Ampersand Gazette #3
“To truly protect trees, we need to make a profound paradigm shift that transcends politics. We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future.”
Margaret Renkl
from a Guest Essay “Should A Person Go to Jail for Cutting Down A Tree?” in The New York Times
1.24.22
Trees, believe it or not, have saved my life. When I was pregnant and as sick as I have ever been, I wrapped myself around a mother Redwood, and I swear, by all that’s holy, that she reached out to my heart, and told me things would be alright.
I don’t know how I feel about a person going to jail for cutting down a tree, but … I do know that trees have consciousness, and for that reason alone, need to be considered sentient. What’s hard for me is the idea of ownership of trees, or cats, or bats.
We don’t own any of these things. We are here to steward and pass them on.
&
“I have considered for months whether to write this column, whether it’s better to, as some advise, have an impeccably curated public persona. But the only image I want to project is one of honesty, openness and even vulnerability. The mission of my work is helping others any way I can, and that includes using the example of my own life and my own flaws.
“My walk in recent years as an openly bisexual man has taught me the amazing power and importance of visibility, how transformational it can be to see someone else who is walking your walk.
“As James Baldwin once put it, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’”
Charles M. Blow
from an Opinion Essay “Death Changed My Life” in The New York Times
1.24.22
I was so happy to read Mr. Blow’s notion that a curated public life is not to be desired. Life may be remembered through a scrapbook approach, but life itself is lived forwards, and then, only in the natural vulnerability that we all face as we look to the future—the unknown.
If on that path I, like Mr. Blow, can help somebody, I count it all good.
&
“There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”
“Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision—maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt?—should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory”—because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.
“What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents.
Paul Krugman
from an Opinion Essay “Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police” in The New York Times
1.25.22
When I was in seminary, there was an annual joke that filtered through our homiletics courses—homiletics is the study of sermon-giving—that was a deliberate misquote of the call to mercy: Comfort the afflicted. We, as seminarians, were also encouraged to Afflict the comfortable. The idea, of course, was to jar people into considering their own acts of mercy.
Mr. Krugman’s essay, however, gave me chills. We are not allowed to have our children read anything that makes them ‘uncomfortable?’ For heaven’s sake, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. I’ve learned more from authors who make me uncomfortable than those who agree with me. How will my ideas ever change, grow, mature if I must always be comfortable with whatever is introduced to me.
It reminded me, spookily, of a verse from my Tao for Now.
When the practice of Wisdom disappears, goodness appears.
When goodness disappears, morality appears.
When morality disappears, law appears.
And here is where we are today—some of us making laws about what others of us are desirous of thinking. It’s not the book-banning that’s the problem, Beloved.
&
“But if you’re thinking it might be time for a break from the numbers, I propose a challenge for the year ahead: Try taking your cues from your body instead of a device.
“That’s what I did. At some point in the pandemic, I took off my watch. It left a stripe of skin on my wrist where it had spent years blocking the sun. Then I lost it and never bothered to find it.
“The adjustment didn’t always feel natural. Once you outsource your confidence to something else, it takes a while to come back. But finally, I stopped counting, stopped tracking.
Lindsay Crouse
from an Opinion Essay “How My Smartwatch Hijacked My Relationship with My Body” in The New York Times
1.28.22
Oooh, this essay just made me beam. I bought the crazy notion that I needed to walk 10,000 steps daily—until, just walking those steps in my own home, and without incident, accident, or trauma, I broke my foot. Just walking. For real.
Bodies, Beloved, are so, so, so very smart. We just have to listen to our own.]
&
“Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.
“But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.
“Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
from a Guest Essay, “My Young Mind Was Disturbed b a Book. It Changed My Life” in The New York Times’ 1.30.22
See above, and I would remind you that Mr. Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Banning books is a slippery slope. No book, and I mean this, should ever be banned. Just as no thought should ever be banned. We must maintain our freedom to think.
&
“Nominating Supreme Court justices has always been about identity and politics. It’s just that for nearly the first two centuries of the court’s existence, the only people considered for inclusion were white men.
“When it comes to power, white and male are silent, like the “u” in disguise. In this country, white men are the presumptive base of power from which everyone else is a deviation. They are the norm against which all others are judged to be anomalous.”
Charles M. Blow
from “When All-White Was All Right” his Opinion Column in The New York Times
1.31.22
Like the “us” in disguise. Oh, ouch. He’s right, though.
I hope you will join me in praying for Mr. Biden’s successful replacement justice having an easy confirmation—whosoever that might be: Black, white, purple; female, male, sneither. A thoughtful, brilliant jurist. No more, no less.
&
“Homophone: Same pronunciation, different spelling (aisle, isle, I’ll)
“Homograph: Same spelling, different pronunciation (polish, Polish)
“Homonym: Same pronunciation and spelling, different meaning (waffle, waffle)
from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day
1.31.22
I learn from Anu Garg five days a week. Did you know these three differences? I knew two of three. See? Anu Garg’s A.W.A.D. keeps me young!
&
“You know what Winston Churchill said (actually, there is no proof that he said it, but whatever): ‘Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing — after they have exhausted all other possibilities.’”
Thomas L. Friedman
from an Opinion Column “Neil Young and Liz Cheney, Thanks for Sticking Your Necks Out” in The New York Times
2.2.22
My heart just sank when I read this Churchill quote, basically because it seems so very awfully accurate to me about America. So often I perceive that we miss the point. We do something for the sake of saying we can do something rather than working through difficult or complex problems. Fine! We’ll make a law about emissions. Done.
Uh, no. Emission laws, as helpful as they are, don’t really touch the real issues of climate change. But we made a law, we say. So? Does it touch the real issue?
&
“All these are examples of what I think of as the fundamental and-ness of life, the way it requires us to experience so many contradictory or unrelated things all at once. There’s no getting away from this and-ness, because it is built into the basic facts of our existence. The world we inhabit is full of splendor and misery, our fellow humans are brilliant and inspiring and selfish and vicious, and we ourselves are hopelessly motley, full of mixed motives and mixed feelings.…
“I began writing my new book before the emergence of the coronavirus, then watched as some of its central themes came to dominate the era: not only the omnipresence of loss and the persistence of joy, but also this experience of and. It is easy to feel that good moments in bad times, like bad moments in good times, are anomalous, even traitorous. But that’s not true.
“There’s no pure form of any significant event in our lives, no single emotion that solely and accurately represents love, or grief, or pandemic. Even at the extremity of experience, life is always busy being many things at once — exhausting and restorative, tedious and exciting, solemn and comic, devastating and fulfilling.”
Kathryn Schulz
from an Opinion Essay “How to Make Sense of Our Covid Losses, Big and Small,”
in The New York Times, 1.27.22
There is a fundamental and-ness to life, Beloved. That’s why I founded The Ampersand Society—so that those of us who want a world that works for everyone remember that only if we live and rather than or can we even approach that goal.
We are all based on and and if we’ll live that way, we will free others to live that way, too. Won’t you join me? S.