Sep 12, 2022·edited Sep 12, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik
Improvement and change requires we look at things honestly. I didn't quite know what to make of this post the first time through. Today I read the latest from https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/liberalism-is-resilient -- it was an honest and serious assessment of liberalism and where it can lead. The transformation of the War in Ukraine and what is now happening is not for the cynical. Your post describes some hard truths as does his. His made me return to yours and read again.
That is an incredible piece and I'm so glad you sent it to me. My dad is back in Russia now, so I sent it to him over WhatsApp. He will very much appreciate it.
"Something that I had to learn repeatedly while researching walking and walkability is at work in all these realities: if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."
This is really it, isn't it? So simply, yet so difficult for people to understand, let alone act on.
Sep 9, 2022·edited Sep 9, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik
I'll never pass up the chance to associate a Nine Inch Nails song with a gorgeous scene of a Montana river eddy.
I'm sorry to hear about the situation with your sister (if you already alluded to this somewhere in an earlier post I must have missed it). I can't speak for others, but I hope you will feel free to include your subscribers in the GoFundMe call, if and when. You mentioned this in parallel with the conversation about disregarding the vulnerable and disabled, and "if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working." Immediately I thought of my friend, an early childhood educator, who has often cited the principle that if a single child is excluded from a classroom activity due to some arbitrary barrier, then it doesn't count as a legitimate activity.
But it also makes me think about how hard it is to get people at large to care, or at least take communal responsibility, when there is so little infrastructure and favorable policy, and reliable information, to support proper care in the first place. Sometimes this can spur individuals to temporarily close the gap themselves, in lieu of help from above and underneath. But just as often it works the opposite, especially when the problem is very big and closing the gap through isolated behaviors doesn't look feasible: people become weary, indifferent, even resentful and reactionary. As you noted, the insane state of affairs "is also saying absolutely nothing new, nothing you don’t already know" - and reading this I briefly felt my own deep weariness; the staleness of being stuck with the answer "1=1" before even tackling the math problem.
I do believe that many people, even a few of the insensitive ones on the trains, would find it in themselves to care more and try harder if there was a perception that *society* cares (including our institutions), and that their caring has agency and not just ethics behind it. Of course ethics should be enough. But when outrage constantly bumps up against 1=1, it takes imagination too.
I'm glad the Nine Inch Nails came through! I've been listening to them a lot recently for some reason.
Your early childhood educator friend sounds like they really get it. That reminds me of the interview I did with Sherri Spelic about gym class last month, and a lot of the things she's talked about with respect to how to make gym work for everyone. As you probably already know, you can run into a real barrier with people thinking that "make this work for everyone" means "lowest common denominator." Maybe part of the issue is too many people thinking it's a division problem when in fact it's multiplication.
Those last two paragraphs are very on point. It reminded me that I got into this very slightly on my book on walking, and I think it's why the whole "human story" thing is an issue that sticks with me. It's easy to criticize daily news media, but I do think there's a huge issue with the reality that we're given about ourselves and our fellow humans and what we're capable of. I interviewed a woman who runs a non-profit that works in war zones, and she walked from London to Geneva to collect messages of support for refugees from Syria. It completely changed the way she viewed people AND what humanity as a whole is capable of because with only one exception in the whole 600 miles every single person had sorrow and sympathy for the crisis.
That doesn't mean people always know what to *do* or that they'll make choices in others' interests that they perceive to damage their own (affordable housing and NIMBY-ism is an issue that comes to mind), but I think it does show that the capacity is there even though the muscles are atrophied. This phrase: "many people, even a few of the insensitive ones on the trains, would find it in themselves to care more and try harder if there was a perception that *society* cares (including our institutions)" really hits hard because I think that's where we landed with the pandemic. More people wanted, and still want to care, but don't see that the institutions even make it possible -- and in fact actively undermine even the most basic efforts to care.
I'm with you, though, too, with the deep weariness and staleness of being stuck 🧡 And that is very generous of you with regards to the GoFundMe. I don't really think it would be appropriate to share it on here, not totally sure why except that that's not what people are here for. I suppose this is one of those occasions when it would be helpful to have a Twitter account! (And my sister is having a very hard time even accepting that this is a necessity, and wishes it could just go out to the many multi-millionaires and billionaires who have vacation homes where we live and fly their private jets in and out. I'd probably feel the same.)
