I’ve never known a world without constant warnings that humankind is destroying the planet. Because I am the most literal millennial, a member of a class that graduated high school in 2000, we had lots of hopeful, turn-of-the-century programming during my elementary years. We performed a play about environmental degradation in which we twirled umbrellas to a song about acid rain. "We’re killing the ohhh-oh-zone," we sang. We also sang songs about being "the smoke-free class of 2000"—a reference to cigarettes and not million-acre wildfires. My first CD player was a prize for winning an Earth Day poster contest sponsored by the local credit union. "Two triple zero, everyone’s a hero!" we sang. "Or a she-ro!"

Staring out of my grimy windows at the thick yellow air in Southern California last fall, I could finally locate myself in the songs about the ozone. I did not, however, feel like much of a she-ro. I should have seen this coming.

There are many injustices and threats I've had the privilege of learning about from a safe distance, as an adult. When I was a kid, we did not put on school plays about the health outcomes of systemic inequality. We did not learn songs critiquing police unions. But climate change? I have always known about that. We sang, "It’s up to us to save the planet." I found the sheet music for the musical, called Assignment: Earth, online. The songs were written by a guy named Roger Emerson who is now in his 70s and living near Mount Shasta, a part of California that, in 2020, was engulfed in one of the largest wildfires ever recorded. He told me that the musical was performed in almost every elementary school in America in the 1990s. The lyrics are all about how, by turning off the tap while we brush our teeth and recycling #2 plastics, kids can save the planet.

I suppose it’s overwhelming to tell children that meaningful change is only possible if people are willing to make governments mad, and governments are willing to make corporations mad, and corporations are willing to make shareholders mad. Better to instruct us how to create for ourselves the illusion that we are doing something. After all, the threatened shower of acid rain seemed a long, long way off. And isn't it better to give kids something productive to do in the meantime rather than just depress them with the scope of it all?

This is the lesson I really learned from the musical: How to create for myself the illusion that I am doing something about a giant, entrenched problem whose consequences I have yet to personally feel.

We have known for a long time that the climate is changing, that storms and temperatures and fires are becoming more intense. We knew before the pandemic that there is no support for people raising children in this country—they’re on their own. That people don’t have enough to eat. That where you live often determines how you die. We knew, long before Darnella Frazier captured George Floyd's murder on camera, that police pose a mortal threat to Black people, and that even the companies that say the right things are often miserable places to work for people who aren’t white. We knew.

It's one thing to know a fact through an educational musical or a book or the bullet points on an instagram slideshow. It's quite another to know it from experience. This is the gap between belting out the lines in the Assignment: Earth musical and being trapped in my house by wildfire smoke. The gap between a guilty, guilty, guilty verdict and actual safety and freedom for Black Americans. The gap between a bouquet of Mother's Day flowers and the sound of thousands of parents screaming in the bathroom. There are prominent displays of shared understanding, and then there's the quiet, daily reality that betrays the truth: The gap between knowing something and living it.

"It’s the kind of macabre but ultimately commonplace horror that streaks through this country so fast and with such frequency that at a distance, they almost resemble natural phenomena but when viewed up close, the awfulness of it burns your eyes right out of your fucking head." This verdict is not justice, it's self-preservation. How to name your Black son in a racist country. How the headlines align with police narratives. On asking yourself, over and over, "Was that racism?" The unbearable whiteness of ballet. Deb Haaland has formed a new federal unit that focuses on missing and murdered indigenous women. What happened to the 14-year-old girl in the Kent State photo. Technologist Tracy Chou on how to fix online harassment. When techies took over Tahoe. How Iowa's largest hog producer turned farming into a numbers game. It's a rough time to be an Arkansan. Watching TV moms through the lens of the pandemic. A lesson in compassion from a lesbian gym teacher. How social media decoupled fame and fortune. The increasingly short life cycle of a meme. Interviews with actor Catherine O'Hara, director Barry Jenkins, author and activist Naomi Klein, and Rep. Katie Porter. The restaurant before and after Covid. I recognize this description: Languishing.

Deep thanks to my paying members, who make this whole newsletter possible! They also generously provide the pie chart to all subscribers. If you'd like to join them in keeping this operation afloat, become a paying member for just $15/year. 

---

A great interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom.  Sharon Van Etten's epic Ten.

"What can we learn about rebellion by looking up at starlight?"

Source: Timelapse from Resilience.

---

LeVar Burton as the next Jeopardy! host. (Yes, this is an official endorsement.)

I also endorse offering a heartfelt thank-you, and maybe some ongoing, concrete support, to the people who offer you maternal guidance and wisdom—whether or not they wear the label "mother." Here in the U.S., this Sunday is the day we pause to offer flowers and pancakes to the women who do a still-shockingly disproportionate amount of thankless work in this country, bearing the weight of the domestic mental load day in and day out. The woman who invented Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, wanted it to be "a day of sentiment, not profit." She spent the latter half of her life trying to undo what had become a merely commercial holiday. This year, I plan to celebrate Jarvis-style.