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Oyez oyez! I am here, and this is a newsletter.
I was out putting up flyers this morning and ended up drenched in sweat. It wasn’t even some kind of all-day Black Flag guerilla wheatpaste operation. I only got up ten flyers, then stopped to go to a meeting.
Flyers are effective, though, because I think a lot of us have learned to tune out electronic communication, which is noisier than ever. Flyers catch you when you are not looking at a screen. The flyer competes with other stuff on the telephone pole, not with everything on your phone.
That said, it is tiring, and I can’t flyer across the world, so +1 for email.
I was putting up flyers for the Good Trouble rally this Thursday in the United States.
If you’re in the US, I think you should go to one. They’re happening all over the country. If you’re going to the one in Powderhouse Square in Somerville, you should let me know you’re going, and we can look at signs together.
While I was putting up flyers — the most timid of acts — I somehow found myself anxious that someone might question my right to do that, and I prepared a verbal defense in my head. After the first few, it went away. No one cared, and the apprehension didn’t make sense.
Similarly, while posting about this to a few message board-esque things, I was pre-clenching for responses about protests not mattering or it not being radical enough. Here, I realized this was like the flyering apprehension and just dropped it and posted.
I do want to hear from the people on this list that don’t think this is a good use of time, though. You are thoughtful, and I could be wrong! Two of the most optimistic people I know have told me they don’t think it’s likely we’ll get out of this state of competitive authoritarianism. I happen to think that even if we don’t, it’s still worth using the levers we have.
This particular lever lets the authoritarians know that they don’t have total compliance. Much like me worrying about getting yelled at over a flyer, any friction can cause someone considering an action to hesitate or even bail.
The protests also let those that get the opportunity to stop authoritarianism know that they are not alone. This could be a low-level bureaucrat that could leak Justice Department plans to disobey court rulings, a guy pushing back against an angry uncle that wants non-Whites out of the country, or even people setting interest rates at the Fed. (We have your back, Jerome Powell!)
As for whether it is enough, it is more than nothing, and small edges matter. Back when I played poker, I tried to make good decisions even if was short stacked and was having a bad night, whether via bad beats or bad play on my part. The ‘ol poker spreadsheet showed me that, over time, it did matter. The players that would just “play off their chips” because they figured losing a bit more than they had already lost wouldn’t matter tended to be long-term losers.
(I realize there are a lot of really good poker players that do not understand anything outside of poker and misapply lessons from poker to politics and other things and thus have destroyed the value of the poker analogy. But because I want to get this newsletter out today, I’m not going to search for a better analogy.)
This month, I am trying to finish a project I started in 2022 finished. I was stuck on a bug for four days and just got it fixed/worked around yesterday. This part of the project is painful, but now that I think about it, it’s not the most painful part.
I was also thinking: I’m kind of doing this for my past self at this point. I want to respect the work that the 2022-2024 me did by getting it out. And if I don’t, my current self will have doubts about whether the work I do now will be carried to completion by my future self. So, there’s a lot of not “living in the moment” happening.
But I think that there is no true living in the moment, anyway. What is the “moment?” The past hour until now? The past second? Every moment of living is informed by the past and future. Except in the case of Funes the Memorious. That guy remembered everything that had happened to him at every moment during every moment, so his living was all informed by the past. Ultra-not-living-in-the-moment!
And putting this temporal talk aside, when I think about it, this is a thing that I want to be out there.
I’ve been having a good time watching the various animals that go through my backyard lately, like these buddies.
See you next time (and maybe on Thursday?)
Jim