I'm trying to remember where I first learned about the blood donation pipeline. Planet Money? Radiolab? I told myself that it wouldn't affect my willingness to give blood, because in the end, the blood /is/ used to save lives, and shortages /really do/ put people at risk. Yet, knowing that my donation flows into a very for-profit distribution chain did douse my enthusiasm, and made me wince every time I hear the altruistic appeals given to encourage me to participate. This falls perfectly in line with the study you've been making on ownership, because we own our blood like we own the land, which is to say, only so far and in certain ways. We put our blood into the commons, and there are people hovering around the edges, ready to make a profit.
This is all very well put and like a mini-essay in its own right. I've gotten a lot out of the book "Mine!" that was on the podcast you recommended a year ago or so. One of the chapters was on body parts and why you can sell, say, ovarian eggs but not a kidney. Plasma is part of that "do we own ourselves and if so or not, then what does that mean?" question.
One of the really interesting things about McLaughlin's book is that she makes very clear points about the life-saving medications that are made from human blood plasma, and she doesn't necessarily say it shouldn't be paid for. But how people are paid and how much, and how much profit is made by the companies that turn the plasma into medications are separate questions.
Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 16, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik
"I urge everyone to read it, in particular for the passages she quotes from a friend about what it’s like to care for and try to protect a medically vulnerable person during a still-ongoing pandemic when so much of society just wants it to be over:"
Yeah. Well, I didn't enjoy my last bout of Covid-19 (July 19th - 103°!) so I feel her. That said, it was all pretty predictable: Americans weren't all that great in 1918-1919 either. (Also relevant: it's pretty clear Covid attacks the brain, and in particular, it is obviously hitting the limbic system (lose of smell, a sense directly wired into that section of the brain). The limbic system also controls emotional regulation. Specifically: 'These interactions are closely linked to olfaction, emotions, drives, autonomic regulation, memory, and pathologically to encephalopathy, epilepsy, psychotic symptoms, cognitive defects.' So if the limbic system gets bashed up, it suggests bad behaviour will increase and will you lookie there...)
"When I mentioned this to a friend she said they might have been hit with the same thing that resulted in no plums for me to turn into fruit leather for the winter: the cold, rainy early summer that culminated in low-elevation snow in mid-June. "
Yep. Rainy as fuck all year here. My late inning play for some basil resulted in total non-germination. (Unusual!) But it was alternately super-damp and bone-dry and very hot, which is totally wrong for seed germination. My newly seeded wildflowers are doing quite we'll; well see if they set seed so as to regenerate next year.
"I have a healthy terror of both deep water and whitewater leftover from a family canoeing accident that almost killed me as a child."
I almost drowned once when I slipped on the algae growing on the concrete on the side of the spillway. I was paddling like a dog, but I couldn't get traction on the slippery surface to climb out of the water; I couldn't drift over the spillway, that was a 20-foot drop to rocks. I wasn't getting anywhere going upstream because the narrowing of the river meant a stiff current. A decent guy gave me a hand. I got better at swimming afterwards.
"(Despite how non-feasible Bittle says these proposals are, I’m left with the haunting knowledge that when people want a resource badly enough, they’re willing to throw practicality, as well as other people’s needs, out the window.)"
Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles are ['leaving'? s/b 'are parched']. They all need more water. Piping it in from the Mississippi is pretty ridiculous. If they have to, they can help out Salt Lake (the lake itself) by buying some water from the Columbia; that's a much shorter distance for a pipeline. That would be intended to be a crutch to help hobble through the drought. As for the cities served by the Colorado, there's nothing for it; they're going to have to start making water out of seawater. Unlike the writer's slant, I am not a nimby, so I am fine with doing that. Better to do that and reduce some of the pressure on the Colorado. (And maybe pipe some to Lake Mead: that's not that long a pipeline.)
