Maybe not "reading," but so many comments online on building hyper local community or becoming more active in existing communities. Which sounds great. But...where to start?
I'd love a future "advice time" thread about the ways in which people have done this (or joined! sometimes I think we have too much emphasis on *launching something new* that feels a bit ego-y to me). I want *specifics*! Not "start a community art class" but...what did you do first, second, etc.? How did you find people?
I started a monthly village potluck. I reserved the run-down little village rec center (with kitchen!) and put up a flyer and told my neighbors and showed up. I had zero expectations. Maybe it would just be my family picnicking down the street. But people came and more people came. That was a year ago. Now we're having a village Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving for all of us who don't have family nearby and it's my favorite freaking night of the month. It's cozy and low stakes and I love it.
Hard second for your proposed thread. This isn't a time to keep ideas to ourselves or judge others for being Luddites if they don't know where these communities are already. If we are going to work together, we all need to be on the same page.
I recently joined the newsletter for my local Unitarian Universalist church (which is kind of a church for all religions). I'm not sure if I'll start attending regularly but I know I'll use the newsletter to find out about local events, volunteering opportunities and elections.
Fantastic idea, thank you! I've been checking out the two local Unitarian Universalist churches from afar for probably similar reasons, but I hadn't thought of signing up for their newsletters!
I've been planning on joining my Community Emergency Response Team. I live in a place isolated enough that if the Big One hits we'll be cut off and have to take care of each other. I'm sure other catastrophes can also come into play. This is only partly about finding people*, but also about the increased urgency of needing to rely on each other during disasters when people like Trump decide to withhold aid from states that didn't vote for him.
*I volunteered with county emergency response for vaccine clinics during covid and did indeed meet some cool people, so it could also work that way too.
Hi! I think facebook or instagram can both help with this. Does your region/neighborhood have a local buy nothing or everything free group? Is there a local mutual aid group who posts on instagram about what they need and where they are working?
Garrett Buck's workshops (Anne Helen linked to his substack above) are spot on for this. He has such a genuine heart and focuses on helping white people organize white people in our communities. I found it really helped me get a better sense of myself and my values and then I was able to take that and find opportunities in my community (for me, it has been getting involved in the housing movement in my very white, very well meaning liberal but also very NIMBY community.)
He's organizing a couple of virtual get togethers:
-I will be offering two public “what comes next” Zoom gatherings this week. One hour (the same content) offered at two different times– Thursday evening and Friday midday. If these seem helpful, I’ll offer more of them. This will be a space to help clarify your thinking and allow you to be in community with others who are puzzling this out. Everybody’s welcome. Show up in your heartbreak, but please bring your heart. (they’re free, of course). Register here:
Mutual aid groups are a good place to start - many were developed after 2016. Sometimes it's a Facebook group where people can give and ask for help, sometimes it's an organization, etc, but I'd search for what's in your area. If you want to work on something different and there's not a group working on that, it's also not ego-y to do that, but I'd suggest looking at that the community organizing environment is in your area first.
I'm not reading anything about the election right now. I didn't watch anything on election night - I figured it would be too nerve wrecking. I woke up, saw the news, turned off my phone. I felt terrible all day with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I met with a friend for 30 minutes to talk about it. I talked with my wife about it a bit, but there's not much to say. I'm sad. angry. frustrated.
I still don't want to read anything. I'm not ready for armchair punditry. I also remember in 2016, a lot of the instant analysis punditry turned out to be wrong.
I can't hold my baby daughter without thinking about her future. What kind of future is going to have?
I will return to action at some point, but right now I'm just grieving.
Also a new parent over here (my son is 17 days old), and struggling with the increased uncertainty this election outcome has tossed into all our laps. In some ways, his existence is a clarifying factor for me in the context of my own straight cis white upper middle class insulated existence- there is no option to ignore the potential for destruction on a generational level that this new administration brings. His future is too important to me now.
I see you and I hope you will eventually get to a place where you can move forward- do it for your daughter if no one else.
My son was just a few weeks old when Trump was elected in 2016. The furious need to protect him and to protect so many of the other things I love - including my own hope and belief - will be forever intertwined for me and have come to define my experience as a parent. That includes the awfulness but also the beauty and wonder of parenthood. Good luck and - still,always- congratulations on your little one.
