their individual goals and dream and then get out.

“We are beginning to see,” she writes, “that a nation of individuals unconstrained by virtue or a sense of communal responsibility has few ways out of collapsing social trust — and the political and economic problems that creates.”

Are universities the only place to address this issue? Not at all, she asserts. But they are a place that vast swaths of young people inhabit when their attitudes and orientation toward life are in flux. Why not look to institutions like Deep Springs and the ten other federally-recognized work colleges, to see how they build a deep sense of collective obligation in the young people that attend them?

Like the author, what I encounter at my university is the opposite of the work college culture. Not just in the individualistic orientation of the students, but also in the push by the institution, students, and parents for as “frictionless” of an experience as possible. Classes can be hard, but nothing else should be. All processes should be as simple as possible, bars for entry should be low, and deadlines should be flexible. Consequences should be limited to non-existent.

Is it any surprise that we graduate students who may be academically accomplished but unable to navigate the world outside the classroom? Who have little to no sense of how to create lasting community to carry them through life’s inevitable difficulties and disruptions? Reading the Deep Springs article, I was reminded of a quote from author Jody Day, from her book Living the Life Unexpected, which is scrawled on a Post-it Note stuck to my desk: “Community is built by doing inconvenient things with inconvenient people at inconvenient times.”

I also came across a story this week from Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher in New Mexico. She described touring the Space Biosphere in Oracle, AZ, an experimental biodome built to show how humans could live in enclosed environments in space. Noticing that all the trees inside were lean and bendy, held up by guy wires attached to the ceiling, she asked why. The scientist leading the tour said the staff had discovered trees “need wind to resist, otherwise they become weak and limp.”

The necessity of friction again. Which brings me around to why I wasn’t here last week.

I wasn’t here because I had the rare chance to see a dear friend of mine from college when she came East to attend her nephew’s graduation. Rare, as in, we communicate digitally every day, have Zoom calls when we can fit it in, but haven’t seen each other in the flesh in more than thirty years.

To explain how momentous seeing her was for me, I could tell you about the modern dance we choreographed together in college that I will never forget. Or describe how we supported each other through our respective divorces and continue to as moms of neurodivergent kids. Or tell you that she’s one of the thirteen people I’ve texted every day since Trump’s second election to preserve my sanity and keep the door to love open.

I could tell you about how she fought Operation Metro Surge along with so many of her neighbors. How proud and often terrified I was all winter.

Or I could describe the whistle she used during the occupation, which she gifted to me as I sat on my hotel bed, and how it made me cry.

But none of that is what I want to tell you about, ultimately. What I want to tell you about Marit is how she calls me on my shit unlike anyone else in my life, and how much it matters.

I’ve written multiple times about how integrity is a social technology. It’s about how we bump up against other people as we try to live our ideals. And sometimes, just speaking for myself, the experience is bumpier than others.

I make mistakes, y’all. Most often flying off the handle and writing things without thinking through their potential impact on people I love. High on my own supply, as they say, of frustration, resentment, or righteousness, I can be thoughtless. Then along comes Marit to burst my bubble and bring me back down to reality where I have to be accountable.

“Honey,” she will message me. “Did you think about how what you wrote might land for folks who are struggling?”

“That hurt my feelings,” she will write. “I know you didn’t mean it to, but it did.”

“That felt harsh. Do we need to check in about something?”

She is unfailingly gentle, but also unrelenting. I can’t get away with being lazy or thoughtless with her. And I won’t lie. There’s a part of me that recoils defensively or wants to retreat in shame whenever she calls me out for screwing up, regardless of how kind she is about it. Because I wasn’t raised to be comfortable with my own imperfections or taught how to engage in constructive conflict. I had to learn that on my own. I’m still learning.

And I’m so grateful for the ways that Marit helps me do that. I owe my ability to practice my integrity with my family and friends in large part to her.

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In a recent podcast conversation with author Rebecca Solnit, host Kelly Hayes talked about the importance of grappling with the reality of our interdependence, which is unavoidable. Yes, we get to have our individual temperaments and quirks, our purpose and personality. Even our goals and accomplishments. But no one ever gets anywhere by themselves. And no one is unaffected by the actions and choices of the people who came before, or the people who surround us now. So, we’re best served by being intentional about who we gather around us and how we engage with them.

“You need to find your people. You need friends. You need co-strugglers. You need to be in relationship with other people,” Hayes says. “And some people get frustrated with that, because they’ve been so hurt or let down by other people that they don’t want to be told to practice interdependence. But what we’re always saying is: You are already interdependent. There is no opting out. You can live a more isolated life while still being entirely dependent on other people, or you can try to become more intentional about that dependence — who you build trust with, who you care for, who you allow yourself to count on, and what kinds of relationships you want your life to be shaped by. It’s never really a question of whether we are going to go it alone, because no matter how much other people have hurt us, our lives are already entangled with theirs.”

By contributing to our communities or engaging with the people we love, we’re choosing how we live out our interdependence. The more explicit we are about what that requires, and the more we build our institutions to teach and support the necessary skills to do it well, the better.

I’ve been sitting here, trying to figure out how to write about what happened in Memphis, TN this week. But I find myself at a loss to find words vast enough to hold my heartbreak. So, instead, let me tell you about my grandmother.

My Grandma Mary was born— maybe in 1911, maybe in 1913, I can never quite remember— in Memphis, Tennessee. When she was small, she and her brother, my Great Uncle George, would play with the sharecropper’s kids on a family farm in Brownsville, right outside Memphis. This is important, not for anything it says about my grandmother, but to remember how recently the worst abuses of Jim Crow were alive and well. Like the sharecropping that was slavery in all but name only two generations back from me.

As an adult, Mary taught third grade in the Memphis public schools, eventually agreeing to teach in one of the first two integrated classrooms in the district. When they asked if she’d be willing, she didn’t hesitate. Children were children in my grandma’s book, and teaching them was her great joy.

Maybe when they asked her she was also thinking of another Mary, a Black woman who occasionally helped my grandma once she went back to working outside the house. That Mary fled to my grandma after she stabbed her abusive husband to death. Grandma convinced her to turn herself in, promising to accompany her to the station and attest to her character. Obviously it was self-defense, my grandma asserted to the police, because she didn’t even use a proper weapon. Yes, she stabbed him so many times, but with a kitchen paring knife!

Who knows if the police simply didn’t care about a Black man dying. Or that for a knife to be considered a deadly weapon it had to be more than three inches long, which Mary’s paring knife was not. Or if, in the end, my grandma walking into that police station with her friend determined they would walk back out together protected Mary. But in the Jim Crow South, where the police would’ve been as likely to target her for trying to help a Black woman as listen to her, my grandma took the chance to do what she knew was right.

Her gamble paid off. They let Mary off and no one said another word about it.

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My grandma was no saint, however. She was human, just like the rest of us, with all the requisite biases and imperfections. Children may have been children in Mary’s book, but family was another thing entirely. When she found out my parents planned to adopt an African child, my oldest brother, Paul, she was pissed.

A devout Southern woman, Mary “said her prayers” for at least an hour every morning. This mostly involved her talking to God like He was sitting right next to her. For awhile after she got the news, though, it wasn’t as much a conversation as a knock-down, drag-out brawl. My grandma railed at God like He was Mary’s abusive husband, What is wrong with you? What were you thinking?!?

God, as the story goes, just let her wear herself out. Then she heard a voice asking, “Whose will, Mary?”

“Not my will, but Thine,” the voice seemed to be reminding her. “Isn’t that what you testify?”

She gave over, as they say, in the face of God’s admonishment. Then she visited my parents in Tanzania, met my brother, and fell deeply in love, remaining my brother’s greatest fan and champion for all the remaining days of her life.

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Would my grandma be protesting the Tennessee legislature’s moves this week in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais to eliminate the only Democratic-led voting district in the state? The district that until just this week encompassed all of Memphis, the second largest Black majority city in the United States, which has now been split across three deep Red districts, diluting the voting power of over half a million Black people?

I don’t know if Mary would have protested. I do know when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers in 1968 she was curious about him and determined to make up her own mind. So, she went to hear him speak and came away deeply impressed— by the weight of his presence, the depth of his faith, and his calls for justice.

I also know when I was about 10 years old, my brother David and I both got sent to my grandma’s one summer. One day late in the visit, David talked me into doing something stupid, then immediately ran to Mary to rat me out.

Grandma found me in the bathroom, crying a river of indignant, heartbroken tears. Quietly she put the lid down on the toilet, sat down, and pulled me onto her lap. Then, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Asha, stop being a jackass. You know your brother is always up to no good. Why would you ever listen to a single word he says?”

Grandma may have been admonished by God, but when I got admonished by her it felt just as powerful. And just as humbling.

I thought of that admonishment when Chief Justice John Roberts, in response to protests over its decision to kill the Voting Rights Act, empowering just the sort of racist power grab currently being enacted by the Tennessee GOP, proclaimed publicly that the Supreme Court is “not part of the political process.”

You know that man is always up to no good, I could hear her saying. Why would you believe a single word he says?

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What am I trying to get at here? Maybe I just want you to know about what’s happening right now in a city that my people come from. A city that carries a significant piece of my currently broken heart.

Maybe I just want to remind myself, and you, that Memphis has always been full of imperfect humans trying to do the right thing. Even when they don’t understand it. Even when their small self says it’s crazy and will never work.

And right now many of those folks are fighting like hell for the integrity of our country and need our help.

What can you do? Spread the word about what’s happening. Follow folks like TN House Representative Justin Pearson and Memphis-native Elizabeth Booker Houston who are deep in the fight. Donate to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has already filed suit against the TN legislature’s gerrymander. Volunteer to be a poll worker in your own district. Those sign-ups are happening around the country right now.

Stay curious. Go to the source and make up your own mind. Stand up for your friends and neighbors.

Grandma Mary and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

XO, Asha

They needed a trained accountant, but they couldn’t afford one, so they got me: a storyteller with a penchant for pattern recognition. (Basic accounting is just reading and interpreting patterns, and some very basic math.)

Most of the owners of the co-op were earnest, idealistic lefties who had never run a business in their lives, and whose eyes tended to glaze over when presented with spreadsheets. Yet, they were supposed to make decisions about budgets and strategic direction, all while keeping in mind a deeper sense of purpose and community obligation than most businesses in capitalism.

My job, on top of actually running a department, was translating numbers into stories for these clueless, well-meaning folks. The stories underneath the numbers helped them understand how things actually worked, what the implications of their choices were, and how to balance their ideals with the often unforgiving realities of being a sizable local employer running a low-margin grocery business.

I discovered I perversely loved writing quarterly and annual reports, helping people understand what was going on so they could make decisions with some integrity. It might have been the only thing I liked about that job, in the end.

I also discovered it’s impossible to act with integrity when you don’t understand what’s going on or how things work. Information by itself isn’t power, but understanding that information absolutely is.

This brings us around to what happened with the Supreme Court this week. SCOTUS ruled along idealistic lines to essentially kill the Voting Rights Act, leaving all of us here in the United States with decisions to make and work to do, hopefully with some integrity.

If you already understand what happened and what it means, you can skip to the “So, what do we do now?” section of this newsletter. For the rest of us, let’s dig in.

The story of the Voting Rights Act

The story of the Voting Rights Act is the story of an African population stolen and sold away from their homelands. Those Africans were then enslaved for hundreds of years and multiple generations, forced to build what is now the United States. Ostensibly, those now American Black folks were freed from enslavement in the wake of the Civil War.

Except, there was no real accountability for the enslavers or their supporters, so there were no reparations or repair. Instead, to replace slavery we got Jim Crow, a system of policies, practices, and laws in the South expressly created to undo the goals of what was called Reconstruction— to integrate previously enslaved folks into civil, economic, and political society.

