It’s a bit of a mess up there. But here are some things I’ve thought about or read about since
getting up. Early.

1. People in ICE uniforms will be wearing gloves that can deliver painful debilitating shocks to
people – whenever and wherever they want with no oversight, accountability or recourse. Some
of these people will feel delight in their power to inflict pain just as they now find satisfaction in
spreading terror amongst their neighbors and community members. These people in uniforms
accepted their contracts, signed up to be bounty hunters , delivering people to camps so
someone else can collect a fee. And many in uniform are grabbing people who look just like
them. Blaming “the administration” is so convenient. Pay attention to the fact that your friends,
neighbors and family members are doing this to your friends, family and neighbors and then
you will have a true grasp of this ugliness we all own.

2. There’s an HISD Wheatley High School teacher, Darius Williams, going viral after expressing
his heartbreak over the fact that his perfectly capable students cannot read or write. And he is
being mocked for caring to the point of crying.

3. The world of work is so disrupted that no one knows what a “job” is any more and those with
one don’t want to do them. Somehow we taught people “do not care about work or your job or
your performance. Do not invest.”

So many now believe caring about your job is a chump’s game. They’re not just “phoning it in”
they’re basically saying “you figure out what I want to do and maybe I’ll do it if there’s nothing
else more pressing or interesting in my life.” Institutions are failing because no one wants to do
the work of making them work. This isn’t going to turn out well.

4. We have changed so much in the past decade and with such speed and unpredictability we
no longer can say for sure what mental health is – but there doesn’t seem to be much of it.
When we think of turning to one another we realize everyone we know is a bit underwater. So
now we have AI friends, counselors, mentors, confidants. As if that is SAFER. Dear god.

5. A story about “identities” which has led me back to a core and unpopular opinion of mine.
We will not get what we want and need from one another by more category creation and
better labeling. Some of us are now like walking cereal boxes – long lists of identity/ ingredients.
All these identities and labels have not moved us closer to one another. Perhaps they serve a purpose as we try to understand ourselves. But the closeness, community and love we long for is not built out of better labeling. We aren’t nourished by the labels on the cereal box.
Ingredients aren’t breakfast.

I guess I wonder how we feed our souls.

I just finished reading “A Marriage at Sea” a story of a shipwreck and a long period of lostness.
A couple adrift and starving. Of course they’re found otherwise there’d be no one to write the
story. So the dramatic tension is all about why we struggle so hard to stay alive. And what kind
of perspective keeps us going, striving. I was supposed to like the book but I didn’t really.
Except for a couple of lines. The real question in the book is “how hard would you work to stay
alive?” And “for what?” At one point the author suggests beauty – beauty wherever is enough.

For me it’s community. Being joined with others in a common endeavor. Life at its best. I still
have that. Have always had it. And my ability to create it, foster it, be in it cannot be taken
away. If necessary I could just live off the memories.

Wrote this for me.

Love Angela.