Thanks for you message. After a couple of days, I'm feeling better. I"m definitely ready to work for my kids. I don't exactly know how to do that, but I'm ready.
if I may, I would posit that you can continue to grieve even as you return to action, at a point that action might feel necessary again. I think a lot of times we hold them at opposite ends. But I think we can grieve and act at the same time. Not all of the time, but they can coexist.
I feel the same, Taylor. When I get back to reading about anything, I'm not interested in the kind of punditry that makes us check the "oh we figured it out now we can feel better" box. So much analysis and so little change. I want the roadmaps for how to we actually change our system (not broken, btw, operating exactly as they've been set up). How to burn it all down.
I've found it fortifying to revisit writing about lineages of organizing (Grace Lee Boggs! Fannie Lou Hamer!). We have so many maps for moving forward, if we look close enough. One book I'm sifting through again is LET THIS RADICALIZE YOU: ORGANIZING AND REVOLUTION OF RECIPROCAL CARE by brilliant abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you
Thank you! This is what I came here to find--roadmaps for connection, community, organizing, and framing how to move forward following the loss of democracy.
And speaking of Kelly Hayes, I really appreciated this reflection this morning! So much of what I learned post-2016 was how much unaddressed grief and anger on the part of my organizing community ended up later rupturing and destroying fledgling groups and organizations as people turned on each other, in ways we're still addressing. https://organizingmythoughts.org/beyond-the-blame-fighting-for-each-other-in-the-face-of-fascism/
"The main misogyny of this election is that many people will vote to line their pocketbooks at the expense of the basic health and safety of so many of us." This. I mean, I like having money but at the cost of my soul? How can people care so little for others? It may be naive/idealistic, but how do people live with themselves? Even if there was going to be some miraculous financial return how are they okay with it? I cycled through the stages of grief very quickly Wednesday morning and was eerily calm by the time I got into my car to go to work. No annoyances, no road rage. I was honestly concerned that I had just crossed into total numbness but then I realized it was actual acute clarity. My giving people the benefit of the doubt was already so low, but now there is no question what the feelings and priorities of people in this country are and I know what I'm fighting and who I am fighting with. But I am weirdly hopeful: "At the core of our shared sadness and rage is a longing for a better world for all of us."
Oh this so so my struggle. The definition of the American Dream has become "me" at the expense of "we." This causes me the most heartbreak of anything.
I also feel this clarity. In the 2016 election my then-boyfriend-now-ex shocked me at the breakfast table in our college dining hall when he said he voted against Hillary. I spent four months trying to justify that to myself (insert self-inflicted gaslighting), then finally broke up with him and spent the rest of the four years trying not to lose my sanity. Not this time. Not just because my now-partner and I agree politically, but because I'm letting myself process the enormity of it all, the surprise-yet-not of how this is all mirroring 2016, the hard, long-term work that is evident and needed now. I feel more driven and ready and (maybe, like you) hopeful than I was eight years ago.
Same, same, same, SDK. I, too, keep going back to painful question: “how can people care so little for others?” I thought I saw the low point of that during Covid but it’s become worse. For me, that’s a devastating conclusion to come to.
I just keep coming back to the basic idea that most people aren’t mad at the real problems? It’s billionaires and Citizens United, not trans kids or immigrants. People don’t understand that at the heart of it we are all workers and are not likely to strike it rich.
Not reading much election analysis, but there is something I want to read about and haven't found. The Boomer generation broke hard for Trump - more so than any other generation, including those older. To me, it ties in with a larger conversation about what is going on with Boomers. They're addicted to their phones, news alerts, and social media. They benefited from a right place, right time economy for almost all of their lives. They seem bitter and yet, about what? I suppose it's a rich text for me.
