I’ve been tracking my reading for the last decade, and in 2018 I set a new personal record for books I read (19). I read a lot of awesome books last year, and inspired by my friend Ruth, I’d like to share a roundup of the thematic highlights.
Environmental history
Nature’s Metropolis (Bill Cronon): One of the canonical works of American environmental history. Cronon uses Chicago as his case study to show the relationships between the rural hinterlands and urban center. I have a new appreciation for the development of grain elevators after reading this.
The Thousand-year Flood(David Welky): This is a history of the 1937 Ohio River flood. It’s always struck me as a little weird how much literature concerns the Mississippi River, and how comparatively little there is on the Ohio. As I get into water issues locally and regionally, I’m trying to increase my knowledge of the Ohio River. Much of the current US environmental disaster response policy was forged during the New Deal, and this is a great look at how that played out during a massive wintertime flood that dramatically affected Cincinnati, Louisville, and Paducah.
The Hidden Life of Trees (Peter Wohlleben): If you need a gentle, lovely work of quiet non-fiction to make you feel better about the shitty times we live in, pick this up. Wohlleben discusses how trees live in community with one another, how they communicate, and how things like fungi are important members of forest communities.
Nuclear non-fiction and apocalyptic fiction
The Power (Naomi Alderman): This was a hell of a book to read within the fallout from the Me Too movement. A dystopia in which women gain the power to electrocute men, it’s a cautionary tale of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The Doomsday Machine (Daniel Ellsberg): Before he was known as the force behind the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was a nuclear policy researcher with the RAND Corporation. There was some wild shit in here, like the time RAND researchers came up with a plan to thwart a Soviet missile attack by STOPPING EARTH’S ROTATION. This book got a bit dense at times, but if you need some more nightmare juice for more sleepless nights for the remainder of the Trump presidency… pick this up!
Almighty (Dan Zak): Protests are often (weirdly, in my opinion) derided as being symbolic performance, and little more than that. I’ve never been moved by this argument, but if you’re someone who earnestly makes it, then I hope you’d at least be willing to admit that protesting the biggest symbol of state violence – nuclear weapons – is at least a hell of a target. If you’re not familiar with the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US military-academic-government project to create the atomic bomb), the Plowshares Movement (the most colorful anti-nuclear protest movement), or the Catholic Workers (a Catholic social justice movement midwifed by Dorothy Day, a Catholic anarchist and someone who I regard alongside Martin Luther King as an American prophet), then Almighty is a damn good crash course into these important chapters in nuclear history, and religious left history, centering around an ill-fated protest involving a veteran, a housepainter, and a nun at Oak Ridge.
Inequality
Titan (Ron Chernow): I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of energy and fossil fuels, and it became pretty clear that at some point, you have to dive into the history of Standard Oil, the first major oil company started by John D. Rockefeller. There still has never been any American as wealthy as John D. Rockefeller was, and there’s a pretty compelling argument one can make that Rockefeller and Standard Oil charted much of the path for American capitalism, environmental attitudes, and worker exploitation through the 20th century. I was disappointed by some of the paths Chernow took (as a socialist, long passages about the furnishing decisions of the Rockefeller estate at the expense of shorter passages about the Ludlow Massacre and other labor horror stories sent me into periodic fits of rage), but overall this is a fascinating book.
Automating Inequality(Virginia Eubanks): Ed Summers recommended this to me, and I know that anything Ed recommends about data and algorithms is going to be good as hell (good as in well-written, the insights are usually terrifying). Eubanks dives into a few case studies about how seemingly benign attempts by the state to automate things like benefits for people with disabilities, predicting the future likelihood for abuse to children tracked by family services, and triaging services for homeless people can lead to reinforcing the very inequalities that supposedly “neutral” technology was supposed to ameliorate.
Winners Take All(Anand Giridharadas): I have not been able to shut up about this book since I read it, and if there is one book right now that I wish everyone I know would read, it’s this one. You can read an essay-length version of Giridharadas’s book in his recent essay in The Guardian. This book delves into the favorite farce of rich people too high on their own supply – that they are best positioned to solve the problems they created in the first place. I loved this book for far too many reasons to list here, but one of the passages that sticks out in my brain is so vivid I have to share it with y’all here:
In her reluctance to be the only fool, Tisch was revealing the hold that the status quo had on her. Again and again, she had voiced an ideal for which in the end she was unwilling to sacrifice. It was important to her to feel superior to her rich friends, but she was unwilling to rush out in front of them and be the only one not to take advantage of a system she knew to be wrong. Her repeated confessions that she will not be the one to bring about the world that she swears she believes in sent a message to Darren Walker: If he wants a fairer system, he is going to have to seek it in spite of people like her, not with them at his side; he might have their moral support, but he could not count on them to make the decisions to change the system that made them everything that they are. “The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it?” Tisch said at one point. “They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it.” Was there anything she could imagine that would convince them otherwise—that could inspire them to pursue a fairer system? “Revolution, maybe,” she said.
Community repair
The Romance of American Communism (Vivan Gornick): One of my DSA friends recommended this to me, and after Winners Take All, this might be my second favorite book I read in 2018. Vivian Gornick grew up in a Jewish Communist home in New York, which gave her a great deal of familiarity with the subject material of this book. In the 70s she went back and interviewed tons of ex-Communist Party (CPUSA) members, and using pseudonyms, wrote up their stories (and often embellished them). It’s written in a somewhat dated style, but the stories are so wild and entertaining, thrilling and disturbing, that it’s hard to put down. I see so many echoes of what Gornick’s subjects talked about in today’s left, from the good (the thrill of winning unlikely victories) to the mundane (the basic tasks of organizing) to the bad (meetings that go on forever) to the ugly (mansplaining and party expulsion).
Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam): The popular sociological text of “why are Americans so lonely?” This book is nearly 20 years old so I guess now maybe it’s a classic?? While obviously some of it is dated, there is so much useful information in here. If, like me, you are a young person affiliated with an older institution (voluntary, religious, community, etc) that is wringing its hands about why “young people aren’t involved these days,” it’s good to remember that this trend has actually been going on for a long time, and can’t be blamed on millennials!
