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 …
Waiving patent rights calls for an awesome PR campaign
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"
Safety, love, and respect are not pies to be apportioned
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"
Magpie words
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. …
We can’t afford the usual faux bipartisan “negotiations” on climate change
Dear President Biden, It turns out that when I’m full-on juggling too many things at work and still trying to cook reasonably good meals, take reasonably long walks, and sleep reasonably healthy stretches, optional letter writing takes a backseat. And so it has lately. In lieu of a real letter, here is a haiku in …
Continue reading "We can’t afford the usual faux bipartisan “negotiations” on climate change"
Tons of opportunities for harm reduction
Dear President Biden, A fairly quick perusal of various articles in the WP this morning doesn’t just suggest, it definitively demonstrates that there are vast urgent opportunities to apply the harm reduction lens to our collective and individual choices. These opportunities run the gamut from police outside of Minneapolis having shot and killed 20 year-old …
“The future is harm reduction”
Dear President Biden, One aspect of the endless construction on the street in front of our house is that there are lots of big orange-on-one-side-silvery-on-the-other-side signs for directing traffic, including some that aren’t in use and are just leaning up against the chain link fence just outside the park across the street. The other morning …
Deep pockets and shallow ethics
Dear President Biden, Most everything coming out of your White House has been much more palatable than anything that ever came out of DLT’s White House. This includes your recent Executive Order targeting ghost guns and stabilizing braces for pistols, and putting more money towards community-based violence prevention programs. At least it looks like you’re …
A thriving wage for everyone
Dear President Biden, So the issue that keeps poking through and grabbing my attention when I have a quiet moment is the press conference you all had on Tuesday about equal pay for women. I read several articles about it and came away feeling a mix of emotions – hopeful, grateful, disappointed, frustrated. The genesis …
Reality nuggets
Dear President Biden, Lately I’ve been hanging out at work (via Zoom-like platforms) with way more young people than old people. I’m humbled and grateful to say that they’ve become my teachers. So many of them are living out loud and questioning what is and why is it is that what is is the way …
The Biden Letters 