"Neanderthal researcher Bruce Hardy writing in Sapiens on the question of whether Neanderthals made art"
Preaching to the choir (me). I was already sold on Neandertal cognitive abilities; that implies a presumption that Neandertals could make art. The uh, Cro-Mangon supremacist types are way out of date.
Always good to see you here, elm. (The beets are still doing well, by the way, but I'm thinking it's getting time to harvest -- along with onions and carrots. We might get frost this week.)
Do you think there's something in the Covid and limbic system thing? People are SO angry and short-tempered and not just "over" having to adapt to a pandemic but seemingly "over" having to adapt to living with other people in any way. It's easy to joke that people have lost their damn minds, but there is something going on and some of the consequences are deadly. (There have been a lot of random shootings here recently related to road rage and seemingly small arguments.)
That spillway situation sounds even more terrifying than my canoeing accident. Very glad someone gave you a hand.
I was talking with someone in LA a couple weeks ago and he said that people there have come around to the seawater necessity. It at least doesn't make any *less* sense than draining the Colorado.
I'm glad! It was nice to be on it, though I must have concentrated more than I realized at the time, because when I went to bed that night, I saw little rapids whenever I closed my eyes.
Such a beautiful, well-crafted post, Antonia. I thank you for including a bit of me and of Sophie in it as well -- and Jeneva. I so admire the way you do what i would call "meandering" -- taking us along as you poke around and observe sometimes mundane and sometimes wildly chaotic issues and things. How you craft this into sense -- into something poignant and powerful. And the sound effects now and photos! Perfection. I won't even go into the incredibly insightful link list -- you are writer, observer, fierce defender, maker and curator.
Meandering should be one of my middle names 😉 It's such a rewarding way to write as long as you bring things together somehow at the end. But your praise means so much to me -- I admire your writing tremendously! The way you manage to make things rich and fiery in such a short space, and that talent for turning a subject on one word, such a poetic gift.
Sep 7, 2022·edited Sep 7, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik
>>"Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor."
Not just America - and not just in traditional business. I felt this really strongly when I was immersed in travel blogging (circa Mike's career, 2010-2014). The loudly-trumpeted exceptionalism in aspirational digital nomadism, "LEAVE YOUR CUBICLE NIGHTMARE" and "DON'T BE A WAGE SLAVE FOR THE CORPORATE MATRIX" and so on, without anywhere near enough attention paid to all the people who make that nomadism possible, the ones in telecom businesses and in coffee shops and working at airports and on and on, to be grateful to them, and not see what they're doing as less or as inferior, but as a gift and a kindness and a thing to be grateful for, to truly respect. To not judge. A decade later, seeing that kind of stuff still winds me up. That's not the way.
(One of my favourite celebrity moments: Olivia Colman collecting her Oscar and telling millions of people that one of her favourite jobs was when she worked as a cleaner, a job she genuinely and unironically loved. Bingo. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, snobs of the world.)
>>"If society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."
This. This, so much.
It just hurts my soul that some people need to have it explained to them that they're supposed to care about other people in such situations. It's just...what went wrong, with you? What broke? Is it fixable? Can you be made to work again?
>>"Sometimes I don’t know how to describe what it’s like living in a place that’s so beautiful it can defy superlatives."
Me neither. But tell you what, I'll come visit your part of the world sometime, so at least in my case no words* are required. That'd be fun. I hope Montana is known for its coffee and pastries.
*I don't mean I'll be silent the whole time. That'd be...super-weird.
The book that spoke this eloquently a generation ago was Tim Russert's book "Big Russ & Me". Russert was changed by the lessons of his father and his guidance about how every person and every job is important and we all depend upon them being done well and should honor that.
Some of what you said in that first paragraph makes me think of Barbara Ehrenreich (who passed away last week) and some of the points she made in books like Nickel and Dimed. Her observations were so sharp. Great writer.
I completely neglected to mention this, but Kathleen McLaughlin is, like Barbara Ehrenreich, from Butte, Montana, and she counts Ehrenreich as an influence, especially because the history of labor unions is absolutely central to what has made Butte an incredibly resilient community. I was just finishing reading Blood Money when Ehrenreich died and we talked about what her work has meant for what we call the working class.