Conflict is not Abuse (Sarah Schulman): I felt really conflicted (pun intended) about this book. Schulman has some excellent arguments about the conflation of conflict with abuse and harm, when it is important to distinguish between the two. At the same time, I think she formulates what she believes to be a universal ethical framework based on her specific life experience in a way I often took serious issue with. Ultimately, this was a very thought-provoking book that forced me to think about how I deal with conflict resolution in real life.
What am I reading for 2019?
I don’t tend to stick to a reading plan (except for the year I only read women authors) – I’m generally a bit of a meandering reader, and often start new titles based on whatever titles are currently available through my library’s eBook program. I tend to juggle a few titles at a time – typically one I’m reading from most days on my bus commute to work, and a couple others on the back burner. Most of the books I read last year were eBooks. I occasionally worry I’m getting out of the habit of reading print books, particularly because a lot of books I eventually want to read are only available in analog.
Right now, I’m really interested in reading about water issues, filling gaps in my knowledge of important political history, and boning up on religious left thinkers. I recently finished a book about the Flint water crisis, am in the middle of a book about the French Revolution, and am occasionally dipping into Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. My only reading goal this year is to beat last year’s reading record – so if I hit 20, I’ll consider it a success.
White women screaming at Elizabeth Eckford during the integration of Little Rock High School, 1957
White boys smirking at Nathan Phillips during the Indigenous Rights March, 2019
It’s a rare event to see a headline originate in Indian Country Today, then pop up a few hours later in Cincinnati media channels, a few hours later on the Facebook feeds of progressives and leftists I know around the country, and finally the New York Times. The story making headlines was how a number of Covington Catholic High School students, in Washington DC for the March for Life were harassing a group of indigenous activists also in town for the Indigenous People’s March – an event meant to highlight many of the concerns of indigenous people, including the immense numbers of murdered and missing indigenous women. The videos on social media were even worse than I was prepared for, and the gleeful mob mentality of a bunch of mostly white high school boys harassing indigenous elders should be a wake up call for everyone who thinks that racism is a generational issue that will eventually go away when the current FOX news demographic peters out.
Something that I think is missing from the national coverage is that there is something deeply and disturbingly evocative of Cincinnati’s culture within the actions of the young men. We need to talk about Cincinnati suburban white flight and the role of parochial schools. Because if we don’t acknowledge this, then we’re only going to keep seeing this happen over and over.
Suburban white teenagers doing racist things keeps happening over and over and over in this region. For non-Cincinnatians, Covington Catholic is in Northern Kentucky, and Northern Kentucky is very much a part of the greater Cincinnati region. Lots of people live in Northern Kentucky who commute across the river to work in Ohio, and vice-versa. At Mason High School (a public school in a northern suburb), black kids received targeted racist SnapChat messages last January. At Kings (another suburban high school), white basketball players wore jerseys with racist slurs on them. A month later, Elder High School (a Catholic high school on the west side of Cincinnati) students chanted racist and homophobic slurs at a rival Catholic high school’s players during a basketball game.
Sometimes, it’s also the adults engaging in this. A Mason teacher told a student he might be lynched. At Kings, a teacher joked about a student being deported. And when students try to speak up, to be on the side of social justice? Sometimes adults try to shut them down – like one Northern Kentucky student at Holy Cross High School, who was barred from giving a speech school authorities deemed as “political and inconsistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church.”
What do all of these schools have in common? Some of them are public, some of them are parochial. But all of them are extremely white, reflecting the fact that with a few exceptions, white people who live in the greater Cincinnati area by and large do not send their kids to Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) – the largest educational environment in the region where white kids would routinely encounter plenty of students who don’t look like them (and the schools that white CPS parents favor are getting whiter).
White people sending their kids to white schools is not a new or unique phenomenon to Cincinnati. It is often perpetuated by where white people move – the suburbs – that are very white. The growth of suburban development is directly linked with white people exiting the city and seeking “good schools” combined with government policy that helped create racially segregated housing patterns. The suburban sprawl around the city of Cincinnati is very white – while Hamilton County (where Cincinnati is located) is around 66% white, the surrounding suburbs are more than 80% (and sometimes more than 90%) white.
But even when white people live in more diverse areas like the city, they still take steps to send their kids to white schools. According to this story in the Atlantic, 2/3 of urban schools are non-white, which is pretty similar to the numbers within Cincinnati Public Schools (approximately 63% Black, 6% Multiracial, 5% Latino, 2% Asian/Pacific islander, and 0.1% Indigenous). I am not a demographer, so the following is some rough back of the envelope math. According to the Census, Cincinnati’s city population is 50% white. Yet the CPS enrollment of white students as of a couple years ago was around 24%. There is obviously some kind of disparity here, between the white population that lives within the city and where their children go to school. Again, I am not a demographer but I suspect that for white parents who live in the city, the disparity is at least partially, if not wholly, explained by white parents who send their kids to private schools – particularly parochial schools. Unfortunately, it is hard to do back of the envelope math for this one, as the state of Ohio only collects data for public schools.
Research shows that white kids who live in diverse areas and go to diverse schools are way more sensitive about the historical and current impacts of racism in American life. You can have a great curriculum that talks about the history of land expropriation from indigenous people, about redlining of neighborhoods that kept out people of color, immigrants, and Jews, of highway construction projects that destroyed black communities – but lived experience is a greater teacher than curriculum. And when white kids are mostly interacting with other white kids in an environment where white parents are choosing to live around other white people, white kids doing racist shit is almost inevitable.
Let’s talk about parochial schools in Cincinnati, because I think this part is critical to understanding what happened in Washington DC.
Cincinnati’s historical relationship with Catholicism runs very deep. Parish social events are a massive part of the social fabric of the city. It is not unusual to see many people with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday. During Lent, many parishes have Friday fish fry dinners that are open to the public. On Good Friday, there are television crews at a historic church high up on a hill where people climb the stairs and pray the rosary. During the summer, parishes have huge festivals that serve as fundraisers for the parishes’ activities. Many parishes with large festivals also run schools.
