Doing Something

It's so easy to feel helpless in the face of powerful forces. My kids—being 11—are really into superheroes right now, and superhero stories are often ones of and underdog beating a powerful foe. The underdog wins because he is on the side of goodness, love, humanity, justice, integrity, rightness, light. I know we're not living in a comic book, but I find these stories more comforting now than ever. But it's important to note that the superheroes don't just sit by and wait for the darkness to subside on its own; they DO something. Yet it's hard to know where to begin, or what will even make an impact.



This week I did some things that I hope, if nothing else, will make me sleep better at night (I've never had nightmares about a president before now, not even W). First, I made some small donations to the following organizations (I don't have much to give, not making an income right now, but every bit helps):

Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, to help in their fight against gun violence, and because the meager protections we currently have will not doubt face assault over the next four years.

NARAL Pro-Choice, because without freedom to make decisions about our bodies and our health, we don't have freedom at all (and also to troll Mike Pence).

Good Shepherd Food Bank of Maine, because food insecurity is a problem that crosses political lines.

350 Maine, because climate change is the biggest threat we all, and our planet face.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, because our civil rights are under attack.

Partners in Health, because no matter how bad it gets, someone somewhere has it worse, and Partners in Health brings lifesaving medical care to the very worst off around the world.

I also wrote a (very long, long) letter to Maine's congressional delegation. There have been a lot of petitions and click-sign email campaigns going around, and I've signed some of them, but what I had to say took up a lot more space than a petition or email. There's also been a lot of encouragement to make phone calls, but I really hate using the phone (took me a full week to call and schedule a hair cut) and from what I hear, people get a lot of busy signals and full voicemail boxes. A letter will at least get somewhere, though I doubt the honorable representatives and senators will actually read it. There was so much I wanted to say, I'm sure I missed a lot (I already realized I left out investigations into Trump Foundation and Trump University fraud), but I got some of my most pressing concerns down, and I plan to continue to hold them accountable. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Senators King and Collins,
Representatives Pingree and Poliquin,

I am writing you to express my horror and deep dismay over the election of a racist, xenophobe, sexist, and likely child rapist to the highest office in the land. I insist that you, Maine’s elected officials, stand up to this demagogue at every turn. President Obama set high standards of decorum, compassion, respectability, intelligence, rationality, and unimpeachable character that the office of president has not seen in decades. I insist that you to hold president-elect Trump to Obama’s standards, not to the standards established during the campaign, in which the candidate’s behavior was expected to rise only slightly higher than that of an emotionally disturbed toddler. We have seen first hand in Maine the damage that can be inflicted when an angry, mean-spirited, and irrational bully with the impulse control of a rabid dog and an adherence to ideology that brooks no argument from outside of his narrow world view is elected executive by less than a majority of the voting public. Do not forget that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly two million votes, at last count. The president-elect does not in any way, shape, or form have a mandate and should not be deferred to as if he does.

There are many ways in which our democracy, our values, and our way of life are threatened by the incoming administration and these must all be countered at every turn, by all of us. But you, as elected officials, have a special role to play and much more resting on your shoulders. Below, I outline some of the many ways you need to speak out and uphold our democratic principles and institutions:

Speak out against any and all rhetoric coming from Trump, his surrogates, advisors, and appointees that demonizes or scapegoats any group of Americans, including people of color, immigrants, refugees, muslims, women, the disabled, and LGBTQ community. Denounce any act of violence or intimidation committed against members of these groups and insist on full investigation of all hate crimes. You also have a special role to play in educating your constituents of the value of a multi-cultural society and demonstrating through your words, actions, and deeds that inclusiveness is one of our greatest values and strengths.

Investigate thoroughly any role Russia played in influencing the election, including hacking of DNC emails and leaking of private information of Democratic candidates.

Insist on full financial and conflict of interest disclosure from the president-elect. Demand tax records for the last 20 years. Require the disclosure of all current, former, and past business interests, especially with regard to foreign nations. Demand the establishment of a blind trust, and/or liquidation of all Trump assets. Investigate each and ever instance of possible misuse of office for personal gain and quid pro quo. Establish a congressional ethics committee to maintain constant tabs on Trump’s business dealings and any possible conflict with US policy or diplomacy. Insist that any Trump family member who is involved in his businesses be excluded from all security briefings, policy discussions, and meetings with foreign officials.