This is so true -- and wow you've brought back a lot of memories from those travel writing days. Even now, you see ads with photos of someone sitting with their laptop on a beach (what about sand??? and wind??? and sun glare???) and text along the lines of "learn to be a freelance writer." Actually, your description of all the people who make the nomadism possible reminds me yet again of how annoyed I get with Thoreau waxing poetic about walking while pooh-poohing the poor people who have to work in shops and the women who have to stay home (thanks, Henry David. Thanks a lot).
My favorite grown-up career job was working as a copy editor at Vogue. But my father job of all time was definitely the years I spent working at a coffee shop in college. Good for Olivia Colman.
"what went wrong, with you? What broke? Is it fixable? Can you be made to work again?" See: many conversations over the last few years with no good answers. On the walk home today I ran into a friend and we landed on that same question and she said, "Is it an illness? Like something wrong in their brains?"
Re visiting this part of Montana, see Patrick's advice below!
So, you want Montana pastries, then have Antonia take you to the Polebridge Mercantile. I'm guessing the trip should cost you one or two Huckleberry Bear Claws and a cup of coffee. 😊
You know your northwest Montana, Patrick! The Merc is indeed where I would take Mike for pastries -- partly because it's tradition (and also located up the North Fork) and partly because we weirdly do not have a good source of pastries around here. There are a couple of good bakeries in Kalispell. Coffee, however, I can supply in quantities, as half my family is employed by Montana Coffee Traders and my brother-in-law is the head roaster there 😀
I managed the Buttrey/Albertsons in GF for 27 years. I vaguely remember authorizing the first Montana Coffee Traders display rack in GF at the Buttrey Big Fresh back in the 90's. Loved working with those guys, the best customer service and a great product. Absolutely hated dealing with Starbucks.
Improvement and change requires we look at things honestly. I didn't quite know what to make of this post the first time through. Today I read the latest from https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/liberalism-is-resilient -- it was an honest and serious assessment of liberalism and where it can lead. The transformation of the War in Ukraine and what is now happening is not for the cynical. Your post describes some hard truths as does his. His made me return to yours and read again.
That is an incredible piece and I'm so glad you sent it to me. My dad is back in Russia now, so I sent it to him over WhatsApp. He will very much appreciate it.
That is wonderful about your dad
He (Noah Smith pen name Noahpinion) is the reason I joined Substack. Consistent excellence.
I've seen his Twitter feed on occasion -- that makes sense! I might have to follow that one.
"Something that I had to learn repeatedly while researching walking and walkability is at work in all these realities: if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."
This is really it, isn't it? So simply, yet so difficult for people to understand, let alone act on.
So true, Chris 🧡
I'll never pass up the chance to associate a Nine Inch Nails song with a gorgeous scene of a Montana river eddy.
I'm sorry to hear about the situation with your sister (if you already alluded to this somewhere in an earlier post I must have missed it). I can't speak for others, but I hope you will feel free to include your subscribers in the GoFundMe call, if and when. You mentioned this in parallel with the conversation about disregarding the vulnerable and disabled, and "if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working." Immediately I thought of my friend, an early childhood educator, who has often cited the principle that if a single child is excluded from a classroom activity due to some arbitrary barrier, then it doesn't count as a legitimate activity.
But it also makes me think about how hard it is to get people at large to care, or at least take communal responsibility, when there is so little infrastructure and favorable policy, and reliable information, to support proper care in the first place. Sometimes this can spur individuals to temporarily close the gap themselves, in lieu of help from above and underneath. But just as often it works the opposite, especially when the problem is very big and closing the gap through isolated behaviors doesn't look feasible: people become weary, indifferent, even resentful and reactionary. As you noted, the insane state of affairs "is also saying absolutely nothing new, nothing you don’t already know" - and reading this I briefly felt my own deep weariness; the staleness of being stuck with the answer "1=1" before even tackling the math problem.
I do believe that many people, even a few of the insensitive ones on the trains, would find it in themselves to care more and try harder if there was a perception that *society* cares (including our institutions), and that their caring has agency and not just ethics behind it. Of course ethics should be enough. But when outrage constantly bumps up against 1=1, it takes imagination too.