There are so many Catholic schools just within the Archdiocese of Cincinnati that as of 2013, it is now the sixth-largest parochial school network in the country, despite the Archdiocese being the 44th biggest Catholic diocese. There are over 100 Catholic schools within southwest Ohio. Across the river in Northern Kentucky, the Diocese of Covington (part of the Archdiocese of Louisville) has over 30 schools.
The modern anti-abortion movement also has deep roots in Cincinnati, and it is deeply tied to the presence of Catholic institutions in the city. John Willke was a major figure within the anti-abortion movement, starting one of the country’s first Right to Life* chapters; Willke was educated at Roger Bacon, one of Cincinnati’s Catholic schools. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s approach to the sanctity of life reveals a nearly monomaniacal obsession with abortion – despite the fact that Catholic social teachingroutinely calls for also opposing the death penalty, calling for an end to rampant militarism, and taking action on climate change. When you take a look at the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s webpage about life issues, it is overwhelmingly concerned with abortion. The Catholic Telegraph, the Archdiocesan newspaper, is also almost exclusively concerned with abortion in its section devoted to life issues.
Legislation to end abortion is about one thing: universal imposition of a particular set of political and religious beliefs on others who do not share these beliefs. For all their handwringing about morality, it bears repeating that many religious groups do not share the Roman Catholic clerical opposition to abortion, and in fact, and many Catholics themselves support abortion access (according to 2018 figures, about 51% of them).
One thing I wish people outside of Cincinnati knew is how much parochial schools are involved with anti-abortion activities. The Cincinnati Archdiocese provides significant support for local teenagers to attend the March for Life and Catholic Telegraph has slideshows depicting smiling groups of mostly white local Catholic high school teenagers in DC, and for those who couldn’t make it due to weather concerns, cheerfully grinning and holding up signs declaring ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN in front of the local Planned Parenthood clinic that is the last remaining abortion provider in the region.
I think it’s the grinning that sets me off the most, because it’s so similar to the smirk by the young man standing in the way of the indigenous elder. I can’t decide whether it’s the gleeful naivete of young people who have no idea what they’re talking about, or if it’s the gleeful arrogance of young people who have been recruited into the ranks of ideologues. Either way, it’s a stance that serves to close off any recognition of perspectives contrary to what these young high schoolers have been told are the only moral ones by every adult authority figure in their life.
That’s ultimately what this comes down to: mostly white, mostly middle to upper-class, mostly suburban young people being told that they are on the side of righteousness and morality. This stance is what is taught in schools, what is taught in their churches, what is taught in their homes. When someone who doesn’t look or think like them interrupts this world view, they are turned into an obstacle to confront and stare down, not a new perspective to listen to, and learn from. This is what is so jarring about the young men harassing the indigenous elders – despite the protestations of the school and the Covington Diocese that the MAGA students don’t represent their teachings, to the contrary – they’ve been exceptionally well-trained in the art of imposing a singular world view on others.
Whenever these stories come up, someone always asks, “Where are the parents?!” I’d suggest that they are right there in the middle of it all – living in white areas, sending their kids to white schools, and perpetuating a belief system that it is OK for children to harass others who don’t share their sense of white patriarchal systems of control. Over and over, I hear as a childless person I am not supposed to criticize other people’s parenting choices. But as a white person committed to ending white supremacy, I don’t see how I have any choice but to question parenting decisions that reproduce systems of racialized and gendered authoritarian control. What’s good for one’s children may just be poison for everyone else who has to live with them.
Since the Me Too revelations last year, it’s become obvious how pervasive and all-encompassing misogyny is that most men only recognize its presence by its most violent manifestations. The prevalence of rape and sexual assault is a moral and public health crisis. It has to be eliminated. But the enormous amount of sexual and gender-based violence does not exist in a vacuum; it is a product of a misogynist culture that every one of us is marinated in from head to toe, from cradle to grave.
Rape is one of the most brutal and violent forms of misogyny, but eliminating rape and sexual assault will not eliminate misogyny. And this is where I find myself turning in circles. Although it’s been several years since I have had direct experience with threatened or actual physical violence by a man, the men in my life routinely act in ways that dehumanize me and other non-men. I believe that violence against non-men exists on a spectrum, where ignoring the needs and undermining the work of women and nonbinary people creates a subtle foundation for more overt acts of violence. Not all men commit acts of overt violence, but all misogynist-based violence is rooted in the dehumanization of non-men. And many men are exceptionally skilled at daily acts of dehumanization.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the vast majority of my male friends, relatives, coworkers, and comrades routinely disappoint me and let me down. This probably isn’t healthy; it’s honestly pretty depressing. I also doubt I’m the only woman who does this. As a socialist feminist, I believe a better world is possible, and making a better world means prioritizing the healthy ways in which men, women, and nonbinary folks can build liberatory relationships with one another. Over the last year I’ve tried to articulate the common qualities among the men I enjoy spending time with, who I feel safe around, and who I trust.
I want to be clear that this list is not a shortcut or way to instantly eliminate misogyny. Men can still do all of these things and perpetuate misogyny. But it’s telling that I can count on one hand the men I know who consistently do all of these things:
1. They consume media, art, music, journalism, literature, and ideas by women and nonbinary people as much as men
From popular culture to various literary canons, the work of men predominates most of what we read, see, hear, and think about. It’s intellectually lazy and embarrassingly boring to only read and watch and listen to shit created by people like you. Casting your media consumption net wide and far helps one empathize with perspectives that are not their own. ALSO it seems like (most of) the men I know somehow have more time to read than (most of) the women I know, probably because they have less caregiving duties in their life (in which case, holler at me, I have hundreds of books from my dad’s library I need to find a good home for).
Women writers and artists and musicians are constantly having to fight against the notion that their work is somehow specifically feminized because of who created it, while men are more often afforded the honor of creating “universal” work. When men enthusiastically consume the work of people with different gender identities, it normalizes the idea that work written by people other than men has universal appeal.
2. They publicly cite and promote the work of women and nonbinary people who they aren’t related to or trying to profit off the relationship, and they trust the expertise and leadership of genders different from them
This is a huge one for me, partly because I work in higher education, and repeatedly during my life I’ve been one of a handful of women in men-dominated leftist groups that have veered uncomfortably close into toxic masculinity. Citing my work has major material benefits for me professionally. It’s really important that it’s not just me saying “I am a leader in my field, here are some articles I wrote” but to have leaders in my profession, which includes many men, behind me saying “Eira is a leader in our field, the article she wrote had XYZ impact on the profession.”