I'm a publisher and online bookseller and we have had a ton of orders for books and zines in the last day and a half. Here is what people are picking up right now:
1. Abortion and contraceptive resources - by far the biggest category, we are flooded with orders for these
2. Protest, activism, and movement-building tactical resources
3. Herbal medicine
4. Queer and trans identity stuff - this is the one category where we're selling more affirming than how-to titles
5. Stuff about writing and publishing - I'm interested to see what comes out of this.
In 2016, we had just started to publish mental health and trauma healing resources. It didn't really gain traction until Nov 9th that year when sales skyrocketed and have kept growing every year since. It's interesting to see that this time around, we're selling less of that (some mental health stuff is going but it's more in the "how to survive today" vein). We've done a lot of internal work these last eight years and it's time to take external action. It's more than a sales trend, I feel this in my bones.
Update, since I posted that comment this morning we are getting more and more orders for DIY projects. How to grow and preserve food, how to build a shed in your yard, how to build secret hiding places in your home, and (my favorite) how to build a windmill.
This is really fascinating - I hope you keep us posted in the coming months. I know we've got librarians in the Culture Study community, and I wonder what trends they're noticing.
My colleagues over in fiction publishing say dystopian genre fiction is flying off the shelves this week, but if 2016 patterns hold true that will quickly give way to cozy escapism.
I’ve been feeling helpless, but this has given me some pragmatic ideas of what I could actually do that might have impact. I also find it a bit comforting that some people have been planning for this already.
Also wanted to add, that if you haven’t been wearing a face mask and want to be part of the resistance, now would be a great time to restart. What better public display of community care, belief in science, and unity is there?
I love this! The disability circles I'm part of are full of folks who are TERRIFIED about what this administration will mean for disability, public health, etc.
"Monstrous as he is, Trump is no outlier. He is the distillation of capitalist pseudo-democracy. His values, entirely extrinsic – fixated on prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth – are the dominant values projected for years on to every screen and into every mind. His criminality is the system’s criminality. His abuse of women, of staff, of customers, of Muslims, of immigrants, of disabled people, of ecosystems, is the abuse the majority of the world’s people have suffered for centuries
What do we do? Stop it from happening in our own countries. This, I believe, requires a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round. No one would claim any of this is easy. But right now, we are readily handing our lives to the Donald Trumps that lurk in every country."
---
And my group chat containing wisdom from friends losing democracy in Nicaragua in 2018: "The only way forward is through, so here is where the work begins. Rights that are not actively defended are rights we concede. So… join the civil resistance and active citizenship today."
On Election Day I bought Alexei Navalny's posthumous memoir PATRIOT and started reading it that night. I had only general knowledge of who he was, but the excerpt from the book that the New Yorker published a few weeks ago lit a fire under me to learn more. How do you live with courage, integrity, humor and joy under an authoritarian regime? This book is speaking into those questions for me.
Whenever the world goes to hell, since childhood I've retreated into fairytales.
Not Disney, but the older stuff - Grimm and Anderson and Lang's colored books, the Arabian Nights through the Kalevala. There's something reassuring to me knowing that all this has happened before and all of this will happen again and again because humanity has been through worse and kept going. And in these tales if you are kind and clever you will triumph, and the evil ones get their eyes pecked out and thumbs cut off and have millstones dropped on them and I find that comforting, if not a bit aspirational.
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is always the perfect blend of fairy tale comfort and feminine rage for me, so I've been going through those stories.
I've also been rereading a bunch of T Kingfisher's short books. She is wonderful at retelling folk tales with incredibly human characters that can be simultaneously hilarious and horrific and heartwarming. Highly recommended for comfort reading.
At times like this I need to read about humanity being human and kind, to remember that there's still good out there and good to be done.
In this moment, I am returning to The Silver Chair, and to A Wrinkle in Time. These classic children's books that emphasize the importance of love over hate, hope over despair.
Hard second for The Hero and The Crown! I must have borrowed the library copy four or five times as a kid. I also reread The Once and Future King a few times in the past when looking for a way forward. Older and with default male protagonist, slyly funny, it paints that children’s lit portrait of the kid with more humility and moral clarity than his elders, and emphasizes learning from anyone, no matter how “small,” via the natural world. (I’m almost hesitant to read it again now in case it doesn’t hold up.)
Just going to add here that Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom on the Daily Show last night had a very good analysis and she elaborated on another component on instagram on her stories, so if you can stand getting on social media, that would be my one suggestion for today. It's a good take with context.
