A quick note before I launch into my actual point: my original subhead for this post was “…but busy IRL.” On second thought, I’m seeking, as of this very moment, to strike the word “busy” from my vocabulary. I hate it. I hate hearing myself constantly saying how busy I am. “Busy” feels like a victim orientation, but “active” feels like a choice.

Now, onto the rest of my complaints observations.

I’m pretty sick of Substack, TBH. It’s amazing — and I read a number of fabulous, inspiring, mind-bending articles every day — but even so, it’s kind of getting to the point where it feels like I’m just endlessly shoving in food and digesting very little.

The list of podcasts I want to listen to, articles I haven’t gotten to, and incredible online courses I’ve signed up for (like “This Jungian Life” Dream School, Michael Meade’s mind-blowing “Living Myth” courses, and this wonderful Bodhisattva training — not to mention several others — I mean, really. Isn’t it all a bit over the top?

And all of that in the cracks, those rare moments that are not taken up by work, family, politics, life at this absurd moment of cascading too-muchness. Too much to do, think about, contemplate.

Even the pile of backed-up New Yorkers on my counter should have a McDonald’s-like tagline: “Haunting Allison since 1997.”

Doing literally anything in the actual, non-mental, non-digital world feels almost like a physical vacation. Even just watering the plants, a chore I used to approach with irritation because it was pulling me away from more “interesting” things, is now a balm, as is cooking dinner without a podcast or audiobook simultaneously cramming more information into my brain. Cutting vegetables, and cutting vegetables alone. What a novelty.

I actually think all of this is a probably a good thing — at least it feels like it is — and a symbol for larger course-corrections to come. We needed to reach a point of total saturation in order to properly harness the gifts of this information tsunami without being drowned by it.

Because very few of us, I think it’s safe to say, feel that those two worlds — the analytical and the physical — are in a state of balanced harmony.

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As I wrote on a recent re-stack of Jen Pahlka’s inspiring, concrete work, “I love abstraction and theory as much as the next gal, but my favorite people are looking at systems through a new lens and proposing concrete remodels.”

To that end, I have lately met a number of truly mind-blowingly incredible people doing mind-blowingly impactful work. Really. I know it doesn’t seem like it when you open your phone each morning, and the outcome of “all of this” (sweeping gesture) is far from ordained, but I am feeling strangely, thrillingly encouraged by much of what I see.

The work ahead is long and arduous. The election problems are going to be real. But much of what is happening is, I believe, a much-needed jolt to the system (both the “system-system” and our personal systems).

To that end, and while I PROMISE YOU that I am more sick of hearing myself utter these words than you are of hearing them, I want to invite all of you to a Zoom call about the Trust Brigade on August 11. The Trust Brigade is a non-profit, that grew out of our very grass roots effort, over the last few years, to flip Colorado House District 08, which is on the very short list of the most flippable toss-up districts in the whole country. It is led by a young man with unstoppable, infectious energy. Jarrek Holmes has put his heart and soul into reversing decades of bad Democratic habits: building something that lasts, not throwing something together for an election and subsequently letting it crumble into dust.

You will hear about how 20-50 volunteers are showing up to deep canvass EVERY WEEKEND, having the conversations that not only move people to vote once, but often permanently shift their behavior.

These are meaningful, memorable conversations. They are the opposite of doomscrolling. They are the way that we will make change in our neighborhoods, towns, states, nation.

The “algorithms” want us to feel so concerned about everything that we don’t even bother, but if you want to find a way to meaningfully “bother anyway,” please join me for a Trust Brigade (Zoom) House Party and spread the word!

Details: The path to winning back the U.S. House runs straight through CD8. Join us on Zoom to see how our data-backed deep canvassing program works and learn how to support this race from anywhere in the country. Please RSVP HERE and forward this invitation to friends, family, and networks nationwide!

Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Time: 6:15 PM – 7:45 PM MDT

RSVP HERE: just putting it in again, so it’s easy to find!

Seriously, NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE, please come. It is online, which I am well aware belies my entire opening, but whatever. I don’t really feel like writing a Master’s thesis; I just want to make good things happen in the actual, real, living world.

RSVP here — or just reply to this email and I’ll send you the Zoom link directly.

Thank you so much for showing up for this one!

Here’s my original message:

Please join me for a virtual event on June 9th from 5:00-6:00 pm MST (7:00-8:00 p.m. EST) in support of Colorado AG Phil Weiser’s gubernatorial campaign featuring Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a state our family still dearly misses.

I’ll keep this one short (a screenshot of the full invite is below), but more updates from my end are forthcoming. Needless to say, things haven’t been boring.

I've been an enthusiastic supporter of Phil almost since the day we arrived in Colorado; when you meet him, you’ll know why.

Yesterday, I recorded a (very clearly one-take!) video in an effort to inspire more people to canvass on his behalf. Phil is a national treasure, and I want to do everything I can to ensure he wins this race.

The video is ostensibly about canvassing, but it’s REALLY about Phil. And as an added bonus, you’ll get to see the toll the last ten years have taken on my hair (just kidding — I’d been coloring it since my 20s, and finally gave that up!). :)

It would be such a joy to see all of you on the Zoom call. My heart is smiling just thinking about it. Please RSVP here — you can donate now, donate later (or both!), or just come and listen! (If you’d like to join without donating, just send me a note and I’ll make sure you get the login.)

I can’t wait to see so many familiar faces, and don’t hesitate to share widely! ❤️

PS: If you really want to do your homework, check out this interview in Colorado Politics, this op-ed in the Durango Herald, or this article in the Colorado Sun about his lawsuits against the Trump Administration. Here's the first TV ad that launched statewide, capturing Phil’s commitment to fight for Colorado. And here's another TV ad, which focuses on his commitment to fight for a brighter future for our kids.

(This is a screenshot so please don’t get frustrated trying to click the RSVP & donate button!)

Please join me for a virtual event on June 9th from 5:00-6:00 pm MST (7:00-8:00 p.m. EST) in support of Colorado AG Phil Weiser’s gubernatorial campaign featuring Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a state our family still dearly misses.

I’ll keep this one short (a screenshot of the full invite is below), but more updates from my end are forthcoming. Needless to say, things haven’t been boring.

I've been an enthusiastic supporter of Phil almost since the day we arrived in Colorado; when you meet him, you’ll know why.

Yesterday, I recorded a (very clearly one-take!) video in an effort to inspire more people to canvass on his behalf. Phil is a national treasure, and I want to do everything I can to ensure he wins this race.

The video is ostensibly about canvassing, but it’s REALLY about Phil. And as an added bonus, you’ll get to see the toll the last ten years have taken on my hair (just kidding — I’d been coloring it since my 20s, and finally gave that up!). :)

It would be such a joy to see all of you on the Zoom call. My heart is smiling just thinking about it. Please RSVP here — you can donate now, donate later (or both!), or just come and listen! (If you’d like to join without donating, just send me a note and I’ll make sure you get the login.)

I can’t wait to see so many familiar faces, and don’t hesitate to share widely! ❤️

PS: If you really want to do your homework, check out this interview in Colorado Politics, this op-ed in the Durango Herald, or this article in the Colorado Sun about his lawsuits against the Trump Administration. Here's the first TV ad that launched statewide, capturing Phil’s commitment to fight for Colorado. And here's another TV ad, which focuses on his commitment to fight for a brighter future for our kids.

(This is a screenshot so please don’t get frustrated trying to click the RSVP & donate button!)

Earlier this year, you may recall, I wrote a letter to Jon Stewart. Through the unbelievable magic of lifelong friendship and the indecipherable ways of the relational world, my 7th grade BFF was able to help get that letter (well, an edited version of it—it was waaaay too long!) and two copies of the book to The Daily Show.

(She also scored us two VIP tickets to a Monday taping with Jon himself, since I was in NYC for our book launch. A bucket list item if ever there was one, considering I’ve had a crush on Jon since his MTV days back when I was in high school. :))

In that letter, I tried to articulate an economic problem, oft-ignored by the left, beneath our choppy political surface. I wrote, “In working on this book, I have learned that our societal problems aren’t only a failure of imagination or a failure of leadership, though they most certainly are both of those things; they are the expression of the slow-motion unraveling caused, in no small part, by money printing. Economists on the left and the right, from the Austrian school of thought to the it-doesn’t-get-anymore-left-than Yanis Varoufakis, have long recognized that the ability to create money “from thin air” is a key root cause of inflation. Even John Maynard Keynes, patron saint of our current economic system, said, “There is no subtler, surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.”

We need to address that blind spot if we’re serious about not just winning but actually rebuilding. There are many articles, you’ve probably noticed, about the potential for a Democratic resurgence as Americans of all stripes grapple with the travesties of this Administration. Such pieces are, to me, like coming home to a pot of chicken soup burbling on the stove.

It has become self-evident to most of us that from many decades of corporate, crony capitalism, we have inherited the shit show we now inhabit. So this is a time in history to get creative. Much of the old playbook —as the recent election of Mamdani reveals as much as anything else — doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t need to repeat the litany of atrocities; we all know them. I think where my own experience comes into play, perhaps, is in thinking about how we might begin to create the conditions not only for a rejection of Trumpism, but for a return to the fold of the democratic rule of law and a belief in the institutions, however imperfect, that once quietly gave shape to our lives.

I’ve noticed, within myself, that I am able to feel genuine interest in (and curiosity about) the experiences of those who’ve aligned with Trump—as long as I don’t know them personally. Whether knocking on doors or chatting with the guy next to me at the bar, I am not just tolerant but positively eager to understand their point of view; and as often as not, I come away with more context and nuance than I’d imagined possible.

For the few people in my own extended family who have shown allegiance to this criminal regime, however, I have absolutely zero patience. A stranger can be an “otherwise good person whose experiences have led them to see the world differently than I do,” but in my own world, that level of generosity feels, well, inaccessible.

Ok, so maybe that’s not where we start.

It seems to me that if we want to actually get the country back on the rails — to “tell a different story about America’s future” — we will need two things that seem to have been sorely lacking in recent history:

1. Sincerely non-judgmental, open-minded curiosity about what led many people to believe in his snake oil and act on that belief;

2. A demonstrably concrete insight into the long-tail story of where we’ve gone wrong, economically, and the bravery to not simply over-promise that we can right the ship overnight.

This will take nuanced communication that respects complexity while still resonating with a broad cross-section of people, many of whom barely have time to breathe. It’ll also take capacity for coordinating a resonant message — fanned out across the country — that can be localized for the unique, specific complexion of various populations’ struggles.

Spending the last almost-three years working on Bitcoin is for Everyone (released two weeks ago, yay!) has taught me that we have largely overlooked an enormous resource in the conversation about societal and political deterioration: our system of money itself.

I am not exaggerating when I say that everywhere I look, I see evidence of that quietly world-shaping, largely untold story of money. And while I never would have lifted that particular corner of the carpet had I not been invited to, my experience is not unlike those famous optical illusions: once you see it you can’t un-see it.

Working on this book has given me a whole new way to think and talk about money, and for me, that is its deepest gift.

Yes, I believe the book is persuasive about Bitcoin. But that wasn’t why I said yes to the project—at first, my eyebrows went up just like yours probably did when you read the title.

It took a lot of research, reading, digging, and reflection for me to realize that Bitcoin is very different from the rest of the (plentiful, unrelenting) crypto-noise. Studying it offers, at the very least, an important lens through which we might imagine recovering from a system that is currently working as designed to benefit the few.

All of the exciting new models of economic organization (mutual aid, local circular economies, etc) are phenomenally appealing, and they all require an “off ramp” from our system, refined over decades and, indeed, under the supervision of both parties.

I believe (with evidence, though I am far from objective LOL) that this book goes further than anything I’ve encountered to explain, in simple and accessible terms, a central factor in our ever-widening “k-shaped economy” of wealth disparity.

Yesterday morning, I read an article that captured, very tangibly, this structural economic predicament as I’ve come to see it:

This gulf [between the very wealthy and working families], while reminiscent of the Reagan-era economy, lacks precedent due to how much the wealthiest account for—and thus shape—new consumer spending. Arguably, that spending power, previously confined to how luxuries were priced, now contributes to price increases for basic goods and services and the elevated interest rates meant to tame said inflation. This perpetuates a nasty spiral in which major players across supply chains ignore signs of household financial distress. Conglomerates and oligopolies, sensing they can mop up yet more earnings in an otherwise sputtering business cycle, behave as if paycheck-to-paycheck America can absorb the prices the very wealthy are willing to pay. Consequently, the norms that used to restrain pricing power have withered—and probably won’t see a revival until a recession (or an epiphany) compels business leaders to reevaluate what the average consumer can bear.

As I hold my breath and allow myself to believe that the momentum just might be in our favor, my greatest hope is that liberals can finally learn from our own failures and blind spots. That we look squarely at the weather system of economics, debt, inflation, jobs, culture, and AI, and — with our eyes wide open to the fragile treasure that is an open and free society — think boldly about addressing these interlocking crises of our time.

Once we can finally see how unfair our economic inheritance really was, we can begin to build a durable, flexible system that accounts for it.

We can fully acknowledge, for example, the technofeudal fencing that surrounds us— the way tech platforms and financial institutions were empowered to extract wealth from our labor while leaving us no alternative. When we do, we can finally start to imagine how we might meet, engage, and transact with each other outside of it.

There is so much we need to reinvent and yet so much we’re desperate to preserve. It’s terrifying, to be sure. But I’ve also learned that seeing things clearly brings its own kind of relief—as does, of course, comedy. Jon Stewart’s ability to unveil the absurdity of even our darkest stories, while almost supernatural, offers more than pressure release: it’s medicine.

So I guess that’s a good reminder as we enter the holiday season. The list of things that we need to incorporate into our new American story contains, of course, way more than the two items mentioned above. It’s actually as long as Santa’s scroll, but if we collectively lift up that carpet corner and refuse to unsee their root causes — preferably with a good dose of humor and humility — we’ll have a lot more energy for all of it.

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PS: Salesperson I am not! 😂 I forgot to include links to Bitcoin is for Everyone in my last post. So far, the reviews have been fabulous. If you buy (thank you so much!) and enjoy the book (yay!), please, please consider posting a review on the bookseller’s site. It makes all the difference. :) Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t wonder, aloud, if this isn’t the perfect gift for the holidays!? It’ll definitely spark interesting, nonpartisan conversation around the dinner table, and make you look like a cutting-edge shopper. :) Your support means the world!

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Bookshop.org (awesome, as they support independent bookstores!)

Buy on Barnes & Noble

I have probably watched Julie and Julia —the movie about Julia Child and the Brooklyn-based writer who, in the 90s, cooked and blogged her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking — well over 100 times. I would pretty much watch it for every “folding party,” my tongue-in-cheek way of making laundry folding palatable.

I’ve cried every time Julia Child received the acceptance letter from Knopf, and again, inevitably, when she unwrapped the hardcover book in her iconic kitchen as Paul, her devoted husband, takes off his glasses and chuckles with delight as his wife’s dream comes true.

So you can imagine my emotions when I finally received a box full of copies of the book I’ve been helping to write over the last three years.

And for those same three years, I’ve been imagining your collective reactions on this front: “What!? A book about Bitcoin? Allison, that really doesn’t compute.” (Pun somewhat intended.)

I get it. I had the same reaction when I was first approached about this project through my beloved literary agent. I couldn’t fathom that the subject might actually align, in many ways, with my deepest goals and values. I had the same passing familiarity with Bitcoin that most of you probably have: and, since this was a few years ago (before it was consistently making headlines—at least the headlines that reached me!), I didn’t have much of an opinion about it one way or the other.

I certainly couldn’t fathom how the subject might fill a whole book, much less one that touches on root causes of inflation and wealth inequality, resource extraction, and the history of money as it’s been written across the world and throughout time. I also had no idea that the story of Bitcoin’s energy consumption was much more nuanced and hopeful than the one I’d encountered.

This journey of discovery led me to acknowledge what I have sensed, for a long time now: that we are self-evidently in a historical moment that demands the recovery of old wisdom and the invention of new playbooks.

It has been a period of immense growth for me. I’ve often wished I’d had a brain scan before and after this project, because the insights and connections have almost literally lit me up from within.

What worked before is not working anymore, that’s for sure. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we can feel into the past 4-5 decades and reinterpret them through the insights that have now surfaced: were they really working? Or were they, in hindsight, more of a slow-motion unraveling?

Finding myself — as co-writer of Bitcoin Is for Everyone (Harriman House, November 2025) along with Emmy-award winning journalist Natalie Brunell — receiving the compliment I mentioned in my February letter to Jon Stewart—that this was ‘the best book on macroeconomics’ our UK financial publisher had ever read—was among the most statistically unlikely compliments I could’ve ever imagined.

Above all, though, the experience has taught me to sit with the discomfort of complexity and to lean, always, away from certainty. It has shown me just how much I don’t know what I don’t know.

I have taken up permanent residence in the territory between “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” and it is not, shall we say, a particularly affordable zip code. The cost of living in the “in between,” of trying to reconcile the truths of (seemingly!) irreconcilable approaches to the most crucial questions and crises of our time, has been real.

As Segel’s Law suggests, “A person with one watch always knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.” And so, with ‘two watches’ perennially on my arm, I’ve definitely cried quite a bit. Why? Because, as we all know and as our book acknowledges from the outset, it is very clear that something is wrong.