I'm glad the Nine Inch Nails came through! I've been listening to them a lot recently for some reason.
Your early childhood educator friend sounds like they really get it. That reminds me of the interview I did with Sherri Spelic about gym class last month, and a lot of the things she's talked about with respect to how to make gym work for everyone. As you probably already know, you can run into a real barrier with people thinking that "make this work for everyone" means "lowest common denominator." Maybe part of the issue is too many people thinking it's a division problem when in fact it's multiplication.
Those last two paragraphs are very on point. It reminded me that I got into this very slightly on my book on walking, and I think it's why the whole "human story" thing is an issue that sticks with me. It's easy to criticize daily news media, but I do think there's a huge issue with the reality that we're given about ourselves and our fellow humans and what we're capable of. I interviewed a woman who runs a non-profit that works in war zones, and she walked from London to Geneva to collect messages of support for refugees from Syria. It completely changed the way she viewed people AND what humanity as a whole is capable of because with only one exception in the whole 600 miles every single person had sorrow and sympathy for the crisis.
That doesn't mean people always know what to *do* or that they'll make choices in others' interests that they perceive to damage their own (affordable housing and NIMBY-ism is an issue that comes to mind), but I think it does show that the capacity is there even though the muscles are atrophied. This phrase: "many people, even a few of the insensitive ones on the trains, would find it in themselves to care more and try harder if there was a perception that *society* cares (including our institutions)" really hits hard because I think that's where we landed with the pandemic. More people wanted, and still want to care, but don't see that the institutions even make it possible -- and in fact actively undermine even the most basic efforts to care.
I'm with you, though, too, with the deep weariness and staleness of being stuck 🧡 And that is very generous of you with regards to the GoFundMe. I don't really think it would be appropriate to share it on here, not totally sure why except that that's not what people are here for. I suppose this is one of those occasions when it would be helpful to have a Twitter account! (And my sister is having a very hard time even accepting that this is a necessity, and wishes it could just go out to the many multi-millionaires and billionaires who have vacation homes where we live and fly their private jets in and out. I'd probably feel the same.)
I'm trying to remember where I first learned about the blood donation pipeline. Planet Money? Radiolab? I told myself that it wouldn't affect my willingness to give blood, because in the end, the blood /is/ used to save lives, and shortages /really do/ put people at risk. Yet, knowing that my donation flows into a very for-profit distribution chain did douse my enthusiasm, and made me wince every time I hear the altruistic appeals given to encourage me to participate. This falls perfectly in line with the study you've been making on ownership, because we own our blood like we own the land, which is to say, only so far and in certain ways. We put our blood into the commons, and there are people hovering around the edges, ready to make a profit.
This is all very well put and like a mini-essay in its own right. I've gotten a lot out of the book "Mine!" that was on the podcast you recommended a year ago or so. One of the chapters was on body parts and why you can sell, say, ovarian eggs but not a kidney. Plasma is part of that "do we own ourselves and if so or not, then what does that mean?" question.
One of the really interesting things about McLaughlin's book is that she makes very clear points about the life-saving medications that are made from human blood plasma, and she doesn't necessarily say it shouldn't be paid for. But how people are paid and how much, and how much profit is made by the companies that turn the plasma into medications are separate questions.
"I urge everyone to read it, in particular for the passages she quotes from a friend about what it’s like to care for and try to protect a medically vulnerable person during a still-ongoing pandemic when so much of society just wants it to be over:"
Yeah. Well, I didn't enjoy my last bout of Covid-19 (July 19th - 103°!) so I feel her. That said, it was all pretty predictable: Americans weren't all that great in 1918-1919 either. (Also relevant: it's pretty clear Covid attacks the brain, and in particular, it is obviously hitting the limbic system (lose of smell, a sense directly wired into that section of the brain). The limbic system also controls emotional regulation. Specifically: 'These interactions are closely linked to olfaction, emotions, drives, autonomic regulation, memory, and pathologically to encephalopathy, epilepsy, psychotic symptoms, cognitive defects.' So if the limbic system gets bashed up, it suggests bad behaviour will increase and will you lookie there...)
