Some Good News

Actually, a ton of it

There’s SO much good being done, in the US and across the globe, all the frigging time. The obsessive, exhausting focus of social media – i.e., our focus – on that guy and his administration is a self-imposed poverty, a habit or addiction that we should take pains to break. Because there are SO many people doing SUCH good stuff.

Just today I saw

Rutger Bregman’s video on an unknown World War 2 hero which shows us the secret to real resistance;

a video about how Brad Lancaster broke the law in Tucson, resulting in the city following his example and beginning to tame its heat island effect;

a video of a young girl reciting Frederick Douglass’s What to the Slave is the 4th of July, from memory, on his front stoop;

an article about Christopher Armitage trying to get the DC bar to investigate John Roberts;

a piece about young new DSA candidates prevailing in primaries, sometimes following AOC’s footsteps and ousting longtime incumbents;

the book in which Kermit Roosevelt discusses the racist threads running through the Declaration and the Constitution;

wonderful, affecting essays in Jesmyn Ward’s new book;

that the Ponca tribe of Oklahoma is the first US tribe to endorse the Fossil Fuel Treaty on transitioning away from fossil fuels;

and I ate at a local restaurant that has been giving out free casseroles to the hungry in Dubuque, Iowa for the last 6+ years, and teaches locals how to grow their own food, in the practice of what the owner calls Radical Generosity.

Good work is EVERYwhere, just waiting to be watered by our attention. If you read Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?, you’ll read about people in dozens of fields, all working on climate change. Even His Oleaginousness has accidentally given impetus to the transition away from fossil fuels by his murderous rampage in Iran. Heckuva job, Donald!

Driverless WayMos going round and round and round. Source.

The main danger of social media, as I see it, is in luring good-hearted people who truly care about our neighbors and planet into a kind of cul-de-sac, like those WayMos circling in a kind of vehicular existential dilemma. Or like religious folks calling themselves “believers”, as if having right opinions about doctrines or policy is all there is to it. Or Americans calling ourselves “consumers,” as if we had internalized the perspective of the billionaires and corporations (which are persons in this country, unlike animals, rivers, and other actually living things and systems) which see us as existing only to serve economic functions. Social media threatens to make us amplifiers of what we hate, rather than forces for doing good. That’s one reason I left BlueSky a week or so ago.

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks. – Winston Churchill

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – wrong with tracking the crimes of this administration, especially as neither our government nor our media are doing a good job of it. Someone needs to keep track of the tens of thousands of people denied due process and deported. Someone needs to track the deaths for which Elon Musk and DOGE are responsible due to taking a chainsaw, gleefully, to the life-saving work of USAID. Someone in addition to Julie K. Brown needs to keep tabs on the pedophiles of the Epstein files – not ONE of whom has been prosecuted, all of whom are walking around as if they are pillars of their communities. And someone needs to figure out how to utterly destroy the economic system that makes billionaires at the same time it makes people indebted for life.

But, to turn to Jack Gilbert once again,

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

So I’ve decided that I’m going to celebrate July 4. Because you are doing marvelous, meaningful things against all odds, and my delight is in the opportunity to support that work in whatever ways I can, and point the way to you so others can help get ‘er done. Because, as George said,

This is the true joy of life: being used up for a purpose recognized by you as a mighty one. – George Bernard Shaw

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