I have cried because, in studying this material, I have learned that our societal problems aren’t only a failure of imagination or a failure of leadership, though they most certainly are both of those things; if they were, then a mere injection of true imagination and leadership could right the ship. A central problem is also one to which many on “my side of the aisle” have been relatively blind as we pursue everything we feel is right and good and necessary. Or, as Jerusalem Demsas recently quipped on her new podcast The Argument: “Caring about the debt is for losers. At least that’s what I used to think for like the last 20 years.”

That problem has become — over the decades — not just what we choose to do (or not do) with our money. It actually arises from our money itself.

The contradiction between seeking to fulfill our democratic vision of preserving the rights of our people — including the right to healthcare, now at the epicenter of our current shutdown debate — and reconciling the predicament at the heart of our monetary system has made me feel, over and over again, as though we are trying to treat a chronic illness with medicine that numbs the pain but aggravates the condition. We are desperate to fulfill our duty to care, but we’re missing a deeper injury in the long tail of decisions that severed our idea of prosperity from the common good. That sincere care cannot, I suspect, be separated from the money we must use to deliver it—at least for the foreseeable future, despite how inspired I am by emerging ideas like mutual aid networks.

As its title suggests, this book is written for everyone seeking to make sense of our shared reality and the ramifications of a global economy built on debt and inflation, which has contributed to “extreme wealth concentration and a pervasive sense of frustration among those left behind.”

I hope you will read this in the spirit of inquiry with which I joined the project. If we don’t ask difficult questions—if we don’t examine our own assumptions and look under every rock—we won’t escape the eddy in which we’ve been stuck, perhaps for far longer than we ever imagined. Although it might seem counterintuitive, at a time of great precarity, we have to be curious, not fearful. This moment in history calls for nothing less than our fullest ability to hold and navigate seeming contradictions with grace and open-minded willingness to challenge inherited assumptions. We must, I truly believe, expand what it means not only to hold loving ideals, but to remain flexible about how those ideals take shape in the face of new information and circumstances.

If you’ve ever lost something, then you know that the first thing you do is retrace your steps. In Bitcoin is for Everyone, we’ve sought to look at “how we got here” so that we might be better equipped to think about “where we’re going.”

It’s certainly not the only map, but I have learned so very much from studying it. I do hope you’ll join me.

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I have probably watched Julie and Julia —the movie about Julia Child and the Brooklyn-based writer who, in the 90s, cooked and blogged her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking — well over 100 times. I would pretty much watch it for every “folding party,” my tongue-in-cheek way of making laundry folding palatable.

I’ve cried every time Julia Child received the acceptance letter from Knopf, and again, inevitably, when she unwrapped the hardcover book in her iconic kitchen as Paul, her devoted husband, takes off his glasses and chuckles with delight as his wife’s dream comes true.

So you can imagine my emotions when I finally received a box full of copies of the book I’ve been helping to write over the last three years.

And for those same three years, I’ve been imagining your collective reactions on this front: “What!? A book about Bitcoin? Allison, that really doesn’t compute.” (Pun somewhat intended.)

I get it. I had the same reaction when I was first approached about this project through my beloved literary agent. I couldn’t fathom that the subject might actually align, in many ways, with my deepest goals and values. I had the same passing familiarity with Bitcoin that most of you probably have: and, since this was a few years ago (before it was consistently making headlines—at least the headlines that reached me!), I didn’t have much of an opinion about it one way or the other.

I certainly couldn’t fathom how the subject might fill a whole book, much less one that touches on root causes of inflation and wealth inequality, resource extraction, and the history of money as it’s been written across the world and throughout time. I also had no idea that the story of Bitcoin’s energy consumption was much more nuanced and hopeful than the one I’d encountered.

This journey of discovery led me to acknowledge what I have sensed, for a long time now: that we are self-evidently in a historical moment that demands the recovery of old wisdom and the invention of new playbooks.

It has been a period of immense growth for me. I’ve often wished I’d had a brain scan before and after this project, because the insights and connections have almost literally lit me up from within.

What worked before is not working anymore, that’s for sure. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we can feel into the past 4-5 decades and reinterpret them through the insights that have now surfaced: were they really working? Or were they, in hindsight, more of a slow-motion unraveling?

Finding myself — as co-writer of Bitcoin Is for Everyone (Harriman House, November 2025) along with Emmy-award winning journalist Natalie Brunell — receiving the compliment I mentioned in my February letter to Jon Stewart—that this was ‘the best book on macroeconomics’ our UK financial publisher had ever read—was among the most statistically unlikely compliments I could’ve ever imagined.

Above all, though, the experience has taught me to sit with the discomfort of complexity and to lean, always, away from certainty. It has shown me just how much I don’t know what I don’t know.

I have taken up permanent residence in the territory between “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” and it is not, shall we say, a particularly affordable zip code. The cost of living in the “in between,” of trying to reconcile the truths of (seemingly!) irreconcilable approaches to the most crucial questions and crises of our time, has been real.

As Segel’s Law suggests, “A person with one watch always knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.” And so, with ‘two watches’ perennially on my arm, I’ve definitely cried quite a bit. Why? Because, as we all know and as our book acknowledges from the outset, it is very clear that something is wrong.

I have cried because, in studying this material, I have learned that our societal problems aren’t only a failure of imagination or a failure of leadership, though they most certainly are both of those things; if they were, then a mere injection of true imagination and leadership could right the ship. A central problem is also one to which many on “my side of the aisle” have been relatively blind as we pursue everything we feel is right and good and necessary. Or, as Jerusalem Demsas recently quipped on her new podcast The Argument: “Caring about the debt is for losers. At least that’s what I used to think for like the last 20 years.”

That problem has become — over the decades — not just what we choose to do (or not do) with our money. It actually arises from our money itself.

The contradiction between seeking to fulfill our democratic vision of preserving the rights of our people — including the right to healthcare, now at the epicenter of our current shutdown debate — and reconciling the predicament at the heart of our monetary system has made me feel, over and over again, as though we are trying to treat a chronic illness with medicine that numbs the pain but aggravates the condition. We are desperate to fulfill our duty to care, but we’re missing a deeper injury in the long tail of decisions that severed our idea of prosperity from the common good. That sincere care cannot, I suspect, be separated from the money we must use to deliver it—at least for the foreseeable future, despite how inspired I am by emerging ideas like mutual aid networks.

As its title suggests, this book is written for everyone seeking to make sense of our shared reality and the ramifications of a global economy built on debt and inflation, which has contributed to “extreme wealth concentration and a pervasive sense of frustration among those left behind.”

I hope you will read this in the spirit of inquiry with which I joined the project. If we don’t ask difficult questions—if we don’t examine our own assumptions and look under every rock—we won’t escape the eddy in which we’ve been stuck, perhaps for far longer than we ever imagined. Although it might seem counterintuitive, at a time of great precarity, we have to be curious, not fearful. This moment in history calls for nothing less than our fullest ability to hold and navigate seeming contradictions with grace and open-minded willingness to challenge inherited assumptions. We must, I truly believe, expand what it means not only to hold loving ideals, but to remain flexible about how those ideals take shape in the face of new information and circumstances.

If you’ve ever lost something, then you know that the first thing you do is retrace your steps. In Bitcoin is for Everyone, we’ve sought to look at “how we got here” so that we might be better equipped to think about “where we’re going.”

It’s certainly not the only map, but I have learned so very much from studying it. I do hope you’ll join me.

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I had volunteered to create a “Spooky Box” booth for our school-wide Halloween festivities at Misr Language Schools in Giza, Egypt, where, from 2003-4, I taught sixth grade.

I went straight to the internet (where else?) for execution strategies. Never one to make things easy for myself, I’d somehow detoured from my original idea, Halloween bowling (which would have required little more than carved oranges and soda bottles filled with sand, as far as preparation was concerned) for the exponentially more expensive and labor-intensive sensory box. Hearkening back to my own school Halloween events, though, I couldn’t imagine a festival without this particular element, whose basic premise was that a dead man had been found hacked to pieces and that I happened to be the unfortunate discoverer of this box, with its hand-sized exploratory holes and its morbid contents. Since my Egyptian colleagues clearly had no clue about classroom Halloween activities aside from the pumpkin and witch coloring pages they dutifully printed out each year, I knew that my cultural expertise was going to be necessary to make the afternoon even remotely authentic (authentically suburban-American, that is). This was, after all, why I had been imported to teach in the American Division of the school in the first place.

So, after reading all about Miss Jane (from Heartland Elementary School somewhere in Wisconsin) and her gory project, and dutifully writing down all of the key ingredients, I first spent about three unnecessary hours over-decorating my own Spooky Box. I then prepared to head over to the Gomaa Degla, our neighborhood market, for the goodies.

Every apartment building in Cairo, as far as I could determine, employs a “boab” to manage and maintain the building. Based upon a year’s worth of observations, our boab’s primary occupation was sitting in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair by the entrance of the building and smoking cigarettes. He occasionally punctuated these long stretches of slumped, vacant-eyed meditation with a few cursory sweeps of the stoop with an ancient broom (the dust, in Cairo, collects faster than flies on fresh dog poop), and I sometimes saw a few dirty rags line-drying on the banister that led up to the apartment units, but mostly he just provided me with an opportunity, each day, to feel profoundly conspicuous. I probably knew his name at one point, but I doubt I ever used it. Friendly advances were clearly unwelcome.

In stark contrast to our building’s off-putting boab, there was another one, down the street, who was wired to engage with the world around him. Just a day or two after my arrival, he and I had established a routine that carried, without exception, through every single departure from and return to my apartment the entire year I spent in that neighborhood. I had learned from a colleague at the school that “good morning” is, in Arabic, not just a blanket greeting but actually one with a wide range of interpretations, depending on the context and speaker’s mood.

“Sabah il kheer!” I cheerfully called over to the man draped as he would be, every day, in a dingy blue galabeyya, after he’d waved hello.

Surprised and pleased with my confident use of the Arabic phrase, he responded with a twinkle in his eye.

“Sabah il nour!” was his reply, which translates as “morning of light”. He thought he had me stumped, but I am a devourer of languages.

“Sabah il eshta!” I yelled back. Even as his figure started to recede into the distance, I could see the delight in his raised eyebrows. “Morning of cream” is a bit more obscure than the other two, and my use of the phrase had elevated me to the status of expatriate neighborhood darling in his eyes. He gave a hearty, appreciative laugh, and I waved once more before I rounded the corner. Our dialogue might as well have been inscribed in stone, because, twice a day from that moment forward, we carried out the same schtick (adding onto the stream of greetings whenever I learned a new phrase) in the same order and with as much pleasure - actually more, since rituals always increase in value to the participants the longer they are used - as that first time.

So, as usual, I made my way past our own boab and internally apologized for my existence, but was soon buoyed by my predictable encounter with the man down the street. I arrived at the market, armed with my list and with a mild air of self-congratulation that I was actually getting the hang of this Cairo-living thing.

The first item on my list, as recommended by Miss Jane, was a piece of meat or liver meant to be the dead man’s heart; we shall call this move “Allison’s Reason-Infringement #1”. You see, I suspect that Miss Jane was probably assuming that her directives would be carried out A) in an air-conditioned classroom, and B) not in the desert. But more on the consequences of my lack of geographically-appropriate lesson plan adaptations in a moment. First, the grocery-purchasing experience itself.

After roaming around trying to fulfill Miss Jane’s other prescriptions for basic body parts (grapes for eyeballs, spaghetti for intestines), I finally came to the meat counter. With my burgeoning command of the Arabic language, I approached with confidence and tried to explain to the butchers what I needed: a piece of meat, or liver, whatever’s cheap, to “stand in” for a dead man’s heart in my spooky Halloween box. Of course, there are no less than ten colloquial and culturally-biased linguistic issues embedded in this description; these guys had probably never celebrated Halloween, much less tried to recreate the innards of a fictional dead person. Never mind that this was all probably way too much information, and that I could have just asked for a piece of meat and been done with it.

But hey! They seemed to get it. The younger butcher disappeared around the back, and, in what had unarguably been the most Poe-like moment in my then 28-year existence, soon emerged, beaming, with a giant, bloody, must-have-been- beating-less-than-thirty-seconds-ago cow heart in his palm.

I had, appropriately enough, a heart attack.

Unbelievably, this was not the end nor the worst part of my spooky box experience. That came on Halloween the next day, when I brought my lovingly-assembled box to school and set up my booth in the courtyard along with all the other teachers.

Things began benignly enough, with my booth garnering the best reactions from the students as it quickly became the most popular activity with the most repeat-business; for about fifteen minutes, I was thrilled and proud, temporarily able to suspend my perpetual awareness of the cloudless sky, 104-degree heat, and the sweat that was, as usual, rolling down my torso from underneath the requisite long-sleeved shirt and floor-dusting skirt (I had let go of underarm sweat-ring embarrassment weeks ago.)

For each group that approached my booth, I delivered the story of poor Mahmoud’s (my only cultural adaptation) tragedy with chilling, gory detail. The kids were having a blast, and so I was happy and fulfilled. And then, as I ran through my dead-man schpiel for about the 18th time, I started to notice the flies.

Not only were these flies multiplying by the minute both in number and aggression, soon dramatically outnumbering my human visitors, but they were also accompanied by what can only be described as the most rapid onset of flu possible in a human body.

Entirely without absorbent Kleenex and unable to abandon my post, I was reduced to maintaining my Vincent Price monologue for the throng of eager, ketchup-blood-soaked children between nose-wipes with my pink cotton blouse, all the while trying to deny the fact that the entire area was permeated with the increasingly unmistakable scent of barbecue.

After a few more minutes in which fluids continued to pour uncontrollably from every facial orifice while I — covered in flies, with increasingly hoarse voice, and clammy, eye-clawing misery — remained committed to my story, I realized, with heart-clenching horror, that it was quite probable I had been poisoning all of my students with the unfathomable germs that accompany a piece of steaming raw flesh.

I shuttered the booth, borrowed the unusually large bottle of Purel that my apple-crunching colleague unsurprisingly kept in her 1983 acid-washed denim purse-sack, and attempted to douse every kid who had visited my booth with an anti-bacterial shower. And then, as I did more days than not, I went home, ordered a latte and turkey sandwich to be delivered by my starched-shirted friend from the Green Mill cafe, ripped off my sweaty clothes in exchange for a light cotton tank dress, crawled into my bed, and cried.

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(I always receive a wonderful burst of personal emails in response to these posts, which I adore! If you don’t want to leave a comment on here, which I totally understand, please do consider “liking” the post (by clicking the heart), because as horrific and abhorrent as this algorithmic world is, likes and comments make a big difference.) ❤️

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Rick Wilson’s tribute said it all, and gorgeously. After naming the destruction and outrage, he continues:

Picture, then, the moment he is gone.

Again, the White House lawn echoes with construction machinery, removing the gaudy tumor of his ballroom, stripping it to the bare ground in a swift and certain way. It was a shabby thing, built cheap and fast, a strip-mall junk building covered in faux marble, a cheap imitation of European grandeur at odds with American dignity.

The day breaks on that new era, and earth movers fire up at the same moment and rip out the disco patio he installed in the Rose Garden. The stones he laid down are crushed, chipped to dust, not a sign of them left for a cult to claim from a landfill.

Picture the gardeners and groundskeepers, eager and ready to replant those rose bushes again, restoring one quiet place that belongs on those sacred 18 acres, not on the patio of Mar-a-Lago. Their hands and tools turn the soil, restoring life and dignity to a small space redolent with history.

Picture the careful work, the painstaking restoration of the East Wing and its facade beginning a few days later, an army of skilled craftsmen honored to work old magic with old tools to remake a lost space, guided by photos and plans, by memory and heart.

Picture the lights rising slowly in the East Wing at its re-dedication, the hush returning.

Picture a young staffer carrying a stack of envelopes for condolence letters, setting them gently on a desk polished by other hands, other years. Picture a volunteer pinning on a name tag and taking her place by the portrait of a First Lady who looks back with steady eyes.

Picture a Marine holding a door. Picture a child pressing a nose to the glass at the Colonnade and seeing the reflection of her own face and something beyond it: the outline of a country that belongs to her not because she is rich or loud but because she is here, because we said she belonged.

That is the opposite of desecration. It is restoration. It is dignity. It is respect.

That is the point of those 18 acres on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I believe we must hold fast to such visions, for imagining is the predecessor to creating.

At the same time, what if — rather than sitting for the foreseeable future in the stew of our gut-punch nausea and rightful fury — we took this regressive display of self-aggrandizement and compensation and inverted it, creating a new architecture for the repair and reconnection needed to heal ourselves, each other, and the natural world?

Think about all of the lame, stressful, un-fun parties that are going to take place in that gold-plated ballroom. Think about all of the falling-over-themselves sycophancy, the “let’s see if we can get close to him and get a little of that to rub off on us”-type of scarcity-mindedness, like a bunch of fraternity boys housing a late-night pizza before it’s gone. Think about all of the fucking strained-smile applause.

Everything that will take place within its walls will be a desperate plea, the cosplay of a theatrical rendering of the past.

The East Wing itself, on the other hand, seems, from my limited understanding and imagination, to have been (among many other things, of course) a place for the feminine art of welcoming. As the NYTimes quoted Laura Bush’s Chief of Staff quoting Betty Ford yesterday: “If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.” Those parties, I suspect, will be populated with a lot of mental chatter and social striving—but very little heart.