Denounce and oppose any administration appointee that does not represent and respect the values of the United States of America. Begin with Trump’s chief strategist and chief counselor, Steve Bannon, a white supremacist, racist, and misogynist whose “news” platform has been instrumental in fronting false conspiracy theories against Democrats. Thank you, Representative Pingree for signing a letter and circulating a petition requesting Bannon’s appointment be rescinded. Senator King, your statement on the Bannon appointment was weak and hollow. Senator Collins, your response was even more vapid than Senator King’s and Representative Poliquin, we have heard crickets from you. Senators King and Collins and Representative Poliquin, please answer the following question: Do you think it’s acceptable and in keeping with American values for a white supremacist to be the chief advisor to a president of the United States? Next, take a look at Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions. Sessions is a documented racist, whose bid for a federal judgeship was denied in 1986 due to his racial views. Again, thank you Representative Pingree for speaking out against Sessions in a statement. Senators King and Collins, your statements of support or non-comment in no way rise to the level of disapprobation that should be heaped upon a racist candidate who, if confirmed, will be charged with enforcing the nation’s anti-discrimination laws. I insist that you take Sessions to task during confirmation hearings and vote against his appointment if there is the slightest lingering doubt of his ability to be unbiased with regard to race, ethnicity, country of origin, or sexual orientation. I expect from all four of you and your colleagues in the House and Senate an intense level of scrutiny and denouncement of any racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, or anti-LGBTQ extremist nominated or appointed by the incoming administration.

Oppose any nomination to a federal judgeship, including and especially to the Supreme Court, of a candidate who has an agenda of rolling back reproductive rights, reversing Roe v. Wade, eroding the First Amendment’s separation of church and state, rolling back voting rights, reversing equal marriage rights for LGBTQ Americans, or further entrenching the outsized role of corporations and money play in our determining our political outcomes and influencing our policies.

Demand from Mitch McConnell immediate and expedited confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama’s imminently qualified and intensely moderate nominee for the Supreme Court, which has lacked a full 9-member panel of justices for ten months due to Republican intransigence and obstruction. If Garland does not receive immediate consideration and confirmation, no nominee from Trump should even be considered unless he is MORE qualified and MORE moderate and unbiased in his views than Garland.

Oppose any repeal of The Affordable Care Act. Twenty million Americans receive their health care through the ACA, including me and my family of five. My husband and I are both self-employed—the existence of the ACA made it possible for me to leave my dead-end and deadening job and pursue work I love—and there is no way we could afford insurance premiums without the tax credits. If you are in any way informed about insurance, you should know that without the coverage mandate, insurers would flee Maine where our older, sicker, more rural population makes insurance coverage more costly. If my family loses our health coverage through repeal of the ACA, or any other congressional shenanigans, I will send our medical bills to each of your offices, and I will start a movement for other Mainers to do the same.

Oppose any rollback of our social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as well as TANF, SNAP, and other benefits that help our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Speaker Paul Ryan has been chomping at the bit to dismantle our civil society, and I insist that you stand in his way at ever step.

Oppose the establishment of a Muslim registry, as the affront to the constitution and American values that it is. This is a country founded on the free practice of religion and should continue to be so.

Oppose any so-called “infrastructure” bill that is merely a hand-out of tax-breaks and privatization schemes for construction and real estate companies. The only infrastructure bill that should be considered would put ordinary citizens to work on actual needed public infrastructure projects, which are not already in the pipeline to go ahead, and would not privatize any public assets, such as roads, water and sewer systems, and would operate through public spending on work, not tax breaks and loans to corporations. Further, any approved infrastructure bill must be fully funded by increased taxes on high-income/high-wealth Americans and corporations. Representative Pingree, I beg you to insist your Democratic colleagues not once again fall into the trap of trying to be reasonable and appease the Republican Beast by trying to cooperate and compromise. They will only continue to devour you and any progressive hopes we have for the future.

