Loving kindness meditation for a new era
Dear President Biden, How are you this evening? By now you’re probably trying to wind down for the night since it’s almost 10pm Eastern. I’m guessing it’s going to be kind of hard for you to settle and maybe even harder for you to sleep tonight after meeting with George Floyd’s family this afternoon, especially …
Continue reading "Remembering Darnella, Joe, and George’s moms"
Dear President Biden, If you are keeping up with what’s going on in the world, you probably did check out the clip of The Linda Lindas’ performance of Racist, Sexist Boy that I told you about yesterday since it was splashed all over the place, from NPR to the Washington Post. If you did, then …
Dear President Biden, At the end of his article about where things stand on the For the People Act (HR1/S1), Mike DeBonis quotes Senator Richard Durbin (Il) as saying: “I say a prayer every morning and evening for Joe Manchin.” Indeed. Joe M. may just become the most difficult person in my loving-kindness meditation not …
Dear President Biden, It’s a small problem, but it’s one that I don’t think is unique to me (though how it manifests for me might be a tad unusual), which is the problem of not knowing exactly how to efficiently call out the “bad guys” anymore. It comes up every morning when I’m reciting the …
Dear President Biden, This is a short little tale about a chance encounter with a boy with green hair, the difference between “good luck” and “have fun” and how much I still have to learn before I can reliably be a true advocate for the beloved community. Saturday morning Laura and I were circling back …
Dear President Biden, I’m so happy to see that you and your administration have come around to the humanitarian and highly practical decision to waive the patent rights on the coronavirus vaccines – well done! I know there’s a lot more wrangling, hashing out, and parsing of language that needs to happen before the thing …
Continue reading "Waiving patent rights calls for an awesome PR campaign"
Dear President Biden, I saw in the Washington Examiner that Friday morning you said the following on NBC’s Today show: “I don’t think America is racist, but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow — and before that, slavery — have had a cost.” What a shitty dance you all are doing. …
Continue reading "Biden needs to stop mollycoddling Whites and gaslighting Blacks"
Dear President Biden, I’m pretty sure it was Saturday, but it could have been Friday, and I was sitting in our living room looking out the window when the 73 bus passed by heading south on the arterial out front. This is not a remarkable thing in and of itself – buses go up and …
Continue reading "Safety, love, and respect are not pies to be apportioned"
Dear President Biden, I don’t think I’ve confessed to you before that I’m a magpie – I collect things, ideas, words, stuff that catches my eye, or my heart. Some of the physical bits are sitting on the kitchen windowsill or the mantel, but mostly the stuff gets incorporated into these letters or my art. …
Dear President Biden, I’m rather in a funk today. It’s not a big deal at all – it’s just what happens when I need to buckle down and start drafting a paper that doesn’t feel straightforward to frame. I spent much of the day picking through Google Scholar trying to get a better handle on …
Continue reading "Strides aren’t enough; we need to hold out for leaps"
The Biden Letters 