Dear President Biden, What a frothy, weird, unsavory, hopeful jumble the headlines are this morning. We’ve got everything from the half dozen stories about the numerous ground-shifting positives of the American Rescue Plan to lamentations about the past year since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic to stories about the GOP and their mouthpieces grasping …
Gratitude haiku III (with a serious catch)
Dear President Biden, There’s space in my headfor quiet. I can hear ducksquack as they fly North. Thank you for this. There’s still plenty to do, including some missteps to call out and some strongly preferred directions to encourage, but I’m grateful for the longish stretches of quiet in my head. I hadn’t realized how …
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The revolutionary gift of seeing and naming
Dear President Biden, I told you the other week about my now favorite podcast Hear to Slay by Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Well, this past week R&T talked with a young Black activist named Amber J. Phillips and at the end of the conversation when they asked her how they and their listeners …
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We need a Cabinet-level Office of Equity
Dear President Biden, I’m a few days late getting started, but this morning I decided that the thing to give up for Lent is reading any news articles or opinions that are clearly about DJT. It’s time to kick that habit. After so many years of digging into whatever nasty thing he was up to …
Revolutionary ego-tripping
Dear President Biden, Her sermon isn’t posted yet, but it probably will be in a couple of days and you could listen to it here, if you’d like. The Dr. Reverend Kelle Brown of Seattle’s Plymouth United Church of Christ was on fire yesterday. Her sermon “The Necessity of Ego-tripping” riffed off of Nikki Giovanni’s …
Equity is critically important, and it’s very, very messy
Dear President Biden, Was it really a coincidence that you wore your very cute blue dog socks to the meeting with the 10 Republican Senators about the COVID relief bill? That’s apparently what your staff told the WP. I kind of think, though, that you were doing a little low-key Madeline Albright move there. You …
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Equality and equity and EO #13985
Dear President Biden, We just watched a short clip that Julius Goat posted on Twitter of you talking about the stimulus package and your desire to get ‘er done even without the Republicans. He tagged it with something like “I know what I hate and I don’t hate this,” which, from JG, is high praise …
Unpacking “ordinary voters”
Dear President Biden, Happy February! We made it out of January! This shouldn’t be any big shakes but after the attempted self-coup earlier in the month I think a lot of us were worried there’d be significant fallout surrounding your inauguration. I know we’re still crashing around in the middle of a very dark forest …
North Star vs. Death Star
Dear President Biden, It makes sense to me that you’re staying in your lane and not interfering or trying to influence (at least not overtly) either the DOJ or Congress when it comes to which of the various malicious actors to hold accountable for what aspect(s) of the January 6th attempted self-coup. After the norm-shattering …
The Biden Letters 