We’ve spent at least the last century, as a culture, in a state of (at least partial) dissociation. Most people I talk to, especially reasonably well-resourced women, have bumped up against the edges of convenience and isolation. Yes, our kitchens are well-stocked with dishwashers and Kitchen Aid mixers; we have Annie’s mac and cheese and extra virgin olive oil with which to lubricate our organic kale.

But it’s no accident that the image of gathering on the banks of a river to wash our clothes, laughing and joking and gossiping while the kids play nearby—with the eyes of the community on them — has come up recently in more conversations than I can count. That longing is real.

Contrast that lovely vision with the controversy over a miscommunication at a roller skating birthday party, and you get the idea.

I am not here to propose a sweeping program or tidy antidote to the destruction taking place before our very eyes, of which the East Wing demolition is emblematic. I think much of the repair will actually be, in many ways, more intuitive and spontaneous, like the dancing frog.

Instead, I am suggesting something inordinately humble. That anyone reading this today listens to that urge to connect, and reaches out to a friend, without overthinking or over-planning, and invites them for a drink or a tea (even a Zoom tea with a faraway friend works!). Let’s offer, in our everyday lives, a moment of a connection as a stated reflection of the spirit of the East Wing of the People’s House — our house —and the (mostly) women who brought it to life and gave it meaning. We can call it the “East Wing Revival.”

That’s it. Violate your to-do list, call a friend, and talk about things that matter to you.

That is the spirit of the East Wing. That is the opposite of grand, gold-plated, exclusive invites, pay-for-play balls.

That’s the world we need to rebuild even before we get to the work of replanting the Rose Garden, because true connection is a rose that nobody can raze.

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PS: I have a list in my Google Keep of “advice to my kids,” where I write down important nuggets as they occur to me. One of my most treasured (and often referenced) is this: “If you’re thinking of someone, tell them. Don’t deliberate - just shoot a text: “I’m thinking about you and wanted to let you know!”

(And here are a few others, in case you’re curious):

• Look at “young” photos of people you only know as “old.” It’ll blow your mind every time.

• When you buy windshield washer fluid, buy two bottles. That way there is always some when needed (this was one of Mark’s contributions!)

• Moisturize yourself after the shower, even though it’s a pain.

• If you go to the bathroom, check the toilet behind you. Good to do at home, essential elsewhere.

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What this reveals to me is that my entire being is not so much “Allison” as it is “Allison in the context of her relationships.” Which I think is pretty much true-true, not just true for me.

And now today is, of course, 9/11.

I guess it’s been five years since I’ve shared the story of my personal experience on this tragic day.

The world is even more fragile, it seems, than it was five years ago.

The moments of my 9/11 story that seem to resonate most with people (and the ones I still remember in my own bones and muscles) are the moments of sheer, unmediated human contact. I am still absolutely certain that our instincts to reach out to each other are the same. Our hands are naturally wired to look for another, like the pores in Andrea Gibson’s spectacular poem “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps”:

“Then one day, in a red velvet theater

in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou

walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.

She took a breath before speaking,

and I could hear god being born in that breath.

My every pore reached out like a hand

pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou

of the universe. I’d never felt anything like it.”

I guess my thinking, at this early hour, is that the “real me” cannot and does not live outside of my world of relationships, friendships, encounters with people next to me on a train (or a bridge or bus, in the case of this 9/11 story), bagging my groceries. Or, really, my relationship to the world itself.

Despite the fact that most of our homes and kitchens are stocked with every fathomable appliance (and then some), most of the equipment we REALLY need is carried on our bodies, and it is underutilized.

In addition to my 9/11 story, I am sharing this really animating piece about what can be done in the absence of representative power. We think we need so much, it argues, but in so many cases we really just need our own set of knuckles and a bunch of clipboards. I have hundreds of clipboards leftover from my own campaign, and my hands thankfully still work.

The window to shift this hybrid warfare (which is what it really is) is closing, but for now it’s still quite open.

We need to stop thinking we’re not ready, not knowledgable enough, too busy, too confused, too overwhelmed. That’s what they’ve spent trillions of dollars programming us to think.

We still have our minds, hearts, and bodies, and they are brilliant. We need to cut the crap and use them.

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This story was first published on 9/11/2016 in Off-Guardian magazine.

Ascending from the Wall Street subway station a few steps ahead of me, a woman’s heels click-clacked purposefully up to street level. Channeling an entire way of life through those pointy-toed, patent leather accessories, she was the embodiment of “places to go, people to meet” — even the curves of her calves meant business.

For several days, I had been engrossed in a horrifying book about the Bosnian War. Following her up the stairs, I silently excoriated the woman for her self-absorption. She obviously wasn’t thinking about places like Bosnia. As she tapped on her Palm Pilot, I flushed with an indignation that wasn’t altogether unpleasant; never mind that, for all I knew, the poor woman was a human rights advocate working to eradicate genocide from the African continent.

Clickety-clack.

I had been working at Omni “Freaking” Fine Art, as I unaffectionately referred to it, for nearly three months. While supposedly constructing elaborate spreadsheets forecasting the sale of dramatically overpriced reproductions of Smithsonian art, I kept boredom at bay with novella-length emails to friends at similar desks scattered around the city. I honestly had no clue how to sell our products, but neither, apparently, did anyone else in the company. That morning, as my alarm clock raised its voice above the general din of Red Hook, Brooklyn at 6:30 a.m., a dull headache reminded me of the bottle of wine I’d polished off with a childhood friend in a little East Village trattoria the night before.

I figured that I’d been with the firm long enough to establish myself as a reliable individual but not long enough to have become a disappointment, and that one late arrival wasn’t going to rock the boat. I hit the snooze button.

As my group of commuters spilled onto Broadway, the brilliant morning sky came rushing into view. I glanced at my watch: it was only a minute or so past nine. Amazing — I’d taken my time, and was still barely late enough to be considered late. Following the high-heeled lady a few steps down the block, I began devising an excuse for my slight tardiness. It wasn’t until I nearly collided with a man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, shielding his eyes as he looked upward, that I noticed that something was wrong.
When I first saw it, I thought that the ring of fire around the circumference of the Twin Tower was a hallucination. Had I been reading too much about the war? Was I actually capable of that kind of morbid projection? I looked around, noticing that all faces were turned upward in the same direction.

And then: right over my head and impossibly close, as though it was just floating up there on the end of a balloon string in my hand, the plane. I can still hear my voice declaring the obvious to nobody in particular: “Holy shit! That plane is going to hit the World Trade Center!” And then it did. As it pierced the tower in slow motion, the mesmerizing neatness of the slice was betrayed by the ear-shattering wail of glass and metal; like so many others around me, I thrust my hands up to the side of my head in a futile gesture of self-protection and, purse banging into the side of my neck, began to run.

A young woman grabbed my arm in her own southward sprint down Broadway. I stumbled to catch up with her, somehow registering a black business suit, swinging ponytail, and shiny black heels. I turned my head and looked up at the swirling mass of paper and debris. Although it couldn’t have actually been this way, I remember that moment, running with the girl, as though someone had pressed the “mute” button on lower Manhattan, and we were all trapped inside of a silent, macabre snow globe.

Everything was falling. I found myself being pulled into the Bank of New York building; a security guard, trying to keep order in the mounting chaos, blocked the entrance when he saw that I wore no ID. The young woman begged him to let me in, but when he waved his arms insisting, “She cannot come in here! She has to go! She has no ID, I cannot let her in!”, she met my eyes one last time before stepping into the revolving door.

I was thrust back into the wild street, twice as alone for having lost my friend. Glancing over my shoulder at the burning towers, I reached into my purse, clasped the familiar contours of my cell phone, and dialed my mom before taking off again. Busy signal.

I had worked in this neighborhood for three years, but had become entirely and hopelessly disoriented. People were running in all directions at breakneck speed, with bleeding wounds and debris-coated hair; but I passed, too, countless others, visible through shop windows and heard on street corners, who were talking and speculating as they craned to gape at the impossible vision that loomed over all of us. Shopkeepers in aprons stood in their doorways, smoking and discussing the goings-on with businessmen whose suits were peppered with dust.

Behind them, the loop of news anchors and attack footage had begun to flatten the three-dimensional world around me onto the television screens mounted throughout downtown Manhattan. It was from one of those televisions that I first saw the word “terrorist” flash across the screen; a moment later, the heel of my shoe broke off. My cell phone had been attempting to automatically redial my mom; with each try, fresh hopes of hearing her voice were slashed by a violent and soulless busy signal. Oh, God, I thought, I need to hear my mother’s voice. Please, God, let me get through to her.

“Get away from this building! It is a terrorist target! I repeat! Get away from this building! It is a terrorist target!” I was in front of the unmistakable facade of the New York Stock Exchange, where a police officer was shrieking into a megaphone to clear the area. Before I even had a chance to change course, a graying middle-aged man, clutching a briefcase under the crook of his arm, grabbed my hand. He didn’t say much — only, “Brooklyn Bridge.” It was enough.

As we set off toward the East River, I turned, for what must have been the thousandth time, to make sure the buildings were still standing; their tips were burning like the ends of a pair of lit cigarettes, and they seemed to be swaying. I quickened my pace, allowing my new guide to lead me toward Brooklyn and — maybe — home. The Brooklyn Bridge. It hadn’t even occurred to me.

We made our way through winding streets until the bridge swept into view, its suspension cables like bones threaded through a pair of enormous wings. And then I saw the mayhem. Hundreds of thousands of people, jammed like Alaskan salmon, desperate for Brooklyn. The lines to enter the bridge stretched as far as we could see, back into the heart of downtown; there was no way we were going to be able to get on, at least not within the next few hours. Looking at my companion for guidance, I saw that he was paralyzed with indecision.

Then I noticed that people were being hoisted over the side of the ramp leading onto the bridge. A moment’s pause over the ethical dilemma of “cutting in line” was replaced by a searing desire to get the hell off of the island of Manhattan; I let go of my guy’s hand, gestured for him to follow, approached the bridge, and started to climb. Almost immediately, a muscular black arm reached over from above and, grabbing hold of my hand, pulled me up and over the side of the bridge before disappearing into the streaming crowd. I leaned over to help my companion, still clutching his briefcase, do the same. With a wordless expression of gratitude, he, too, was swallowed into the thronging, desperate mob on the bridge.

“America is under attack!” “They’ve hit the Sears Tower in Chicago! LA! Boston!” “The Brooklyn Bridge is next! We have to get off!” People shoved and screamed, and rumors circulated like an airborne virus, sending waves of panic through the crowd and causing mini-stampedes to erupt like seismic events.

I was pushed to the ground by one of these stampedes, trampled until two guys swept me up and half-carried me until I had steadied myself enough to just continue hobbling along on my broken shoe, my arms linked through theirs. I was wiping my nose on my shoulder, but I’m pretty sure neither of them noticed. Some people were climbing up the railing of the bridge, clearly debating whether they’d survive jumping into the water, while others pulled them back down and dragged them forward.

And then, by some miracle, my phone rang. My call had finally gotten through to my mom. I was nearly halfway across the bridge, and, hearing the pronouncements of everyone around me, had little reason to believe that I was going to make it to the other side: either a building was about to fall on us or a plane would soon be bombing us. America had been pitched into a thundercloud of terrorists.

“Mom? Mom?” I wailed at the sound of her voice. “Mom!? I was walking to work and the plane hit the Towers! They are going to fall — the plane hit the Towers! Oh, Mom…”
“What? Allison, what? I can’t hear you. You’re crying too hard. What are you saying?”

“They are hitting the buildings! I’m on the bridge and — ” My mom, at that moment, had to be one of the last people not to know what was going on. She’d been tucked away in her gym class, entirely disconnected from the rest of the planet. She clearly assumed that this was yet another in a long and illustrious line of semi-hysterical phone calls about my inability to choose a professional direction. She interrupted my sobs. “Allison, I think you need to take a minute and calm down and call me back when I can — ”
The line went dead.

A rumbling crescendo from behind wrenched my attention away from the phone. We were a sea of faces, suspended over the East River and momentarily suspended, too, between being utterly transfixed by the spectacle of the tower beginning to collapse and physically aware of our own imminent demise. We were stuck, and would be crushed by a skyscraper. A tidal wave of humanity swept over the bridge, the herd willing itself toward Brooklyn.

And then, impossibly, the tower seemed to dissolve into itself. A great billow of dust and smoke, like the impact of a gargantuan octopus on the sandy ocean floor, unfurled in all directions. The once-glistening skyline was shrouded in darkness.

With our backs to unimaginable catastrophe, those two men held onto me the rest of the way across the bridge. When we finally plunged into Brooklyn, it felt as sweet and innocent and green as an Alpine village. We started walking downtown. Now that there was space for talking, none of us knew what to say. So we asked each other where we were heading, and wondered aloud if the buses were still running.

We reached Atlantic Avenue just as my bus was pulling up to the stop, and my friends helped me on. We hugged, smiling ambiguously and without any real meaning, just appreciating each other. As the doors closed behind me, I felt a relief so profound it was as though I was actually dissolving. I was fine. I was safe. I was on the bus that would bring me home.

I looked around at the people on the full bus — all looking at my tear-stained face and debris-covered clothes — and felt their wonder and curiosity and sadness. They knew that I had “been there”, and that compassion punctured whatever bubble I had constructed to get me through the last hour. I tried to stifle a sob, barely able to stand and keep my grip on the swinging handle. A man got up from his seat and motioned for me to sit down next to an enormous old Hispanic woman riding in the handicapped chair, and I gratefully took a seat.

As soon as I sat down, tears streaming down my face, the woman pulled me to her breast and stroked my hair as though I was her very own granddaughter. I can still feel the billowy softness of her bosom, her breasts like two queen-sized pillows filling a Downy-white cotton blouse. She was practically Mother Earth herself, and her soft hands on my forehead are one of the most memorable moments of human contact I have ever experienced. I looked up at her with a mixture of gratitude and despair; she simply nodded and pulled my head closer.

I found a declaration welling up in my throat, and needed to tell this woman. “I am never, ever going to bring a…” and then my voice trailed off as I saw a woman, deeply pregnant, sitting in the row of seats across from me. “…child into this world,” had been the end of my sentence, but I couldn’t say that, not now. I looked beyond her, through the window, to where the sky was dazzlingly, deceptively blue.

I write these stories with a beginning, middle, and end, because that’s how I was taught to do it in middle school. Don’t stories need an arc? Shouldn’t they be tidy? I also write them this way because it at least gives me the feeling that I am somehow making progress towards making sense of my life; that, if I unearth the right structure, its pieces will somehow learn to behave and fall into a cohesive narrative with sufficiently meaningful themes and at least some discernible symbolism.

Of course, the longer I beat my head against the wall of this exercise, the more futile it reveals itself to be; the more I try to wrestle these stories into pretty blue Tiffany boxes with pretty white satin bows (even the very-far-from-pretty ones, like this one), the more they continue to leak into the present and recolor the past, like some sort of shapeshifting inkblot.

Of course my 9/11 story did not end with me looking off into the distance at the dazzling and deceptively blue sky. My bus kept going, and I got off, and then a lot of stuff happened after that, including a very real panic attack after getting very wasted with my Red Hook friends that night, during which I can only remember my friends encircling and containing me in a net of arms and legs and words. I’ve always been predisposed to archetypal, mythological thinking, and I was raised on fairy tales.

I never really wondered, until more recently than I’d care to admit, what happened after the happily-ever-after parts, after the story was over. I was just always left with a good feeling. But after Will Hunting drove off to “see about a girl”, did he have to stop for gas? Did they have kids? Did he ever have a shitty meal at a restaurant or spend too long on hold with a cable provider? I recognize that these questions are tired and that stories are not meant to include such details, but I also feel a bit fooled by stories, because I thought life would be more like one than it actually is and I have tried for a long time, perhaps I’m still trying here, to fit myself into those too-tight slippers.

I’m not sure which details are pertinent — which ones move the story along, and which ones impede it. It’s all in how you tell it. Which, when you’re writing about yourself (for some unknown reason, because you know that you are not famous or noteworthy in any way, and that there is objectively no reason whatsoever that people would be even remotely interested to read about your very particular experience of being a person) becomes very tricky, because then you find yourself only wanting to take up the reader’s time with the really outlandish stories, like the one with the heroin-shooting dwarf, because you feel obligated to justify the time, ink, and trees that were given both to the production of the work and the reading of it.

When the subject of September 11th arises in conversation, I rarely tell my story, unless to real friends, who hear the story as having happened specifically to me, and all that entails for me, rather than just as an interesting anecdote. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation, really: first, people start discussing “where they were”, and I listen while they gravely describe calling their child’s preschool in Des Moines, or wherever, because they saw the footage online at work and panicked, because nobody knew what was happening or could have been happening across the country. It’s our generation’s Kennedy moment, and everyone (rightfully) has a frozen-in-time image of where she was, what she was doing, how she felt, and what she did next. It’s kind of a similar phenomenon to dreams, though: people love to tell their own, but rarely care to probe deeply into others’, which is why I can usually get away with not telling mine. Unless you offer, nobody asks.