In political work, I need men to trust my expertise and to trust non-men’s leadership collectively. Leftist men who gatekeep and hoard cultural and social capital in political work are far more of a threat to leftist organizing strength than any right-wing troll. If your organizations and coalition-building activities don’t reflect the overall gender distribution of your corner of the world, and you aren’t concerned about fixing that, good luck with pulling off the revolution.
3. They volunteer to Do The Work and then actually do it
I have a tendency to take on a lot of work (no doubt part of gendered socialization) in the various professional and political arenas of my life, though I’m getting better at drawing my boundaries and making my limits visible. The men in my life that I really appreciate often say things like “I want to ensure this work isn’t totally falling on you, how about I write the first draft/call this person/organize this meeting?” Note: this is very different than saying “tell me how I can help.”
Telling someone you can help without a specific offer of assistance places the burden back on me, and then it’s easier to just say “No, I’m okay” instead of sitting around thinking of what I can delegate. The other thing the men I appreciate do is that they follow through. If they’re not going to make a deadline because Life Happened they’re proactive about letting me know when they’ll Do The Thing so I don’t have to ask them what is going on. I’m beyond overwhelmed with everything I’m trying to juggle between caregiving for my elderly father, dealing with the eternal “doing more with less” mandate of working in public higher education, maintaining my own sanity and relationships, and surviving late-stage capitalism. Men who don’t shoulder their fair share of the work, or men who say they will and don’t, make my life much more difficult.
4. They do emotional labor
Emotional labor is an expansive term, but from my perspective, it’s all of the small ways in which one tends the garden of their various relationships, professional, romantic, friendly, comradely, and neighborly alike. A garden requires planting new seeds, weeding harmful things, paying attention to it, and feeding it through sunlight, water, and nutrients.
Our relationships are the same way. Offering a hug to someone who is going through a rough time, remembering your family’s birthdays, checking in with a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, inviting people at work to go to lunch with you, expressing appreciation for both the daily work of others and when they go above and beyond – these are all vital acts of emotional labor that pay off enormously in building solidarity with one another. It means a lot to me when men at work ask me about how my father is doing even if it’s been weeks since the latest eldercare emergency, or when men from other areas of my life ask me about a specific workplace challenge I mentioned months ago. Women are very much socialized to do these things, and we tend to give more emotional labor to men than we receive in return. It is absolutely vital and world-repairing work that men need to take on.
These are the things I wish more men would push themselves to do – and hold other men to the same standards. Our collective lives and freedom depend on it.
The big change around our house these days is quite literally around our house. Working with an organic landscaping business, we ripped out our front yard and replaced the grass with a variety of native and pollinator-friendly plants. Whenever we tell people about this, one of the first questions folks have is “How do the neighbors feel?”
Bee balm
A robin playing near the ferns
I’m delighted to report the neighbors are pretty into it. The front yard still requires a considerable amount of weeding (something we hope will taper off as the plants grow together), so I’m often out working in the front yard on weekends. I’ve met more of my neighbors just in the last few months than I ever did mowing my lawn, and many of them stop to say how much they enjoy our yard.
But the sweetest joy of our yard has been seeing the bees and other pollinators working the plants. The world may be collapsing around us, and indeed bees are in the insect canary in the coal mine. But I feel like with every bunch of flowers, I’m throwing them a small life raft. There are few everyday sights that move me as much as watching bees enthusiastically buzz around flowers.
###
I recently saw Robin Kimmerer speak at FGC Gathering (a large conference for Quakers). Kimmerer is a professor in the SUNY system, and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin’s talk was incredibly moving, but what stayed with me was her call for transitioning from the “it-ness” we ascribe to non-human animals and plants and natural elements. We refer to birds as ‘it,’ we refer to trees as ‘it,’ we refer to rivers as ‘it.’
Kimmerer called on us to consider using kin as “a pronoun for the revolution”, inspired by her indigenous language, for the creation around us. She notes how and why to use “kin”:
Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.
The day after I heard Robin speak, I was checking the news and saw one of the most profound acts of bearing witness to our kin in recent memory. A mother with her child on her hip confronted Scott Pruitt, a man who probably thinks of anything winged or feathered or mossed or leafed as “it”, saying to him:
“Hi, I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country,” Kristin Mink told Pruitt inside a Teaism restaurant in downtown Washington, not far from the EPA’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. “This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”
And a day later Scott Pruitt resigned.
I don’t know whether he resigned because of the mother and her child. I don’t know if it was because Pruitt realized that being a sleazy capitalist selling out future generations involves less harassment if it’s dictated from a board room than a public office. I don’t know if all that righteous Quaker energy pouring out of Toledo was bending something in Washington DC.
But I know that bearing witness for our kin, kin who are collapsing en masse, kin who cannot speak for themselves, is one of the most sacred acts we can engage in as a way of trying to repair so much of what has been broken in the march towards elevating innovation over creation. I’m so grateful to that mother and her child for speaking out for our kin.
###
A few weeks after I was in Toledo I joined about 75 others to go speak out against proposed deregulation of Ohio River pollution control standards at a public hearing, the only public hearing to be held in a region of 5 million people who get their drinking water from the river. As I was driving down the highway the only thing I prayed for was to pack the hearing. And as I crossed the Brent Spence bridge and could see the Ohio river below out of the edge of my vision, I silently said to kin, “I’ll do the best I can for you.”
Many members of the various faith and political communities I’m connected to showed up. And then I yelled at the commissioners for my allotted 5 minutes for public comment and after that I ended up getting interviewed by a local news station.
This is what I said in my testimony:
Good evening commissioners. My name is Eira Tansey. I am from Cincinnati, and I get my drinking water from the Ohio River. I am a member of the Metro Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Socialists of America is an organization of over 45,000 people across the United States fighting against a capitalist system that silences the voices of working people.