"When I mentioned this to a friend she said they might have been hit with the same thing that resulted in no plums for me to turn into fruit leather for the winter: the cold, rainy early summer that culminated in low-elevation snow in mid-June. "
Yep. Rainy as fuck all year here. My late inning play for some basil resulted in total non-germination. (Unusual!) But it was alternately super-damp and bone-dry and very hot, which is totally wrong for seed germination. My newly seeded wildflowers are doing quite we'll; well see if they set seed so as to regenerate next year.
"I have a healthy terror of both deep water and whitewater leftover from a family canoeing accident that almost killed me as a child."
I almost drowned once when I slipped on the algae growing on the concrete on the side of the spillway. I was paddling like a dog, but I couldn't get traction on the slippery surface to climb out of the water; I couldn't drift over the spillway, that was a 20-foot drop to rocks. I wasn't getting anywhere going upstream because the narrowing of the river meant a stiff current. A decent guy gave me a hand. I got better at swimming afterwards.
"(Despite how non-feasible Bittle says these proposals are, I’m left with the haunting knowledge that when people want a resource badly enough, they’re willing to throw practicality, as well as other people’s needs, out the window.)"
Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles are ['leaving'? s/b 'are parched']. They all need more water. Piping it in from the Mississippi is pretty ridiculous. If they have to, they can help out Salt Lake (the lake itself) by buying some water from the Columbia; that's a much shorter distance for a pipeline. That would be intended to be a crutch to help hobble through the drought. As for the cities served by the Colorado, there's nothing for it; they're going to have to start making water out of seawater. Unlike the writer's slant, I am not a nimby, so I am fine with doing that. Better to do that and reduce some of the pressure on the Colorado. (And maybe pipe some to Lake Mead: that's not that long a pipeline.)
"Neanderthal researcher Bruce Hardy writing in Sapiens on the question of whether Neanderthals made art"
Preaching to the choir (me). I was already sold on Neandertal cognitive abilities; that implies a presumption that Neandertals could make art. The uh, Cro-Mangon supremacist types are way out of date.
elm
very late response: HI!
Always good to see you here, elm. (The beets are still doing well, by the way, but I'm thinking it's getting time to harvest -- along with onions and carrots. We might get frost this week.)
Do you think there's something in the Covid and limbic system thing? People are SO angry and short-tempered and not just "over" having to adapt to a pandemic but seemingly "over" having to adapt to living with other people in any way. It's easy to joke that people have lost their damn minds, but there is something going on and some of the consequences are deadly. (There have been a lot of random shootings here recently related to road rage and seemingly small arguments.)
That spillway situation sounds even more terrifying than my canoeing accident. Very glad someone gave you a hand.
I was talking with someone in LA a couple weeks ago and he said that people there have come around to the seawater necessity. It at least doesn't make any *less* sense than draining the Colorado.
"Cro-Mangon supremacist types" 😂
Thank you, Nia. So much to think about. And this. Yes. This: "if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."
Thank you, Greg 🧡
Thank you for that little clip of the water, it was very soothing!
I'm glad! It was nice to be on it, though I must have concentrated more than I realized at the time, because when I went to bed that night, I saw little rapids whenever I closed my eyes.
Such a beautiful, well-crafted post, Antonia. I thank you for including a bit of me and of Sophie in it as well -- and Jeneva. I so admire the way you do what i would call "meandering" -- taking us along as you poke around and observe sometimes mundane and sometimes wildly chaotic issues and things. How you craft this into sense -- into something poignant and powerful. And the sound effects now and photos! Perfection. I won't even go into the incredibly insightful link list -- you are writer, observer, fierce defender, maker and curator.
Meandering should be one of my middle names 😉 It's such a rewarding way to write as long as you bring things together somehow at the end. But your praise means so much to me -- I admire your writing tremendously! The way you manage to make things rich and fiery in such a short space, and that talent for turning a subject on one word, such a poetic gift.
>>"Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor."