Jim Crow was whites-only water fountains, lunch counters, and bathrooms. It was Black folks being systematically prevented from owning homes or land, and then required to sit at the back of the bus. It was segregated schools, hospitals, businesses, and neighborhoods. And, most importantly for our story, it was voting restrictions aimed at keeping Black folks from potentially amassing any kind of political power.

For nearly a hundred years, from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until 1965, when the Act was finally signed by Lyndon Johnson, Black folks fought for the right to vote. Throughout that time, but primarily during the middle of the twentieth century, a select few white people joined them. Many, many people died in that fight. People whose names you’ll probably recognize— Martin Luther King Jr. among them— and plenty of people you wouldn’t because they were just regular people. Students, shopkeepers, church-goers, mothers, and farmers who were imprisoned, beaten, hosed, attacked by dogs, and lynched, just for trying to secure Black people’s rights as citizens in the face of white supremacist resistance.

The Voting Rights Act, which created structures to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ensuring that the right to vote not be determined by race, was one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the structures it created was the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting systems submit any changes to election law to the Department of Justice before enactment (Section 5). This was known as “preclearance.” The other key provision (Section 2) was giving individuals the right to sue to “undo existing laws and procedures that would deny equal political opportunity to voters to elect their candidates of choice.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has openly worked to eliminate the Voting Rights Act since he was a clerk at the Court during the Reagan era. And under his leadership the Court has been working to undo the key structures of the Act for well over a decade.

Why? For the same reason Southern politicians created Jim Crow. Because they’re racists who don’t believe they should have to share political power or economic resources equitably with Black and Brown people.

The irony, for working white people anyway, is that when the voting rights of Black and Brown people are protected everyone does better. Schools are better. Roads are better. Overall health improves. Turns out, when you make sure everyone gets to freely choose their leaders, democracy works! Crazy!

But the white supremacist project has never been interested in making democracy work. It has always, ever since the founding, preferred oligarchy. And its leaders have been working systematically since the founding to turn us into one.

This week, with their gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts’ Supreme Court took us one step closer to oligarchy. This is obviously bad for Black and Brown political representation, but it’s also bad for most white people. Because oligarchy isn’t just about race. It’s about privileging race and wealth in the distribution of power. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act will screw poor and working white people, all while the oligarchs feed them illusions of superiority.

But illusions of superiority don’t put food on the table, pay for gas, or educate children well, it turns out. They just pacify people so they don’t demand better.

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So, what do we do now?

There isn’t just one thing to do, unless you count “fight like hell” as a thing. Realistically, though, there are a host of things. The following is a very abbreviated list, essentially of what I plan to do. Maybe you have other things you plan to do. Please (please!) put them in the comments, along with links if you have them, so other folks can join you.

1. Donate to organizations fighting in the courts. Yesterday, I set up a monthly recurring donation to Democracy Forward. You might choose the ACLU, or the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. When the Administration is losing, it’s often in court. So, if you’ve got extra to help democracy win, send it.

2. Register voters and vote, vote, VOTE! It feels like a lifetime ago, but it was only last month that Hungary defeated Viktor Orbán in an electoral landslide, all despite years of systemic gerrymandering and other suppression of dissent. The midterms are the first step in reinstituting some checks and balances, and stemming the tide of encroaching fascism. But only if Democrats control both Houses of Congress, which will specifically require white voters who are left of center to turn out en masse (Black folks are already doing that). Am I an enthusiast for the Democratic Party? No. But I will hold my nose and vote for anyone who I have any potential to lean on to enact change. The DNC is lean-on-able in the near term. The GOP is not.

3. Push to enact comprehensive voting rights legislation. Some folks are calling for Democrats, once they’ve swept the midterms, to push forward the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. I don’t honestly know how that would work now that the VRA has been effectively neutered by SCOTUS, since what that Act does is strengthen the VRA again. Even if it passed with a veto-proof majority, legal challenges would be filed and SCOTUS would support them. It also only legislates against racial gerrymandering, which is far from the only factor undermining the integrity of our electoral process. More comprehensive legislation is needed, and it turns out it exists! In 2019 and 2021, Democrats in the House passed the For the People Act, which tackled racial and partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, voter registration, felony disenfranchisement, Native American voting protections, and government ethics reform. It didn’t pass the Senate because of the filibuster and then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But it could (and should!) be revived, or some equivalent legislation introduced to protect and strengthen (finally!) our electoral democracy. Educate yourself and then start pushing your legislators.

4. Push for Supreme Court reform. Included in the For the People Act is ethics reform for the Supreme Court, which is needed, but not enough. Jamelle Bouie posted an extensive explanation of what Supreme Court reform should and could look like, and it’s way more than just ethics reform or expanding the court. Check it!

5. Share this post! If you’re not talking about what’s happening and helping folks around you to understand the stakes here, please start. As the picture says, democracy is not a spectator sport. It only survives if we engage consistently and loudly.

Okay! That was a long one, but per usual, it’s been a week. I hope this was helpful as you contemplate what you can do to defend democracy. If you have other suggestions or plans, or even questions, please share them! We are a very smart, engaged group of folks and I know someone will have answers.

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XO,

Asha

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My anger has a half-life not unlike radiation. If it diminishes, it’s at such an incremental rate as to appear infinite. At best, it recedes into the background, simmering quietly on the back of my emotional stove. But it requires very little energy or input to pull forward and bring back to a rolling boil.

The world, in recent times, has provided an abundance of input.

And despite years of work to understand it’s not the feeling that is the trouble, it’s what we do with the feeling, some combination of cultural and familial conditioning always leaves me ashamed when I express my anger publicly.

Even if I’m careful. Even if it’s entirely justified. It still feels, as my mother would have said when I was a kid, like I’ve let my ugly out to play.

So, the emotional whiplash in the wake of publishing last week’s newsletter lingered. And the continuing onslaught of news didn’t help at all.

Anger! Shame. Anger! Shame. Back and forth for days.

Then, the most unexpected thing happened. I came home from work to find an envelope wedged in my front door. Inside was an unsigned letter stating the person who’d left it had been meditating on a deck of tarot cards for over a year, and now had started pulling cards to find they signified specific people.

I was one of those people.

My card? The Egyptian goddess Hathor.

A page ripped out of the book describing the deck was also in the envelope. It read:

The Egyptian goddess Hathor encompasses the trifecta of creator, sustainer, and destroyer. As a Great Goddess, she was known for helping women bear children, the dead to be reborn, and the cosmos to be fortified. Initially, Hathor was an angry deity, intent on destruction and driven to fury by human ingratitude. She showed little mercy until the goddess of beer delivered a particularly strong batch of brew. Hathor emerged from her drunken revelry imbued with benevolence.

Being resistant and literal, at this point I thought, I don’t even like beer! But I kept reading.

In her mellowed manifestation, Hathor personifies joy, music, love, fertility, dance, and celebration. Drawing this card is a reminder that celebration is no passive affair. As one of the most joyous doorways into the temple of the beloved, whole-hearted celebration brings you back into true alignment.

Okay, now I was feeling a little called out.

Following her transformational merriment, Hathor promised to release the fertile waters of the Nile, but first she required the most appropriate human response: life-affirming feasting. An ancient prayer to Hathor mentions that her yearly festival revitalized the heart. Celebrants were asked to name five things in life that they would miss if they died at that instant. The fabled five gifts of Hathor, these expressions of gratitude encouraged the Egyptian ideal of ma’at— harmony and balance. Without this acknowledgment, ingratitude could take root, making the soul vulnerable to misery, jealousy, and self-absorption.

[SIGH] And anger, in my case.

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Did I mention this card appeared on the day I was supposed to be hosting a community dinner at my house? A dinner I had postponed because I was so overwhelmed with anger? A dinner, in my recurring shame, that I was still feeling like I didn’t want to host, so sure no one would come.

But here was some Fairy Godmother at my door, poking me to do it anyway.

So, I did. And people came— sharing conversation, laughter, and delicious food.

And my anger receded.

It didn’t go away. It never does. How could it, given the state of the world? But it’s back to bubbling quietly in the background for now.

As for the gratitude? Well, I have so much to be grateful for. All my people are healthy. My son just signed a lease on an apartment just blocks from my house. My daughter safely returned from a trip to Michigan. The cherry tree is budding up in front of my house, and I found an abundance of trout lilies on our land.

I do love me a delicate woodland wildflower.

I don’t want to know who my Fairy Godmother is. I prefer to let her simply be the magic poke I needed to rejigger my insides.

Maybe you could also stand to rearrange yourself?

What would you miss if you died right now? What can you celebrate, even in the face of everything?

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I mentioned the land I share with my son. Thirty-seven wooded acres at the tippy-top of the Appalachians. It’s that time of the month, when I send around a video about our project there to my paying subscribers. If you want to see what’s happening, join us.

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We rarely sit in the mess, which, speaking for myself, is most of life. It’s contradictory, paradoxical, and befuddling. How does all the beauty, horror, mundanity, absurdity, and frustration all fit in one container? I don’t know.

J.K. Rowling can hang by her transphobic ass for all I care, but her idea of a Room of Requirement is gold. With luck and work, our lives expand as necessary to hold all of it. That’s how you know it’s a true picture, if you ask me. Anything less than a jumbled mess is a lie. So, here’s to the mess. It’s honest, at least.

Integrity is a social technology, ultimately. It’s about the moral quality of our interactions and choices as we bump up against each other in community. Which is not to say that our integrity is morally successful to the extent that we’re able to enforce our personal values on other people. Sadly, we don’t get to do that. Or we shouldn’t, though some people seem to be committed to little else.

Often, I wish we could justifiably force our values on other people. Or at least, I could. Because most of the time, really all my life, I’ve felt by trying to live into my values, I’m swimming upstream in this culture. And it’s not like my values and beliefs are so outlandish, either. I believe in equity, justice, and kindness. I believe there’s enough to go around, materially speaking. I believe a system that’s set up to economically (institutionally, socially, politically) privilege a few at the expense of the many is fundamentally unjust as well as bad for everyone, regardless of where they fall on the ladder of privilege. This is true whether the ladder is based on gender, race, immigration status, or any other category.

Which brings me to the core belief at the center of it all for me: there is that of God in everyone. Even the people I disagree with or despise. I resent this part of it, if I’m honest, because it’s so much goddamned work to live into. But despite my resentment, this belief was imprinted on me so early and thoroughly that nothing else makes any sense. I resent that, too.

Whether this belief makes sense, a lot of the time these days I find myself wondering if it’s worth the effort. Why should I be working so hard to find the divine in everyone in a world where there are online rape academies, where women and children are trafficked every day, where online spaces (like this one) unashamedly platform transphobes, Nazis, and violent, unashamed misogynists in pursuit of profit, and where finding a male politician of any party who’s been sexually coercive or violent with women is like shooting a fish in a barrel?

Why am I putting in the effort to practice my integrity and find the divine in others in a world that denies and diminishes my humanity, treats me as disposable, and then tells me I should be grateful for whatever scraps I can eke out of this social, emotional, economic, and political trash heap?

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I read an article this week about the so-called Alpine Divorce, wherein men leave their female partners alone in the wilderness after dragging them there for their own ego aggrandizement, often to get injured or die. I was reminded of the time my ex-husband suggested we go mountain biking, a thing I had never done and professed no aptitude for. “It’s just an old railroad trail,” he assured me. “It’s not like we’ll be on narrow dirt trails through the mountains.”

It was several miles out, then a turnaround, and several miles back. On the way out, I was mostly doing fine until the trail went over an old trestle bridge that had been filled in with large gravel. I didn’t know how to bike over large gravel. It seemed dangerous. So, I got off my bike to walk it across. My ex rolled his eyes at me and swore it was easy, no big deal at all. You just had to go fast enough.