And that is why I am here today: because only a few years after the water crises of Flint and Standing Rock, we are on the verge of another nightmare in which regulators are more interested in carrying out the wish list of polluting industry than protecting the health of the public.
Make no mistake: the public does not want this commission to abdicate its authority and responsibility for setting regional unified pollution control standards. Many of us want you to make existing standards stronger. Over 97% of the responses from the 900 pages of first round public comments called on you to do just that.
We have been told that a majority of ORSANCO’s commissioners favors Alternative 2, a path towards deregulation that happens to line up with the interests and stated preferences of polluting industry. We have been told that the federal Clean Water Act is sufficient to clean up the river, but this is anything but reassuring. As Mary from West Virginia wrote to you on February 22: “If state and EPA agencies’ work is adequate, why do I keep reading that the Ohio River is the most polluted inland waterway in the country?”
Ohio’s status as one of the dirtiest rivers in the country can be directly traced to several of the companies who have requested this commission to gut pollution standards. Alcoa, AKSteel, American Electric Power, ArcelorMittal, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy, Jupiter and Aluminum have all had dozens of Clean Water Act violations in just the last 3 years.
The majority of the commission has not acted in good faith. ORSANCO’s own reporting has found over 100 pollutants for which it has issued standards that are not found elsewhere within federal or state guidelines. It is outrageous that the only public hearing during this comment period is happening at an out of the way hotel in the middle of the week. It suggests the commission is not very interested in hearing from the public. So we must ask – why is a majority of ORSANCO leadership more interested in protecting polluting industries than in protecting the 5 million individuals who depend on the Ohio River for their drinking water?
Could it be because half of the commissioners have ties to polluting industry themselve? They have either worked directly in the mining and energy industries, or they represented them as clients of their consulting firms and law practices. Commissioner Snavely of Kentucky retired from Excel Mining. Commissioner Caperton of West Virginia worked at Massey Energy. Commissioner Flannery of West Virginia is on the National Coal Council. Commission chair Potesta of West Virginia has represented clients like DuPont, who has been one of the worst polluters of all.
This is not sound science or policy making. This is the fox guarding the henhouse door. If the commission guts regional pollution control standards, it is selling out the health and safety of everyone living downstream from polluting industry for the ability of corporations to make more money.
###
I don’t know what’s next, for the river, for the bees in my yard, for the animals and the toddlers who love them being carried on their mother’s hips. I’m worried for my kin. Bearing witness on their behalf is the only thing I know how to do right now.
Sometime between Trump’s election and inauguration, I posted something on Facebook to the effect of, “I see many of my friends using language of despair and hopelessness that really scares me. I desperately need all of you to remain in my life. Please do whatever it takes to get rested and ready for the road ahead.”
I still feel this way. I want to share some of the reflection I’ve done on what it means to build community in a time of frightening chaos.
The most important thing you can do right now in this absolutely terrifying hellscape is to build a community of people, preferably in either close proximity or frequent contact, who care for you, and both hold and inspire you to the standards of bravery and accountability you aspire to. This is the foundation for surviving the foreseeable future.
One of the things that distinguishes many Americans right now from previous periods of historical trauma is our collective isolation from a cohesive sense of community identity. Many of us move far from home for education or work. We are told that a mark of success is to do just this – to take opportunity wherever it is. For many middle-class people (particularly in my profession), we take it for granted that uprooting our households and families every few years between cities is the normal price we pay for career success. We rack up student loans in the thousands for the opportunity to do this, without gauging how damaging it is to have to find new friends every couple years. Many of us suffered spiritual trauma so we don’t have a religious community we can count on. What passed for activism for many years was writing a check to a good cause instead of grassroots organizing. After working a long day at an exhausting job it’s far preferable to come home and hang out with Netflix than to go to a neighborhood meeting where people drone on about traffic control measures.
It’s a blessing to see people in the streets protesting the latest fuckery of this administration. At the same time you often hear folks saying, “why aren’t there more? why aren’t we shutting everything down RIGHT NOW?” But I think this misses something: that ambient despair and hopelessness – a large part of why people stay at home – are most effectively held in check by a sense of community solidarity and identity. And the courage people need to stick their necks out is bolstered by community identities that reinforce the importance of doing the work of standing up for others. It’s a lot easier to go to a protest if you know your friends will be there. It’s tolerable to go to a boring neighborhood meeting with droning people if you already have post-meeting beers set up. Many of the most revolutionary social justice acts through history were done by participants who were part of a strong community, knowing that if something adverse happened to them, they could rely on their community to care for their family or homes or even themselves. When you don’t have community identities where this is a normal part of life, it’s a lot harder to go out in the streets or turn up for the work that repairing the world requires.
Here’s where I need to explain some of my own personal history and why I feel such a deep conviction on why y’all need to make building community priority #1.
The first activist-y thing I ever did was joining Food Not Bombs as an awkward teenager. Some of the folks from those days have become lifelong friends for me, but more importantly, we all showed up at anti-Iraq War protests. Fast forward to New Orleans. I joined a pretty badly organized infoshop and radical library. I eventually fell away from it, but I met some awesome people that I still stay in touch with. They remain my connection to what’s happening on the ground in the South.
A few years ago I decided to move back to Cincinnati, where my parents still lived and where a few friends were left. I have a great job, and I hope I keep it for a long time. But a couple years ago, I had the realization that because I have roots here, I’m staying in Cincinnati for the long haul even if my job goes belly up. I decided to choose building community over building a career. In the end, I think it’s a better safety net and quality of life, especially as the safety net of government vanishes.
My husband and I are not planning on having children, and being childless fundamentally colors your perspective on community in many ways. I know that if I want to make sure I have someone who cares about me in my old age, I have to build deep and dense networks across space and time. And because I don’t have children, I have the time and resources to invest into strengthening the communities that I’m part of, in ways that are sometimes challenging for parents with extensive caregiving obligations. Therefore, I feel a fundamental ethical obligation and expression of my values is to devote myself to community building.