Last night I read a ton of posts on r/GenZ about how young men justified their votes for Trump. The GenZ political gender gap is a huge preoccupation of mine and reading this made me realize it’s even worse than I thought. I think this is a very serious political challenge for the left to navigate. Shared some of my thoughts about it over on Mastodon https://glammr.us/@TeamMidwest/113441772203462705
It’s too soon for me. That’s not to say I’m not reading. My home town book club met yesterday, despite an ongoing big snowstorm. We retreated to Zoom and the meeting was a godsend. Our November book was THE WOMEN, by Kristin Hannah. Our conversation was transforming. And we were able both share our sorrow over the election results and discuss the threads that led from the Vietnam war to today’s political realities.
My gurus for all things political are Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance and Rachel Maddow. All 3 recommend getting active immediately and joining something. I already belong to 2 book groups and serve on a local town commission. My hometown is predominantly Republican, but I have served on local boards and commissions for nearly 15 years. My town board work has introduced me to many thoughtful dedicated people on both sides of the political aisle. I know absolutely for a fact that people with different political views can work together towards common goals. Today, to broaden my perspective, I’ve signed up for the newsletters of my state Democratic Party and the national Protect Democracy organization.
But for now, I’m not ready to dissect the failures of the 2024 election and the coming horrors of another Trump administration. I’m reflecting on what’s most important to me and how I will work to those things. I can’t fight every battle all the time. As a single 72-year old woman, Social Security and Medicare are critical to my life. So I’ll start with protecting those. I’m bypassing many of the media outlets I usually follow and focusing on nurturing my spirit. Someday I’ll be able to analyze what happened on Tuesday, 11/5. But not now.
I read The Women in early Aug, before spending 10 days in north Vietnam. That book is still in my bones three months later. Being in Vietnam and seeing how my little group of mostly white Americans (our trip was led by a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka) was welcomed during our time there gave me a lot of hope. We inflicted unspeakable harm upon the people and the land there, yet they were so proud to show us their country. If the people of Vietnam can reconcile with each other AND with us, the perpetrators of so much violence, I have hope that we too can find our way forward.
Thanks for these, AHP. I am hoping to read a lot more in the future about the WHY of what just happened--honest and multi-factorial analysis. But I'm not ready for that, and I think it will take time and not just quick hot takes.
To counterbalance things a bit, I'm returning to Ross Gay's book INCITING JOY, which is magnificent. I don't think we need to jump to joy right now--let's mourn and be angry and grieve collectively--but it has a longer-term urgent power. A quotation from the introduction (mine is an advanced reader's copy, so the final might be a little different): "what does joy incite?--I should say, I have a hunch, and it's why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that this solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow--which does not necessarily mean that we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow--might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It's why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as a practice of survival."
I was reading THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A BACKYARD YEAR by Margaret Renkl last night, and she quotes Ross Gay. I've never heard of this writer, and it's now twice in 18 hours I've seen his name. I'm taking it as a sign and getting one of his books right now. Thanks for sharing! PS I also highly recommend Renkl's book; a nice distraction and it makes me want to go buy seven different types of bird seed.
Maybe not "reading," but so many comments online on building hyper local community or becoming more active in existing communities. Which sounds great. But...where to start?
I'd love a future "advice time" thread about the ways in which people have done this (or joined! sometimes I think we have too much emphasis on *launching something new* that feels a bit ego-y to me). I want *specifics*! Not "start a community art class" but...what did you do first, second, etc.? How did you find people?
<3
I started a monthly village potluck. I reserved the run-down little village rec center (with kitchen!) and put up a flyer and told my neighbors and showed up. I had zero expectations. Maybe it would just be my family picnicking down the street. But people came and more people came. That was a year ago. Now we're having a village Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving for all of us who don't have family nearby and it's my favorite freaking night of the month. It's cozy and low stakes and I love it.
Hard second for your proposed thread. This isn't a time to keep ideas to ourselves or judge others for being Luddites if they don't know where these communities are already. If we are going to work together, we all need to be on the same page.
I recently joined the newsletter for my local Unitarian Universalist church (which is kind of a church for all religions). I'm not sure if I'll start attending regularly but I know I'll use the newsletter to find out about local events, volunteering opportunities and elections.