I have realized, over time, that I prefer not to offer for several reasons: first, because it feels like a case of one-upmanship. I am never the one to bring up 9/11, which means that, once I moved out of New York City, almost every other person’s story that I’ve encountered is more distant from the attacks than my own; it feels both awkward and rude to make their heartfelt accounts seem insignificant or somehow foolish when I say, “Well, actually…”.

Secondly, it feels like capitalizing on tragedy for a moment in the spotlight; even though my experience was deeply frightening, and has had a lasting impact, it was, by comparison, really not all that much. There’s something of an ego trip derived from people’s genuinely fascinated responses that feels ugly and cheap, riding upon the back of so much grief and sorrow from which I was very much spared. I also choose to not tell my 9/11 story because the telling feels canned. I know the details, I know the plot points, and I always feel as though I’m telling the story from a million miles away, and am thus disconnected both from the story itself and the listener. The hollowness is enough to make my eyes water as I watch myself and don’t like what I see, so now I usually don’t even consider it.

Aside from the generally inherent drama of the incident, though, there exist a couple of pretty much incontrovertible truths: if I hadn’t been slightly hungover from those drinks the night before, I wouldn’t have been late to work. And if I hadn’t been late to work, I probably would not have lived, because my desk was not only facing but directly pushed up against a set of windows that were blown out with the force of tons of high-flying debris in the explosion.

After several out-of-body days wandering around Brooklyn, drinking beers, splurging on sushi, and lazing with my friends on the Red Hook waterfront lawn while we watched and smelled the smoke from Lower Manhattan as the Statue of Liberty raised her torch stoically in the foreground, I re-entered the office and discovered that my desk and new window provided a direct view of Ground Zero cleanup.

Needless to say, my productivity did not increase. Which leads to the second incontrovertible truth: if this tragedy had not occurred, my boss would not have decided to send me back to Maryland to work from home for the summer and try to enter the DC art market with our wares, which means that I would never have decided to simultaneously enter an elementary education certification program wherein I met Mark, my future husband, who had also started on the path to becoming a teacher. It is very uncomfortable to contemplate the fact that my beautiful family is in no small part built on the foundation of a terrorist attack.

On the day I left New York for that supposedly brief sabbatical, I took the newly re-routed green line to Penn Station. The subway car was, as it had been since that blue-skied morning, almost completely silent and very palpably full of feeling, although there were two teenagers flirting loudly and in almost endearingly complete obliviousness to the emotional tone of their surroundings.

We pulled into Bowling Green, and a man stepped onto the train wearing a NYFD jacket and an expression of grief and exhaustion on his face under a mop of tousled red hair. He was carrying a small American flag. Trying not to stare, I looked down at my purse and felt the sting of tears at the corners of my eyes, imagining what he’d seen and lost. I looked up again, just because I had to, and his eyes met mine.

I tried to communicate something akin to “I’m sorry” before looking down again, but knew that my face was probably more akin to some kind of visual gibberish. Just as I felt myself flush in embarrassment, the conductor announced over the loudspeaker, “Now approaching Cortlandt Street, World Tr-” and cut himself off, who-knows-how-many-years of habit suddenly crashing into our new reality.

I got out at Penn Station, and so did the fireman. As I hoisted my duffel bag higher onto my shoulder, I felt a light touch on the elbow.

“Are you ok?” he asked, as people streamed ahead on both sides of us.

“Me? You! I was just thinking about you! Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. You heading up to Penn Station? Traveling somewhere? I’m going there as well, can I help you with your bag?”

“Yes, I’m going home to Maryland for a while. And no, I’m pretty sure you’ve done enough recently. You cannot help me with my bag, don’t be silly. But thank you so much for asking.”

“C’mon, I’d enjoy it. It would truly be my pleasure.” Shrugging in mock-capitulation, I allowed him to take over my duffel and we walked for a while in pleasant silence.
“So, Maryland, huh. Is that where you’re from?”

“Yes — I’m going home for a while. My office is downtown, and my boss thought it might be good for me to work from there for a while.”

“Ah, nice. So you’re heading home to your family. That is just wonderful to hear.”

We introduced ourselves, and chatted the rest of the way into the Amtrak waiting room. He bought us both coffees, and we sat until my platform number was posted. Danny, a former fireman, had been volunteering at Ground Zero and was still, daily, looking for many of his former colleagues and buddies. He did not go into tremendous detail about the ordeal, but of course that wasn’t necessary. What he seemed hungry to discuss, more than anything, were the ordinary, daily details of my life and family; my mom had called while we were still chatting and had told me exactly what we were having for dinner, and those details would certainly have never survived in my memory except for the fact that Danny overheard and smiled broadly at the idea of me, later that evening, eating string beans and flank steak with my parents. He told me a bit about his life growing up in Staten Island, but kept steering the conversation back to me, eager for stories that had nothing to do with, well, pretty much anything.

I told him about the time my family all crowded around my mother’s dinner plate in awe and disgust as one of her spaghetti noodles appeared to be crawling around of its own volition (we later discovered that an almost invisible thread of her hair had attached itself to a noodle and created this grotesque illusion), and he laughed heartily, a belly laugh, when I told him about the time, when my brother was four and I was ten, when we took a family trip to Antigua.

My mother had somehow not deemed it necessary or appropriate to bring her passport or, for that matter, even her wallet; we were easily able to leave the US under such conditions, and Antigua similarly welcomed this unidentified-but-paying woman with open arms, but when it came time to board the plane on our return trip to the States we confronted an entirely different set of circumstances.

Mom needed identification, and she didn’t have any.

In desperation and absolute bewilderment that my mother could be so naive, my dad pulled out an Owings Mills family portrait of the four of us. “Look! Would I really carry around a family photo of a woman who wasn’t my wife?” The airline attendant paused, thinking over what to do as she looked down at Dad’s bushy ’70s moustache, back up at my father, and then down to the smiling image of my mom in a turtleneck sweater that seemed ready to devour her entire head, and back up to my mom and her anxiety-raised eyebrows.

The woman was obviously our mother, my dad’s wife. The attendant hesitated, and then looked down at my brother and asked, very gently, “Little boy, is this woman your mother?” To which my brother responded, deadpan, “I have never seen this woman in my life.”

When it was time to for me to board my train, Danny and I exchanged numbers and addresses and hugged as if we’d been friends for years, both of us with teary eyes that were neither sad nor happy but just plain emotional, and he gave me his little American flag. He called me later that evening, just to check and see how the flank steak and string beans had been, and we spoke briefly a few times over the next week or so. Although he had volunteered at Ground Zero every day, he and his team had not found any survivors. I received a card in the mail a few weeks later. On the front it simply read “Thank you” in gold script, and bore the image of a single rose. On the inside, it said:

Dear Allison, I just wanted you to know how great it was to meet you and chat with you that day at the train station. I told my friends all about you the next day as we worked at the site, and my story — and your stories — brought a lot of smiles to a lot of people on a real dark day, and for that I will forever be grateful. Wishing you and your family all the best,
Danny

Again, this story has no arc. I don’t actually even remember how Danny and I lost touch. But I do feel that the meeting was important for me, and, it seems true, for him. I feel glad, and a little bit proud, when I think about how my ridiculous stories and general demeanor brought a momentary smile to those men in that unthinkable situation. Even though that’s not a lasting achievement, like writing a book or having a career, for that matter, it feels fundamentally anchored in the “this is who I am and how I like to be as I move through the world” department.

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Under the Second Tower was originally published in An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two Types of People (we really love to sort ourselves)

Perhaps it might be plausibly argued that there are two types of people: “those who can recall quotes and jokes on command” and “those who can’t.” I am definitively a member of the latter group. I have easy recall of only three jokes at any given moment, and have held on to the current offering for at least a decade.

My longtime go-to:

“Why do Norwegian naval ships have bar codes on their sides?”

“So when they come into port, they can ‘scan da Navy in.’” 🤷‍♀️😂🤦‍♀️

But ever since I heard the quote above, it has stuck with me—and the conclusion, which I have only just discovered, enriches the wit exponentially. I love it. It tickles that part of me that longs for truth and clarity while also recognizing the ongoing absurdity of the human project, and I’m here for it.

I am now 51 years old, and I am starting to think that I’ve gathered a sufficient amount of experience and insight to declare, with all the caveats, admissions, and acknowledgments in the world, that I can safely say that I’m starting to really know—with at least some degree of confidence—what kind of person I am.

Most of the time, that comes down to a general tendency of seeing some value on either side of any “two types of people” equation: for example, I was just this morning listening to an interview with a conservative Harvard professor about the situation between Trump and the university. At one point, the professor made the (obviously sweeping) generalization that Democrats are largely focused on empathy (wanting everyone to be “equal and included” and Republicans are largely preoccupied with admiration (wanting people to do what they are good at and succeed or fail “on the merits”).

Of course, that framing overlooks the systemic underpinnings of success (and its absence) implied by the idea of “equality of opportunity” that solutions like affirmative action or universal pre-k seek to ameliorate, but I thought it was a provocative lens. Do Democrats, in our pursuit of justice, inclusion, and equality, have a blind spot when it comes to acknowledging our admiration for success—even as popular culture (see: everything) clearly shows that we crave success, admiration, and the feeling of “being special”—maybe even superior—at least as much as the next guy?

Much has been written lately about the distinctions between “honor culture” and “dignity culture.”

For the sake of simplicity, it can be argued that Republicans (and the right more broadly) are primarily aligned with “honor culture” while Democrats (and the left more broadly) are steeped in the values of “dignity culture.” As philosopher Marie Bjedere put it in the article linked above:

If a country is alone, outgunned, and in a situation where global lawlessness prevails, that country will need a strong Alpha leader who will intimidate, dominate, and destroy any enemy that presents a danger. If a country enjoys the luxury of relative global political stability, that country will need a mature leader who is as deft with diplomacy and soft power as with armies and posturing. The current global landscape can be interpreted either way depending on whether we are looking through an Honor or Dignity Culture frame. Leadership that can flex between both frames will have a tremendous strategic advantage.

On Tyrants and Parenting

Tucked away at the end of a long cul-de-sac in a sprawling Evergreen neighborhood, far from the mind-blowingly consequential events unfolding all across the globe, I can still see how much tricky intricacy is contained within these two frames and in their interplay.

As a woman and a mom, I can see that I mostly subscribe to the “dignity” model. It is evident in how I parent, how I collaborate, how I show up. And yet there is undoubtedly—and I can see my husband Mark’s knowing smile as he reads this—a small but mighty tyrant lurking in there, too. This tyrant, as the quote suggests, comes out mainly in times of stress or anxiety (though not necessarily, it should be said, in moments of full-blown crisis—as when we thought that our house had been burglarized by what turned out to be an intrepid squirrel who cut his little paw trying to get in, leaving a mess of papers and wrappers and bloody prints across the piano. I wouldn’t say I was the picture of authoritative leadership at that particular moment.) If you ever want to meet this little tyrant that lives within me, however, you can predictably meet her in any car in which I am not the driver: in general, there’s my way and there’s the wrong way.

The distinction has arisen a number of times throughout our married and parenting lives, which are largely a mixed bag of traditional and reversed gender roles. Mark taught me how to cook (I could basically make oatmeal and pour Cheerios when we met), and has fully taken over the laundry from my sorry-ass laundry-doing self (once, when we were first married, I spent the ENTIRE DAY—literally, we watched a whole season of The Biggest Loser from start to finish—ironing, as I come from a long line of, shall we say, expert and persnickety ironers. At the end of the marathon, as the winners celebrated their remarkable and hard-won achievements, Mark looked over at my output and said, with genuine compassion, “I’m so sorry to say it, but they look exactly the same as when you started.” Thus ended my ironing career.).

On the other hand, I have also just recently completed a two-year project (more on this in a future newsletter!) in a field very heavily skewed towards men. I also have to admit that I have spent the last ten minutes trying to think of other ways I personally upend traditional gender stereotypes around the house, but I am (rather notably) coming up short. Do I fix things? Nope. Do I mow the lawn or use the snow blower? No. Do I assemble furniture or change light bulbs and smoke detector batteries? Nope.

I guess we’re more traditional than I thought!

(A funny aside: I had to pause this writing because a realtor just came to the house—we’re putting it on the market (another long story)—and wanted to make sure it was ready for exterior shots. It was, thanks to a shit ton of work we did yesterday (wait—I did the mulching. So there’s two things!). She was about to leave but thought we should make sure all of the light bulbs were working. I flipped the switch, and both lights high above the sliding glass doors came on, and then one proceeded to burn out before our eyes. She was like, “You can change that by Wednesday, right?” And I was like, “Um.”

With the kids, this “honor and dignity” paradigm has definitely come up a number of times over the years. I tend to orient towards “enlisting” them in the project at hand, while Mark leans towards “instructing” them to do a task and expecting a straightforwardly affirmative response that is not always forthcoming. This usually results in a little side discussion around “asking nicely,” which eventually becomes a bit of a triangulated dynamic from which we have to emerge through skillful and passionate debate while the kids roll their eyes. Eventually equilibrium is restored, and we note, with some resignation, how many tasks could have been accomplished in the amount of time it took to get there.

The thing is, I know Mark is (sometimes) right. Sometimes you just have to tell a kid what to do. Every situation should not be approached like our dog Pepper, who requires a special trip to the calligrapher, a personalized wax seal, and a full marching band in order to properly finish her business in the dog area. We are not all equals. Leadership is required. He’s not instructing with malice, he’s just being direct. And he’s not always like that—he is, I think it’s safe to say, a leader who can “flex between both frames.” Wow—Mark is going to be delighted by this particular newsletter!

But I really do think it’s true, and I think it’s utterly imperative that we become more skillful at navigating within this polarity rather than rigidly ascribing to one or the other. Maturity requires case-specific assessments of complex and multidimensional scenarios. Sometimes, as with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s speedy repair of the I-95 bridge, the example often cited by Ezra Klein as he promotes his new book, a leader just has to make things happen. And yet, if we ever again find ourselves in a moment of non-crisis (God-willing), we need to find a way to still make things happen without getting mired in the brambles of process, policy, and over-collaboration. As Klein put it, “ On the one hand, you don’t want everything done under an emergency declaration. Your normal rules should be good rules. And on the other hand, I’ve had sort of the same question that you’re raising, and I’d be curious what you’ve concluded about it, which is: How do you snap the system into more of a different mode?”

Illuminators and the Power of Listening

Over the weekend, I heard a “two types of people” distinction that I think really does skillfully thread the needle between the seemingly incompatible orientations of honor and dignity culture. At a bat mitzvah, the rabbi suggested that, indeed, we could be one of two things: we could be a diminisher, or we could be an illuminator. He went onto say that an illuminator isn’t trying to outshine another person, but rather seeks to light up the world for all of us, including themselves.

I think that this is a profoundly beautiful framing that, if understood with nuance and applied with dexterity, could unlock vast reservoirs of stuck, self-righteous energy. Maybe we could use it to peer into the cobwebs of our own minds and see if the other person has to be wrong in order for us to be right. Maybe we could cling to our certainties a little less tightly, just for a moment, and see what comes in. Maybe we could see—as I have seen time and time and time again—how much a person comes to life when treated with respect and curiosity.

Which leads me to the bold claim teased in the subheading of this little meandering piece, which fully and completely contradicts the humorous conclusion to the opening quote: in my 51 years of experience,

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF PEOPLE HAVE A POWERFUL STORY.

I am absolutely convinced that even if I were to conduct interviews in a maximum security prison, I would emerge no less convinced that hearing each and every story would be a profoundly humbling experience.

As human rights activist Professor Loretta J. Ross puts it in the opening to her new book Calling In, “I am a reformed callout queen. I’ve furiously called out enemies, I’ve righteously called out friends. I’ve gleefully called out strangers. I even once called out President Barack Obama, though that’s a story for another time. My ego sure gets the appeal of putting people on blast. But I also realized a long time ago that running my mouth never did seem to accomplish what I wanted it to.”

Professor Ross’ message, delivered in a way that makes me want to take a bubble bath in her words, as weird as that sounds—is one of illumination. It’s far too rare, and very precious.

There are two types of people: those who take 18 minutes to watch this incredible interview with Professor Ross, and those who will wish they had. :)

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I don’t usually share links to articles with which I have no personal connection — we are all inundated — but I thought this one, “The rise of end times fascism” by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, said almost everything that needs to be said. And brilliantly. And with hope. If you haven’t come across this one yet, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

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Voter Protection Corps 🗳️ | An important invitation

I am on the board of the Voter Protection Corps—a nonprofit dedicated to safeguarding democracy by protecting voter access and election integrity.

This is a committed group of people who’ve been doing the urgent, concrete work of protecting voters (all across the country) from a range of threats—not just during election cycles, but every day. I'm really proud to be a part of this group, and am learning SO MUCH about the ongoing, brick-by-brick efforts to defend our democracy year-round.

My mom always jokes that she organizes and fundraises so often that people are going to run away when they see her coming LOL. I get it! But — we all know the state of things, and that we have to do everything in our power to cling to and preserve what we have so that we might later rebuild. To that end, I'm not afraid of being supremely annoying!

So: I’d like to invite you to join me for a (free!) Zoom meeting on 4/15:

You also are probably aware that the Trump administration has launched a dangerous new attack on voting rights with a sweeping Executive Order attempting to upend election rules nationwide and the introduction of the SAVE Act that would make it more difficult for voters to participate.

