No New Words
Four essays from the archives
Today you see the sweat on my brow at a closer range. I don’t have a new essay to offer today for so many reasons I won’t bother elaborating. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the ICE raids in LA and Phoenix (and across the country), and potential new ordinances in my city that make it increasingly difficult to feed people living on the street.
Part of why I started The Good Enough Weekly was to practice consistent publishing, whether it’s pretty or ugly. Things are quite ugly nearly everywhere I look (for chrissakes I’m drafting in Substack which I NEVER do, that’s how bad things are this week), and also beautiful — I watch de-arrest videos from Tucson and LA over and over.
Keep shoving at the thing from all sides. And read on for some newsletters from my archive pertinent to this moment.
"The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened." [D.W.] Winnicott was speaking about it at a personal level – the fears for the future we all harbor – but it can be true in the broader sense, too. Many are afraid that society as they know it is collapsing. But what if my society was built upon bringing apocalypse to Indigenous communities? Catastrophe is the structure on which my privilege rests. It only makes sense that more of it is coming.
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Koch writes, “Nationalist anxieties about ‘our’ water forget the fact that the US itself appropriated the water rights of Indigenous communities in the region not long before. Insofar as they obscure settler colonialism, the ‘water grabbing’ stories extend the broader structure of arid empire. They also overlook a much longer history of US-Saudi ties, which actually gave rise to the very source of the problem: fanciful visions of power and profit from unsustainable desert farming.”
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Noel Ignatiev writes in How the Irish Became White (PDF), “The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave. They came to a society in which color was important in determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted to it in short order.”
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Aaron Bushnell’s words have been in my head since I read them, and they will remain, along with the specter of the woman who self-immolated (and survived) in Atlanta in December but was effectively erased from the media. Joshua P. Hill’s newsletter is worth reading for more about the acts of protest and what to do to organize for Palestine. The words Aaron Bushnell chose were deliberate, and he knew the heft they would carry coming from a white man in a military uniform. It’s part of the dysfunction of the white-supremist, patriarchal world that his words would be heard by more people. I hope his words haunt all of us, as they are haunting me.
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The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and blog posts on food, climate, and labor. Rooted in the Sonoran Desert.