Thank you!! This is a great idea!
Fantastic idea, thank you! I've been checking out the two local Unitarian Universalist churches from afar for probably similar reasons, but I hadn't thought of signing up for their newsletters!
I've been planning on joining my Community Emergency Response Team. I live in a place isolated enough that if the Big One hits we'll be cut off and have to take care of each other. I'm sure other catastrophes can also come into play. This is only partly about finding people*, but also about the increased urgency of needing to rely on each other during disasters when people like Trump decide to withhold aid from states that didn't vote for him.
*I volunteered with county emergency response for vaccine clinics during covid and did indeed meet some cool people, so it could also work that way too.
Hi! I think facebook or instagram can both help with this. Does your region/neighborhood have a local buy nothing or everything free group? Is there a local mutual aid group who posts on instagram about what they need and where they are working?
Just some preliminary thoughts!
Garrett Buck's workshops (Anne Helen linked to his substack above) are spot on for this. He has such a genuine heart and focuses on helping white people organize white people in our communities. I found it really helped me get a better sense of myself and my values and then I was able to take that and find opportunities in my community (for me, it has been getting involved in the housing movement in my very white, very well meaning liberal but also very NIMBY community.)
He's organizing a couple of virtual get togethers:
-I will be offering two public “what comes next” Zoom gatherings this week. One hour (the same content) offered at two different times– Thursday evening and Friday midday. If these seem helpful, I’ll offer more of them. This will be a space to help clarify your thinking and allow you to be in community with others who are puzzling this out. Everybody’s welcome. Show up in your heartbreak, but please bring your heart. (they’re free, of course). Register here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZIRYzwfrZxByKfIL9iw4mcm8w8MVJueffdg5I4hmWJXUvvQ/viewform
Mutual aid groups are a good place to start - many were developed after 2016. Sometimes it's a Facebook group where people can give and ask for help, sometimes it's an organization, etc, but I'd search for what's in your area. If you want to work on something different and there's not a group working on that, it's also not ego-y to do that, but I'd suggest looking at that the community organizing environment is in your area first.
I'm not reading anything about the election right now. I didn't watch anything on election night - I figured it would be too nerve wrecking. I woke up, saw the news, turned off my phone. I felt terrible all day with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I met with a friend for 30 minutes to talk about it. I talked with my wife about it a bit, but there's not much to say. I'm sad. angry. frustrated.
I still don't want to read anything. I'm not ready for armchair punditry. I also remember in 2016, a lot of the instant analysis punditry turned out to be wrong.
I can't hold my baby daughter without thinking about her future. What kind of future is going to have?
I will return to action at some point, but right now I'm just grieving.
Also a new parent over here (my son is 17 days old), and struggling with the increased uncertainty this election outcome has tossed into all our laps. In some ways, his existence is a clarifying factor for me in the context of my own straight cis white upper middle class insulated existence- there is no option to ignore the potential for destruction on a generational level that this new administration brings. His future is too important to me now.
I see you and I hope you will eventually get to a place where you can move forward- do it for your daughter if no one else.
My son was just a few weeks old when Trump was elected in 2016. The furious need to protect him and to protect so many of the other things I love - including my own hope and belief - will be forever intertwined for me and have come to define my experience as a parent. That includes the awfulness but also the beauty and wonder of parenthood. Good luck and - still,always- congratulations on your little one.
Thanks for you message. After a couple of days, I'm feeling better. I"m definitely ready to work for my kids. I don't exactly know how to do that, but I'm ready.
grief is. it just is, and it will continue.
if I may, I would posit that you can continue to grieve even as you return to action, at a point that action might feel necessary again. I think a lot of times we hold them at opposite ends. But I think we can grieve and act at the same time. Not all of the time, but they can coexist.
I feel the same, Taylor. When I get back to reading about anything, I'm not interested in the kind of punditry that makes us check the "oh we figured it out now we can feel better" box. So much analysis and so little change. I want the roadmaps for how to we actually change our system (not broken, btw, operating exactly as they've been set up). How to burn it all down.