On the way back down, he took off, flying down the trail quickly away from me. I got to the bridge and quailed, but knew by then he was easily a mile in front of me and likely impatient. So, I hit the gravel at high speed and wiped out, digging a ten-foot-long furrow with my body, tearing up my clothes and the side of my leg.

I lay there in the gravel, alone in the middle of nowhere, and couldn’t catch my breath. Eventually, I dragged myself and my bike over to the side of the trail and just sat there, bleeding and trembling.

It took nearly an hour before my ex reappeared. He’d been having so much fun, he said, that he’d gotten all the way to the car before he realized I wasn’t behind him. He asked me with some confusion what happened, and I told him, “I don’t know how to do this. I did what you said to do and totally bit it. But you were long gone, and I didn’t know what else to do. So I’ve just been sitting here, waiting for you to come back.”

Blood was leaking into my shoe, but that was honestly less upsetting than his defensiveness, and then his assertion that I must have done something wrong to get myself hurt so badly. If I’d just done what he told me to, everything would have been fine. Why was I always such a bother?

I should have left him then. I should have left him so many times. But I’d been so well-trained, surrounded by selfish, violent men all my life. Why would I expect my husband to be any different?

Having a man was more important than whether he valued my humanity, safety, desires, or needs. Find the good in him, I was taught. Reach for it. Believe in it. Be an example of kindness and consideration and sacrifice, and eventually he’ll be better. Your love will heal him.

I’m so tired of this shit.

Years ago, I stopped signing up to sacrifice myself for anyone, which is not to say I don’t extend myself for people. I go all out for my kids and my friends. I show up for my community. But I won’t do myself damage for anyone anymore. And I refuse to believe the extent to which I’m willing to damage myself, particularly for a grown-ass man, says something positive about my worth.

The problem is, this culture persists in telling me— most of us, really— that our value is tied to our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for the powerful. That our only utility is as grease for the wheels of supremacy. Otherwise, we don’t matter. Our health and safety, our very survival, don’t matter.

I’m so tired of proclaiming I matter. That my trans son and daughter matter. That my poor, Black, Brown, disabled, queer, and immigrant neighbors matter. That people on the other side of the globe I will never meet, but whose destinies are still tied up with mine, MATTER. While these assholes proclaim the exact opposite, acting selfish, violent, oppressive, exploitative, and corrupt with impunity.

The anger and despair is so heavy, y’all. Sometimes I can’t stay upright.

Meanwhile, I was driving through the neighborhood this morning. It had rained overnight and the air was heavy with the redolence of the tulip poplars. I pulled up to a stop sign next to a guy standing with his dog, clearly out for their morning constitutional. The guy was wearing camo shorts and baseball cap, and a Marine Corp Semper Fi sweatshirt. His belly stuck out over his belt, and he was desperately in need of a shave. The stereotypical Western New York redneck, in other words.

His dog, though? It was the most demented looking little chihuahua, just standing there, staring into space with its head cocked to the side, while the guy gazed down at it with tired resignation. The incongruity made me laugh out loud with unexpected delight.

When he’s not out in the early morning hours trailing along behind a demented chihuahua, is that guy an asshole? Does he beat his wife or yell at his kids? Does he hate gays, shout slurs at trans folks out of the window of his truck, support ICE, and vote for Trump?

Maybe. And maybe not. My soul can’t afford to walk through the world assuming he’s a danger to me and mine. But I also can’t afford to be surprised if that proves to be the case. So, I’m stuck in the middle, my heart cautiously open, which doesn’t quite work. It’s paradoxical and stuttering. It hurts.

I’m not sure there’s any remedy for it, though. I wish there was.

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Thanks, friends. Truly, you make my heart glad.

XO, Asha

You’re walking with thirteen-year-old me, if you’re coming, and a friend of mine— also thirteen, also redheaded. We’re all walking along a verdant stretch of the Appalachian Trail in Middle Virginia. The green of the encroaching forest is so vivid it almost vibrates, though it might be the soupy humidity causing the air to wobble and shimmer.

High summer in Virginia is like being baked in a steam oven. It’s a great environment for bread, less good for people, but we have nothing to compare it to at this point. This is just what summer is for us— getting dropped off at a trailhead with a group of other dirty kids our age, leveraging our massive packs onto our backs, and then walking. Miles and hours and days of walking.

This particular stretch of trail doesn’t offer much in the way of fresh water, so we’re both carrying at least a gallon, maybe two. If it’s one gallon, that’s eight pounds of weight on top of our portion of the group’s food, our personal gear, and, if it’s our turn, a tarp large enough to keep the rain off all of us at night. If it’s two? You can do the math.

We are proud of our ability to bust hump, as we used to say, staggering under the weight of our packs every time we put them on, but secretly relishing the effort. What it requires of us, and what it says about us, that we can do this difficult thing.

Badass is what it says.

This particular stretch of trail may be lacking in water, but it makes up for it in rocks. The narrow stretch of unforested ground we’re winding along is littered with stones ranging in size from softball to soccer ball, all crammed up against each other. It’s nearly impossible to take a step without turning an ankle, or at the very least, stumbling, rushing precariously forward until we steady ourselves again.

Every time one of us stumbles, the other one mumbles, “You okay?” The stumbler responds automatically, “I’m fine.” This goes on for so long as we snake through the moist forest, the query eventually shortens to simply, “Okay?” The response becomes just, “Fine.”

A few more hours, and we stop even asking. Not because we’re too tired to care anymore. We just know what the other one is thinking. “Fine!” we declare into the silence as we find our footing again.

This memory of burden, effort, and companionship came crashing back in this week, and I’ve been trying to ferret out why. What about it fixes my attention? What connects that moment to this?

Ten minutes after I saw the news that President Trump blinked on Tuesday night, choosing not to make good on his threat to annihilate an entire civilization, I was on a video call with a dear friend. I’d been crying pretty steadily at that point, overwhelmed with both relief and fury. She’d just finished her work day and hadn’t heard. When I told her, she bowed her head, holding it like a too-heavy thing. Her forehead filled the screen.

We grunted and groaned, just like that long-ago friend and I did when dropping our packs at the end of that endless day. No need to ask the question.

“Fine!” we declared wearily. Except this time, the actual words were, “Thank god!” and “Fuck!”

By the time I found myself stumbling along the Appalachian Trail at thirteen, I’d been worrying about the potential of nuclear war for a few years already. Marching past the Fall-out Shelter signs in my elementary school, singing and dancing in a production of a children’s musical about nuclear disarmament, the threat seemed ever-present.

All day on Monday and Tuesday of this week, I felt decades of accumulated worry weighing me down like water, gallons and gallons of it. I’m not thirteen, badass, and spry anymore, though. It hurt, that weight.

But the relief, laying it down, was the same as all those years ago. And so was my gratitude to be doing it in the company of one of my fierce women. I wouldn’t have survived the weight of all the intervening years between those years and these without the constant company of fierce women.

Maybe that’s why that long-ago, stumbling hike has been so front of mind the last few days. I needed to remember that I’ve always managed to do the hardest things by keeping company with fierce women.

Now, though, we’re all walking each other through these times. So, in the absence of physical presence to assure me you know I’m listening, regardless of gender, I have to ask the question explicitly:

You okay?

Seriously, are you alright, my friends? Are you eating real food, sleeping as well as you are able, and discharging stress from your body? Do you know how to discharge stress from your body?

Movement works— walking, running, dancing, stretching, jumping about— as my fierce friend reminded me on Tuesday night. In a pinch, a little bout of hand shaking will get you from one moment to the next. Singing works, too. Turn up the music really loud if you need accompaniment. Deep breathing helps (in for four, hold for four, out for eight, as many times as you need to). Orgasms work remarkably well, in my experience (and don’t require company).

Crying is sometimes the best, and only appropriate method. Real crocodile tears, if you can manage it.

I queried my folks about their favorite movies for having a good cry, because sometimes we need help to get started, we’re so pent up in order to survive. I suggested movies about underdogs triumphing as a theme, since those movies always make me cry. Their accumulated list, in case you need it: Mighty Ducks, Cool Runnings, McFarland, USA, Miracle, Bad News Bears, Breaking Away, Rudy, Remember the Titans, The Cutting Edge, Slapshot, Money Ball, Brittany Runs a Marathon, Hoosiers, Dream Horse, We Are Marshall, Invictus, Seabiscuit, And Me Before You, and A League of Their Own. And just for straight-up crying: Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, Running on Empty, Lady Jane, and Biko.

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I wrote to one of my fierce women after our Abuser-in-Chief inflicted his latest emotional rollercoaster upon the world, I don’t know how we’re supposed to survive three more years of this.

But what other choices do we have? Give up? Tune out? Hide our heads and hope we’re not the next on their list?

That does seem to be what they all want, to break us all, however that may express itself. And in response, I have to heave a tremulous, very tired, but resolute NO.

With my fierce women at my back, I say no. With me, and all of the rest of us, at your back, I hope you say no.

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Take care of yourselves, my friends. Take care of your bodies. Take care of your spirits. Take care of your loved ones, and let them take care of you.

This trail will not break us as long as we keep each other good company.

Much love to you,

Asha

Reports state this was the biggest No Kings yet, and the biggest mass protest since the first Earth Day in 1970. For sure, we had a huge turnout here in Ithaca. At least 3,000 people by all accounts, which is more than 8 percent of the population of our city. Amazing! So, why did I leave so uninspired and vaguely disheartened?

Probably because that’s sort of how it is these days, for me and everyone I know. We’re trudging along and enduring— the last, stubborn dregs of winter, but also authoritarianism and a slowly tanking economy. Did I hope that No Kings would somehow, miraculously, ignite a feeling of spring in my heart? That organizers would swoop in to direct all those millions of people, out of the blue, onto the political ramparts where we could fight triumphantly? That I would feel like we were winning on a bleak Saturday waving at traffic next to a strip mall?

I’ll confess, I did. I wanted someone else to do something, or tell us what to do to fix all of this, or at least help me feel some glimmer of confidence that we’re getting somewhere. I wanted to feel like a part of something inevitable.

So, the next day, when the critiques of No Kings started popping up online, I headed towards them, expecting to see my disappointment validated. And I did find some validation there, of my desire for more direct action, at least. But I also encountered something that set all my alarm bells off. Contempt. Contempt for the organizers and participants, for anyone new to either of those roles, for anyone deemed liberal and complicit. It oozed out of every word.

Can we talk about contempt, friends? Toxic is a description that’s so overused at this point it’s almost meaningless, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it. By definition, contempt is a feeling of disdain, disrespect, or scorn for someone or something deemed worthless. It’s a tool of othering and disempowerment. Contempt is used by people already in power to justify why they should have power over others, but it’s also used by those desperate for power to feel some semblance of it in comparison to others.

Contempt is classified as a “moral emotion” because it can function as a way for members of a society to designate good behavior from bad, right from reprehensible. But often as not, the contemptuous person is subjecting the object of their contempt to an interpersonal standard that they have decided is important. “You aren’t behaving the way I think you should,” in other words.

Contempt is hell to be on the receiving end of, but it’s also hell on the contemptuous, speaking from experience. It leaves the contemptuous lonely and literally sick. I defaulted to contempt a lot in my marriage, though I wouldn’t have named it such at the time. I would have said I was just defending myself from being consistently devalued and disrespected, which was essential to maintaining my integrity. It felt righteous, which should have sent my alarm bells ringing, but didn’t.

Did my contempt cause my divorce? Not by itself, it didn’t. But it sure contributed. How could it not? Contempt is othering. It’s separating and distancing, which is the opposite of intimacy and connection.

