Max and I are in New York City. I sit at a window stuffing myself full of bagels and think about things I meant to write but didn’t. Forgive me, internet, I haven’t sent a newsletter in more than a month, forgive me I didn’t post a photo shoot on insta, my followers want to know where I went, am I still alive, what am I up to.
My dear Reader: I do not have any fucking clue what I am up to.
I’m writing this quick and dirty because I have been stuck on sending newsletters even though I have a million things I want to say and my schedule is capacious enough that I should be able to find the time to say them.
But the words are all jumbled up in my mind and I know they are just the best words, the cleverest words, I have all the best words, she says, giraffe and airplane and rhinoceros, I can ace your cognitive test, like Our Dear Leader has been bragging, but words are just words, they need to be put together in the right order, they need to have meaning, they need to be chosen deliberately by a human mind, I would not ask you to read words that were not, but that’s why I haven’t sent you any newsletters, because when I go to write the words down I can’t immediately make them meaningful, intelligible, and it HURTS, it burns, master, it burns, it feels bad, and then I stop almost immediately.
Oh look, she has no grit, she failed the cupcake test, she doesn’t know how to grind, she’s a quitter, she’s a loser, she’s a flake.
I mean, what I am is someone who spent April thru August trying very hard not to die, and so yeah, I guess my grit got ground down, it’s hard to come back from that, I’m trying to have some compassion for myself, but also I really want to send something out to you all because it is one of my most fundamental beliefs about the world that my words can make a difference.
But, ugh, I hate all those words I just wrote and now I want to cry.
***
Let me try again, with lower standards this time.
I’m sitting now in a coffeeshop across from where we’ve been staying in NYC, and it’s not the best location for the moment due to the fact that they are loudly digging up the street, but another woman just came in as well, driven to this coffeeshop because the one she usually goes to has a gas leak and we are commiserating about the noise and the coffee shop guy closes the door for us to block out the noise — and — here we are, in community….
***
Last week I was walking back from the Soho Trader Joe’s and I tried to bum a cigarette off a nice woman I saw sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette. “Oh, I bummed this one,” she said apologetically. “I don’t let myself buy them anymore”. I laughed. “Me either,” I said. Another day I was sitting outside Penn Station and I watched a woman bum a cigarette off a guy sitting next to me. Three minutes later he turned to me and asked did I want one too. “hah, you saw me looking,” I said, “but no. I mean, yes, but no. But also I just think it’s heartwarming, the bumming of cigarettes.” He looked at me like I was a little daft, which I am. But the bumming of cigarettes is a microcosm of mutual aid, as is the provision of a lighter. In this paper I will —
And — community —
***
Speaking of community, speaking of mutual aid.
In late August, I started volunteering for my local food pantry. I show up and help unload trucks. Acorn squash, limes, diapers, soap. Carrots, lettuce, eggs, granola bars, milk. Ramen and canned tomatoes. I live in a town with a lot of wealth, but people are always lining up for the food pantry. For me, it is simple, straightforward work. It is physical, it is social, it is IRL.
I didn’t really used to think of a food pantry as political, but of course a food pantry is political. A food pantry declares that people should not have to go hungry in the midst of plenty. A food pantry is not trying to disrupt anything, turn a profit, address theoretical future existential risks to humanity. A food pantry is addressing current existential risks to humanity, to actually existing humans right in this minute, just as the Gaza flotillas have been trying to do. A food pantry does not think that poverty or hunger mean you are defective or immoral or lazy, it does not comment on these topics, it simply provides food.
Yes, I understand there are complexities to the operation of food pantries, but my role is simple: move the food. I like this simple role, one that does not require me to add links or mess with styles, make a slide deck, care about ARR or EBIDTA. I do not have to talk to a chatbot or a tech bro to do the work. I do not have to join the zoom, answer the Slack message, write the progress report. I just move the food.
~~~
If you have been reading the news the last few days, you might have noticed people writing ever more urgently about the food. That is because, while the (US) federal government has the money to continue to provide SNAP benefits in November, but they are choosing not to. 12% of US residents receive SNAP benefits. SNAP, for those who are not US-based or aren’t familiar with current terminology, provides cash for food.
Our government is choosing to deliberately starve the US population.
Other people have written about how cruel and fucked up this is, about the kind of evil people willing and eager to starve their own populations into submission. I won’t repeat them here. I will just, along with everyone else on the internet who gives a damn, tell you that you have before you an unbelievably simple and satisfying opportunity/obligation for the practice of mutual aid and the building of a community strong enough to stand against shameless cruelty: feed your neighbors.
The first and most obvious way to do this is to donate money to your local food bank and food pantry. In Boston this is the Greater Boston Food Bank and my local pantry is the Brookline Food Pantry. If all you do is give money, that is very fucking important, so don’t say “all I did was give money” and feel bad about it. Money buys food, and the food banks can buy more food per dollar than you can.
Also you can volunteer. As I described above, it is hard to find a more immediately feel-good way of spending your time than feeding people. Most importantly, THE PEOPLE GET FED!
Finally, there are other ways to help get people food. Food pantries can’t serve every hungry person, for all kinds of reasons.You might have a community fridge that you can drop food off at. You might get involved in a group that provides meals and other supplies to the unhoused. You might check with your local schools and libraries to see if there are opportunities to distribute food through those channels (even just classroom snacks can make a difference to students who aren’t getting enough food at home).