As voter suppression tactics escalate, Virginia’s 2025 elections will be the first major test of how far these threats will go — as well as a proving ground for voter protection strategies to ensure that every eligible voter can register, vote, and have their votes count.

Virginia’s 2025 elections will be the most important statewide test of our democracy infrastructure under the new Trump administration and will set the stage for 2026 and beyond. Our best defense will come from building voter protection infrastructure now. Voter Protection Corps is convening a new webinar on April 15 with leading voices on voter protection in 2025, with a focus on Virginia.

Please join us on Tuesday, April 15 [which happens to be my birthday—your presence would be the greatest gift!] at 5:30 PM eastern for a Voter Protection Corps briefing on the threats to democracy in 2025 — and how we can fight back.

Register now → https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/_7PB-fc9RgaSuVH4miiRZw#/registration

Our speakers:

Justin Levitt — Constitutional law scholar and former senior White House advisor for voting rights, who will provide analysis on the Trump Executive Order.

Tram Nguyen — Co-Executive Director of New Virginia Majority, who has helped register over 300,000 voters and transform Virginia’s electorate.

Nico Walker — Deputy Voter Protection Director at the Virginia Democrats, who led poll observing operations across the Commonwealth and will share lessons from the ground.

You’ll also hear from Voter Protection Corps leadership about how our community can meet this moment — and what resources, partnerships, and strategies we need to win the fight in Virginia.

This event is for everyone who’s worked to protect voters — and knows the threats we’re up against. Together, we’ll strategize, share intelligence, and lay the groundwork to protect democracy in 2025 and beyond.

RSVP now → https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/_7PB-fc9RgaSuVH4miiRZw#/registration

Really hope to see you there!

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The Myanmar Earthquake — A generational catastrophe that’s getting lost in the general news insanity 🇲🇲

My dear friend Win, a refugee from Myanmar, was in Thailand (on the 25th floor of a skyscraper) during the earthquake. He is one of the most incredible people I’ve had the privilege to know; thank God he was unharmed, able to make it out of there, and arrived safely back in the U.S. He lost many friends. As a green card holder, his re-entry was no longer a given; I cried when he texted me that he’d made it to the other side. I will share more about Win’s story another time; I recorded the conversation in which I learned about his harrowing escape, as an activist wanted by the Burmese military whose image was plastered all over state media — and I was hysterical when he got to the moment when, via the UNHCR (The United Nations High Commission for Refugees) the U.S. embassy approved his resettlement in the U.S.

Most of us—myself, first and foremost—literally have no fucking idea.

Please, if you are able, support Win’s effort (you’ll see that there’s a Bitcoin component (much more to say on that front, but I will save it for now!); for a more traditional link, please visit this page) to help Myanmar recover through this link:

Ok, now my own post.

I was just reading this excellent review of NYT conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and it’s helping to bring something into focus that’s been sitting fuzzily at the edges of thought and perception for a while now.

Here was the line that brought it all forward: “At every turn, this book wants to present us with a world that is fundamentally comprehensible.”

It reminded me of a conversation I was having earlier this morning with a lovely woman from Vancouver Island. We were discussing “all the things,” up to and including the jealousy I sometimes feel for people who live inside of such a simple, clean narrative: “climate change isn’t real,” “life begins at conception” etc. Wouldn’t it be utterly wonderful not to wake up in a cold sweat at 1am, thinking of all that is being unmade? Wouldn’t it be fabulous to instead live inside a cozy cocoon of certainty?

I’m starting to think that the gulf between certainty and uncertainty might be one of the deepest fault lines of our times.

As the article continues, “But the universe is not a cozy sandbox in which the important objects are conveniently highlighted under your cursor. It’s maddening and multifaceted, full of wonders beyond our comprehension and details whose importance is not lessened by the profusion thereof. An honest look at the world does not allow us to rest on this sort of overconfidence in our understanding. As this book demonstrates all too well, such hubris can lead to dramatic failure.”

For all of its problems, the religious impulse seems to have contributed significant value to society. The weaponization of religion under “Dark MAGA” and the neoreactionary, anti-human fusion of the tech right with the autocratic machinery currently sweeping across the globe and, traitorously, into every aspect of our lives is (perhaps brilliantly) co-opting the human desire to be definitively on one or another side of a binary choice at all times.

A draft of this post has been sitting around for a week or two [okay, now more like three or four]; I am swamped. Re-reading it now, it already feels old, in a way—at least in terms of my state of mind and the focus of my attention. But I’m going to post it anyway, I think, because the onslaught of terrifying and demoralizing developments is calibrated to make any response obsolete faster than it can be crafted. Maybe rejecting that dynamic is part of reclaiming our right minds, our common sense, and—yes—fortifying our ability to grapple with complexity and not be reduced to flat pieces on a checkers board.

To that end, bear with me for a moment. I can’t stand thinking about Covid anymore (much less talking about it), but it seems to have really been a turning point for a culture that felt it was not getting the full story. Without really hunting, it’s very difficult to find a nuanced take that tells the full story of Covid, both the heroic global effort to save countless lives and the very real gaps in the public narrative. Entire swampy ecosystems seemed to grow, almost overnight, in that humid information vacuum.

My personal sense is that we can and must hold two thoughts: that many good people of good faith and good intention really tried their best under extraordinary circumstances, AND the shutdown was waaaaaay too long, did cause immeasurable harm, and some people really did probably manage the crisis to their own benefit.

Has the left mostly moved on to grappling with the very profound crises facing us today? Absolutely. The point isn’t to relitigate stale conversations about stuff that feels like it happened 200 years ago, but rather to point to one of the most reactive agents that were added to our already fragile national chemical cocktail.

As I often say to my kids, “Trust walks in on foot and leaves on horseback.”

I have no idea how our institutions can work to regain trust with ordinary voters; I can only do everything I can to ensure that we still have a viable opportunity to try.

But it seems to me that the left and the right, such as they are, seem to have similar allergies to uncertainty; they’re just threaded through prisms that are absolute inversions of one another, and therefore produce an entirely different picture for the viewer. I worry that if we don’t overcome our own knee-jerk version of holier-than-thou — if we don’t scoot over and make some room for people [not the technofascists, but those they’re also seeking to control] to sit with us who might otherwise not be inclined to do so — our would-be overlords will be telling all of us where to sit and what to say for many decades to come.

With perhaps 5-10 exceptions, we are all downwind of a “devious and meticulously executed multi-generational psyop,” as one friend put it. Whether we were fooled into thinking that Trump was going to save us (probably zero people reading this) or hypnotized by an unshakeable certainty of our own righteousness in all situations and ways of living, knowing, and being, we’re here now.

The rule of law and Constitutional order by which we make meaning and discern truth — in the name of justice and freedom — within the complexity of modern life is our best defense, and they are perfectly imperfect. I know I don’t have to tell you that they are already deeply (though I refuse to believe irrevocably) in jeopardy.

We are now in the knotty position of needing to defend our defenses. I have my hand in many worlds; ideas and possibilities are sprouting, like wildflowers, in all of them. It is incredibly heartening.

What I think we need more than anything, though, is a sense of connective tissue between and among those worlds. We need to somehow manage a worldview that pairs a grassy common-sense with a deep appreciation for the unanswerable mysteries. In the absence of either, we have sent people scrambling into holes into which it will be difficult to shine light.

We need to find a way to be certain about the everyday things that make life livable — family dinners, dignity, a livable wage, healthcare — and uncertain about the things that make life magnificently unknowable.

They have used every tool in their arsenal to manipulate us into ceding control of our faculties to algorithms that reinforce the certainties we already feel.

As this article put it,

Another way to understand the necessity of abstract thought is by looking at the difference between cults and culture…Cults require members to submit to a singular interpretation of reality, and those who introduce complexity or doubt are cast out as threats.

To defeat MAGA, we need a culture—not just an opposition movement, but an alternative social fabric that embraces complexity, fosters dialogue, and encourages people to think beyond slogans and simplistic narratives. Democracy cannot survive within a cultish mindset; it requires an active, questioning public that values uncertainty as a path to deeper understanding.

Or, as I put it on one of my signs (the other one, also pictured below, got a lot of attention — I dare you to read it and not get that brilliant song stuck in your head!) at the April 5th protests, “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness (but do that too!).”

There’s a lot of darkness. Let’s light candles. 🕯️🕯️🕯️

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I can still remember the feeling of being about four years old, happily swinging, when — on any given day — I’d be suddenly gripped with terror. For some reason, I had the sense that a giant bulldozer was about to barge through the honeysuckle fence and scoop me up.

I’d leap off of the swing and run into the house, screaming, “Bulldozer! Bulldozer!”

WTF? I have no idea.

Somehow, I just came across this outstanding article from 2022 (ignore the clickbait title); we need a new expression for “must-read.”

Guys, I am the bad guy in this article. I am the Lululemon-wearing, yoga-doing, IPA-drinking import from the east coast who literally just got back from a weekend in Steamboat Springs followed by a weekend in Breckenridge.

Hating myself is not an option; letting myself off the hook isn’t, either. Because so much of what was written in this article was real and true. The thing is, I’ve always been from the east coast; that pin was pushed into the map way back in 1974, and there’s no way to change it. I was also an east coaster back in 1996, when I spent a summer (improbably) embedding myself in Breckenridge’s mountain biking community, dating a guy from the bike shop (a funny story there), and becoming a fixture at the small coffee stand on Main Street.

When I think about how I’ve bounced around over the last few decades — from Prague to NYC to Cairo to the Boston suburbs and now, the foothills of Colorado — I’ve tended to focus on what I’ve gained. Friends, first and foremost. The insight that comes from travel, from really immersing myself in a community and seeing my own habits, beliefs, and opinions through a new lens. The obvious stuff.

I’ve never, until now, felt like a cultural bulldozer.

But here’s the thing: I, and most people like me, probably don’t want to be these people. We don’t want the culture of entire towns to be wiped away like dirty snow prints left on hardwood floors by our fur-lined Ugg boots, comfy and cozy though they are.

If towns like Bozeman and Three Forks are like sandcastles being washed away by the tides of private equity, people like me, I think, are less like the waves and more like the sand crabs left behind by them. We burrow wherever the waves of privilege carry us and, in the aggregate, eventually render the original landscape unrecognizable.

We probably think we’re independent, that we’re consciously crafting our own lives—and in many ways, of course, we are. But if we dig a little, we can see how we’ve pulled into deepening systemic grooves over the last few decades: monetary, psychological, and technological forces masquerading as freedom, choice, and progress. Like a needle on a record, we think we’re making our own music, but really, we’re just tracing the grooves someone else pressed into place for us. We’re less like composers and more like components.

This is not to say that we bear no responsibility for the damage we’ve wrought—or all of it. Like Americans traveling abroad, our (in many ways, much-welcomed and much-needed) money has translated into an imposition of our tastes on the places that have grown to rely on our business and so sought to provide the specific comforts we require.

In the book I’ve been collaborating on, the argument is persuasive: broken money has led to the dominance of things like private equity, which has devoured everything in sight in its search for “yield.”

There are many ways that this transformation was allowed and encouraged to insidiously take over, slowly but surely, while few of us were watching.

For years, we’ve been heading toward an iceberg—so slowly that we could tell ourselves we weren’t. Or that someone, somewhere, would step in and help us change course before it was too late. But then, a few weeks ago, “someone” punched the accelerator, and the iceberg has come rushing into view. Our hair is blown back.

It reminds me of an old joke my grandfather would bring up every time I said, “I’m serious!”

“And, I’m Roebuck,” he’d reply. “Who’s minding the store?”

Busy with our individual pursuits, many of us largely failed to notice how thoroughly the store was being neglected. We were like five-year-old me, pumping our legs on the swing set while a bulldozer moved almost noiselessly into place behind the fence.

It certainly felt better that way, at least while it lasted. Many of us were lucky enough to have it both ways. We could enjoy our lives and be the “good people” arguing on behalf of ideas that are, at their core, so righteous and unimpeachable that our status was pretty much iron clad.

Working to preserve democracy, for example, has also helped me preserve something else—my own sense of innocence.

Even as I knew, on some level, that a bulldozer was lurking behind me, and that in some very real ways, I’d actually helped put it there, I could still look at myself in the mirror. The slow erosion in the background was easy to ignore as I focused my attention and energies on the work I was doing in the foreground.

The situation reminds me of something I discovered back in the days of the Standing Rock protests: I was following the story and donating money (not a lot) to the protestors when I realized, with horror, that Citibank — our bank — was a key financial sponsor of the pipeline. It was as though I was shoveling coal into a raging fire with one hand while throwing thimblefuls of water onto it with the other.

I was unintentionally fueling up that bulldozer.

I am such a lover of culture. I don’t really care what culture it is: if it’s real (ie not manufactured—or, let’s be honest, sometimes even if it is), I’m smitten. Whether it’s an Egyptian wedding or the Denver Stock Show rodeo, I am just so amazed by the technicolor beauty of human traditions and connection to the things that make living alive; I still can’t believe that Passover is our kids’ favorite holiday—but actually, I can.

There is no way to read that article and not see the thing starkly that I have seen peripherally for many years now: I am a part of the trampling of culture, even as the mists are parting about just how bad the backlash to that trampling is going to be.

As our country is being ripped to shreds by forces of such enormity, by a machinery of such breathtaking depth and engineering that it takes some time to rewire our entire sense-making infrastructure to account for it, I think we need to look squarely at the things we’ve been studiously ignoring.

I’ll start with myself.

I want to have it both ways. I want to live in a safe, thriving country that honors local culture. I want people to be able to live where they work and work where they live; I want to travel across the country and see those lives in action, how people create community where they live. I want a neighborhood butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. I want everyone to have those things—not just wealthy communities with boutique fish markets and cheese shops.

To simplify to the point of absurdity, I want American towns to look like Radiator Springs did before they put the highway in (I dare you to watch that 3 minute video and not get choked up).

Yet just as the Sackler opioid crisis was foisted upon an unsuspecting population—often by doctors who (at least at first) thought they were helping—so has the destruction of American towns spread, directly (through our lifestyles) and indirectly (through our investments), by unsuspecting carriers of broken money through people like me.

The fact that we’ve done so with sometimes deafening preachiness definitely didn’t help.

For my part, I’ve long had a knack for burying my own hypocrisies, like that sand crab, under a mound of rationalization. Even when it’s automatic and unconscious, at some level I know I’m doing it, just as I know that our natural gas fireplace is horrible but can’t resist turning it on when the nights are cold.

What it really comes down to is this: with the exception of maybe 5-10 people sociopaths, we’ve all, to some extent, been played.

But that’s the good news.

We’re being called to reevaluate everything—to ask whether this is just “how it is” or decide that we can reclaim control over our lives. For better (public goods, shared prosperity) or worse (Amazon Prime, social isolation, stressed-out kids), we’ve been swept along by forces we barely questioned.

This horrifying moment is also fertile. We can stop tinkering around the edges and start imagining a world where we’re not just instruments in someone else’s symphony, not just sand crabs washed ashore by tides we don’t control. As we cruise toward that iceberg, the window to shift—from patchwork solutions to a wholesale reimagination of work, life, and planetary regeneration—is slim, but real.

As AI redefines the meaning of skillful work, we have to revisit the core meaning of our own humanity.

Human beings are not meant to be mere instruments. We are musicians.

What’s your instrument? Mine, I suppose it’s time to fully accept, is writing. Which is why (among many other things) I’m hell-bent on helping develop a civic corps of storytellers—through Writers for Democratic Action and beyond. To do what I always do, wherever I happen to be: talk to people, listen, and share the stories of our lives.

The point isn’t to stay home and observe from a distance. If anything, we need to be more curious, more generous, more reverent toward the places we go and the people who shape them.

The “corps” part is key: I can get creative, as so many are doing, and I don’t have to do it alone.

For too long, we’ve been mostly forced to act as soloists, busking for survival, struggling to be heard above the din.

We think we’re operating in a free market, but really, we’re just trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a world where the rhythm has already been set by consolidated power and techno-feudal systems that bulldoze through our lives as effortlessly as they’ve remade entire towns, like Bozeman, in their image.

But people are finally waking up to the urgency of the moment.

Yes, it’s still messy and incoherent — as frustrating as that is and as impatient as I am, I am starting to think of it less as “insufficient” and more as “organic and necessary.” I think we are in the beginning stages (the cacophonous “warm-up,” perhaps, but still) of finally recognizing that we no longer want to be scanned like instruments on a shelf but rather summoned as players in an orchestra.

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Yesterday, I listened to Jon Stewart’s conversation with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. As with pretty much anything Jon Stewart has ever done, I recommend the whole interview.

But there was a moment, right at the beginning, that prompted me to write the letter (below) that I’m snail-mailing to the Daily Show today:

Here’s what Jon said:

I have not seen anything like this. The chaos of launching tariff wars in the morning, calling them off by afternoon, and claiming victory. As though, somehow, in the intervening six to eight hours of bluster, the countries that you had challenged had fallen to their knees in prayer, “No, dear Lord, not our wheat! Not our lumber! We’ll do whatever you say!” It is obviously the strategy of…it reminds me of that strategy of “create chaos, then act like you’ve solved the chaos by calling down the chaos when you realize the American public is turning against your chaos, and then claim victory and expect to be praised for it.”