I've found it fortifying to revisit writing about lineages of organizing (Grace Lee Boggs! Fannie Lou Hamer!). We have so many maps for moving forward, if we look close enough. One book I'm sifting through again is LET THIS RADICALIZE YOU: ORGANIZING AND REVOLUTION OF RECIPROCAL CARE by brilliant abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you
Thank you! This is what I came here to find--roadmaps for connection, community, organizing, and framing how to move forward following the loss of democracy.
Yes! Love this book as a resource and roadmap.
And speaking of Kelly Hayes, I really appreciated this reflection this morning! So much of what I learned post-2016 was how much unaddressed grief and anger on the part of my organizing community ended up later rupturing and destroying fledgling groups and organizations as people turned on each other, in ways we're still addressing. https://organizingmythoughts.org/beyond-the-blame-fighting-for-each-other-in-the-face-of-fascism/
YES!! Thank you for sharing this! <3
I found this article to be really wonderful, in a similar vein - https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/?ref=shesabeast.co
Yes!!!
Thank you! The ebook was free and I made a donation.
"The main misogyny of this election is that many people will vote to line their pocketbooks at the expense of the basic health and safety of so many of us." This. I mean, I like having money but at the cost of my soul? How can people care so little for others? It may be naive/idealistic, but how do people live with themselves? Even if there was going to be some miraculous financial return how are they okay with it? I cycled through the stages of grief very quickly Wednesday morning and was eerily calm by the time I got into my car to go to work. No annoyances, no road rage. I was honestly concerned that I had just crossed into total numbness but then I realized it was actual acute clarity. My giving people the benefit of the doubt was already so low, but now there is no question what the feelings and priorities of people in this country are and I know what I'm fighting and who I am fighting with. But I am weirdly hopeful: "At the core of our shared sadness and rage is a longing for a better world for all of us."
Oh this so so my struggle. The definition of the American Dream has become "me" at the expense of "we." This causes me the most heartbreak of anything.
I also feel this clarity. In the 2016 election my then-boyfriend-now-ex shocked me at the breakfast table in our college dining hall when he said he voted against Hillary. I spent four months trying to justify that to myself (insert self-inflicted gaslighting), then finally broke up with him and spent the rest of the four years trying not to lose my sanity. Not this time. Not just because my now-partner and I agree politically, but because I'm letting myself process the enormity of it all, the surprise-yet-not of how this is all mirroring 2016, the hard, long-term work that is evident and needed now. I feel more driven and ready and (maybe, like you) hopeful than I was eight years ago.
Same, same, same, SDK. I, too, keep going back to painful question: “how can people care so little for others?” I thought I saw the low point of that during Covid but it’s become worse. For me, that’s a devastating conclusion to come to.
I just keep coming back to the basic idea that most people aren’t mad at the real problems? It’s billionaires and Citizens United, not trans kids or immigrants. People don’t understand that at the heart of it we are all workers and are not likely to strike it rich.
Not reading much election analysis, but there is something I want to read about and haven't found. The Boomer generation broke hard for Trump - more so than any other generation, including those older. To me, it ties in with a larger conversation about what is going on with Boomers. They're addicted to their phones, news alerts, and social media. They benefited from a right place, right time economy for almost all of their lives. They seem bitter and yet, about what? I suppose it's a rich text for me.
If you haven't already read it, I recommend The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America by Philip Bump.
I'm a publisher and online bookseller and we have had a ton of orders for books and zines in the last day and a half. Here is what people are picking up right now:
1. Abortion and contraceptive resources - by far the biggest category, we are flooded with orders for these
2. Protest, activism, and movement-building tactical resources
3. Herbal medicine
4. Queer and trans identity stuff - this is the one category where we're selling more affirming than how-to titles
5. Stuff about writing and publishing - I'm interested to see what comes out of this.
In 2016, we had just started to publish mental health and trauma healing resources. It didn't really gain traction until Nov 9th that year when sales skyrocketed and have kept growing every year since. It's interesting to see that this time around, we're selling less of that (some mental health stuff is going but it's more in the "how to survive today" vein). We've done a lot of internal work these last eight years and it's time to take external action. It's more than a sales trend, I feel this in my bones.
Update, since I posted that comment this morning we are getting more and more orders for DIY projects. How to grow and preserve food, how to build a shed in your yard, how to build secret hiding places in your home, and (my favorite) how to build a windmill.