Oppose any rollbacks or repeals of our environmental protections. I am not old enough to have seen Maine’s rivers run different colors, depending on the dye woolen mills were using that day, but you know as well as I do that the US EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and subsequent laws and rules and international agreements have cleaned up Maine’s rivers, nearly eliminated acid rain damage to our forests and lakes, slowed the accumulation of mercury and other toxic pollutants in our fish, arrested the growth of the ozone hole, reduced the number of bad air days on Maine’s coast, and protected and preserved our forests, fisheries, and the state’s natural beauty, which is the only natural resource we have that currently has value. Trump has promised to eliminate the EPA, drill on sensitive lands, hand over public lands to the states. All of these policies would be a disaster for Maine, for Americans, for our children and grandchildren and must be opposed vehemently. Further, the greatest threat our world faces going forward is climate change and the catastrophic weather events and dispossession of people it will undoubtedly cause. The president-elect denounces climate change as a hoax. This is a dangerous line of thinking when the survival of entire species, including our own, is at stake. Oppose any withdrawal or non-compliance with the Paris Accord, insist on the full defense of the Clean Power Plan in the courts, and promote the development of clean power and carbon-neutral technologies.

I am devastated that our country voted in a racist, xenophobic, woman-hating, pussy-grabbing, demagogue. I am horrified that there are enough neo-nazis, white supremacists, and ku klux klan members to not only hold rallies and parades but to vote one of their own into the highest office in the land. I am sickened that the Republicans have abandoned all semblance of decency and have embraced an ideology that threatens to send this country back to the 1950s Jim Crow era—or perhaps 1930s Europe. I preferred living in a bubble, believing racial violence, anti-muslim violence, rape and violence against women, and violence against LGBTQ persons were isolated incidents and not a symptom of a great and virulent malady that has stricken our nation. But now I’m woke. And I don’t plan on going back to sleep. I will be watching Washington. I will take note how you vote. I will hold you accountable for upholding the values of a country in which hatred, exclusion, and violence have no place.


Sincerely,


Andrea Lani

Read!

I've been reading Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, a tome thick enough to boost a small child up to the Thanksgiving table, and one I've passed by at the library many a time. But something compelled me to check it out this month. Smiley, stuck in a novel-writing dead-end, decided to read 100 novels that span the breadth and depth of the history of the genre. Over the course of her reading, she gained insights into the nature of the novel—what it is, what it does, how to write one. In the most exciting chapter, Chapter 8, "The Novel and History," Smiley proposes a revolutionary idea: novels do not only reflect changes in society, but the act of reading novels actually has driven those changes.

Smiley writes: "The novel has gotten us from the manners and mores of fourteenth century Florence to those of twenty-first-century California...by very modest means—not by argument, but by proposing simple, understandable choices about common dilemmas." Watching characters struggle with their choices engenders sympathy in the reader, sympathies that can be applied, by extension, to living humans in their own society. As an example of this choice-making, Smiley considers Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "Page by page, choice by choice, Austen's own fine sense of discernment teaches the readers to take a view similar to hers." She goes on:

Such transformations in the way a character, or a reader, perceives herself and acts as a result of her perceptions were broadcast into society, and therefore into history, by market forces. In the same way that the popularity of the novel encouraged aspiring novelists to try different techniques in their own works, the nature of the novel as entertainment encouraged, or you might say trained, average readers to think in new ways about themselves and their circumstances. By taking up current concerns and portraying and commenting upon them, the novel made them present and important to readers who might not otherwise have had the eduction or the connections to take a larger view of their lives.

When I feel skeptical of this idea, that reading novels can truly change us, and thus our world, I think of the people I know who read widely and deeply; they are almost to a one also the most broad-thinking and compassionate people I know. And research bears this out: a study conducted a couple of years ago found that people who read literary fiction score better on tests measuring empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence than those who read pop fiction or nonfiction.