It’s very reminiscent of, it’s something my dog used to try to pull. The dog, I can recall, he used to vomit on the rug — and I apologize to any of you who are listening to this podcast in a cafe — but the dog would vomit on the rug, and then he would eat it.

And then he would look up at me like, “Huh? How about that? I just cleaned up for you! How ‘bout a treat?” And I’m like, “You fuckin’ threw up! That’s YOU! YOU DID THAT! You don’t get a treat!”

So that is my plea to the American people, as the Trump Administration vomits on the carpet of our great nation.

I’m sharing the letter with all of you today for two reasons: first, for the same reason I’m writing to Jon. I hope it sparks a bit of curiosity!

Second, in case any of you might have a way to help shepherd it from The Daily Show's mailroom (which I imagine looks something like this 📬) to Jon himself.

Dear Jon,

I know you are as invested in the renewal of the Democratic party — and all it represents as the path to preserving and strengthening our constitutional democracy — as anyone. I’m right there with you: I’ll spare you a comprehensive laundry list of my credentials, but they range from hosting phone banking parties and knocking doors for Obama (when my daughter was a toddler and I was pregnant with my son) through starting a wildly successful Indivisible group in MA, running for state rep, helping to start a statewide deep canvassing program, and now coordinating countywide support — while serving on the board of the Voter Protection Corps — for our fabulous Colorado AG who’s just launched a bid for governor.

Long story short: I’m a Democrat.

I’ve just listened to your interview with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (cardiologists should be sending you kickbacks for doing more than anything else to keep our collective blood pressure in check!), and wanted to elaborate on your outstanding dog-eating-its-own-vomit metaphor. As a mother of two labradors with a muscle memory of the unique sensory experience of grabbing hot, thick vomit with an outmatched paper towel, it got me thinking.

On our end, there’s another unpleasant truth that nobody’s talking about.

I’ve just spent two years collaborating on a book (slated to come out in November) that our UK financial publisher deemed “the best book on macroeconomics he’s ever read.” To friends and family, I have since joked that this was probably the most statistically unlikely compliment I could have imagined receiving: as a professional writer, if I’d had to guess, a book “on zebra castration” might’ve been higher on the list of projects I expected to work on in this lifetime.

Nevertheless, I have learned a hell of a lot about economics. And the point I am hoping to make in this letter is that there is a huge hole at the center of our Democratic argument that, if not addressed, will not only not calm the pendulum of a change-demanding electorate, but will also cause it to swing ever-more-wildly with each pass through the electoral process—even if, by some miracle, we manage to preserve that process.

That hole is money printing.

Economists on the left and the right, from the Austrian school of thought to the it-doesn’t-get-anymore-left-than Yanis Varoufakis, have long recognized that the ability to create money “from thin air” is a key root cause of inflation. Even John Maynard Keynes, patron saint of our current economic system, said, “There is no subtler, surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.”

Here’s where my own dog metaphor comes in. When Rep. Jeffries characterized inflation as something that simply “hit” Americans — as if it were a natural disaster rather than, in many ways, a direct consequence of policy choices — it crystallized something for me.

This is a complex, thorny, polycrisis we’ve got on our hands, and I don’t think that any truly serious person believes that there’s a silver-bullet solution available if we can just dig deep enough. But here’s the thing: trying to persuade everyday Americans that the Democratic party will solve a problem that they refuse to acknowledge their (partial) role in causing is like a dog that drops a dead rabbit at your feet. It proudly thinks it’s providing dinner, but it actually just killed your other pet.

No amount of well-intentioned messaging, insulin price-capping, and “we care about you” rehab with the working class (sorely needed, as you clearly recognize) will patch the hole at the center of our argument. The problems are deep, but failing to acknowledge them — to pretend that we have all of the answers, if only we can find a way to articulate them so the public will finally understand that we get it — is not the way to earn back trust.

If I were to run for office again, I’d run on the principle that a dose of hard truth is better than a heap of half-truths.

Here’s my attempt at a speech that could capture some of this:

“Guys, we are downwind of a lot of decisions that Monday-morning quarterbacking can easily rip to shreds. Unfortunately, time works in one direction only: forward. The American Dream is better understood now than it was before: now we know what happens when jobs are sent overseas, when our economy is financialized, when we let corporations turn us from consumers into products (as, for example, with social media and opioids). We can see what happens when the media is incentivized to radicalize its audience, turning the news into a casino and raking in profits from obsessive viewers continuously pulling the outrage lever.

The truth is, our monetary system is designed to funnel wealth upward, converting your hard work into someone else’s asset appreciation. We’re taught to channel our rage at each other — at ‘socialist teachers’ or ‘right-wing uncles’ — while the real mechanism of our collective impoverishment hums along quietly in the background.

That mechanism is known as money printing, and it moves that money along certain paths just as directly as pipes move water.

This infrastructure is largely invisible, so the only thing we can think to do is to throw out whoever’s in charge and cross our fingers that the new guys will handle it. But if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we’ll see that this never really works.

I'm a Democrat because I believe that we all want to live full, healthy, comfortable lives. We want to enjoy our years on earth, and to share those years with our children, grandchildren, friends, and family. I believe Democrats come closest to articulating a vision whereby we can each pursue that life to the best of our ability. And as a Democrat, I believe we should all pitch in — to the degree that we are able — in creating a social commons that invites everyone else to work toward that reality.

And just as I believe that there are certain rules that we need to live by in our homes in order to coexist peacefully and raise children prepared to thrive in the wider world, so do we need a system of rules by which to organize our wider society. I believe the US Constitution has come closer than anything in human history to articulating that ideal system of rules.

I admit freely that Democrats have, in many ways, lost the plot in recent years, and have used their position in the social order in a manner that not only oversimplifies people’s lived experience of present-day America, but often does so in a way that feels condescending and hypocritical. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve lived it. I understand the impulse to strip it all down; you have worked hard, all your life, within a framework that has become increasingly threadbare, at best; the numbers don't lie. The profits accrue to the top, while the ordinary American worker — farmer, machinist, caregiver — bears not only the daily life burden but also the tax burden as well. It's absurd.

It's absurd, and you are not wrong. In many ways, the country has skewed away from you. If we are to move forward, we have to admit that even some of our earnest attempts to benefit the American people — including our response to the pandemic — have, in hindsight, had mixed results. We closed the economy for too long. Our stimulus, aimed at helping people through troubled times, has also caused rampant inflation.

The system is built that way.

In our system, money does not flow naturally; it flows unnaturally, away from the many and toward the few.

This is no accident. It is why most of the measures taken to ameliorate our struggles with inflation — the rising price of groceries, houses, education — are so stunningly ineffective.

I have spent a lot of time talking to random people in my life: while having a beer at a bar, riding the subway, taking a cab. I think most people are much smarter than they’re given credit for. If we look people squarely in the eye and say yes, this system is pretty fucked, and needs an enormous overhaul, they’ll agree. I also think that they’ll agree that, despite its gargantuan flaws, the American system is better than any other yet conceived, that its Constitution is the glue that has held us together for nearly 250 years. It’s the basic building block to which we must return if we are to really begin the societal renovations that are necessary to revive the American Dream.

As Americans, we often have a weird and somewhat contradictory sense of ourselves and how we are perceived in the wider world. On the one hand, many of us don't really care; we're not necessarily trying to be a beacon of light in the world, we're just trying to keep the lights ON. But most of us, regardless of our religious orientations, have either a sense of God himself or of some greater, unfathomable force in the universe; even if we're not always conscious of it, it is our North Star and the compass by which we judge where we're going and how we're doing. The world has watched America air our dirty laundry over the last decade or so, and it's been kind of embarrassing. We're not as good as we thought we were; maybe we needed to be taken down a few pegs.

Now it’s time to stop with oversimplified hysterics that feel momentarily thrilling but get us nowhere.

It’s time to unite around the Constitution and to rehabilitate the poisoned river of our financial system so that we can rebuild the American Dream on solid ground rather than on the quicksand of false promises. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick.

There is, in fact, no quick fix—anyone promising that is selling you something. But Americans have never shied away from hard truths or hard work. We can start by being honest about how we got here, and then do what Americans have always done, particularly in moments of crisis, when shit gets real: roll up our sleeves, look squarely at the problem, and get to work.”

So that’s it. That’s the difficult, unpleasant truth that nobody, anywhere, is talking about. Why? Because everyone in power, across the spectrum, is entangled within it. Many may not even fully know it themselves. It’s not our fault that we’ve found ourselves here, and we are unlikely to finish the work of disentangling it in our own lifetimes, but — as the Talmud suggests — nor are we free to desist from it.

Or, as Isabel Wilkerson put it in Caste,

We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock…We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

And to think all of this — reflections on monetary policy, visions for democratic renewal, and nods to Talmudic wisdom — started with your comment about a dog eating its own vomit. Inspiration is, indeed, everywhere.

To that end, if this letter happened to spark a bit of curiosity, I’d be happy to send along a reading list, from both sides of the political spectrum, to add nuance to the case I’ve started to make here.

You are a national treasure. Thank you for being you, for all of these years and for all of us.

Very truly yours,

Allison M. Gustavson

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Dear friends,

I wrote a long post that I’ve just been sitting on, for multiple reasons.

This is how it started; the rest I will refrain from publishing.

I owe you an apology. Over the last 17 years of activism — and especially since 2018 — I have shown many sides of myself, but not all sides. I have been operating under an abiding philosophy that people do their best when encouraged, and shrivel under the gaze of criticism and judgment. I do believe this is largely true, but it’s not universally true; just as parenting involves nuance, discretion, and maturity, so does “leadership” (in any form) require texture and dimension.

We can’t just show people what we want them to see (well, we can — but what we get is Instagram and Facebook and an entire generation of devastated children because we couldn’t see what was really f-ing obvious: that turning ourselves into a “brand” is harmful and anti-human).

I probably withheld certain feelings because it’s far more pleasant. I thought it would also be more effective, in terms of my overarching goal of rallying people, to be seen as a “really nice person” than to reveal the more complex, nuanced truth. If you want to know what I mean, ask my husband Mark: I know how much he loves me, but I would not say that his experience of me matches my so-called “public persona.” This is true of all of us, to be sure, but when I have (for some unknown and ungodly reason) appointed myself the task of organizing and talking about important social and political issues, I think it’s important to be more honest and forthcoming, or risk skewing the entire project. Or, as Chris Rock put it, “When you meet somebody for the first time, you're not meeting them, you're meeting their representative.”

After sustained reflection (including — not at all incidentally — my daily meditation), I think it might be more productive to send a short (ha! it’s already not short) note to explain why my posts might be even more intermittent than usual, and give my handful of generous paid subscribers the chance to pause their subscriptions in response.

I am profoundly grateful for every single person who reads this newsletter; I want to honor your investment in me. I want to produce thoughtful work that accurately reflects my viewpoint. The fact that some people felt called to pay me is a choice I do not take lightly. I also feel, in my bones, that this is the teeniest microcosm of a bigger issue: if people are paid (in money or attention) to share their opinions, they have to continuously produce opinions to share (it’s also important to look at who is paying them—in my case, awesome, wonderful people. Cable news, not so much). The influences that shape those opinions are obviously complex and multifaceted, but the amount of analysis that one can cram into an opinion is definitionally limited. This does not mean I don’t want or need to be paid (oy, please don’t think that! I very much do)—it’s just that I occupy a strange space where it’s not enough to be a meaningful contribution to my income, but is very meaningful to me, nonetheless.

The problem is, my viewpoint is complicated and, frankly, evolving. I am working consciously on unpacking my own blindspots, reading, studying, and thinking about how we got here and where we’re going. I think the questions that we need to ask are much deeper than the ones that, in my experience, many are asking in the clogged toilet of a public space (although I have also encountered quite a bit of brilliance, too!). I am working on releasing the places within me that are still holding onto blame, the targets of which may or may not always align with what you might think. I’m almost there.

I think it’s really important to admit that we don’t always know what we’re doing, and that when that’s the case, maybe it’s time to pause for a beat. I have been — and want to continue — finding myself in places and with people who are willing to set aside their echoing drumbeat and explore new ways of being and creating substantive change.

To be honest, I’m starting to feel a bit hamstrung by the identity I’ve created for myself. (Edit: actually, that’s not entirely true. In many ways, I feel even more convinced than ever about intuitions I had many years ago: intuitions about how to create real community, how to listen, how to be curious about the world and about people whose circumstances wildly from our own and have thus developed different viewpoints—not just to “make them feel heard” in some manipulative, means-to-an-end kind of way, but to actually learn).

Like all of us, I have many, many more sides than the ones routinely on display for any given person or constituency. I am very actively working to synthesize and integrate them into a coherent worldview, which remains a work in progress. There are quite a few people on this list, which takes my breath away: this many people really want to know what I think. It is an honor that I do not take lightly, and I want to make sure that I am always in integrity with that honor.

I am pretty active on Substack, in terms of commenting on other writers. Maybe we can follow each other, and thus create a more robust dialogue that way. It might be a more honest snapshot of what I’m really thinking on any given day, as I pore through material over my morning coffee before getting started on the day’s work. I want to know what you’re thinking, too—commenting on this newsletter has never taken off as much as I’d hoped it would. Conversation is much better than just speaking into a void. It is my jam. :)

I really believe in this country. The other day, for a book I’m writing (stay tuned!), I interviewed a recent refugee from Burma. I was brought to tears, and then cried again when I re-watched the Zoom recording of our call.

Last night, I grabbed a beer while waiting to pick up my son from his volunteer work, and met a local guy, now retired, who spent a lifetime at the highest levels of fire management coordination for the U.S. Forest Service. We didn’t vote for the same candidate, but had a phenomenal conversation: a nuanced discussion of economics and environmental stewardship that was friendly, joking, witty, serious, wise, urgent, eye-opening. I learned a lot.

The United States, in its ideals and potentiality, is really important. Our country needs to grow up, and so do we.

I think part of growing up is recognizing that thinking we know everything is a good indication that we know very little.

I will write just as soon as I really have something to say. :)

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I’ve decided to break this post up into three “ingredients”: protein, fiber, and superfood. The superfood is pretty wild; be sure to make it to the end for my most unconventional proposal to date. ✨

The Protein: Relational Organizing

As you all know, I’m a hard core believer in canvassing—especially deep canvassing. In fact, I’m writing this from the street outside of a coffee shop after an afternoon spent having impactful, memorable conversations in Commerce City, CO, where I developed a much-needed spring in my step just knowing that my presence moved the needle for a number of people, which it definitely did.

Yay! This is, again, in CD-08, one of the two most toss up House districts in the country. Every single vote could prove decisive.

I’d now like to add to another, largely untapped approach to our collective toolbox that could make all the difference in this election, and we can do it from home: relational organizing (a fancy way of saying “mobilizing people you already know”).

If you don’t know about Micah Sifry’s newsletter, you should. He’s amazing. Sifry has done his homework. In a recent post, he recommended a few relational organizing apps, and I spent a bit of time checking out one of them — Reach — which is awesome but too cumbersome for me. I don’t think it’ll work with my network.

But the second one, SwipeBlue, is f-ing AWESOME. I’ve been testing it as I write this, just to be sure it’s worth sharing.

SwipeBlue is insanely easy to use, and — by all accounts — effective. (I sound like a toothpaste commercial). It pairs up your phone contacts (don’t worry! they’re not shared with anyone! No data changes hands!) with the voter database — including party affiliation — and pre-populate texts for you that you can then customize (or even rewrite from scratch) according to the nature of your relationship with that particular person. You can choose to sort friends in a variety of ways: those who live in swing states, pro-choice friends in states where people are fighting abortion bans, or even just letting people all over the country know that you voted early. It’s really amazing.

It can be casual and personal, but still targeted. The app keeps track of the number of conversations, and that kind of gamification really helps. Rather than one of the incessant and interchangeable texts from every campaign known to man, your contacts will see a friendly, encouraging text from YOU pop up, causing them to pause for a beat. I’ve just texted the first three people on my list; to be honest, I can’t quite remember who they even are. But screw it: if there’s a chance they’ll read the text because they remember ME, then maybe they’ll take an extra minute and make sure they’re all set, voting-wise. Maybe they’ll even sign up to do the same thing with their network.

Relational organizing is a powerful, underutilized tool. It really could make the difference.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve decided to try it! :)

The Fiber: Yard Signs

(It’s “fiber” because it’s paper!) If you’re anywhere near Evergreen, CO and want a Harris/Walz sign, I’ve found the mother-lode of yard signs and picked up a whole stack of them. Let me know and we’ll arrange it!

The Superfood: Actually visualizing a win (stay with me here, LOL)

This one is a bit nutty, but I am going for it because it’s going to take everything we’ve got and I see no point in demurring.

The MAGA folks are laser focused: they are like a kid with a mirror, harnessing the power of the sun to fry a bunch of ants on the sidewalk.

The Dems, however, feels a bit more, well, dispersed. I’m not going to get into specifics; I think you probably know what I mean. In contrast to the ant-fryers of the world, our vibe — outside of hard core politics — seems to tend more towards those essential oil diffusers. The Democratic “community” (at least as it feels in the day to day world) feels less targeted, more atmospheric, if only because it’s such a big tent that’s ideally capable of containing us.

I remember hearing about this crazy study when I was doing yoga and meditation training (I’m still doing both; just not training!), promoted by a Harvard physicist: the tl;dr is about the “measurable effect on the levels of crime” in Washington DC that were observed over a period of concentrated meditation by 4,000 practitioners.