Not just America - and not just in traditional business. I felt this really strongly when I was immersed in travel blogging (circa Mike's career, 2010-2014). The loudly-trumpeted exceptionalism in aspirational digital nomadism, "LEAVE YOUR CUBICLE NIGHTMARE" and "DON'T BE A WAGE SLAVE FOR THE CORPORATE MATRIX" and so on, without anywhere near enough attention paid to all the people who make that nomadism possible, the ones in telecom businesses and in coffee shops and working at airports and on and on, to be grateful to them, and not see what they're doing as less or as inferior, but as a gift and a kindness and a thing to be grateful for, to truly respect. To not judge. A decade later, seeing that kind of stuff still winds me up. That's not the way.
(One of my favourite celebrity moments: Olivia Colman collecting her Oscar and telling millions of people that one of her favourite jobs was when she worked as a cleaner, a job she genuinely and unironically loved. Bingo. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, snobs of the world.)
>>"If society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."
This. This, so much.
It just hurts my soul that some people need to have it explained to them that they're supposed to care about other people in such situations. It's just...what went wrong, with you? What broke? Is it fixable? Can you be made to work again?
>>"Sometimes I don’t know how to describe what it’s like living in a place that’s so beautiful it can defy superlatives."
Me neither. But tell you what, I'll come visit your part of the world sometime, so at least in my case no words* are required. That'd be fun. I hope Montana is known for its coffee and pastries.
*I don't mean I'll be silent the whole time. That'd be...super-weird.
The book that spoke this eloquently a generation ago was Tim Russert's book "Big Russ & Me". Russert was changed by the lessons of his father and his guidance about how every person and every job is important and we all depend upon them being done well and should honor that.
I haven't read that book but I like that!
Some of what you said in that first paragraph makes me think of Barbara Ehrenreich (who passed away last week) and some of the points she made in books like Nickel and Dimed. Her observations were so sharp. Great writer.
I completely neglected to mention this, but Kathleen McLaughlin is, like Barbara Ehrenreich, from Butte, Montana, and she counts Ehrenreich as an influence, especially because the history of labor unions is absolutely central to what has made Butte an incredibly resilient community. I was just finishing reading Blood Money when Ehrenreich died and we talked about what her work has meant for what we call the working class.
This is so true -- and wow you've brought back a lot of memories from those travel writing days. Even now, you see ads with photos of someone sitting with their laptop on a beach (what about sand??? and wind??? and sun glare???) and text along the lines of "learn to be a freelance writer." Actually, your description of all the people who make the nomadism possible reminds me yet again of how annoyed I get with Thoreau waxing poetic about walking while pooh-poohing the poor people who have to work in shops and the women who have to stay home (thanks, Henry David. Thanks a lot).
My favorite grown-up career job was working as a copy editor at Vogue. But my father job of all time was definitely the years I spent working at a coffee shop in college. Good for Olivia Colman.
"what went wrong, with you? What broke? Is it fixable? Can you be made to work again?" See: many conversations over the last few years with no good answers. On the walk home today I ran into a friend and we landed on that same question and she said, "Is it an illness? Like something wrong in their brains?"
Re visiting this part of Montana, see Patrick's advice below!
So, you want Montana pastries, then have Antonia take you to the Polebridge Mercantile. I'm guessing the trip should cost you one or two Huckleberry Bear Claws and a cup of coffee. 😊
https://travelmontananow.com/polebridge-montana-why-you-should-visit/
You know your northwest Montana, Patrick! The Merc is indeed where I would take Mike for pastries -- partly because it's tradition (and also located up the North Fork) and partly because we weirdly do not have a good source of pastries around here. There are a couple of good bakeries in Kalispell. Coffee, however, I can supply in quantities, as half my family is employed by Montana Coffee Traders and my brother-in-law is the head roaster there 😀
Sippin' on my Montana Blend right now. Delicious! Addicted to the stuff.
I will tell my brother-in-law! (Also, when I lived in New York, Montana Blend is what I ordered in bulk because I could never find anything as good.)
I managed the Buttrey/Albertsons in GF for 27 years. I vaguely remember authorizing the first Montana Coffee Traders display rack in GF at the Buttrey Big Fresh back in the 90's. Loved working with those guys, the best customer service and a great product. Absolutely hated dealing with Starbucks.
💖
Great Falls? Have I mentioned my grandmother lived there for 40-some years?