It’s really not my intention to use my new Substack as a place just to rail and whine about the rise of fundamentalist Christianism in American politics, but the midterms are just a few days away and it’s hard to focus on the other things I’d like to write about. Today I find myself fascinated by amateur theologian Lauren Boebert’s joke about Jesus not having enough AR-15s to keep the Romans from killing him. As a devout Christian, she knows that the whole point of the crucifixion was for Jesus to
I'm finding it hard to read any news, certainly haven't been able to watch or listen to much news for several years. Must not allow despair to poison the day. I don't fully agree with Jia Tolentino in "Trick Mirror" but she does a good job of describing the challenge of the day:
"One of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era reveals itself: to get through it want any psychological stability--to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss--a person's best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself. As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional--to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck."
I haven't watched tv news in many years, and that helps. I've got a good internet blocker that helps me limit the amount of doomscrolling that I do, but it's tough. Internet immediacy has trained us to believe that something really important might be happening out in the world right now, so we'd better check! I agree that Tolentino's description of our fraught moment is pretty good, but I disagree strongly that our only options are to be destroyed or morally compromised. There are plenty of opportunities in each day to engage with the world and the people in it in positive ways.
I'm finding it hard to read any news, certainly haven't been able to watch or listen to much news for several years. Must not allow despair to poison the day. I don't fully agree with Jia Tolentino in "Trick Mirror" but she does a good job of describing the challenge of the day:
"One of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era reveals itself: to get through it want any psychological stability--to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss--a person's best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself. As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional--to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck."
I haven't watched tv news in many years, and that helps. I've got a good internet blocker that helps me limit the amount of doomscrolling that I do, but it's tough. Internet immediacy has trained us to believe that something really important might be happening out in the world right now, so we'd better check! I agree that Tolentino's description of our fraught moment is pretty good, but I disagree strongly that our only options are to be destroyed or morally compromised. There are plenty of opportunities in each day to engage with the world and the people in it in positive ways.