This is really fascinating - I hope you keep us posted in the coming months. I know we've got librarians in the Culture Study community, and I wonder what trends they're noticing.
My colleagues over in fiction publishing say dystopian genre fiction is flying off the shelves this week, but if 2016 patterns hold true that will quickly give way to cozy escapism.
I’ve been feeling helpless, but this has given me some pragmatic ideas of what I could actually do that might have impact. I also find it a bit comforting that some people have been planning for this already.
10 WAYS TO BE PREPARED AND GROUNDED NOW THAT TRUMP HAS WON https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYcdFNkwT9fT7XiRktcG1ieKWklLlyMBGAHg98rhyTMU9iyVKc2HV9hj6E_aem_w12GLPM2R1EAEzwfhkGzLg
Also wanted to add, that if you haven’t been wearing a face mask and want to be part of the resistance, now would be a great time to restart. What better public display of community care, belief in science, and unity is there?
I love this! The disability circles I'm part of are full of folks who are TERRIFIED about what this administration will mean for disability, public health, etc.
This is so practical and yes, please please please consider this!
Thanks for this link, if you have any other resources of this type, I'm down! It felt so invigorating reading this!
Yes! I came here to share this one.
Thank you for sharing this! I appreciate this more than anything else I've read since Tuesday.
George Monbiot on The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/trump-voters-revolution-politics-right
"Monstrous as he is, Trump is no outlier. He is the distillation of capitalist pseudo-democracy. His values, entirely extrinsic – fixated on prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth – are the dominant values projected for years on to every screen and into every mind. His criminality is the system’s criminality. His abuse of women, of staff, of customers, of Muslims, of immigrants, of disabled people, of ecosystems, is the abuse the majority of the world’s people have suffered for centuries
What do we do? Stop it from happening in our own countries. This, I believe, requires a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round. No one would claim any of this is easy. But right now, we are readily handing our lives to the Donald Trumps that lurk in every country."
---
And my group chat containing wisdom from friends losing democracy in Nicaragua in 2018: "The only way forward is through, so here is where the work begins. Rights that are not actively defended are rights we concede. So… join the civil resistance and active citizenship today."
On Election Day I bought Alexei Navalny's posthumous memoir PATRIOT and started reading it that night. I had only general knowledge of who he was, but the excerpt from the book that the New Yorker published a few weeks ago lit a fire under me to learn more. How do you live with courage, integrity, humor and joy under an authoritarian regime? This book is speaking into those questions for me.
Honestly, I'm not reading much. I'm listening to angsty Chopin piano and divesting from billionaires.
Angsty piano ftw! Beethoven, man.
Whenever the world goes to hell, since childhood I've retreated into fairytales.
Not Disney, but the older stuff - Grimm and Anderson and Lang's colored books, the Arabian Nights through the Kalevala. There's something reassuring to me knowing that all this has happened before and all of this will happen again and again because humanity has been through worse and kept going. And in these tales if you are kind and clever you will triumph, and the evil ones get their eyes pecked out and thumbs cut off and have millstones dropped on them and I find that comforting, if not a bit aspirational.
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is always the perfect blend of fairy tale comfort and feminine rage for me, so I've been going through those stories.
I've also been rereading a bunch of T Kingfisher's short books. She is wonderful at retelling folk tales with incredibly human characters that can be simultaneously hilarious and horrific and heartwarming. Highly recommended for comfort reading.
At times like this I need to read about humanity being human and kind, to remember that there's still good out there and good to be done.
In this moment, I am returning to The Silver Chair, and to A Wrinkle in Time. These classic children's books that emphasize the importance of love over hate, hope over despair.
I do this too! I read The Hero and the Crown by Robyn McKinley, such a good ‘lady being herself and saving the day’ story.
Hard second for The Hero and The Crown! I must have borrowed the library copy four or five times as a kid. I also reread The Once and Future King a few times in the past when looking for a way forward. Older and with default male protagonist, slyly funny, it paints that children’s lit portrait of the kid with more humility and moral clarity than his elders, and emphasizes learning from anyone, no matter how “small,” via the natural world. (I’m almost hesitant to read it again now in case it doesn’t hold up.)
