Meditations in an Emergency
Essays and analyses by Rebecca Solnit| Meditations in an Emergency
Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by| Meditations in an Emergency
Many people seem to love sweeping generalizations. Not all people, but lots of people I come across trying to discuss the politics of our time fall back on pretending that a category of people is homogenous as in all its members hold the same positions. If categories were indeed airtight| Meditations in an Emergency
An Army Called ICE Is Already Waging a Domestic War (This is a series of short essay-reports, beginning with the worst – ICE and attacks on immigrants and ending with the best – what we can do and a brief homage to Jane Goodall.) A lot of us have assumed| Meditations in an Emergency
Tuesday, hundreds of highly skilled professionals were forced to sit in the room where their inferiors in all but rank staged long, pointless, hateful, ignorant, and undisciplined performances. Such a gathering of all top military leadership is unprecedented in modern times, a major security risk, and a big insult to| Meditations in an Emergency
My dearest wife, It is week two of the Siege of Portland, and still these barbarians will not yield to our troops. We have severed the cords of their latte machines but they are making cowboy coffee in their camps, where loud ukulele songs of resistance even now drift in| Meditations in an Emergency
Something that's true of all the narcissists I've known and witnessed is that they're unhappy and they can't recognize that this is an entrenched condition. They think it's due to something someone just did, and if they punish, intimidate, coerce| Meditations in an Emergency
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no| Meditations in an Emergency
I drove home to San Francisco from New Mexico last weekend, and in the western Mojave desert of California I passed in quick succession three vast renewable energy sites: the first was three solar concentrator power plants, the kind where rings of mirrors reflect sun onto a central tower, which| Meditations in an Emergency
I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other| Meditations in an Emergency
Twenty years ago, on August 29, 2005, a huge hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. New Orleans's levees failed, as had been predicted, and much of the city went underwater. Although the authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order, they had provided no resources to the many who were too poor| Meditations in an Emergency
Someone made this extra-grumpy meme about the fact that football player and podcaster Travis Kelce proposed to pop superstar Taylor Swift and now they're engaged, or rather about the fact that of course lots of people and media outlets are paying lots of attention, which Grumpy Meme believes is an| Meditations in an Emergency
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power. They not only describe but shape reality;| Meditations in an Emergency
On July 31, the Washington Post ran a story noting that the National Museum of American History, a branch of the Smithsonian, took down a portion of an exhibit about presidential impeachment concerning Trump's two impeachments. The piece quoted an unnamed source: "A person familiar with the| Meditations in an Emergency
I've been traveling, which means being blessedly offline a lot more than usual, but I'm settled for a while, and there's so much to say. Before I say anything elaborate or essayistic, I just want to say THERE IS A LOT OF RESISTANCE GOING| Meditations in an Emergency
This is the forty-fifth post since I launched on February 2. It's been a wild ride and a lot of fun and quite thrilling to see so many of you join me (there are a bit over 30k subscribers now). To celebrate I dropped the – strictly optional| Meditations in an Emergency
In one of my early posts on this site, I wrote "I have faith in the American people – faith that we're an unruly, insubordinate bunch scattered across a vast swathe of land, from our beautifully diverse cities to our remotest rural communities, that we are not easy to subdue and| Meditations in an Emergency
The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn't making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase--"what if they had a war and no one came?" What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people| Meditations in an Emergency