In activist communities, contempt often functions through “calling out” others for their lack of ideological purity or commitment. It’s framed as critique, which is necessary and useful in any community, but then veers towards judgment, insults, and personal attacks. “Did anyone know any of these people a year ago?” a local activist sneered about local organizers in the wake of the latest No Kings, implying they were insufficiently committed and undeserving of leadership.

The goal with a statement like that isn’t to bring people together. It’s not asking reasonable questions about whether current organizers are responding to the opportunity provided by their reach in the community to mobilize effectively. It’s not making concrete suggestions of how or where to focus energy, resources, and time that might be more effective. It’s simply implying, not so subtly, they aren’t of us.

Contempt is everywhere in our political world right now. The current administration, and the GOP that enables them, are unified in their contempt for women, for immigrants, for poor people and queer people. But plenty of people on the political left barter in contempt as well. Friend of the newsletter, author Garrett Bucks, offered an analysis of the contempt at the heart of both Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emmanuel’s burgeoning campaigns for the presidential nomination just this week.

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Man, get a load of these jabronis

Right now, somewhere in America, the most unnervingly ambitious men on the planet are jockeying to be the next President of the United States. There they are, in South Carolina, or New Hampshire, or on their own podcast, or pretending to enjoy fried fish in the vicinity of Iowans. Every week, like clockwork, new profiles of these men emerge in high prof…

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3 months ago · 78 likes · 38 comments · Garrett Bucks

Both Newsom and Emmanuel are building their political brand on their ability to “tell it like it is”, both about Democratic voters, who they deem too “woke” and unrealistic about what it takes to win elections, and the GOP, who they are determined to not just defeat, but decimate with their uberMensch, tough guy faux-populism. But that populism is built on the same willingness to throw the marginalized under the bus that the GOP does so gleefully, so how is that changing anything?

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So, what do we do to combat contempt? I don’t think we can do much to change other people’s behavior. But we can name it and refuse to justify it. (We need someone who’s going to fight! So, he’s a little aggressive and seems to actually enjoy pitching insults. So, he indulges in the occasional slur and encourages some people to stay at the back of the bus. They’re still on the bus.)

We can push back anytime anyone tries to shut down dialog or connection, insisting that they know the right thing to do or path to take, and the rest of you dummies should just shut up and listen, dammit.

This doesn’t mean being closed to critique, or not listening to the voices of those who are more experienced or impacted. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to manage our own defensiveness or lack of knowledge and experience, and stay open to loving correction. But you can also trust your gut. If someone seems like a bully to you, they probably are.

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Where we can have a real impact, though, is in confronting our own contempt, in our personal relationships and in community. Anytime we feel righteous, we can pay attention. Righteousness is a near-enemy of integrity, one of those subtle ways in which we undermine the very virtue we’re endeavoring to practice.

We can pay attention to where we feel devalued or disrespected. Instead of responding in kind, as satisfying in the moment as that might be, we can name our experience. We can ask for what we need, hold our center, and insist on dignity and respect for everybody. And if we find that we have claimed a seat at a table where dignity and respect are no longer being served, we can get up and go.

Find another table. There are plenty to choose from, and lots of work to do.

No one is required to endure contempt, disrespect, or abuse— for the good of the children, the community, or the cause. That’s not how we build the world we all deserve.

XO,

Asha

Ever since I read that, I’ve been reflecting on the many days, weeks, months, and years in which defiant refusal to give up or let them win— “them” sometimes being more removed or amorphous (this administration, that political party, men generally) and sometimes being very specific (my abusive brother, my sexist boss, my shitty ex-husband)— felt like the only thing that was getting me through the day.

Sometimes my defiance is fierce and dramatic. Sometimes it’s quieter and more dogged. It’s leaning into the storm of chaos and cruelty and bad news and simply placing one foot in front of the other. If I’m still upright at the end, then I win.

So, this week I thought I might share some things that have been keeping me upright recently. Perhaps they’ll help you stay upright, too.

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A masterclass on loving where you are

Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib loves his hometown, Columbus, OH. He loves the people. He loves the local shops. He loves his neighbors. He loves his friends and their kids. He’s a Macarthur Genius Fellow and could live anywhere. But he stays in Columbus because that’s where he makes sense to himself, even as his wide-ranging thoughts take him everywhere.

Now, when we are relearning the art of neighborliness, and how loving the people we can touch in real time as well as we possibly can is the best antidote to fascism and despair, Hanif is a great teacher.

If you prefer to just listen or read the transcript, you can do that here, on the NPR website.

Otters!

We love otters in our house. They’re apex predators, it’s true. You absolutely should not get close to an otter because they will mess you up. But they’re also playful and tender with their babies (Have you seen an otter mom with her baby on her belly, just floating around??), and an absolutely essential part of many freshwater ecosystems.

Pollution and human encroachment had all but wiped out the native otter population throughout the Great Lakes region where I live. But various groups have been working for years to reintroduce and protect them, while simultaneously others have been working to clean up the water they swim in. And it’s working!

I found out this week that there are otters in the inlet headed down to the lake just blocks away from my house. And there might be otters in the marsh across the road from our land outside of town. All because people I’ll likely never meet or know kept working steadily, with no promise of success, to make what is now the present the future.

That’s how most change happens, y’all.

You can walk all the way around!

If you’ve been here for more than a minute, you’ll know that I’m something of an Anglophile. What can I say? I was raised on Monty Python and All Creatures Great and Small (and Benny Hill, because my dad was ridiculous). I’m also an avid walker and hiker. The perfect vacation, to my mind, is going somewhere beautiful to walk about, preferably where there’s a lot of open country and not so many people.

So, my imagination was completely ignited by finding out that last week King Charles III officially opened the England Coast Path, a system of interconnected coastal pathways that will allow you to walk all the way around the coast of England and Wales (over 2,600 miles). Eventually, they’ll connect up similar pathways around the coast of Scotland, which will mean over 9,000 miles of trail.

Does the whole idea of monarchy fly in the face of democracy, which I believe in with my whole heart? Yes! Has King Charles done remarkable work to protect the environment in the UK? Also, yes.

Will I ever walk all the way around the UK? Probably not! But I could by the end of this year. Anything is possible.

The Beginning Comes After the End

I am unashamedly a huge fan of Rebecca Solnit, as you can probably tell. I’m also a fan of political writer and commentator Anand Giridharadas. I featured his book The Persuaders: At the Front Line of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, which is still worth reading, here in the newsletter way back in December 2022.

The two engaged in an enlivening public conversation, in part about Solnit’s most recent book, at the Brooklyn Public Library earlier this week. Like the folks who worked so hard for years to bring otters back to the Great Lakes region, Solnit has been pushing for progressive social change for over forty years and maintains a longer view of how it works.

Unlike centrists, Solnit advocates for swinging for the fences when it comes to what we demand from our leaders. But she also reminds us over and over that any change that comes in response to those demands both matters and accumulates. In contrast, anyone who thinks victory only counts if it’s quick and total is setting themselves up for failure, and isn’t a good student of history.

We lean into the storm and keep going. As long as we’re breathing and showing up, it’s not over. The future isn’t known. Anything is possible.

That’s enough for today, friends. I hope you’re making a plan to come out for a No Kings protest tomorrow, March 28th, wherever you are. I’ll be out here in Ithaca. My mom, who’s 85 years old, is planning to walk up to the rally in her neighborhood park in D.C. with her sign and walker. (I come by all that I am honestly, as they say.)

Single day protests aren’t a landing pad, but they can be a launching pad, a place to make connections and collect information about how and where to keep working. I’d love to see what your local No Kings protest looks like (send pics as a reply to this email!) and hear how you plan to continue showing up after.

What comes after is what will save us. We will save us.

Much love to you,

Asha

When I first started writing publicly about the violence and abuse I experienced in my childhood, I did it mostly on social media. It was 2008, 2009, and I had, at most, a few hundred online friends scattered all over the globe— mostly old college buddies, other local moms and farmers, and summer camp friends.

There were also a handful of my parents’ friends and contemporaries who’d managed to embrace this new, online reality. After I would publish something about my childhood, I started getting private messages from this last group of folks. They offered support for my writing, never stepped in to question or deny anything I was describing, but seemed to want some dispensation by offering soft, vaguely regretful apologies, all to the tune of, “We always knew something serious was going on, but we just didn’t know what to say.”

I mostly ignored these mea culpas, because I couldn’t offer them absolution. Also, because the only honest response I could conceive of was, “Right. So, you left me, a child, to get abused because you were uncomfortable?”

I started to pull away from Quakerism in my twenties because of deep ambivalence about pacifism, combined with the feeling there was no one in my faith community who could help me wrestle honestly with my constant, overwhelming rage. In response, my mother insisted my problem wasn’t pacifism, or even Quakerism, it was Quakers.

“Lots of Quakers call themselves pacifists, Asha, but they’re just conflict avoidant. It’s not the same thing. Keep it straight,” she argued, hoping, I think, to convince me to stay. She was right. But that didn’t change the fundamental problem of trying to find some healing for my wounds in a community without basic first aid training.

Back in the day, our family wasn’t the only one who activated the conflict avoidance so endemic to our progressive faith community. I didn’t know that as a kid, though. Only as an adult, while reconnecting with another woman who grew up in our Meeting, did I find out that her father had been a pedophile. This was known, she said, by people in the Meeting.

I don’t know if her father sexually abused his older daughter, or if he was just an angry, controlling prick who drove her to leave home as soon as she graduated high school. But I heard from his younger daughter that he abused her best friend, another peer of mine in Meeting. Steps were taken to keep him from ever being alone with the children of the Meeting after that, but no charges were filed. No public community reckoning was engaged in. His behavior was just quietly swept under the rug. And when his Type 2 diabetes confined him to a wheelchair, making it difficult for him to get in and out of Meeting spaces, the community seemed to simply heave a quiet sigh of relief for not having to deal with him anymore, leaving his wife to care for him largely alone.

He died, in the slow, brutal way that diabetes can inflict, and then, some years later, his wife committed suicide.

All of this to say, when the New York Times broke the news this week (gift link) that the charismatic leader of the United Farmworkers union, Cesar Chavez, a revered figure on the political left, sexually abused multiple women and girls, including his co-founder Dolores Huerta, I was sad to hear, but not at all surprised. Progressivism has never been a protection against predation.

Patriarchy, a social system that hands men the right to define women’s value as less than theirs and entitles them to women and girl’s bodies and labor, is alive and well. Even in the hearts and minds of men who’ll swear to their graves they are feminists. Even in the hearts and minds of the women who defend and protect them.

Working in and around movement and progressive social circles all my life has never protected me from male entitlement or aggression. It only compounded the feeling of betrayal when it happened. It’s one thing to be subjected to harassment or abuse by a man who’ll unashamedly tell you to your face that in his estimation you’re not worth shit. It’s another to be treated like you’re not worth shit by a guy who everyone around you, including the guy himself, swears is one of the good ones. A really nice guy. A leader. A great light in the community. So, what’s your problem?

The gaslighting inherent in the experience is crazy-making. Which, of course, is what patriarchy wants, for everyone to think women are crazy. Delusional. Not to be trusted. Better to sacrifice yourself for movement (or family, or community) than subject yourself to those accusations. Dolores Huerta told the Times that she didn’t report Chavez’s behavior because she was protective of the movement, which was being actively targeted by the government, but also because she didn’t think anyone in union circles would believe her. Describing the movement context in which Chavez’s predation occurred, she “framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing.”