It holds up! And a great idea to re-read right now. The political allegory is pretty poignant.
Just going to add here that Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom on the Daily Show last night had a very good analysis and she elaborated on another component on instagram on her stories, so if you can stand getting on social media, that would be my one suggestion for today. It's a good take with context.
She is so thoughtful. I am going to look these up!
You can also see the full version on her tiktok. Really good context for trying to understand some people's motivations.
Last night I read a ton of posts on r/GenZ about how young men justified their votes for Trump. The GenZ political gender gap is a huge preoccupation of mine and reading this made me realize it’s even worse than I thought. I think this is a very serious political challenge for the left to navigate. Shared some of my thoughts about it over on Mastodon https://glammr.us/@TeamMidwest/113441772203462705
Poetry is helping me process. Here’s a good one to start:
To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Also yesterday Kwame Alexander posted this one:
Tired
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
It’s too soon for me. That’s not to say I’m not reading. My home town book club met yesterday, despite an ongoing big snowstorm. We retreated to Zoom and the meeting was a godsend. Our November book was THE WOMEN, by Kristin Hannah. Our conversation was transforming. And we were able both share our sorrow over the election results and discuss the threads that led from the Vietnam war to today’s political realities.
My gurus for all things political are Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance and Rachel Maddow. All 3 recommend getting active immediately and joining something. I already belong to 2 book groups and serve on a local town commission. My hometown is predominantly Republican, but I have served on local boards and commissions for nearly 15 years. My town board work has introduced me to many thoughtful dedicated people on both sides of the political aisle. I know absolutely for a fact that people with different political views can work together towards common goals. Today, to broaden my perspective, I’ve signed up for the newsletters of my state Democratic Party and the national Protect Democracy organization.
But for now, I’m not ready to dissect the failures of the 2024 election and the coming horrors of another Trump administration. I’m reflecting on what’s most important to me and how I will work to those things. I can’t fight every battle all the time. As a single 72-year old woman, Social Security and Medicare are critical to my life. So I’ll start with protecting those. I’m bypassing many of the media outlets I usually follow and focusing on nurturing my spirit. Someday I’ll be able to analyze what happened on Tuesday, 11/5. But not now.
I read The Women in early Aug, before spending 10 days in north Vietnam. That book is still in my bones three months later. Being in Vietnam and seeing how my little group of mostly white Americans (our trip was led by a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka) was welcomed during our time there gave me a lot of hope. We inflicted unspeakable harm upon the people and the land there, yet they were so proud to show us their country. If the people of Vietnam can reconcile with each other AND with us, the perpetrators of so much violence, I have hope that we too can find our way forward.
Thanks for these, AHP. I am hoping to read a lot more in the future about the WHY of what just happened--honest and multi-factorial analysis. But I'm not ready for that, and I think it will take time and not just quick hot takes.
To counterbalance things a bit, I'm returning to Ross Gay's book INCITING JOY, which is magnificent. I don't think we need to jump to joy right now--let's mourn and be angry and grieve collectively--but it has a longer-term urgent power. A quotation from the introduction (mine is an advanced reader's copy, so the final might be a little different): "what does joy incite?--I should say, I have a hunch, and it's why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that this solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow--which does not necessarily mean that we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow--might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It's why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as a practice of survival."
I was reading THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A BACKYARD YEAR by Margaret Renkl last night, and she quotes Ross Gay. I've never heard of this writer, and it's now twice in 18 hours I've seen his name. I'm taking it as a sign and getting one of his books right now. Thanks for sharing! PS I also highly recommend Renkl's book; a nice distraction and it makes me want to go buy seven different types of bird seed.
This book sounds wonderful! Thank you. (And I love the serendipitous synergies.)
Margaret Renkl is a gorgeous writer. I haven't read any of her books yet, but I enjoy her columns in the New York Times.
Ross Gay is a favorite of folks I love. I've read parts of The Book Of Delights, but as a scholar of joy, I think I need to read this one now!
You absolutely should read Gay! If it helps, here's a review I wrote a few years ago: https://pshares.org/blog/inciting-joys-communion/ I really do love his work so much.