Resist. Rest. Repeat.

And cartoons and photos to brighten the message.

At Mission San Luis Rey

Hello Friends,

I helped a friend move yesterday and afterward, instead of finishing up here, I just sort of collapsed. I’m late, but it’s still Sunday, so here we go. No recording (late, late!), but I’m including lots of photos because they might bring you a smile. They’ll also make this post too long for email, so click the title to see it all.

I’m interested in what you are doing to keep your sea legs strong after nine years in the storm. How do you keep from being thrown overboard?

The Root of All Evil

This week was so bad, thematically the same as last week: the love of money is the root of all evil.

Disney and mergers. We have all read about this. But

Heather Cox Richardson

included a bit of back story I didn’t know:

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.

Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

Kimmel is off the air but Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, who recently called for killing homeless Americans by “involuntary lethal injection,” is still employed.

Maybe This Will Help

• If you missed Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on September 18, you need to watch it. Pure gold. On the same day, Stephen Colbert was damned good, too.

• I receive a daily quote newsletter from Sojourners because I like their choices. Here are a few recent deliveries I’ve been thinking about:

Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?
- Galatians 4:16

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.
- Maria Ressa, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future” (2022)

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. - Proverbs 3:27

I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated. - Toni Morrison

Be subversive. Embrace radical love that is outside the confines of tradition. Be suspicious of everything they taught you. Carry a research notebook. Be curious. Resist. Rest.- Tricia Hersey, “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” (2022)

Be a Cactus is free, but if you’d like to support me, please buy my latest novel, Keep Sweet, about escape from a patriarchal cult. I’ll be grateful, and you’ll have a great read! Available from the Publisher (Inlandia), Amazon,and Bookshop.org. I handmade many beautiful fabric bookmarks. If you order the book from the Publisher (Inlandia), you will receive one as a thank you!

The Worry Overview: Speaking to the Moment

I was already thinking about this since my immediate family leans into caretaking jobs (read: poorly paid), so a piece by Paul Krugman this week really spoke to me:

If jobs that are coded ‘female’ were to pay better—think health care, child care, education, etc.— they would become male jobs, too, and we could position ourselves in calm instead of rage.

Exploiting Male Rage

Men’s problems are real. MAGA’s solutions are fake

Charlie Kirk’s audience consisted to a large extent of resentful young white men who felt that modern society wasn’t delivering the status that they deserved. …

Clearly, something has gone wrong for prime working-age American men. And the demoralization caused by the decline in economic opportunity fuels political radicalization. …

[O]utside relatively gender-neutral white-collar occupations, the economy as a whole has been shifting away from male-coded jobs toward female-coded jobs. …

While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.

Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers. Yet there’s no question that the MAGA-sphere brilliantly exploited the American male’s sense of economic and social loss. …

What would a real solution to men’s economic problems look like? It wouldn’t involve trying to recreate an imaginary past when men had manly jobs and women knew their place.

What we can do is help men to take the jobs the 21st-century economy actually creates. Richard Reeves calls them HEAL occupations — health, education, administration and literacy. Many of these occupations are female-coded and have become more so over time, partly because they’re underpaid. But they don’t have to be. We can and should have many more male schoolteachers. There is no reason more men shouldn’t be providing the kind of care we traditionally associate with female nurses. And we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing the wages HEAL occupations pay, through a combination of increased funding, educational outreach and unionization.

We can also make it easier for men to acquire the skills needed for these jobs with policies like free community college and apprenticeship programs.

I’m worried about the ways our representatives are resisting. I thought this was an interesting conversation:

Our Entire Democracy May Be Riding on Democrats. That’s Terrifying. Conversation from the NYT (gift link)

[I]t does seem that our entire democracy may be riding on whether Democrats can find the right leader before November 2026, the right message and the right succinct set of policy priorities, not to mention the right blue states to gerrymander. A modest to-do list! On which of those tasks do you see them making the most — or any — progress?

I’m worried about thoughtful voices losing their platform:

NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowship Program Canceled from Publishers Weekly

The annual program had, to date, offered grants of up to $50,000 in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to published writers … .

The email … said the NEA has “withdrawn” the “Creative Writing category” due to the agency “updating its grant making policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the Administration.” As a result, per the email, the NEA is “cancelling existing funding opportunities that fall outside these priorities.” …

The move marks the Trump administration’s latest round of cuts to the NEA. In May $1.2 million in grants awarded to 51 independent publishers and literary organizations were canceled, also under the guise of new grant making policies prioritizing projects that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence,” “foster AI competency,” and “make America healthy again,” among other stated priorities. The National Endowment for the Humanities similarly terminated 1,400 research grants to scholars and authors in April; last month, the Authors Guild won its class action lawsuit against the NEH and DOGE, with a judge granting a stay on the cancelation of the grants.

Trump has proposed eliminating the NEA, which constitutes about .003% of the federal budget, in fiscal year 2026.

I’m worried that we aren’t putting enough energy into kids’ analytical skills:

Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low From the NYTimes (gift link)

High school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 on a national test, a loss probably related to increases in screen time and the pandemic. Their math scores fell as well.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam, showed that about a third of the 12th-graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills.

IT WAS A SIGN THAT, AMONG OTHER SKILLS, THEY MAY NOT BE ABLE TO DETERMINE THE PURPOSE OF A POLITICAL SPEECH. [emphasis mine] In math, nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may not have mastered skills like using percentages to solve real-world problems.