In the wake of the Chavez revelations, progressive writer Rebecca Solnit has noted the cult of personality that allows for this kind of predation to occur largely unchecked. Whether on the right, the left, or straight down the middle, we are always looking for a savior, one lone, charismatic hero who will lead us and tell us what to do. And if we think we’ve found him we’ll ignore or forgive all manner of depredation. This is the entire reason for the rise of Donald Trump. But on the political left, she argues, it’s ultimately the collective who actually make lasting change— doing the unglamorous, daily work of community organizing and care, providing the ballast that keeps the ship on a steady course.

This is true, important to remember, and definitely the framing Dolores Huerta is seeking to advance in the wake of these revelations. “The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she declared in her full statement. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”

In the wake of these revelations, there’s another piece that’s important to lift up, though, and that’s the necessary work of repentance and repair. This isn’t work we’re good at in our culture. Individualism, Protestantism, and capitalism all conspire to encourage us to skip over accountability and repair when harm is done, instead leaning hard on individual victims to “forgive”, “move on”, “let it go”, or “think of the greater good.” This allows us to move swiftly past any harm that occurs, while simultaneously telling ourselves that each incident is isolated rather than systemic.

This tactic doesn’t protect victims or prevent future harm. It simply protects existing systemic distributions of power.

Individuals, families, communities, movements, and societies, however, can’t fully practice integrity without the work of naming and owning harm, offering apologies, accepting consequences, and seeking transformation. Is this deeply uncomfortable work? Yes. Is it non-negotiable? Also, yes.

Integrity is relational. It’s about the moral quality of our choices as we bump up against each other in the process of becoming ourselves, both individually and collectively. Our ability to honestly confront the harm we inflict, suffer, and witness as we stumble along is essential to being positive moral agents in the world.

We are never going to create a future in which no harm occurs. But if we want to create a future in which the lasting effects of harm on victims are lessened, perpetrators are held to account and given the opportunity for true redemption, and our movements, communities, and societies are not constantly at risk of shattering under the weight of unresolved trauma, learning the skills of repentance and repair are essential.

A good guide to begin this learning is Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. In it, Rabbi Ruttenberg lays out the five concrete steps of true repentance. She then applies those steps to a wide variety of arenas where we commit harm— in families, intimate partnerships, communities, institutions, and nations— to show how each step works, and where the most common pitfalls are. I consider it mandatory reading for anyone who cares about community, justice, or practicing integrity.

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According to its official statement, in the wake of the Chavez revelations the UFW has committed to a formalized process of repentance and repair. May it bring all the victims, and that movement community, both healing and transformation.

And may it provide all of us with a successful model for how accountability, repentance, reparations, and repair can happen. We are in sore need of it.

In love and rage,

Asha

It was a surreal moment.

War, for Americans, is often surreal in this way. Except for 9/11, we have been largely exempt since the Civil War from experiencing the horrors that we visit on other countries with increasing regularity. Even then we sometimes treated violence and war like entertainment. Families, along with politicians and journalists, came out to the edge the first battle, at Bull Run, to have picnics and watch the fighting.

Well into the 20th century, families also often came out to watch lynchings in the South. When I witness white folks getting in their feelings about discussions of racism, I always think, How would you respond if your family was only a generation or two from having your willful slaughter treated like a family fun day at the park?

I have to believe it is this desensitization to violence and distancing from the realities of war which allowed us to hand away our civil liberties via the Patriot Act so blithely after 9/11. That allowed us to authorize the reorganizing of immigration enforcement under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of I.C.E. That inspired so many politicians (all except the courageous Barbara Lee) to believe George W. Bush’s lies about WMD’s and authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

The impunity that President Trump is claiming for himself to bomb Iran and Venezuela, to potentially attempt to overthrow Cuba, didn’t just come out of nowhere. Not only is Trump a monster of our own making, he has taken our removal from the realities of war to their utmost and inevitable conclusion.

None of the harm or destruction or slaughter has anything to do with us. It’s over there. It’s for those people to deal with.

At the same time, we’ve never been more inundated with real-time views into the demolition and carnage. If you look at Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, you can watch the whole thing play out in the palm of your hand 24 hours a day. Maybe our animal brains and hearts aren’t built to process the realities of war halfway around the world, but we’re not built to watch it in 2-5 minute increments all day long either.

If, like me, you feel like you’re whole system shuts down in the face of those options, it makes sense. Violence is visceral and very human, but we’ve excised our direct human experience of it to such a degree that we’ve dehumanized both our victims and ourselves. Who doesn’t numb out reflexively under the weight of it?

So, what to do?

What I do is avoid the video rendering of war as much as I can. I track the headlines and dive deep to read sources I trust (and some I only trust a little. Hello, New York Times.) on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. Then I step away to actually do something in real time.

I don’t just consume and consume, growing ever more bloated with horror, outrage, and panic. I let the information move through me and out via my hands and voice.

I call my representatives in Congress. I email them when calling feels overwhelming or not possible. And I take steps to effect my own community in concrete ways.

This week I went to a city council meeting. My goal was two-fold— to support efforts to eliminate Flock surveillance cameras from our city, and to defend the rights of artists contracted by our local public art project to install a mural on city property. Their contracted task was to honor the Underground Railroad. They chose to connect that historical liberation struggle to the present day, featuring a call to free Gaza at the side of the mural.

Some members of our city council asserted they’d violated the contract. They wanted the message to free Gaza painted over.

In defense of the work, one of the artists talked about being the Black father of two young girls, of his pain in witnessing so many children just like his own being slaughtered in Gaza. He described how he could not, in good conscience, sanitize his art and leave the need for liberation comfortably in our past. He had to bring it into now, into today, into here.

Some community members rejected his call for us to sit with our discomfort and complicity in the slaughter of children. They insisted it made them feel unsafe, as if they themselves were being attacked. They got in the face of another one of the artists after she spoke. They insisted she was lying about the slaughter of innocents by the Israeli state.

Only people safely removed from the realities of war can say such things, can demand to be protected from any reminder of the deaths of tens of thousands.

Luckily, the effort to silence the artists didn’t succeed. The mural won’t be painted over. Our public art project will also, for the fourth year in a row, support projects celebrating the vibrancy of our Jewish community and neighbors. Because we don’t wish to exclusively assign villainy to anyone.

This was what I could do this week to push back against war and paralysis. It didn’t fix everything, didn’t even touch the war in Iran. But that doesn’t remove my obligation to keep going and do what I can. As the Talmud states, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Sometimes, it’s true, what I choose to do ends up missing the moment in some way. During the first Trump administration, in the face of travel bans and family separations, I worried that we would need an Underground Railroad again, this time for undocumented immigrants. So, I welcomed an undocumented single mom and her son to move in with us, rent-free. They stayed for almost two years.

My fear didn’t materialize then, but it has now. Immigrants are hiding and being hidden from our government as we speak.

Being eight years early doesn’t make what I did wasted effort, though. That mom is now happily married to a U.S. citizen with legal status. Her son is in college, gets straight A’s, and plays in marching band. And my kids and I had a part in their story. How could that be any less than a triumph?

So, how are you holding up, my friends? Are you feeling numb or paralyzed in the face of it all? Are you managing to push back against this endless wave of war and chaos? Maybe one on one day and then the other, back and forth?

Tell me how you are.

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Sending so much love,

Asha

In the end, I found myself hopeful. I pointed to leaders coming up now who clearly are walking in the path Jesse paved for them. These leaders are going to take all of us, I believe, much further than Jesse ever could have, due as much to generational failings as his personal ones.

The leaders I pointed to who made me feel so hopeful are men. I wrote that they were showing us what was changing culturally regarding masculinity and male leadership.

And then the world continued to happen. Director of the FBI Kash Patel flew to Italy on the taxpayer dime to party with the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey team after they won gold— chugging beer, mugging for the camera like a WWE wrestler, and screaming like a frat boy. Then he called the President, who proceeded to insult the gold medal-winning Women’s team. That same President, it turns out (to no one’s surprise who believes survivors), likely sexually molested two different 13-year-old girls, a fact known by the FBI prior to him leaving the office the first time, and hidden by his Department of Justice after he was elected the second.

All of which left me feeling like a bit of a chump, spouting off about hopefulness around masculinity and male leadership. Really, Asha? You say you’re skeptical about people, but have you met men, like, specifically? Hopelessly naive is a better description.

As my complicated father used to say, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Meanwhile, as every male leader I could see casting my gaze out over the world seemed to be trying to win a gold medal in misogyny, I fell down a rabbit hole listening to the Wild Card podcast. I already shared one episode—an interview with author and poet Jason Reynolds—last week.

The podcast offers long-form interviews centered around a card game. Each card contains a different open-ended, philosophical question, and the guests pick cards at random to answer extemporaneously.

If you know me or have been paying attention here for more than a minute, you can imagine that this scenario is basically Asha catnip. I could listen to it all day long. Famous people, not-famous people, my best friend, the checkout person at the grocery store— I would happily listen to almost anyone openheartedly answer these questions.

As the world, and certainly its men, seemed to be conspiring to spin me up like a Tasmanian Rage Devil, the question that really gave me pause, though, was this one:

Has your understanding of what it means to be a good person changed over time?

Huh.

It has. I used to think that “being good” meant playing by the rules. Doing what would make the adults in my life happy. Being nice. Peaceful. Accommodating. Not causing anyone any trouble.

Being good only existed in contrast to being bad. Being bad meant being naughty, dishonest. Mean. Greedy. As my mother used to say, “ugly on the inside.”

Being bad caused work, trouble, and suffering for other people. Assuming you got caught, of course. You could be bad for a long time without getting caught, but, Woah, boy, once you got caught?!? Then you were officially, doubly, undeniably bad.

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Which begs another question: has any rigid binary ever served anyone?

Maybe folks who are invested in social control and weaponizing people’s humanity against them. People with heavy-duty shame triggers. People clinging to simple categories to keep from drowning in the chaos. Ultimately, though, they do more harm than anything else, putting us at war with ourselves and others, perpetuating a subtle, soul-deadening violence.

I don’t know if my definition of being good changed over time. Maybe it expanded. Or maybe I just became uninterested in being good and more interested in being whole. Working on being whole, which means acknowledging all the parts of myself, including all the shitty, selfish, violent, judgmental, angry parts, has led me to be more open to the idea that other people are whole, too. They’re also all the things— kind and cruel, generous and miserly, violent and judgmental, loving and playful, and on, and on.

Maybe being good for me is ceasing to be shocked when people are horrible, or I am. Which puts me in a better position to actually deal constructively with that reality.

The trouble isn’t that some people are bad. The trouble is that some people are unaccountable. Men, often, but also rich folks, bosses, white people— anyone who holds power in a hierarchical system seems to protect their power through lack of accountability. But when anyone lives in a world where there are little to no consequences, they become monstrous.

I’m not looking for everyone to be good all the time, whatever that may mean. I’m looking for people, groups, and institutions to be accountable. Accountability should be universal, because goodness isn’t. How could it be?

Universal accountability would take care of so many of the problems we are plagued with at the moment. And if hope is more of an action than a feeling, it would be a hopeful act.

On a totally separate note, it’s been a month since my last video check-in at my land. It’s really snowy out there! But also gorgeous.

I’m offering monthly video check-ins on our development project to my paying subscribers. If you’d like to share in the process as my son and I build out our homes and community on 37 wooded acres at the northern tip of the Appalachians, join us!

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I didn’t expect to be so struck by Jesse’s passing, but I was. Partly due to his particular combination of presence and ubiquity. An absolute lion of a man, he stood at the forefront of movements for social change my entire life. He told me I was somebody on Sesame Street when I was still in single digits. His first run for president came when I was twelve. His second, followed by a bid for the vice-presidency, during which he became the first politician to name queer folks as part of the quilt of our country, came when I was sixteen.

He was there when Bill Clinton was elected when I was in college. He was there when we invaded Iraq in 2003. I was a new mother, a million miles away from movement, but I knew Jesse was there and would speak truth to power as he always did. When Barack Obama was first elected in 2007, Jesse was there, too. We both wept that night. And were, perhaps, similarly disappointed in the end.