But how does this transformation of individuals translate into a transformed society? Smiley writes:

In the course of 650 years, Boccaccio and his successors have helped to create a certain kind of world. It is a world not unlike the novel, a world that seems to many people transparent and automatic but isn't. In this world, everyone, male and female, could become, might be, his or her own protagonist—that is, could develop a rich inner life based on the competing demands of conscience and ambition, selfishness and social connection. In this world each person feels a tension between himself or herself and the group, and also wishes to learn how to negotiate that tension. In this world individual existence has the potential for meaning—it can be understood and possibly changed or at least learned from. Cause and effect can be disentangled and observed. Events don't simply follow one another, as coordinate clauses do in a medieval narrative; they shape one another and grow out of one another, as subordinate clauses do in a modern narrative. In this world the ordinary person can step back, observe both the world and himself or herself, make a judgment, and then make a choice. This world is an agglomeration of individuals who relate to others as individuals. It is a word where "point of view" is a well-developed and important concept, the Western liberal ideal, and a paradox: if you look at a novel or a democracy one way, it is the tale of one person; if you look at it another way, it is the tale of a group. Neither the person more the group gains permanent ascendancy; the two coexist.

But social change, we have learned, is not linear nor is it irreversible. Smiley adds:

After more than a hundred novels and two and a half years of history, I saw that the world I thought was established and secure, at least in the West, is more fragile than I thought, because it is newer than I realized. That a woman could be an agent rather than an object or a possession, that a marriage can be chosen, then rejected, that an identity can be constructed by an ordinary person—these are difficult ideas, strange to many, and dangerous to some. The tension between the individual and the group that the novel depicts is often intolerable to the group, and for some groups, an individual does not have a right to a point of view. The routine quality of the novel, the way that novels seem ubiquitous and benign, pleasurable, or fun, or even tedious to schoolchildren, masks their subversiveness and helps us forget how they have remade the world.

So for those of us feeling off-balance this week, stressed out, helpless, and even for those who feel satisfied, vindicated—especially for them—I offer one task to carry alongside our work of chopping wood and carrying water. In between writing letters and making phone calls, marching in the streets, and holding our children tight, we must read. Read wide and deep. Read classics and current tales. Read about those similar to us and those who are different. Read Dickens and Austen and Hardy. Read the Brontes and Eliot and James. Read Tolstoy and Dumas. Read Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf. Read Kafka. Read Ayn Rand, if you must, but don't only read Ayn Rand. Read Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain and Harper Lee. Read Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster. Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Tillie Olsen. Read Rebecca Harding Davis and Susan Glaspell.

Read some of these books and authors, below, whose characters may live lives very different from yours. Some of these I've read, some have been on my "to-read" list for a while, and most were recommended by friends. (I'm only including fiction—mostly novels and a few short story collections—in this list; of course there are tons of memoirs and nonfiction and poetry books out there that we also can read to understand more about our diverse, messy, beautiful world, but the thesis here is that reading novels actually changes that world):

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Drown; Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George

Living with The Enemy by Donna Ferrato

The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

Passing by Nella Larsen

Hell's Bottom, Colorado by Laura Pritchett

Interpreter of Maladies; Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga

Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

For Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles by Sujoya Roy

The Known World by Edward P Jones 

Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

How To Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

A Taste of Honey by Jabari Asim

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid 

God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

The Lottery and other stories by Shirley Jackson

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

The Translator by Leila Aboulela

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

The Round House and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Read to your children. Read them Ashley Bryan and Ezra Jack Keats. Read them Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter and The Dark is Rising series. Read them The Little Prince and Hope for the Flowers. Read them Little House on the Prairie and The Birch Bark House. Read them Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Hand your teenager one of these books:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
The Sun is also a Star by Nicola Yoon
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Something like Hope by Shaun Goodman

Lizzie Bright and The Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt

Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older

So Far From God by Ana Castillo

And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomas Rivera

Willow by Tonya Cherie Hegamin

Monster by Walter Dean Myers 

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel by Sara Farizan

Darius and Twig by Walter Dean Myers.

Novels can, in the words of Mary Oliver, “take us out of our own existence and let us stand in the condition of another existence, another life.” (Though Oliver was talking about imagery, I believe this is what fiction does.)

Now, dear reader, what are you reading? What would you add to this list? What books have you read that challenged your assumptions about race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, history, class? Do you believe in the power of reading novels to change the world?