It’s evil to starve people, but we don’t have to let people starve.
***
Max and I went to No Kings in New York City. This seems like a million years ago now but that is because since then somehow half the White House has been demolished and we are starting a war with Venezuela and ICE is throwing more and more tear gas in the streets of Chicago and we are debating whether a man with a Nazi tattoo and some kind of fishy stories about that Nazi tattoo, a guy who also turns out to have worked for Blackwater, i.e. WAS A MERCENARY, is a suitable Democratic candidate for the Senate. (sidetone: read Tressie McMillan Cottom about hit, she always has a great take.) So much has happened since No Kings that if I hadn’t already started this newsletter last week, when the White House had not been mutilated, I might have entirely forgotten that No Kings happened at all.
It did happen, and it was huge, despite the poor media coverage. It was also a lot of fun. (Yes, we are allowed to have fun while protesting). I hand-rolled a poster from some spare cardboard and the sharpie I carry with me everywhere these days. The poster said “Absolutely the Fuck Not” and it was very popular amongst middle aged women at the protest. Apparently we’re all very angry.
Anyways here I am with my sign:
****
Also while we’ve been in NYC, friend.ai, which I will not link to, has been papering the city with ads, which the people of NYC then creatively defaced. friend.ai is a company that sells a little surveillance pendant you can wear to ensure that you lose all your actual friends. Last weekend the company did some promotional event in a park near where we are staying, which Max and I stumbled upon. Those of you who follow me on bluesky may have noticed that I have a lot of rage toward wearable surveillance tech.
Reader, I saw that friend.ai promo event and I lost my fucking head. There was a guy with a camera and a line of people waiting to yell at some poor person dressed up as the friend pendant. “What is this, do I get to yell about the surveillance tech?” I yelled. “Yes, absolutely,” someone told me. “Just a couple of waivers for you to sign.” “Waivers?” I yelled. “This is a fucking promotional event? Fuck that! Fuck your surveillance tech! People who wear this shit are unfuckable losers!” I yelled, directly at the camera, while giving the double finger.
Max casually walked away to the other end of the park, like he didn’t know me, which he probably at that moment wished were true. I started walking away after I was done with the yelling, but the cameraman followed me. “I’m filming a documentary” he said, “and I’d like to use this footage.”
I got the documentary filmmaker’s number and said I’d think about it. I did think about it. But in the end I told the guy I didn’t think you could make a documentary about a 23 year old tech founder and his dumbass startup without it becoming a hagiography, and I had no desire to play a bit part in a hagiography as the wild-eyed profanity-spewing enraged middle-aged woman, even though I am, in fact a wild-eyed profanity-spewing enraged middle aged woman.
***
Finally, again, I know it was a month ago now that Ezra Klein wrote a completely dumb essay about Charlie Kirk and then had Ta-Nehisi Coates on his podcast (can we get rid of podcasts, by the way? PLEASE???) so that Coates could explain to him how very wrong he was and Klein could utterly fail to understand his point. But I keep thinking about that conversation (I read the transcript, because I don’t listen to podcasts — gift link)
In it, Klein asks Coates why “we” are losing, and Coates matter of factly says sometimes you lose. Losing doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong or, importantly, that your values are wrong because they are out of step with the values currently in ascendance. The values currently in ascendance are cruelty and punishment, exclusion, hate, degradation. They suck.
Anyways, here’s part of the exchange:
Then let me flip that question a bit. Why are we losing?
We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.
See, that feels very fatalistic to me.
It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth. Let me express what I mean.
I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m the writer, I’m the individual, right? But I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.
Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.
I can't get this exchange out of my head.
When you read or listen to a man like Coates talking to a man like Klein, it’s immediately obvious which of those two people is more admirable. Coates clearly has wildly more moral clarity, understanding of history, and courage. Coates is grounded; Klein is not. Coates has really thought through what matters to him; Klein has spent his career scrambling to say stuff to stay relevant and feel important.
I keep going back to this exchange because there has never been a more critical time for each of us to clarify our values and to reach for courage. To access the courage of our convictions, we will need to pay more attention to the people who are obviously already doing that, like Coates, and less attention to the ones flailing around trying to make sure that they “win”, like Klein.
***
I started this essay by saying I don’t have any idea what the fuck I am doing. Here we are at the end of the essay, and I see that this is not true.
Sure, in the day-to-day sense it is frequently true: I wake up and try to figure out how to spend my day, I start a neighborhood chat group but I don’t know if it will work or if I am doing it right, I take a drawing class and can’t even decide if I like it or not. I wait for Max at the entrance of a camera store in New York, and while waiting I start talking to the guy at the door, and he tells me it’s a grand opening and there will be prosecco later, so I return to the store for prosecco and I meet a woman there who I think is cool and we exchange numbers and go to a wine bar and then I have maybe a new friend, but maybe not, because I don’t have any idea what the fuck I am doing.
But in a much deeper sense, I know exactly what I care about, and what I’m trying to do. I am trying to orient my energy and creativity and labor towards the moral ground on which I stand, I am trying to live up to my own values, I’m trying to build courage and clarity and strength, for myself and my community. I’m trying to show the fuck up to this terrifying historical moment, with bravery, not cowardice.
Just because it’s difficult and confusing, just because I’m not sure exactly how to do what I’m trying to do, doesn’t mean that I don’t know what that is.