Community building looks like lots of things to different people. For me, building community locally has meant investment in political, advocacy, and religious life. I’m involved with local Planned Parenthood advocacy, the Cincinnati DSA chapter, and a Quaker meeting. I am terrified for what the future will bring, but I know that it’s a lot easier to feel that I’m Doing The Work and that I’m Not Alone when I participate in these spaces. I’ve been urging my friends to find their own communities where they can be a part of something larger than themselves. Communities with shared values and organizing principles are critical to shoring up a sense of being anchored amidst the hurricane of terror swirling around us.
This is what my faith says about the importance of community:
Each of us lives in multiple overlapping and interconnected communities. Some we are born into, while others we choose to join. Each one provides us with an opportunity to test, refine, and express our beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. Claiming membership in a community is a way to define ourselves to others. As we live into that commitment, community can be more than just a group of people. It can embody our testimonies – a way we witness to the world about what we believe to be most important.
It really freaks me out to see people I love going “LOL WE’RE FUCKED!!!!” whenever the news keeps getting worse (as it inevitably does). And at this point, maybe even if we are fucked, we can all go down together sharing some comforting memories of friendship and Doing The Work of repairing the world instead of our last memory being horror scrolling through the latest Vox hot take.
All I know is this: if The Revolution ever breaks out, it will be a hell of a lot easier to launch myself into it from a potluck at my house or Yet Another Committee Meeting than if I’m sitting on my couch alone binge-watching some dumb dystopian tv show. I’ve never felt like Black Mirror or The Handmaid’s Tale or fucking social media could reach out and hug me whenever I’m freaking the hell out, but when I spend time with my community I always have that comfort at hand.
I don’t know what the future will bring. People are justifiably terrified. There is no one coming to save us. We have to save ourselves, with each other. Please go join a group of people who are already Doing The Work. Make it your top priority. You need it. I look forward to seeing you at the next meeting.
Ten years ago last week, I received a job offer to work at Tulane University as a paraprofessional archivist. I was graduating from the University of Cincinnati in the summer of 2008, at the same time the economy was collapsing. I had been a student worker at UC’s archives, and thought maybe I’d like to become an archivist. So I sent tons of applications for staff positions out into the wind, hoping I could get a paraprofessional job for a while before deciding whether I wanted to pursue my MLIS. The only response I got was from Tulane, and all my interviewing was over the phone. The first time I ever set foot in Louisiana was when I drove down there, with my dad, to move in to my new city.
I spent five years at Tulane, during which I got my MLIS while I was working full-time. It was probably the most formative five years of my life. New Orleans is where I became an archivist, where I met my husband, where I learned a lot about how the history of a city as complicated as New Orleans is both a warning and inspiration for how to navigate a chaotic future. I moved back to Cincinnati in 2013 for professional and family reasons, and I’ve now lived back here almost as long as I lived in New Orleans. As a lifelong Ohioan, Louisiana is the only other place I’ve ever built a life, and I carry a bit of New Orleans in my heart always.
I’ve been back to New Orleans a couple times since moving back to Ohio, but the trip back for this year’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference hit me right in the Feelings Department. The 10-year anniversary of my job offer at Tulane also meant that I’ve been an archivist for a decade. In 2008 I took my first leap into archives in New Orleans, and in 2018 here I am, back in the same city where I got my start, presenting about the impacts of climate change on the profession. I go up for tenure later this year, which comes with all of its own anxieties. Cincinnati is my home – it’s where my family lives, my roots are, where I have a house, and where my husband and I are very deliberately cultivating our communities for the long haul. But I’m so profoundly grateful that even several years later, New Orleans still feels like a very familiar second home.
New Orleans is not an easy place to live in. When I moved down in 2008, I had to evacuate just a couple months later for the first mandatory evacuation after Katrina. I rode out another hurricane a few years later, but my now-husband’s apartment lost power for several nights. The heat was insomnia inducing, to the point where we had to go visit some wealthy family friends with a generator out in the suburbs just so I could sleep for a few hours. When my husband and I had been back in Cincinnati for several months, at one point we turned to each other and said, “We haven’t had to boil our water for several months.” My salary in New Orleans was just a hair above the poverty line, and there was a house down the street from my second apartment in the Lower Garden District where a man had been murdered in a mistaken identity drug dealing ordeal. I jogged past it early on the mornings I would go for a run, and I tried not to look at the front door very hard.
But the thing about New Orleans is that there is no place like it on Earth. I sewed a new costume every year for Mardi Gras. I learned how to cook red beans and rice. I was too poor to drink good beer, so Miller High Life will always taste like a damn good night out. My friends and I made bike maps of the city, organized zines in the info shop, and baked each other deliberately ugly birthday cakes and beautiful homemade king cakes. I doubt I ever went more than a week or two without dancing at some live music. Before I moved in with the man I eventually married, I had four roommates – three of whom were locals. One, the daughter of a shrimping family, helped me find out my shellfish allergy wasn’t as bad as I thought it was and I’ve been safely eating shrimp and crawfish since. One made the best damn gumbo I’ve ever had and then his family guided me through my first Passover Seder. One would bring home fresh soy milk her mother made a few miles away in New Orleans East. I learned a lot about how to be sensitive to an entire city’s collective trauma around being drowned and forgotten. “Y’all” entered my vocabulary and has never left since, and I hope it never will.
It felt so good and so right last week to see old colleagues and friends, dance to brass bands, eat the kind of food that the Midwest can never manage to turn out, and sweat in the ubiquitous sauna heat of the city. This country – this world – is profoundly lucky to have New Orleans. And I feel so fortunate I got to experience it first hand for the time that I did.
(I originally wrote this on Facebook on May 26, 2018, the day my Irish sisters, brothers, and cousins voted to repeal the country’s abortion ban. And now Argentina might be moving in a similar direction. As the US slides into ever more repression of women’s basic human rights, it’s been a joy to witness these victories across the world.)
I’ve been crying on and off with joy and thankfulness since Ireland voted to repeal its abortion ban. I’m so glad to report that it looks like the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo, where my branch of the Tanseys came from, went narrowly for the Yes to repeal, by just a few dozen votes. I wrote a long reflection last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop bawling my eyes out. Here it is:
On the evening of the 2016 federal election, my dad was the one who phoned to tell me the election was called for Trump. I had gone into a total media blackout after finishing up my duties as a poll worker. I guess that after busting my ass for more than 12 hours to do my part for participatory democracy, I’m glad I learned the shittiest global news of 2016 from someone I love rather than from a TV screen.