And just a handful of years ago, a local choir I sang with performed at Carnegie Hall. Standing on the back row, I gazed out onto the audience and gasped. “Is that Jesse Jackson??” And it WAS. Singing spirituals for Jesse was one of the great privileges of my life. Because he was great, as in massive— in his impact on this country, and on every justice struggle I have ever, and will ever, participate in all the days of my life.

I’m realizing his death also struck me so hard on a very personal level, because he was born in 1941, the same year as both my parents. Like Jesse, my folks also came up in the Church, dedicated their lives to civil rights, social betterment, and the kind of service leadership that is the best of what Christianity has to offer. And when I read Jesse’s obituary in the New York Times (gift link)— a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a deeply complicated and noble man— it struck me that they shared that dichotomy as well.

In my eulogy for my father I wrote, “My father was a big man. He had a big body, a big voice, a big heart, a big Spirit, a big ego, and big wounds ( I come by all that I am honestly, as they say). He was beautiful and horrible, as I believe we all are, but not tending to do anything by halves, my father’s Light and Dark were impressive in their scope.”

Jesse was similar. In the midst of all his transformative work, he fathered a child outside of his marriage. And over many decades, beginning before I was even born, his ego and ambition left any number of fractured relationships with movement comrades in his wake.

Unlike Jesse, in all their fifty-three years together my father never once cheated on my mother. But he did run roughshod over people. Was known to leave a bitter taste in some people’s mouths. Struggled to live his ideals, proclaimed publicly with such conviction, in the humbling, morally murky realm of family.

I remember him chasing my brother David around the dining room table in the hopes of grabbing and smacking him. I must have been nine or ten at the time. David was twelve or thirteen, all arms and legs. Dad easily had seventy-five pounds on him and hands the size of hams. So, it was not for nothing that David was working hard to keep the table between them.

It all ended abruptly when David stopped running and threw out across the table, with all the sardonic contempt a teenager can muster, “So, you’re a real pacifist huh, Dad?”

Baldly confronted with his own hypocrisy, Dad turned on his heel and silently walked out of the room, disappearing behind his bedroom door. Which was a kind of answer to the question, I guess. It was the only one we ever got, anyway.

I don’t write this to throw my father under the bus. He was a great man, my dad. He worked with Cesar Chavez’s California farmworkers in college. Hunted fires for the California Fire Service. Spent my college years leading workcamps to rebuild arson-burned, Black churches in the rural South. He also wrote poetry, was a talented portrait photographer, and relished teaching me to use power tools. But, like Jesse probably, he was hobbled by his own pride, which masked an abiding shame and self-doubt.

Both my parents have always been equal parts noble, admirable, and deeply flawed. And all of three of them came up in a culture that did not hold that nuance well, or teach people how to hold their own complications honestly and without shame. Shame, in fact, seemed to be the primary tool of parenting and social control in certain Christian toolboxes, making nuance verboten.

Folks in Jesse and my parent’s generation also, by and large, didn’t go to therapy. To undo that shame training or for any other reason. They had no language for trauma, or all the ways that personal psychology can get acted out in both public and private spheres. Did they value self-reflection or vulnerability? Not as far as I ever saw.

What they knew was struggle. In both Jesse and my mom’s case, they also knew poverty and the scourge of Jim Crow. So they learned how to fight, with as much moral clarity as they could muster. This made them massive, formidable, but not necessarily comfortable with human imperfections or frailty, particularly their own.

It’s real hard to practice integrity privately from that position, much easier to hurl yourself at the world.

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In its obituary, the NYT quoted academics and political consultants who saw Jesse as the bridge between the moral leadership of Dr. King and the electoral success of Barack Obama, a characterization that punched me right in the gut. How poignant, to be unwittingly caught between. And how familiar, if I’m honest.

I feel my own life existing, generationally, on a bridge between the mid-20th century culture that birthed the civil rights movements and whatever is going to emerge, is emerging even now, in this second quarter of the twenty-first. I know the weightiness of that Civil Rights generation, what it meant to be alive and awake in a world they molded with such dedication and moral clarity. But I also see what got buried or ignored under all that weight.

It’s why I started this newsletter, ultimately. Because I was raised to stand with conviction in public, but without the emotional skills to hold the complexity involved in practicing integrity in private. Those I had to learn on my own, aided by a culture that was rapidly changing.

I’m as skeptical of the therapizing of language and culture as the next person. All the therapy in the world isn’t going to fix systems built on inequity. We’re not going to self-care ourselves into justice. But I do see leaders emerging now who are working to change hearts and systems while understanding the concurrent necessity of mental health, of private integrity and accountability. Who are prioritizing care in policy and in their lives. This is undeniably because psychology, therapy, self-improvement, and mindfulness have become as ubiquitous in the culture as Jesse.

One of those cultural leaders is Jason Reynolds— author, poet, MacArthur Fellow, and recent National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature at the Library of Congress. After Jesse’s passing, because sometimes things find you at just the right moment, I came across this interview with him. It’s worth watching all by itself, but also worth considering in light of Jesse’s life.

Jesse would have never given an interview with this quality of emotional vulnerability. But Jason can because of the work he did. Jesse changed systems and perceptions, paving the way for a progressive Black man to succeed in publishing and become a champion of young people, particularly young Black boys, in both literature and life. “I am somebody” lives and evolves in Jason.

Then there’s Zohran, who is taking up the mantle for working people, women, queer folks, and immigrants that Jesse tried to carry for so long. And he’s doing it with zeal, political acumen, and what appears to be remarkable emotional intelligence.

Jesse laid out the quilt before us. Zohran is politically tending it.

Jason is a decade behind me, age-wise, Zohran nearly two decades. So when I picture myself as a generational bridge between movements and cultures, I’m not thinking of familial generations— my parents, then me, then my kids. I’m talking about cultural generations. Increasingly, I see myself and my age peers, Gen X, as something of a bridge between what we were— in all its beauty and challenges— and what we need to be in order to become what we profess we are. Particularly as it pertains to masculinity and male leadership.

It’s weird to be the middle child, so to speak. It’s easy to feel a little overlooked or neglected. But Gen X has been the victim of benign neglect all our lives, so maybe we’re well-suited for the job. Or maybe I just see it everywhere as a result of that history.

Regardless, despite my unexpected, enormous sadness at Jesse’s passing, I find myself incredibly hopeful. What a great, complicated, maddening, dear man he was. How lucky we all were to live on this Earth with him and be loved by him. What an honor and a privilege to do our part to carry on his work, tending this quilt together in whatever way we are able.

We are better placed to do it because of him, and we’ll take it farther than he could. Which is what we always want for our children, is it not? To do better than we did.

Rest in Power, Jesse. We’ll keep doing better and better. Promise.

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I know down to my bones that building and working in community over time is the only way as many of us as possible will survive this horror. But here’s my problem: communities are made up of people and, honestly, I’m not a fan of people. I mean, have you met them?

Sure, all the valiant people helping and defending their neighbors in Minnesota (and Maine, and D.C., and, and, and…) are people. But so are the folks who don’t shovel the curb cuts at corners so it’s impossible for the disabled and elderly to navigate my snowy neighborhood right now. So are the folks who hold loud, private phone conversations on the bus. So is whichever asshole stole the peonies out of my yard this past spring, and the rose bush a few years before that.

Donald Trump. Pam Bondi. Stephen Miller. All of them are people. (Okay, I’m not sure about Stephen. I think he’s a lizard creature that’s gonna unzip his skin suit any moment.)

People conceived of and perpetuate racism, and sexism, and capitalism. They are the ism champions.

All the pedophiles and enablers in the Epstein Files? People.

I could go on (an on), extolling all the legitimate (and also petty) reasons that I’m at best skeptical, and more often wary, of people. I’m sure you probably could as well. People are frequently the best answer for why people are a very bad idea.

It’s important to practice our integrity so when life requires us to step forward courageously and risk it all we’ve built our clarity and capacity sufficiently. But most days, for me anyway, that nobility feels very far away. Instead, I’m just pushing through the persistent discomfort of living my values in the face of imperfections and inconsistencies (my own and other people’s). This feels maddening and humbling, occasionally even enraging, but rarely noble. Who wouldn’t want to retreat to the comfort of their own little bubble of known people, pleasures, and safe, non-confrontational socializing (or introversion, if you’re me) instead?

Truthfully, this is mostly what I’ve been doing for years now. Talking a great game about the beauty and power of community, of being in face-to-face relationship with real, imperfect people, while mostly sitting alone, safe and comfortable, in my house.

The uprising in Minnesota has pulled me up short, though, showing that it was past time for me to push past my discomfort and walk my talk. So, I decided to start hosting monthly community dinners at my house. Not a potluck, which is a great tool in established communities but provides barriers to entry for folks unknown to each other, in my experience. Instead, it would be dinner, which I would make, and just invite folks to come and eat.

Each month I envisioned a different Build Your Own meal, inspired by the magical curry feasts my mom would occasionally prepare when I was a kid. The base of these feasts was simple— a big pot of Basmati rice and another of chicken curry. But then there were dozens of little bowls of condiments— dried and fresh, cut fruit, nuts, fresh veggies, chutneys, my dad’s pickled jalapenos from the garden out back. It was abundant, wacky, colorful, and absolutely magical to me, how everyone was encouraged to build their own perfect plate with the balance of flavors and textures that suited them.

The same template would work, I figured, for chili, burritos, ramen, and what is a salad bar, really, but that? It would be super casual, I told folks— paper plates and bowls, the house not perfectly pristine. Just come.

I created a Facebook event and invited 45 people— close friends, social acquaintances, former co-workers. Anyone, really, who expressed vague enthusiasm when I first wrote about the idea publicly. Every time my resistance to having people I don’t know intimately in my house, or my fear of judgment, or my dread that if I invite connection people will suck the life right out of me reared up, I said to that anxious bunny, “You can come, too. There’ll be plenty of food. It’ll be okay.”

Y’all! It was lovely. Despite February weather, six whole people came— two close friends, two social friends, and two folks I barely know. Just enough to fit around my table. Lively conversation ranged from politics to astrology to kids to books and more. A friend talked about the course she taught this past fall on trans utopias and folks noted titles to read later. The same friend posed a question about local city government and another friend referred her to a video series on Instagram made by her partner, recently elected to our city council, that explained the answer. Many of us saved that link, so excited to get informed and engaged.

One friend brought wine, just because. Another brought blueberries. Another brought a container of Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups. It wasn’t a potluck, but people are gonna people, sometimes in the best ways.

We talked about the Minnesota uprising and one friend expressed concern that we aren’t ready here if ICE comes for our neighbors. I told her that’s why I invited everyone. Because it’s hard to organize in a crisis when you don’t know or trust people. That’s where it all begins. So, we are beginning. And we’ll get to the rest when the time comes. I have to believe that.

But first there will be dinner and conversation, laughter and hugs. And peanut butter cups!

I don’t think that we’ll be saved from fascism by tens of thousands of monthly small dinner parties. It might be running clubs, or meet ups at the dog park, or conversations in the school pick-up line, or coffee hour after church, or porch sitting and nodding at neighbors after the weather turns. All those uncomfortable, delightful, poignant ways that we meet, connect, and learn to show up and trust each other. That’s how we build the foundation for whatever fight comes our way, and for the future we want.

Next month I’m making curry. If you’re local, wanna come?

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Some great things I read this week:

• A wonderful profile on Mira Nair, Zohran Mamdani’s brilliant filmmaker mother. Also, a Substack, where profile author Rebecca Traister talks about how it all came together and what it meant for her.

