happy new year
I have no idea who reads this newsletter, except for at least two people and only because they sometimes text me about it. This newsletter is practice, in some ways, for other writing I hope to do, am currently doing, or realize I don't need to finish. It's an outlet for my post-MFA malaise of ideas. Or, rather - and God save my soul for furthering our culture's dependence on J.K. Rowling as an explanatory device - it's something like my public Pensieve, only for opinions instead of memories. I need them out of me, and also I'm conditioned by social media and my own vanity to share. I journal, but there's something alive when it comes to communicated writing. For me, at least.
What I'm also doing, I hope, is challenging myself not to curl into a useless ball of sweats and cheese-breath in the face of life's one-two punch of numbing mystery and bovine infotainment. We receive so much of our culture I think most of us forget how such reception shapes us when we try to round out our own thoughts into some kind of positive (meaning active) outlook. I've been telling a lot of people lately I no longer believe in casual debate. Don't care how we treat immigrants? About the unborn? That climate change is upon us? I mean, read more. Be discerning (I tell myself), not simply opinionated.
But calls for discernment become a grade-school exercise at some point, and can therefore seem childish. "Did you know you have biases that only self-reflection and accountability might counteract?" Uh, yes. AND YET, I link to a pastor's wife below who takes comfort in Ephesians 2:10. I'm not sure how that will land on some friends. Probably it won't land at all; she'll be ignored. She needs comfort, though, because she's a climate scientist and one of the authors of the Fourth National Climate Assessment. She has an amazing Twitter thread that point-by-point refutes lies propagated by Rick Santorum and Sarah Saunders and others about the report's bias. Does "lies" seem strong? I don't know what else to call someone's willful misrepresentation. She also has a series on PBS (short videos, many posted to YouTube) that explores Global Warming as Global Weirding.
Most of those facts are likely to be received emotionally, to land in the cushion of our confirmation biases, our fears, our anger, our hope. "Pastor" and "climate change" cannot be heard neutrally. People are emotional and exhausted and it hurts (however little) to be wrong, to be drawn into contest. "Yet again my value is being called into question!" Discernment is predicated on a willingness to be wrong, and yet I don't want to be wrong or make sacrifices or admit my own stupidity as a default emotional state. The only antidote is humility. I'm an amoeba: simple, contained, moving after truth but with pseudopods. The idea that I'm writing this newsletter to reinforce humility is preposterous, of course, the medium doesn't fit the intention. But that is the hope, I think.
You know, to broadcast my humility.
Oh, well. Happy 2019 (somehow, some way) to you and yours!
BONUS: A conversation between two friends about how 2018 was in terms of their reading.