The physicist claims there’s evidence to support the contention that crime went down by 18 percent as a result of their efforts.1

I am not here to defend a 30-year old study. I just believe that we should try anything and everything. Especially because I fundamentally believe that in trying to imagine a better world and really connecting with how it feels, we have more energy to bring it about. My one-person experiment (me!) proves it. When I’m miserable about all of it, I do less, and what I do, I do rather poorly. But when I have even the smallest jolt of hope, I do 10x. That’s the entire recipe for me.

Here’s what I’m thinking: keep doing everything we’re doing. Knock doors, make phone calls, write postcards, and work this phenomenal SwipeBlue angle I’m discussing above.

But also.

I think we should organize a worldwide network of people to tune in — at the same time, every day — for at least a minute of

silent meditation

prayer

visualization

whatever-you-want-to-call-it

imagining a Harris/Walz win and the generative, regenerative potential that such a win makes possible (or, at the very least and as I see it, does not preclude).

Clean oceans. Clean air. Healthcare for all. Ceasefire in Gaza. Safe, robust schools. Abortion rights. Healthy soil, nutritious food. Inoculation against misinformation (which is different than censorship!). Main streets filled with humming small businesses. Prosperity. Human rights worldwide. A reinvigorated and accountable media ecosystem. Time to spend with family and friends around the dinner table. Live music. Peaceful coexistence. All of it and more! Whatever YOU imagine when you dare to dream that we are not, in fact, circling the toilet bowl but rather preparing to invite in a more just and healthy society.

I think we all spend far too much time worrying and dreading and far too little time dreaming, imagining, and building. Maybe we’re scared to dream and be disappointed, like Charlie Brown with the football. I get it. But I know that my entire day is changed when I work from a place of creativity and imagination rather than stress, angst, and horror, even when I do the exact same things.

[Note: I am WELL AWARE of the fact that many believe that a vote for H/W is a vote against Palestinians and for continued war; I understand, but I do not agree. I think Pinchbeck did a wonderful job outlining the problems with that argument, as have many others who point to the fact that Netanyahu wants a Trump win. It is my view that we need to elect Harris/Walz and then work like hell for the rest of our lives to end this war and revitalize our democracy in all the ways (as in, not go to back to our normal lives after voting them in).]

A final point before making it concrete: I remember only one bit of wisdom from my mountain biking days: focus on the rocks, and you hit the rocks. Focus on the smooth path between the rocks, and your tires sail right through. It never failed.

So my proposal is this:

At 8am EST every single day from now until at least the election (but maybe forever), set an alarm and focus for one minute on the direction you WANT our country/the world to take. Picture it in your mind; smell the clean ocean breeze, visualize a seamless Inauguration, picture money flowing away from the creation of bombs and towards the care and education of children. Whatever sounds good and right to you. Don’t worry if it feels hokey (and maybe get curious about why it feels that way in the first place, which it definitely does). Who benefits from that message? Not us.

I checked with good ol’ ChatGPT and 8am EST will capture the greatest number of people at the least intrusive moment.

There is so.much.power in collective, coordinated human attention. Throwing a hopeful thought towards the universe alone is one thing; knowing that at the very same moment, all over the world, people are doing the same thing at the same time, that’s chills-inducing. I am convinced it can matter (even my Rabbi said he liked the idea; we carpooled to an incredible church gala last night!).

And by the way: the preacher at that gala brought down the house with his phenomenal sermon about “putting ourselves in position” to receive the blessings that are coming to us. It was powerful: as a former wide receiver, his entire point was basically, “You can’t catch a ball if you’re standing in the wrong position.”

If we’ve got one hand working to win but are biting our nails off the other one, we’re in no position to catch the ball.

So: if you’re willing to put yourself out on a limb and share this idea (however you want—with this email, in your own words, whatever) with the people you know and love, and tell them to do the same, I think we will feel something; I’m so convinced, I’m willing to throw caution to the wind and write a pretty uncharacteristically “woo-woo” message to all of you. It’s not my normal way, but these are not normal times. So fuck it.

I am not suggesting that things will miraculously transform overnight, but I think we will create the conditions (our own energy) for those transformations to take place.

I think it’s time to lean into the parts of ourselves that have been buried under a mountain of data and rationalism. It definitely can’t hurt! There are about 1,300 subscribers on this newsletter, just so you know; it can snowball pretty quickly if we wanted it to.

See you at 8am. I’ll be starting tomorrow. So that’s one. ❤️

PS: For inspiration, I just love this Chobani commercial. I’ve probably posted it before, but it really does help me to imagine a world in which high technology and our natural, human values can coexist. :)

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I understand that the pressures, commitments, and general nonstop-ness of being a state representative may have precluded me from fully achieving this, but if I had won my campaign back in 2018, I would have wanted to create an infrastructure for ongoing outreach and connection with the constituents who voted for my opponent.

As I’ve written many times before, my conversations with those voters was, for me, crucial and, in a way, life-changing. Overall, they validated my general (if unoriginal) hypothesis that people are complicated, and that — had I experienced the exact same life circumstances as they did — I cannot say, for sure, that I’d feel (or vote) any differently than they did.

Although my campaign managers may have disagreed, and may have viewed those discussions as a “waste of valuable time on the doors,” my conviction that such dialogue is imperative has only grown over last six years.

I’ve spent the last week in some pretty heavy-duty Republican and Libertarian spaces, and it has been, to say the least, eye-opening. I was, in fact, in the room with Trump himself (at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville—long story!).

A few days later, I found myself at a meet-and-greet for a leadership program that, it turns out, is geared mostly towards conservatives seeking to rescue democracy (from socialism) through the lens of deep Constitutional analysis and exploration of “first-principles.”

Once again, I encountered many people with strong beliefs who happened to see the world differently than I do. If I am accepted into the program, I will be truly excited to debate ideas on their merits and from a place of curiosity and mutual respect even when we disagree, which I suspect might be often.

Nearly everyone I encountered, though, seemed certain that they were genuinely on the “right side of history,” and that it was up to them “to save our country.” Though I mostly felt out of place, the pervasive sense of conviction and sincerity was undeniably relatable.

People really do care about this country.

If and when we win

We need to first focus on winning, of course. But I do not think we will ever truly lower the temperature in this country unless we create new and non-judgmental avenues for wrestling with these issues. Otherwise, we are simply engaging in an endless game of tug-of-war, the ribbon finding itself first on one side, then the other, eternally. 

One day, when I was knocking on doors as a candidate, I came to a tidy townhouse with a well-trimmed yard. A woman answered the door, about my age, wearing a fluffy monogrammed ivory robe. Unlike me, she was clearly enjoying a leisurely Saturday morning, managing to somehow look both pajama-relaxed and put-together, and greeted me with a warm smile. 

As had become my relatively unconscious habit, I began weaving the split-second social and visual cues into a general prediction — often right, though certainly not always — regarding her response to my arrival and “pitch.” Here was a woman whose presentation, I thought (with considerable bias), suggested likely support. 

When I’d introduced myself and my reason for intruding upon her morning, she expressed appreciation for my effort, which only further solidified my sense of mutuality. She complimented me on my bright-orange winter coat, and I chuckled and mentioned that I’d been thinking the same about her robe. After months of door-knocking, it was one of those breezy, effortless exchanges that elevated the whole experience. It gave warmth and connection to a potentially transactional moment, like joking with the woman next to me in line at the grocery store who is also clearly making tacos that evening. Using my mental “Sorting Hat,” I had already concluded that we were on the same page, and I was simply enjoying the conversation for what it was before moving on to the next house. 

I went through my schpiel with ease, giving a brief overview of my personal history and identifying the key issues I was focusing on in my campaign: education, the opioid crisis, climate change, common-sense gun laws, and supporting a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions.  She listened with sincere interest, and nodded appreciatively.

I finished and, as required by the Newtonian laws of campaigning, asked if she’d consider voting for me in November.  When an enthusiastic “yes” was not immediately forthcoming, I felt myself mentally shift gears: the Sorting Hat had failed, it seemed, and new information was coming at me.  

“Well,” she said, leaning into the door jamb and crossing her arms, “I do agree with a lot of what you have said, and I truly appreciate you taking the time to stop by and talk with me. But I am passionately pro-life, and honestly cannot understand how, as mother yourself, you can support abortion.” She said this without ridicule or condemnation, but simple perplexity. She really could not fathom how I, a mother of two, could feel anything but fiercely protective of the rights of unborn children. 

I knew right then, of course, that this conversation wasn’t going to shift either of our stances. No way. Time-tested campaign practices would have advised me to move on to the next door; winning was, after all, a game of numbers.

Of course, I did nothing of the sort.

The nature of our interaction, the foundation of mutual recognition — we’re both mothers, we’re both courteous, friendly, and willing to engage from a place of curiosity — felt important. So, rather than politely thanking her and moving along to the next voter, I settled in for a real conversation.  

I told her that I felt the very same way that she did: that it was because I am a mother that I feel even more certain of a woman’s right to choose.  I told her that it was equally impossible for me, knowing how much time, work, resources, and love were required to raise even the most treasured children, to imagine forcing unwanted babies to be born into the difficult and often tragic circumstances that surround the choice to terminate a pregnancy.  That I have a daughter, and God-forbid she might find herself in one of the many situations that result in an unwanted pregnancy, I would want her to have all of the profoundly difficult options available to her. 

“I hear you,” she said. “I really do. But both of my sons are adopted, both of them are special needs, and if their mother had terminated her pregnancy, I wouldn’t have my children. They are the lights of my life. I just cannot imagine the world without them, my world without them. It takes my breath away to think of them being unable to live their lives, based on a decision their mother may herself have come to regret.”

My children are not adopted, but I did try to imagine a world in which they were not here, not mine, different kids. I couldn’t.  Despite my passionate views to the contrary, I could see how she was able to make that connection — “the presence of abortion would mean the absence of my specific and beloved children” — and the impasse that created within her. 

While we continued to talk — about adoption, about policies that protect the lives of embryos but ignore or even undermine health outcomes after that birth has taken place — I sensed that we were having three different and simultaneous conversations.

First, we were talking, if not super explicitly, about policy: what does the government have a right to dictate or not dictate? What is freedom? What is the intrinsic right of every human being, and specifically every woman, to make her own healthcare decisions? Second, we were talking about ourselves, and the real circumstances of our lives and families, which certainly intersected constantly with those policy discussions in both obvious and subtle ways, even if we don’t always think about things that way.  And third, we were talking about ourselves, our identities as mothers, our unique experience of “being who we are”:  how, face-to-face with one another, could we possibly make sense of the seemingly intractable territory that had opened up between us? What does that space mean for our society in general?

As our conversation progressed, that red ribbon at the center of the tug-of-war rope barely budged.  More to the point, in fact: we were not pulling on the rope at all.  It was lying there on the grass, stretched out between us, temporarily beside the point. We were not trying to move the needle in one short conversation in a doorway; we were just sharing our views, our lives, our hearts. 

When it was time for me to pick up my purse and clipboard and move on to the next house, the woman and I shared a heartfelt goodbye, grateful for the time we’d both taken.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, “I know we haven’t resolved anything, particularly, but it was so great to get to know you and to understand where you’re coming from. If you win your race, I think you’ll make a wonderful representative.”

“Oh, wow, thank you,” I responded. “And yes! I got so much from this conversation.  It is so easy to make flat assumptions, but hearing about your family really gave me so much to think about.  I can absolutely see why you feel the way you do, even if I don’t feel that way myself.”

I can’t recall which one of us said it first, but we were both in total agreement: This, here, is where change happens. This is the type of conversation that moves mountains. If I won, we decided, we’d host a panel discussion where we modeled such discussions so that a new way could open up for people in our community: not agreeing yet (and maybe never), not disagreeing, not deciding, but listening.

I didn’t win, and the hours I spent engaging in such similarly non-vote-getting conversations may not have helped matters. But I was as certain then as I am now that the world I want my children to live in is the one in which such gratifying conversations — in places and with people that challenge my assumptions and force me to grapple with my own beliefs and convictions — are encouraged.  

(PS: The above is pretty much an example of Deep Canvassing, which I do about twice a month. If it sounds interesting to you, please reach out! It’s an INCREDIBLE process. Here in CO, we’re focusing on a district that was won by less than 1% in 2022, one of the swingiest swing districts in the country and crucial for taking back the House.)

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The other day, as we parked the car and headed into the mall to return a few items, I noticed a bit of action outside of Nordstrom. Three guys were coming through the glass doors; one guy had one of those fluorescent yellow construction vests wrapped around a bulky item, and was handing it over to a second guy.

“How nice!” I thought (I literally did think this.) “He’s bought his friend a surprise gift!” As I got closer, the second guy removed the vest to reveal a plush maroon blanket, neatly folded and tied with one of those wide, Nordstrom-ey fabric bows.

The guys, it should be noted, were pretty scruffy. But most guys in Colorado are very scruffy, truth be told. It’s the Colorado look: beards, tattoos, a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some local brewery.

“Lovely!” I thought as the second guy examined the blanket. (Ok, maybe that wasn’t the actual word that went through my mind, but it was definitely the sentiment.) “I wonder if he likes it!”

Suddenly, the action intensified, and there was a lot of cursing. We were almost through the doors at this point, and I had a lot of mental catching up to do to rewrite the scene according to this new information. I tried to look without looking (and turning back to make sure that my son was proceeding in a quiet and undetectable way — “quiet and undetectable” being words that have never described him, or me for that matter — he actually was!) and noticed that the third guy had produced handcuffs and was proceeding to cuff the first guy.

Not a particularly dramatic story, but it revealed something very powerfully to me: we (and by “we” I mean “I”) absolutely see the world as a projection of our expectations.

What kind of life must I lead that I saw three scruffy guys emerge from Nordstrom with a dirty construction vest draped haphazardly over a bulky shape and thought, “Wow! A surprise gift!”

I mean, really.

It reminded me immediately of a second story, which I will always treasure, from when our daughter was about four.

We were having our parent-teacher conference with Linda, our beloved teacher, who was going through Sonia’s "work” (why did I put “work” in quotes?) and telling us about all of the incredible things she was learning in her magnificent Montessori classroom.

With a twinkle in her eye (Linda always has a twinkle), she pulled out a worksheet, saying, “I just had to show you this.” (I feel compelled to say that this was one of very few worksheets! But it was an instant classic.)

The paper was a grid, each box containing an image. A “star,” for example, with room for the student to provide the initial letters:

_ _ A R

Sonia had, of course, done a fabulous job all the way through.

Until she reached the second to last image, and was utterly stymied.

The picture (and this I seriously cannot believe had made its way into our perfect Montessori environment), which I can’t quite remember perfectly, was of a hand approaching a child’s body; the child was crying, as expressed by the three lines coming out of her mouth (sort of like this, but much more rudimentary and of a child clearly in distress):

The letters underneath were:

_ _ A N K

Sonia simply could not figure out what was happening in this picture, and — ever her mother’s daughter — Linda reported that Sonia becoming frustrated with herself. Linda came over and patiently talked her through it.

“What is happening in this picture, Sonia? What do you see?”

To which Sonia replied, “I think the kid is throwing up and the mom is rubbing her back.”

These stories came to mind as I read this wonderful interview with Vivek Murthy, our Surgeon General (the headline does not do justice to its scope; also, if you don’t subscribe to The Ink, you can read one article, I believe, for free. I did). This quote is actually part of an extended question, not Murthy’s answer, but I thought it was really illuminating:

My image of our political [situation] today in many ways is of people sitting on the street shivering and crying, saying, “I don't feel good.” And Democrats are going up to them and saying, “See, we're building a bridge right there. Right there, there'll be a bridge.” And the people are still crying. Shaking and crying. And they say again, “But this bridge is going to be amazing. It's going to have eight lanes.” And, actually, the bridge may well help those people. It's not that the Democrats are wrong that the bridge will help them, but someone else is coming over and saying, “Let me give you a hug, and let me explain to you why Mexicans did this,” and the problem is, you might well take that hug.

Our issues are complex, multitudinous, and interconnected. But in order to address them, we are going to have to deal with the fact that emotional intelligence — particularly our cognitive empathy — is just as important as implementing solutions.

My (probably very unoriginal) hot take is that we are, in many ways, an incredibly immature society. And that makes sense: America is, by all reasonable measures, still quite young, and probably in its adolescence.

Adolescents are brilliant and visionary, but they are also limited by their own inexperience and the heightened sense, shared by all of us, that they’re starring in their own movie. And they’re right: if you live with an adolescent, you may recognize that their presence has a high impact on the family dynamic. They may be quietly full of doubt, but also of clarity, righteousness, and conviction.

Moving towards maturity, which our culture has worked very hard to delay, is a messy process of becoming — as George Saunders said in a commencement speech, quoted in this wonderful essay by Alex Dobrenko — “counter-instructed in our own centrality.”

It is a messy, painful process. Learning that you are often not even “on-screen,” much less starring, can (and usually will) feel disorienting and disappointing before it becomes a liberating relief.

America is definitely becoming, in ways that are also quite alarming, “counter-instructed in [its] own centrality.” That doesn’t mean we are not important; we are just not (or, I guess, should not be) all-important.