• A succinct history and explanation by Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones of the importance of white folks who are race traitors in garnering wide public outrage to defeat white supremacy.

• A description of the defiant return of a pride flag to the Stonewall Monument in NYC after federal officials removed it.

• Rebecca Solnit lists all the ways we are winning, including Bad Bunny’s joyful halftime show at the Super Bowl.

BAD BUNNY!

I think it goes back to the notion of gift and responsibility. You may as an individual say, I was given this gift. And often our names are associated with that gift. But it’s also your responsibility. So you’re often named—not in a prescriptive way for what you are called to do in the world—but as a reminder that you are called to do something… So it is very much associated with the gift of individuality, but you then have the responsibility to give it back. It’s reciprocity. In return for the gift of being a living human person you have responsibilities to everything around you.— Robin Wall Kimmerer

Sometimes inspiration comes in the oddest places.

I was on the bus the other morning, headed to work. It was very early and cold. Usually, I put my head phones in, crawl inside myself, and tune out the world until I can get to my desk and put my game face on. But this morning I was running late, my head phones weren’t charged, and my brain already felt full at 7:15 in the morning, so I was just sitting there, staring into space.

That was when a poster caught my eye. It was entitled something like “Your Rights as a TCAT Passenger” or some such. But then it was not one list, but two. It listed my rights as a bus rider— to be safe, to be treated with respect by both drivers and other passengers, etc.— clearly headed as “Rights.” Then it had another list right next to that one, similarly enumerated, that was entitled “Responsibilities.” That list, unsurprisingly, had items like “treating fellow passengers and drivers with respect” and “not trashing the bus”, though I’m sure they stated it more elegantly.

All of a sudden, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution popped into my head. Now, I’m no lawyer. I couldn’t rattle off all ten of the amendments that feature in it, and certainly not all twenty-seven in the entire document. But I know that what we call the Bill of Rights is a list of things that each of us in the U.S. is theoretically entitled to in relation to our government.

It was important to enumerate these entitlements by the Framers because they were coming from a monarchy, where any rights extended to individuals were subject to the whims of the King or Queen, or dependent on proximity to the aristocracy. The Framers weren’t radical for our time. But they were radical for theirs in that they were trying to create a system that enshrined the rights of the individual (propertied white man) in law.

Despite having based the structure of their system on that of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, though, the Framers entirely missed one of the most important aspects of that long-standing indigenous democracy. Namely, the notion of reciprocity.

Potawatomi botanist, author, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass and other works about the importance of using the word reciprocity as opposed to responsibility. Responsibility as a concept still locates itself in the individual, but reciprocity is relational. Using it highlights how what we get to have or count on in any given system is due to what we continue to create and build together. No eco- or human-built system can sustain itself over time without a balance of give and take.

I know we like to think of rights as immutable in the U.S., but the reality is that they’ve always been apportioned unevenly. Also, because we are missing the half of the equation where we’re clear what each person’s part should be in maintaining the system that affords us those rights, we’re easy to manipulate into misunderstanding who is contributing and who is not. Trickle down economics? Welfare queens? An exploding gap between the rich and poor? A refusal (for decades now) to raise the federal minimum wage? All share, at their foundations, a misrepresentation of who is contributing to the common good and what contribution actually means.

Where would we be as a country right now if the Framers had understood and enumerated that? Not just what each of us as citizens is due, but what we also must offer to keep our society and government functioning and, god forbid, healthy? Vibrant, even?

Again, I’m no lawyer. So, there are legal structures laid out in our existing Bill of Rights that I don’t really understand. I’m also a semi-crunchy, totally earnest, and frequently optimistic pacifist, so there’s stuff in there I just don’t care about or believe in. Like the Second Amendment? Fugeddaboutit. If you don’t need a hunting rifle to feed your family, then I don’t think you should be entitled to a gun. And I know that kind of expectation works because, Hello! Canada.

Anyway! Over the last several days, I’ve found myself imagining what a Bill of Rights & Reciprocities would say if I were writing it. This isn’t just a random thought experiment, I don’t think. I mean, it is, but random thought experiments are where many a world-changing idea is born, so it seems like a useful discussion.

We’re in an imagination battle, remember. Our systems and institutions are crumbling, if they haven’t already been dismantled altogether. Most of our political leaders are content to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. So, it’s up to us to envision what we want in this new reality that’s forming even as you read this. Then we can strategize how to birth that reality out of the ashes of whatever we’re left with by 2028.

Not that we’re going to sit on our hands dreaming until then. We’re going to fight like hell to preserve what we can and protect each other. While we’re also imagining what could be. Here’s what I’m imagining right now.

My Bill of Rights & Reciprocities:

As a resident of the United States, I am entitled to:

1. Speak freely, worship freely, protest and appeal for redress of grievance to my government. I am entitled to access to a free press.

2. Free and equal access to all resources to advance good health— healthy and adequate food, clean water, green spaces, and health care (including, but not limited to, health, dental, and mental health care).

3. Free and equal access to child care and education from birth until completion of secondary school, as well as public, low-cost or free university and/or training programs that meet my skills and ambitions to contribute to my community.

4. A safe and protected environment in which to live, work, and play, including but not limited to adequate housing and public lands. I am also entitled to safety in my own home, without fear of search or seizure of my private property (including my personal data) by any governmental officers, unless such search and seizure is authorized by a judicial authority.

5. Never be enslaved or subject to cruel or unusual punishment. If I am convicted of a crime and incarcerated, I may be enabled to work, but I must be adequately compensated in order to save towards my eventual re-entry into my community and/or to support my family.

6. If I am accused of a crime, I have a right to a fair trial, adequate representation, and to be incarcerated, if necessary, under safe and humane conditions. If I am convicted of said crime, I am further entitled to safe and humane incarceration, with adequate assistance to understand and mitigate my impact through amends and repair, and encouragement to return and contribute to my community.

As a citizen of the United States, I am entitled to:

1. Vote, after the age of 18, without restriction based on race, gender, or any other immutable characteristic.

2. Run for any federal or state office. Local office (city, town, county) may be filled by non-citizens if approved by the locality, appreciating that all residents benefit from and contribute to local life. To seek election as President or Vice-President, I must be at least 35 years of age and no older than 70 years of age when I assume the position.

I offer, in reciprocity:

1. My vote and political engagement via public service, protest, and service.

2. Income taxes that are proportional to my income and ability to cover my basic living expenses. If I own a business, I understand that I must also pay taxes commensurate with the business’s income and the value of the social infrastructure from which my business benefits.

3. My commitment to protect the Earth and all its non-human inhabitants so that our shared natural resources are available for future generations.

4. My humble respect for and right relationships with all residents and citizens, who, by their presence here, exist in mutual relationship with me.

5. My willingness to protect and serve my neighbors, community, and country via concrete acts of service and care, including but not limited to military service and/or federally-coordinated volunteer service. All citizens must serve at least two years either in the military or a community volunteer corps between the ages of 18 and 24. Community volunteer corps service must be done in a separate state from the state in which I was raised. In both instances, I will be provided safe housing and a stipend sufficient to purchase food, clothing, transportation, and any necessary tools or gear for my position.

Is it everything we need in the Constitution? No. Does it cover the basics? I think so.

So, now it’s your turn. What would you add? What would you change?

What’s in your Bill of Rights & Reciprocities?

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It was a lesson in how things “go viral”, long before such an idea even existed: “And I told two friends, and then they told two friends, and so on, and so on.”

I was thinking about it because of reports of how confused and enraged the administration and right-wing pundits have been in response to the scale and decentralization of the resistance to occupation in Minnesota. In her newsletter, Meditations on an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit pointed to right-wing influencers who have suggested there must be hidden, centralized funding and coordination going on to mobilize all these people and resources.

It couldn’t simply be masses of people showing up for their neighbors.

This is a failure of imagination on their part, she suggests, that is endemic to evil. “Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil,” she quotes W.H. Auden as writing, “but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.”

The administration and their followers are irretrievably narcissistic, in other words, incapable of imagining that anyone might be different from them or have different motivations or desires (greed, dominance) than they do.

Philosophically, we are seeing in the Minnesota resistance, which is the scaling up of the resistance in L.A. and Chicago, the power in radical empathy and altruism. Both of which are, as Solnit notes, exercises in imagination. We have to imagine what someone else is feeling or experiencing to help them.

I’ve argued here before that we are in an imagination battle, to cite adrienne marie brown. Our capacity to imagine the present possibilities that can build toward the future we want is our greatest superpower. But there is something else going on in Minnesota, something tactical and pragmatic, which exemplifies a tremendous power equally inexplicable to the administration and its followers. It is the decentralization of effort, the eschewing of cult-of-personality-type, top-down, hierarchical movement in favor of horizontal sharing of power and community protection. It is guerrilla warfare turned non-violent.

Take out one person, one neighborhood group, one organization, one business, and another steps into their place to continue the work. There are just too many people in too many different ways— resisting, helping, protesting, and protecting— for even a brutal force with undeniably greater firepower to completely quell.

Tim Hjerstad described the mechanics of how mass movements have won against authoritarians over and over again throughout history in a recent newsletter. Not by having bigger guns, but by having bigger numbers. Hordes of regular people who remove the pillars of support for the regime through noncompliance and non-cooperation:

Even the most brutal dictatorships can’t function if enough people simply refuse to cooperate. The regime can imprison some resisters, but it can’t imprison everyone. It can fire some non-compliant bureaucrats, but it can’t replace the entire civil service. It can threaten some business leaders, but it can’t run the economy alone. It can deploy force against some protesters, but mass deployment becomes unsustainable when resistance is widespread enough.

The mathematics of repression work against authoritarians when resistance reaches critical mass. Imprisoning thousands requires cooperation from jailers, judges, and administrators. Deploying military force requires soldiers willing to follow orders. Maintaining economic control requires business leaders willing to cooperate. When enough of these actors defect or resist, the costs of repression exceed the capacity to impose it.

This is why authoritarian regimes invest so heavily in maintaining the illusion of inevitability and the atomization of resistance. They need people to believe that resistance is futile, that they stand alone, that cooperation is mandatory. Mass nonviolent resistance shatters all three illusions simultaneously.

Tim Hjersted's Substack

Why Nonviolent Resistance Doesn't Require Your Opponent to Have a Conscience

One objection comes up often when discussing nonviolent resistance…

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5 months ago · 70 likes · 1 comment · Tim Hjersted

You could look at the need to motivate that many people as an overwhelming challenge. How will we ever get that many people to stand up?? But I would challenge us to flip that on its head and feel the relief that comes in realizing you don’t have to do everything. Or know everything. Or track everything. You just have to find your job or small group, your one thing, and give it everything you’ve got.

This past week, one thing I did to contribute was participating in a fundraiser for rental assistance for folks in Minnesota who haven’t been able to go to work for fear of being picked up by federal agents. No work means no income. No income means no money. No money means eviction, exposing the already vulnerable to brutal cold and apprehension.

I sent what I could spare, which was $25. Then I posted on my social media about it, letting folks know that I knew the organizers, who knew the church collecting the funds, and encouraged my network to participate. Several of those folks donated. Several others shared my post further. Meanwhile, the organizers were sharing on Substack and within their own networks.

And I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on.

What started as a $5,000 goal ballooned to $27,000 raised the last time I checked, with the church collecting upwards of $250,000. That isn’t enough to help all the people in Minnesota who need it right now. (There’s a growing movement calling on Governor Walz to enact a temporary eviction moratorium to help everyone.) But it’s a host of families, safe for now, and it’s a whole bunch of people from all over the country who know what can happen collectively when we each do our one thing, together.

It’s also, and this is important, providing social proof of what is possible. Social proof is what causes us to look around for signals in other people’s behavior of the right thing to do. We are a social species. Especially when circumstances feel uncertain or risky, we are wired to look at what others around us are doing so that we can feel safe.