The test scores are the first of their kind to be released since the Covid-19 pandemic upended education. They are yet another sign that adolescents are struggling in the wake of the virus, when schools were closed for months or more. They also arrive at a time when Americans overall are abandoning printed text for screen time and video-dominated social media, which experts have linked to declining academics.

Resist

Only recently, have I come to think of empathy as resistance.

I donated blood on Friday and they had a “Peanuts”-themed little thank you giveaway. I received a drop of Woodstocks!

Donate blood

In the four months of rashes, bruises and hematomas, I didn’t donate blood because I was worried that it might be somehow tainted. I was chatting with my doctor about how the Red Cross contacts me almost daily either by text, phone message, or email because I am one of the small number of people whose blood can be given in newborn emergencies. This is because I’ve never had Cytomegalovirus (CMV), a flu-like virus that most adults are exposed to at some point in their lives without knowing it. (They think they have the flu.)

CMV is generally harmless to adults, but can be fatal to babies. For this reason, babies needing transfusions as part of their medical care should only receive blood from donors who have not been exposed to CMV.

My doctor said my blood labs were coming up normal, I was completing my medication doses and I should donate! I don’t know if these weird issues will return. I felt I was in a brief window of good health and decided to get done what I can while I can.

Pay attention to local censorship

Yes, the Jimmy Kimmel thing is huge. But don’t forget to pay attention to your local public and school libraries. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, censoring books is largely about censoring empathy.

Political postcard writing

Mostly I don’t talk about this because I have a lifelong sense of ‘my relatives think I’m nuts!’ Not my immediate family (husband, kids), but others with whom I disagree (and love dearly). I’m sure this comes from being a younger member of my generation of the family—older siblings, older cousins. Lots and lots of loved ones whom I looked up to as a child (they were so cool, right?). I have no doubt that there isn’t a single person in my family of origin who is older than I am and ever, ever, thinks, “Gee, what will Vic’s response to what I say be?’ But, having grown up as one of the younger kids, I think about their responses to me all the time.

I realized with the advent of Trump that simply voting wasn’t enough, so I’ve been writing, donating money, and protesting for nine years. This current campaign is an odd one—I would never have imagined it, but then I would never have imagined other states working to make me invisible. Yet here we are. Unlike Texas, California has to vote on whether to change its districting—in the short term, only! I remember long ago when I learned that, compared to citizens in smaller, less populous states, I was not equally represented in the House of Representatives. I’d thought it equalized the issue of big states and the senate. It’s weird, knowing your vote is less than.

Rest

You may not be as hayseed as I am, but in case you haven’t seen passion fruit, here it is, inside and out.

Baking a quince cake, trying passion fruit

We have a dwarf quince in the yard, a tree that was here when we moved in. I didn’t know what it was, the fruit so weird and never seeming to get ripe—woody, pulpy, hard. I decided to use it. Now that was a thing. It was almost impossible to peel and slice—I got so sweaty, I had to take a shower before I could continue with the next step, which was to boil the slices of quince in water, sugar and cinnamon for an hour and a half!

What did I finally land with? A tasty syrup and a pretty cake. But not an ultra-tasty cake, which, considering the ridiculous preparation, had to be the result if I were ever to make it again. So—no recipe link. Not worth it. Sometimes that happens. Now, I want to get rid of the tree. This is Southern California, persistently in drought. Trees need to earn their water—be beautiful (no), be shady (no), give fruit (no). I want to plant a plum. Not only would the same sort of cake be MUCH better with plums, but plums are delicious right off the tree. Water earned.

My son’s girlfriend brought us some passion fruit from her parents’ yard. I’d only ever had passion fruit jelly (in Hawaii), and had never seen them. I took her advice and am eating them in plain Greek yogurt, but adding either honey or the syrup from that misbegotten cake.

Crafts: work on an embroidery/quilt project.

I only fit a bit of this in, but it’s a freestyle project that I am working on without a pattern, often without drawing any borders or lines. Just stitching many colors of thread, which is soothing.

Taking care of myself

I often see that people regard mani/pedis as a sort of self-indulgent delight. To me mani/pedis are similar to having my teeth cleaned. It’s that kind of self-care. Nowhere near awful, but not fun either. Just good maintenance. So I got one. And a haircut. In the four months of rashes, bruises and hematomas, I did not want to expose that shitshow to a cosmetologist. Again, I might be working with a small window, so I jumped through.

Taking a Chance

I’m in a long period of writer’s block, if such a thing exists. I’m not sure it does. I believe my mind, like my body and its autoimmune out-of-control, is in such a stressed-out state that it refuses to do what I ask. It only responds, “Can’t you feel the world on fire?”

Yes, mind.

Yes, body.

Yes, chef.

I can.

I purchased the new Deep Dive “How to Write a Novel” course, which includes 50 recorded lessons. I figure if I am too stressed to get any new writing down, I will get to learning about how to do things better, so that when my state of being allows it, I will have the tools.

Literary citizenship

I volunteered to read submissions for the Inlandia Journal. My assignment includes 85 submissions to read in the next few weeks. I read some as they were submitted so that I wouldn’t fall behind. It’s great to see people putting their creative work out there.

I hope you are taking care, too, empathetic friends! You are the foundation of civil society.