In our own cultural tensions and through our engagement with the rest of the world, we need to recognize that we’re not all-seeing and all-knowing; that, quite obviously, our own cultural experience shapes and colors what we see.

I saw a guy presenting another guy with a gift.

Sonia saw a mom reassuring her child.

The Democratic Party sees bridges.

There is no way to get around this; we will always see through our own eyes. That is good! The problem becomes, I think, when we fail to see that we’re doing that, when we just assume, without checking ourselves, that what we see is all that’s there. When we can’t step out of ourselves and witness the reality of others, which would add dimension to our repertoire of understanding.

American democracy is a triumph, and was formed as a result, clearly (and to put it mildly and reductively) of a lot of self-reflection and soul-searching. What are our human strengths and frailties? What are our strengths and our blind spots, as individuals and as a collective? What mechanisms can we put in place to support the cultivation of the former and reduce the harm of the latter?

When everything is reduced to “with us or against us” — “us,” in this case, feeling like just the plural form of “me” — we become locked in a closed, depressing loop that centers ourselves. Within that framework, there is no room for surprise, discovery, understanding, life.

As Albert Camus said,

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”

Clear sight, I guess I’m arguing, isn’t “seeing clearly straight out of the gate.” My life has brought me to the point at which I egregiously misinterpreted what I was seeing outside the mall.

I think that story shook me out of myself and reminded me, perhaps, that clear sight is, rather, the ability to question how and why we see what we see.

Maybe that’s what maturity looks like? And maybe when we do that, we’ll stop trying to comfort an ailing person with the promise of a bridge?

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As you may recall, I’ve decided to use Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots to unearth some basic thoughts in our tumultuous moment.

The last chapter examined order; turning the page this morning, I was hoping for a reasonably contained topic that would help jumpstart my thinking and prepare me for the rest of my day’s projects. Alas: LIBERTY does not particularly fit that description, but I’m feeling the pressure to keep my commitment to this project (is that self-imposed “rule” an expression of my personal freedom or a hindrance to it?), so here we go.

Weil first defines “liberty” as “the ability to choose,” which is all well and good, and then recognizes the fact that any time people live in community — almost always, of course — limits will naturally arise in the form of rules.

That’s unarguably true, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but my first question — about self-imposed “rules” — really has me thinking. I’ve struggled for my entire adult life to discern my own limits, and I will admit to having constructed an elaborate and often exhausting set of parameters within which I attempt to operate, every day, as a coherent human being who has given a great deal of thought to such things. I cannot even remotely tell whether these rules lie at the root of my personal flourishing or are, in fact, a prison that must be dismantled (the feedback I get from “the world” and from those who know and love me is mixed and contradictory at best).

Anyone who dredges up the energy to attend a yoga class and then leaves radiant, revitalized, and wondering why this choice doesn’t come naturally and without resistance after nearly thirty years of practice knows exactly what I mean. Extrapolating that choice and its consequences to an entire day/week/life, one could fill her years with choices that benefit self and others (yoga, purposeful work, caring for family, volunteering), but when does so much “choosing” become its own problem? When do you put down the “educational reading” and pick up some crappy romance novel, or just go walk the dogs, and how do you keep from telling yourself “putting down the educational book and picking up the crappy romance novel (ok, I’ve only read ten pages and I’m not even sure it’s a romance or, for that matter, crappy; this wonderful newsletter convinced me to buy it, and it’s now adding to the un-fun pressure of my nightstand) is ‘good for you,’ and walking the dogs makes you a ‘good dog mom,’” which is really just self-imposed-rule-following in disguise?

Yet while the erosion of personal liberty through self-imposed rules is fascinating and personally relevant, it is not the focus of Weil’s chapter and is certainly not the #1 burning question as we face down the possibility of a second Trump term and its accompanying New World Order horror show Project 2025. So back to the text.

Interestingly, Weil focuses not on the width or narrowness of rules to recognize their impacts on liberty, but rather on the conditions within which those rules are made. She writes, “They should emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction.” Rules properly instituted, she argues, are understood and internalized and do not have to be endlessly re-adjudicated, just as “the habit, formed by education, of not eating disgusting or dangerous things is not felt by the normal man to be any limitation of his liberty in the domain of food. Only a child feels such a limitation.”

Our Deep Canvassing program officially launched this Sunday, and I spent the entire day talking to low-propensity left-leaning and unaffiliated (independent) voters in Thornton, CO. My canvassing partner and I had some wildly profound conversations that day, and my one overarching takeaway is this: people are amazing, thoughtful, nuanced beings who respond to their lives and their world in ways that directly reflect their experience of that world. This sounds obvious to the point of absurdity, but I’ve re-learned it again and again, out in neighborhoods and talking to people I’d have never known existed but for the bizarre and life-changing act of knocking on doors: if I was that person and I had lived that exact life, how can I possibly presume to think I’d have reached different conclusions about things?

These wonderful, open-hearted people made it clear to me — if it wasn’t already abundantly clear, which it is — that it has been a long time since ordinary Americans have felt a sense of reciprocal relationship with the authorities entrusted to guide and shape our lives. It is no wonder, then, that we have such an incoherent cultural relationship with freedom. The goodwill has been squandered, and our society is full of people who, as Weil puts it, “either seek refuge in irresponsibility, puerility [childishness] and indifference — a refuge where the most they can find is boredom — or feel themselves weighed down by responsibility at all times for fear of causing harm to others.” To that, and based on these conversations and many others, I’ll presumptuously add a third category: those whose circumstances preclude both of those choices, and are just trying to get by and do the best they can.

Reading endless articles, as I do, about the “state of democracy,” one can have the experience of occupying an increasingly airless room. That “airless room” is a lot like a prison, and — I think we can all agree — a prison is the physical incarnation of the antithesis of liberty.

So even though the prospect of “spending Sunday knocking on doors in Thornton, CO” was kind of like that yoga class, so was the effect of having gone: invigorating.

And, I mean, really: if I didn’t have dogs to walk, would I walk as much? Feeling responsible for others is actually, perhaps, a key to true freedom.

Also maybe just reading a crappy romance novel every once in a while and not making a big freaking deal about it.

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You may or may not remember that I have set the intention of going through Simone Weil’s remarkable book Roots, using its exploration of the “needs of the soul” as a guidepost for reflecting on the state of things these days.

Ironically, the theme of Weil’s first section is order. I say “ironic” because I’ve been working on a separate post for weeks; it has been lingering like an unmade bed on my spread of open tabs, having gotten completely out of control and taken on a life of its own. If I can’t figure out what I’m trying to say, how could anyone else?

Lo and behold: “order.” Phew.

Weil describes order as “a texture of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones.” That’s a mouthful, but it does speak to something that has always felt very true (and very confusing) to me: with all of our obligations — to self, family, friends, community, country, planet, morality — how do we possibly weigh and juggle them all to ensure that none are being sacrificed for the sake of others? I have struggled with this for my entire adult life. For example: what if, in meeting the needs of one friend, I am, by definition and because of the immutable laws of time and space, abandoning the needs of another? By what metric can I possibly prioritize? And who made me the judge, anyway?

And that’s just a seemingly minor social example (although, to be honest, the circumstances I’m thinking of were actually anything but minor).

Here’s another: my daughter, now almost eighteen, has been a (very, very) determined vegetarian since she was eight years old. Every day and at every meal, I have an internal fight (often spilling over into dinnertime angst) derived from competing obligations: no matter how well we plan our meals, she simply does not take in as much protein as she would if she ate meat, chicken, or fish. I am not at all confident that our plant-based substitutes are, in the long run, the way to go, but also feel compelled to honor her deeply-considered choices, and acknowledge their congruency with my own profound desire to do no harm.

This set of incompatible urges leads to a state of perpetual disorder within me.

The list of examples is endless, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I am perpetually stuck in the crosshairs of what Weil calls being a “troublemaker” and being an “agent of order.” Troublemakers increase the number of incompatible obligations in their lives, and agents of order (you will have guessed) decrease that number.

Thankfully, she gives perfectionists like me a “pass” by declaring that the idea of true order, along these lines, is probably a “fiction.” There are just too many variables, too many people, too many factors, and too many choices competing for our attention to render a perfectly ordered existence. But damn, if I don’t try. I’m pretty sure that everyone around me would appreciate it greatly if I tried a little less.

And yet, as if in laughing counterpoint to all of that angsty, self-created chaos, there’s the universe itself. Weil then turns her attention to the cosmos, where an “infinite number of mechanical actions concur” and produce an order that feels total, and breathtakingly beautiful even if we can’t possibly understand it. And then there are the artistic masterpieces that somehow seem to echo or reflect that cosmic order, even if we can’t quite understand how they do it, either. Perhaps that’s part of the mystery of art.

She seems to acknowledge that we’ll never actually “get there,” at least not permanently, but that to strive for such a state of order should be top of mind. How? By remaining attuned to the incomprehensible cosmos, the vast beauty of great art, and the human urge to do good, even when we fail.

This brings to mind the other great thinker I’ve been reading lately, Carl Jung.

In his book The Undiscovered Self, Jung really takes us to task for how we, as individuals, are (let’s be honest) failing at our biggest directive in life — to become full, flourishing individuals — and are thus subject to deeply violent instincts that will weaponize our need for belonging to their own ends.

In a passage that could have been written this morning, Jung writes:

 …insofar as society itself is composed of de-individualized persons, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes — it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one [emphasis mine. That is brilliant.]. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman.

Weil talks about these “instigators of violence,” too. She seems to be saying that their belief in the machine-like qualities of the universe are fundamentally anti-human and, I would add, dead. We can look at the clockwork of the cosmos and see a dead machine that we must use and exploit for our own purposes, or we can look at the same unfathomable structures and see “beauty.”

I think, in our inflamed political moment, we’ve all fallen victim to the tyranny of the bumper sticker. No matter what we think, feel, and believe, we are pretty committed to a narrative in which the world would FINALLY click into place if we could just get everyone marching to the same tune (the tune of our choosing, of course). But that looks, to me, an awful lot like the very things Jung was warning us against. He continues:

…our blindness in this respect is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can only be maintained by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.

I do not know how to reconcile my desperate need for order with the messy chaos of life, but I do know that it always feels a little less suffocating when I remember, occasionally, to look up at the stars and wonder about it all.

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[This post is intended as an introduction to the important and unique Deep Canvassing work I’m doing with a small team in Colorado. If you’re so moved after reading, I’ve included the ubiquitous “ways to give” at the bottom. ;)]

A bit of backstory:

We moved to CO in the summer of 2019, just in time for me to start rolling up my sleeves for the (mildly consequential) election coming down the pike. I got to work almost immediately, connecting with my state rep, getting deeply involved in her re-election campaign (she’d first won in 2018, when I made my own run and was fortunate to meet so many of you!) and getting the political lay of the land in my new home state. My kids, having absorbed the lessons of the prior three years, also agitated to create a weekly “standout” for Biden at a busy intersection here in Evergreen. As my mom often says, (mis)quoting the great Fozzy Bear, “pride swells.”

Our state rep won her re-election campaign (hooray!), one of many victory dances celebrated on that sunny day in 2020. I still get teary when I remember seeing Jen Psaki standing on that podium, after so many years of abuse. It was like allowing my frozen insides to melt; sometimes you don’t know how tense you’ve been until you start to relax.

The following year, I was introduced to the crew working to re-elect Phil Weiser, our phenomenal CO Attorney General. A number of conversations persuaded me that this campaign would be a great place to focus my energies, and I went all in, even becoming the Jefferson County Co-Coordinator for his campaign.

I have a million great stories from that effort, but the purpose of this message is to highlight one particular outcome that could — and I’m not overstating this, given to hyperbole though I am — have a dramatic impact on the complexion of the US House in 2024 and beyond.

I was invited to become a part of a kitchen-table effort to bring Deep Canvassing to Colorado, because research shows that deep canvassing is the single most effective tool in increasing the turn-out of people who previously didn't vote. A woman (now dear friend) and lifelong organizer had become steeped in the technology of Deep Canvassing through her voter work in Pennsylvania and wanted to gather a small team to bring the approach back to Colorado. She’d received permission to test the approach in concert with AG Weiser’s campaign in the spring of 2022.

Our effort was an unqualified success, and undoubtedly a factor in AG Weiser’s re-election.

Now onto the present and the calm, uneventful year ahead of us:

After the campaign wrapped up, I reached out to AG Weiser to see if he’d be willing to have a brief conversation about my own political trajectory here in CO (“Will you run again?” is probably the most commonly repeated question I receive, second only to “how do you like Colorado?” Ask my husband, and you might get a different answer to the first q.) AG Weiser “did me one better” and invited me to meet for lunch, a gesture whose generosity perfectly illustrates his character and dedication not only to democracy and the rule of law, but also to directing his attention and his platform towards bringing out the best in people.

It turned out to be a really impactful meeting. Impactful for me personally, because I (once again) realized that the ripple effects of our efforts are never entirely foreseeable, or even quantifiable: when we put ourselves out there and make connections, beautiful things emerge.

It will also turn out to be impactful for Colorado itself. The Deep Canvassing team had been busy discussing pathways to building out a program in anticipation of 2024, including partnering with various issue-based non-profits as a means to mobilizing that same low-propensity voter pool. Now, as a result of our conversation — which reinforced to the AG the effectiveness of his campaign test-case — and thanks to the incredible support and leadership of AG Weiser himself, we have created a partnership with the Colorado Democratic Party to enable us to launch a full scale Deep Canvassing operation in CD8, the most flippable seat in Colorado.

Because of our work, Colorado will become the birthplace of a whole new crop of voters who would have otherwise sat it out, and those voters will be instrumental in keeping CD8 blue.

As I mentioned above, Colorado’s 8th Congressional District is undoubtedly the most vulnerable in CO and is slated to be one of the truly high-profile national races. If you’re thinking about where to put your energy this election season and want to know that your money is going directly towards getting low-propensity voters to the polls, this is your race.

While our kitchen-table team of volunteers will continue to work pro bono on this project — including the full-time dedicated leadership of my friend who started it all — over the next year, we plan to hire a full-time Deep Canvassing Organizer to start in March and run deep canvasses through the election.

Deep Canvassing will increase voter turn-out in November, and our work will train hundreds of people who will carry this skillset into future elections. To be in the room with this intergenerational group of volunteers, from college students to retirees, was to be moved to tears with a palpable sense of hope that has been hard to come by lately.

Deep canvassing is a way of reaching out to people who do not vote regularly that focuses on listening, empathy, sharing stories and creating an opportunity for people to reflect and change their own minds about voting.  The change in behavior endures because of an authentic conversation.

Deep canvassing is the opposite of ordinary canvassing. Whereas an ordinary canvass often sees dozens of volunteers spraying literature across a district they barely know, Deep Canvassing involves highly trained conversationalists connecting “political abstractions” to the lived experiences of people that voters care about; we even learn their names.

Going through this process brings you into true connection with real people, which is gratifying enough; but what it really does is bring politics to life for them, often for the first time. I remember one guy down in Denver: I’d shared a bit about myself and why I feel so strongly about healthcare after my dad had struggled with major health problems in the past. When the conversation turned to the man at the door and I inquired about people he cared about, it took a bit of gentle prompting until a light bulb went off: “Yeah, I guess you’re right! My wife is six months pregnant, and, now that I think about it, I guess it’s really important to me that our baby will have access to clean air and water.” BINGO! It took nearly seven minutes for me to even discover that his wife was pregnant, but by the end of the conversation, I knew the baby’s name and I knew that this guy was about 60% more likely to vote than he had been before I came along, because literally he told me so.

THAT’S DEEP CANVASSING.

I know that we all share a profound concern about the authoritarian direction that Trump's election in 2016 and continued popularity reflects.

His recent campaign speeches demonizing immigrants and talking about militarizing massive deportations are unlikely to be received favorably in CD8, where we’re focusing our attention, which has a large number of Latino and recent immigrant voters. But we need these voters to actually vote!

SO:

If you live in Colorado and want to get involved, PLEASE REACH OUT TO ME!

I’m also inviting all of my friends who live elsewhere and are willing to invest in this effort — 100% of these funds will be earmarked for Deep Canvassing in CD8 — to help build “The Horizon Project,” the new name for our hard-won effort.

We need to raise $100,000 to pay for the full time staff person and to cover the costs of training and running canvasses from March - November, and each individual can give up to $10,000 per calendar year to the Colorado Democratic Party; the link below will go directly (and only) to this project.

We’re starting early (really, we started back in 2022 with our eyes on the 2024 prize!) because that’s how we build effective campaigns.

As always, every little bit counts. If everyone on this newsletter gave $10, we’d cover a significant portion of that essential staff person’s salary!

I've included the link that, again, ensures that your gift goes directly to this project.
 
To give online: 
Colorado Democratic Party - Federal Account — Donate via ActBlue

To mail a check:  
Colorado Democratic Party
789 N Sherman St. Ste. 110
Denver CO 80203
Make checks out to "The Colorado Democratic Party" - on the memo line please put “Horizon Project.” As required by Federal Election Law, please include a note stating your occupation/employer and a preferred mailing address if different from the return address on your envelope.
 
As you begin to think about how and where you want to give money in 2024 to help win key swing seats, thank you for considering making a gift in support of our unique work in this critical swing district in Colorado.

Mostly, though, I want to thank you for all that you do for justice, and for your friendship.

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