We prefer safety, generally, and rightly so, but we’ll take company if necessary.

That’s why it’s essential, especially for those of us with any kind of social privilege, to take some risks and then communicate with the folks around us about it, whether it’s one-on-one or via larger public channels. It helps us personally, building our muscles for autonomous decision-making and defiance in the face of tyranny, but it also provides social proof of what is possible.

We’re out here, doing it. You can do it, too. We’ll have your back.

Eventually, we’ll have the opportunity to turn our imagination toward rebuilding our institutions so that they embody the collective care currently embodied in our resistance. That’s all that systems of nationalized health care, food and income assistance, guaranteed housing, childcare, or education, and progressive taxation are— collective care in institutional form. But, for now, our work must be more local, more decentralized, more viral.

And I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on.

Anyone who’s been to the arcade can tell you, Whack-A-Mole is the worst. It will eat your money, and then you’ll lose. Even if you win, you lose, because you look like a hyperventilating, jacked-up madman. Kind of like the federal agents in Minnesota.

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Pick your spot. Poke your head out. Tell someone about it.

XO,

Asha

When my son and I bought our land, an RV was conveyed with the property. I don’t know anything about RVs. But now I was the proud owner of a not-insignificant asset, no idea how to take care of it, and winter was coming.

I found a nice, local guy and his wife who do mobile RV repair and maintenance. They came out to help me get all the systems shut down for the winter. And what we discovered was that the prior owners had walked away without emptying the black water tank into the septic system. RV guy said I’d have to do that before winter, the implication being that *I* would have to do it because he wasn’t going to. The flexible pipe coming off the exit valve was old and damaged, and I wasn’t paying him enough to deal with that.

Fair enough. So, I went out there a few days later with flex tape in hand, did my best to patch the pipe, and opened the valve. For about 30 seconds, old toilet contents filled the pipe in a torrent, completely thwarting my taped patches, fountaining out anywhere they could find the smallest crack.

That’s kind of how it feels to live in the United States these days, like a flood of foulness is rushing out of every crack, assuming you're lucky enough to not yet be getting the hose right to the face. Except it’s not just a thirty-second torrent, face-first or otherwise. It just goes on and on.

We are drowning in our own shit here. And it’s tempting to make comparisons, especially when talking about ICE, to the Nazi Gestapo. Certainly, CBP head Greg Bovino gets off on cosplaying an SS officer. But it’s important to remember that the Nazis based much of their strategy on the United States. On the tactics employed by white supremacists post-Reconstruction and on the Jim Crow Laws, which sought to control and terrorise previously enslaved Black Americans. This is homegrown shit we’re flailing in right now.

If you’re overwhelmed, that’s understandable. Anyone paying attention would be. Please make sure to keep breathing. Eat real food, sleep as well as you can, and ask for help when you need it. It doesn’t aid anyone for you to run yourself so ragged reading the news or trying to contribute that you go under, where the only way to survive is to tune everything out, encasing yourself in a bubble of ignorance or nihilistic despair.

That’s what they want, for the majority of Americans to ignore or justify whatever doesn’t directly hurt them. Don’t give in.

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What the administration wants to turn the United States, the Western Hemisphere, and the world into is not inevitable. We, by which I mean the vast majority of humans who do not, in fact, agree with them, can prevent the future they’re scrambling and bullying to define. We can turn this shitty ship around.

All you need to do to help turn the ship is one real, concrete thing every day. One thing. You can contribute to resistance and community in Minnesota. You can support immigrant rights organizations in Maine, ICE’s latest focus.

You can read up on the work of the Somali community in Maine, then push back against racist, false narratives that paint all immigrants as criminals and drains on the state. In 2023, I featured a podcast here, The Sum of Us, which profiled Somalian farmers who had managed to revive the dying town of Lewiston, despite horrible racism spurred on by then-Maine Governor Paul LePage and a right-wing media spinning lies. You should listen and share it.

You can contribute to Liberation Farms, run by the Somali Bantu Community Association, or find an immigrant farming association in your own state and support them. You can spread the good news of how immigrants are keeping our rural areas alive in Maine, Minnesota, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Maryland, and many, many other states.

You can strengthen ties of mutual aid in your own community. Contribute to or volunteer at food banks, community health clinics, homeless shelters, and job training programs. You can monitor drop-off and pick-up at your neighborhood school. You can join your local ICE watch.

You can support a union.

You can help staff voter registration tables and support efforts to increase turnout for the midterm elections. Not because electoral politics will save us, but because it is a potential avenue to leverage power.

You don’t have to wait until November, either. You can hold your elected representatives accountable right now. Email, call, or show up at their offices. We pay them. Make them do their jobs.

If you have a Ring doorbell camera, you can get rid of it. Amazon (Ring is a subsidiary) has faced accusations of collusion with law enforcement for years. Now, it has publicly announced a plan to join the Flock AI network of community surveillance cameras.

You can make art. You can gather with friends and neighbors to discuss strategy and share food. You can speak up in your religious community, your PTA, and at your job. You can join local protests, attend city or county council meetings, and run for local office. You can boycott corporations that support the systematic undermining of democracy.

It’s so bad right now, friends, but we can and will save us. Rest up if you need to, gather your people around you, and then choose today’s one action. If you need help deciding where to start, reach out. I’ll do my best to help.

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I believe in us.

Stay safe, strong, and warm.

XO,

Asha

Violent, systemic oppression of racial minorities and women has been a feature, not a bug, of the United States since its founding. And throughout our history, movements and leaders have emerged to challenge the enforcement of those power hierarchies. Zohran Mamdani quoted one, labor organizer Eugene Debs, in his mayoral inauguration speech. Dorothy Day was another, as was Emma Goldman and César Chávez, though Martin Luther King, Jr. is perhaps the most widely known in that long history.

I’d encourage you to listen sometime this weekend to his final speech before his assassination to fire you up for what is going to be required of all of us in this moment. King was much more radical in his final years than anyone in power at that time, left or right-leaning, was comfortable with, because he sought to connect the dots between race oppression, class oppression, and militarism. He wasn’t interested in incremental reform of fundamentally oppressive systems. Instead, he challenged us to come together across every divide constructed by the powerful to separate us in order to rebuild the very foundations of society.

When you see everyone, from Native American activists, to clergy, to White suburban moms, to young, black musicians, all hitting the streets in Minneapolis to protest the violent incursion of ICE thugs tricked out in paramilitary gear in the Twin Cities, calling out, "ABOLISH ICE!” in unison, you are seeing the continuation of King’s legacy.

Be a part of that continuation. This doesn’t mean you have to attend street protests, necessarily. There are so many other ways to show up. The unsung heroes, the very backbone, of the civil rights movement were the women who, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, organized meal delivery, child care, and car pools for workers at risk of losing their jobs. Just like people are organizing grocery delivery and remote schooling for immigrants afraid to leave their homes in Minnesota right now.

Another often unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement was Dorothy Cotton. Dorothy was the only woman in King’s inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As the Education Director of the SCLC, Dorothy led voter education workshops that covered everything from voter rights and black history to economic empowerment. Dorothy understood that racism was not just about personal racial animus. It was a system of laws, institutions, and social norms that enforced a racialized distribution of resources and power. Marches and street protests were just one way to combat that system. You also had to deprogram people’s minds and hearts, foster solidarity, and build alternative institutions and systems.

It’s notable to me that, in her memoir If Your Back’s Not Bent, Dorothy described the abuse she and her siblings suffered at the hands of their father. As a result, she understood how oppression is fractal, that it assumes the same shape in families and societies. The personal and political simply mirror each other at different scales.

This means there’s a unique heartbreak in this moment for all of us who have experienced abuse, sexual assault, or domestic violence. Because the private hell we each, I hope, escaped from long ago, has now become our collective, public hell, from which it can feel like there’s no escape at all. The uncontrolled rage and violence of men determined to force submission by any means necessary. The excuses and lies perpetrated by them and the women that aid them. Their turning of culpability on its head.

You made me do it, they proclaim. If you hadn’t been so disrespectful, so mouthy. If you hadn’t challenged my right to say what you get to do, when you get to do it, and how you get to simply be, then I wouldn’t have had to hurt you.

Fucking bitch, Jonathan Ross declared contemptuously, after he shot Renee Good in the face.

It’s been hard, I’ll admit, to get out of bed every morning since Renee was shot (hard on and off since the inauguration), to wade up out of my anxiety-dream-laden sleep and through the fog of waking dread simply to make it through the day.

The only way I’ve found to keep moving is to lean into community, into moments of connection and delight. I sit in my car, Zoom-calling with a friend in Minneapolis, about what is happening there, but also here. How our hearts are faring. That same friend shares the below interview with the singer of Brass Solidarity, a protest group that formed after the murder of George Floyd less than a half-mile from where Renee Good was killed. They’ve continued to make art for and with their community ever since, carrying forward the work of Dorothy Cotton, who believed in the power of voices raised in song to strengthen resolve and fight back despair.

Ain’t gonna let ICE agents turn me ‘round/turn me ‘round/turn me ‘round!

Another Twin Cities friend shares a link to a website for donations to support mutual aid, GoFundMe’s, and organizations. So many there are afraid to go to work, school, the grocery store, and so many others are showing up to care for them via every avenue. The incredible organizing by everyday people who are so determined to protect each other, leaps off the screen. And I can help, even from here. So can you.

Closer to home, I’ve been arriving at work each morning in the cold darkness to find that our new Building Care staff person— a young, white guy, it feels important to my heart to note— has folded the ends of the toilet paper rolls in the bathrooms and the first paper towel on the roll in the kitchenette into little boats, roses, and bows for no discernible reason but delight.

Small delights can get me from one hard day to the next.

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I’ve also been continuing to meditate on a quote from Lyz Lenz, which I shared in last week’s newsletter. She called on us to “start building what we hope will remain” after this empire falls. I wrote in response about the integrity with which we should approach whatever we’re choosing to build. But, in hindsight I realize, I didn’t really write about what I’m building. What I’m helping create to sustain me, my chosen family and community.

What are you building? Tell us, please.

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In the near-term, I work with our local social justice-oriented, public art project, Ithaca Murals. (That Dorothy Cotton mural is one of ours.) We work with artists and community members to install dozens of new murals every year, all over our city, county, and region. Every new project is formulated to document in vibrant detail, and support, not just who we are as a community, but who we are determined to remain.

We want to see ourselves. We also want anyone else who comes here to see us, too. To see and understand that we are so brimming over with diversity, creativity, and solidarity, it can’t be contained or erased or forced into submission. It’s busting out everywhere.

Longer term, I’m building a DIY, off-grid, trans and queer-friendly community with my son, on 37 wooded acres at the tippy top of the Appalachians. Not as an escape from (waves hand around vaguely) all of this, but as an embrace of what we want to remain instead— chosen family and community purpose. Systems and space for sharing resources and labor while living more lightly and creatively on the Earth.

2026 will be our first full calendar year on the land, and I’d like to take you along virtually if you want to come. Below the paywall is the first of a series of videos I plan to make at least monthly (potentially more when the weather’s better) over the next year out on the land. I’ll share the woods, what we’re working on, and all the musing I’m doing as we go. About how to live more sustainably, build and live in community, and approach this second half (final third?) of my life.

This project is deeply personal and, honestly, vulnerable to share, so I’m going to keep the videos for paying subscribers. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and want to come along for the ride, please join us. If not, no worries. I’ll still be here with free essays every Friday.

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Please, first and foremost, take care of yourselves. And as John Lewis (another lion of the Civil Rights Movement) admonished us, make some good trouble when, and however you can.

XO, Asha

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