Today I got to deliver equally dramatic election news to my father, but I’m glad to say it was far more joyful: that Ireland repealed its abortion ban. I had a much more emotional reaction to this than I anticipated – I saw the exit polls saying the vote to repeal was almost certain as I was getting home from work, and I started crying in the middle of the sidewalk before I even walked through the door.
I think, in large part, my emotional reaction is because of my father.
My dad carries a lot of identities, but probably the most consistent one is that of being an Irish-American. He has a picture of Ben Bulben as his laptop wallpaper. He has an old faded map of the counties of Ireland hanging on his wall. He has shelves and shelves of books about Irish and Irish-American history. He constantly rants about the Notre Dame “fighting Irish” mascot and the phrase “paddy wagons”: both are profoundly offensive to Brian Tansey. The only thing he finds more offensive than Irish stereotypes are people like Bill O’Reilly: Irish-Americans who forgot what kind of discrimination Irish immigrants once faced in the US, but who now turn around and spit on today’s immigrants.
My dad is old enough (85) to have briefly experienced the old-school anti-Irish sentiment that once circulated in bourgie WASP circles, and still talks about the time he got called a “mick” when he was attending Columbia University in the 50s. My dad schooled me on Irish-American history starting with coffin ships up through Irish-American city ward machine politics, and it was threaded through with tons of colorful family legends: like how when James Tansey left County Sligo in the 1890s with his buddy for Liverpool’s docks, they were stumped on where to go next. The coin flip decision turned up America – otherwise it was Australia.
And as if you needed any further proof of how seriously my dad takes his Irish-American identity, well, uh, he’s the one who named me “Eira.” Which, at least in my dad’s telling, was a feminine homage to Éire (the Irish word for Ireland). I’ve yet to find any scholars who can verify this as an accurate variation. Oh well, it’s on the birth certificate. And so every day, when I have to spell out my name on the phone or have someone ask me about it’s origins, I’m reminded that a larger part of my genealogy traces to Ireland, and that my Dad sure wanted me to be reminded of this every day until I expire.
My dad and I have travelled to Ireland together, twice. The first time was when I was studying abroad at the University of Sheffield back in 2006, and the second time was when I was living in New Orleans, in 2011. Both times we got a car and drove up to County Sligo where our Irish ancestors came from. On our most recent trip, we visited the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo where Dad’s grandfather came from. We visited with Father Joe, the parish priest, who took us on a tour of the area and pulled out some marriage records from his office desk that mentioned some of our family names. Father Joe even helped us meet and connect to some distant relatives. Dad still talks about the salmon dinner Father Joe served us, I still remember the Guinness pints we drank at the bar where there were pictures of the local darts team with men who had the last name Tansey and the same dark curly hair as mine.
While we were there, it was very clear that the country was moving apart from the church. This was when the Irish leadership and the Dail were told telling the Vatican off for their handling of the child abuse scandals. The stories of how generations of Irish women were systematically abused at the hands of the Catholic laundries were well-known. Ireland was definitely finding its way to an identity that stood apart from Catholicism. It was so affirming to see Ireland resoundingly and democratically pass gay marriage a few years ago. And now this? Y’all. I’m so happy.
Where I live in Ohio, it’s a never-ending horror show of how much politicians want to destroy women’s fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy. I have no doubt that if Pence and Kasich have their way, they would immediately try to create their own 8th Amendment in the United States. Goodness knows they’ve both tried everything up to that point in Indiana and Ohio. I’ve been mulling over what my moral responsibilities will be to my fellow women, and wondering how much we’ll have to relearn the lessons of the Jane Collective. Or more likely, Women on Web, which has helped many Irish women obtain an abortion in the last several years.
Victories for women’s fundamental human rights are so precious and rare these days. Every day I am reminded that I live in a country that profoundly hates women, that does not trust women, and that is led by men who only value women as grabbable pussies or as reproductive chattel.
To see that there is a country in the world today where a majority of voters cast a vote to trust women as opposed to inscribing hatred for them is extremely moving. And tracing some of my own background to Ireland makes me feel a profound connection to all the women whose stories were never told, many of whom suffered terribly, but whose work reverberates across the generations.
Thank you, Ireland, for giving us a bit of light in these dark times. I am so proud, but more importantly, I am inspired.
Back when I was running my mouth on Twitter, I posted this extremely hot take on shabby news coverage of archives. Unlike many of my previous hot takes, I think it’s timeless and I still stand by it 100%. My archivist friends coined it “the Tansey test.”
Since I deleted my Twitter account, I realize there is not a definitive place where folks can go to cite the Tansey test. Before I deleted my account, I downloaded my twitter archive and saved a few screenshots, too. So here you go, y’all.
Each year the Society of American Archivists (SAA) sponsors MayDay on May 1, a day dedicated to disaster preparedness and response. MayDay is intended to be “a time when archivists and other cultural heritage professionals take personal and professional responsibility for doing something simple—something that can be accomplished in a day but that can have a significant impact on an individual’s or a repository’s ability to respond.”
On MayDay, archivists are encouraged to update and review emergency response plans for archives (for example, what’s the plan if you walk into the stacks and find mildew everywhere?) or inventorying disaster response supply boxes (which would include various things to help with a water leak), and a number of other ideas.
Of course Mayday is a distress signal that traces its lineage as a reference to the French m’aidez or m’aider ‘help me!’, and it is this reference that SAA is primarily alluding to. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “Mayday” to the 1920s:
For those of us who identify as comrades, May Day (without the space) on May 1 has long had a very particular meaning. May Day is also known as International Workers Day, and traces its origins to an important event in labor history, the Haymarket Tragedy, which took place only 2 miles from the current headquarters of the Society of American Archivists.
On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25 and May 4, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours’ work for ten hours’ pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.
Since Haymarket, May Day has become an international day of remembrance to honor the labor movement’s sacrifices on behalf of workers. It was widely observed within the United States until the Red Scares.
Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or “May Day,” as an international workers’ holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments. American observance was strongest in the decade before World War I. During the Cold War, many Americans saw May Day as a Communist holiday, and President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as “Loyalty Day” in 1955. Interest in Haymarket revived somewhat in the 1980s.
So how come on MayDay (the SAA version), archivists rarely, if ever, also acknowledge the other May Day (the one that’s been around for over a century)?
A Garland for May Day 1895, by Walter Crane. Crane was an English artist who was sympathetic to the Haymarket defendants. Image via the University of Michigan Labadie Collection.
My friend and archivist colleague Steve Ammidown made the image at the top of this post, and it basically says it all. To effectively respond to archival disasters, archives have to have adequate staffing of professional archivists. A disaster plan is only as good as the people and resources available to put it into action. As someone who has been writing a lot about both labor and climate change issues within our profession, I completely agree with Steve’s assessment that disaster preparation and emergency response cannot be separated from the larger labor and staffing issues that haunt our repositories.
So by all means, archivists – do your part for MayDay. But until we deal with the long-term labor issues articulated by workers each May Day since the late 1800s, anything else is a band-aid on top of a gaping wound.
(Thanks to Steve for letting me use this image and inspiring this post!)
Several months ago, I learned about John Hersey’s epic essay, “Hiroshima.” Hersey, a reporter in Japan between 1945-1946, interviewed several survivors of the atomic bombing. His magnificent essay appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker, and was the focus of the entire issue. In typical New Yorker practice, the cheerful cover (illustrated by Charles E. Martin), gives no hint to what is in the following pages. Published just over a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey’s essay bore witness to the instantaneous deaths of more than 100,000 men, women and children, and the nightmarish hell the survivors navigated in the hours and weeks after the bombing.
I’m not sure when I learned about Hersey’s essay, but as soon as I did, I filed it away for when I knew I would have a couple uninterrupted hours to read it (yes, it takes that long; the essay is also a 160 page short book that’s been in print for decades). You can read it on the New Yorker website.
On a recent bus ride from Cincinnati to Chicago, I finally got around to reading it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more moving account of anything in my life, from the small graces most of us possess, to the way we harden our hearts and close our ears and eyes to others suffering more than us, to the way we traverse all the emotions in between in about five minutes. And yet, this is not any ordinary backdrop: it is a story in which a woman’s skin comes off her hand like a glove, in which men’s eyes have melted out of their sockets, in which a woman carries her dead baby for four days hoping her missing husband will be able to see them before the cremation. It is a story that is anything but universal, because less than 200,000 people are still living today who have ever witnessed being so close to the heat of the sun. Every day we run the risk that an accident could go terribly wrong, or men could become terribly vindictive. The tally of 200,000 witnesses could grow by several zeroes in an instant.
But today, only 0.00002% of the world’s population can tell you what it was like to live through cruelest human experiment ever conducted by science’s most brilliant minds.
A few days after I read “Hiroshima,” news broke that John Bolton is going to be the new national security advisor. The Bush administration was bad enough, but bringing back the greatest villains from those terrible eight years is just too much. Bolton is a batshit madman who is the living embodiment of “some men just want to watch the world burn.” And a week later, we were bombing Syria because Trump felt like he had to back up his bombastic tweets with military action (and I felt more secure than ever that I made the right decision to leave Twitter, given its role as a platform for war-mongering).
Last year, I felt that my rights were hanging on by the thinnest of threads. I still feel that way, but I’ve also been mentally preparing myself for what I’ll do if and when the worst happens with the judiciary destroying everything I hold dear. But lately, at annual events like family holidays or professional conferences, I have a fleeting thought that whispers around the edges. I wonder if something so unspeakably bad will happen, plunging our country into some kind of civil war, that it would prevent us from gathering together again next year.
Going back and reading what I wrote last year, it’s clear I’m struggling to define and come to terms with ideas of citizenship and patriotism. They are concepts often profoundly opposed to one another. Although citizenship is far too often constructed as state-sanctioned legal residence, I’ve begun to appreciate that citizenship encompasses a much more holistic set of experiences than patriotism. One can be a citizen of a state, a city, their neighborhood, their nation, or the planet Earth. Citizenship implies personhood and identity (often in multiple instances), but patriotism implies a certain set of practices oriented around principles of defense. Citizenship is a concept that, in my mind, transcends boundaries and can exist within a borderless world. But patriotism is inherently bound up in the idea of the nation-state (you wouldn’t say your neighbor who picks up the litter in your neighborhood is a good patriot, but you would likely say they are a good citizen). And the geographically-bounded notion of patriotism and the nation-state is where patriotism begins to break down for me.
Historian Christian Appy has said “patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.” After I read Hersey’s essay, I read a little bit about how it was received at the time. Apparently many people read it and wanted to know how much the victims of the bombings blamed Americans, and many were relieved to learn that many of the victims did not blame Americans. I guess discourse about collective trauma, responsibility, truth and reconciliation have come a long way since then, but it’s still a telling clue to how guilt is the essential magnetic force that orients our moral compasses.
When you remove a sense of guilt, you remove an obligation to apologize. Guilt and patriotism do not easily coexist. So instead we tell ourselves that the ends justify the means, that incinerating hundreds of thousands of people who don’t look like us is always a justifiable cost to spare American lives. That having the misfortune to be born in the wrong place in the wrong time in history on the wrong side of America means that you’ll never get an apology when our country fucks up. Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place decades ago, but similar body counts from the insistence on protecting American lives at any cost are still with us.
We are told by our parents at a young age to say we’re sorry when we hurt someone, but when we acquire the means to the most anodyne deadly weapon most of us have – a car – the advice changes. Insurance companies say, “Do not discuss whose fault it was (even saying “I’m sorry” may be considered an admission).” Lawyers and insurance companies advise us that if we screw up, if we hurt someone, if we hit a car, that we should not apologize. Because to apologize would be to admit guilt. And admitting something can be used against you.
It’s no wonder that saying sorry does not come easily to us, and that we cloak our refusal to say we’re sorry under a thicket of legal excuses and justification. It’s not just the US government. It’s our entire culture.
Comments Off on Citizenship for our sanity and safety, Part 2
