Three Voices That Feel SANE
THE PROBLEM: Who do we trust for information? Who is really seeing things as they are, and telling it like it is – and they’re not on YouTube? The breakdown of trust in information and information-bearers has thrown us back on our hearts and guts, memory, critical thinking, and common sense, but we still need to find it and feel it in others to maintain enough confidence build a strong sense of reality.
WHO'S ALREADY ON IT: Foraging through social media, we can stumble across independent writers, consultants, and teachers who crowdfund their writing with Substack and Patreon accounts. Two of the best, who are shared and re-shared, are Heather Cox Richardson (historian, whose Substack Letters from an American relate our daily American politics with the Civil War era) and Cory Doctorow (novelist and nonfiction author, who has added the word "enshittification" to our vocabulary of the Modern).
Here are my personal favorites, three voices who keep me SANE.
Vu Le
If you toil in the nonprofit swamplands, whether in programs or fundraising, you have to read Vu Le. He is the wittiest, smartest, and angriest nonprofit leader I have ever encountered. A few years ago he left his Executive Director post at RVC, a nonprofit in Seattle focused on developing leaders within communities of color. While speaking on strategic topics in philanthropy and service organizing, Le writes his blog, Nonprofitaf.com. Here, he tells powerful truths about how funders obstruct the organizations they say they support, the simple (yet apparently terrifying to funders) ways these failings can be fixed, and how nonprofit fundraisers shoot their organizations in the foot by appealing to donors' vanities. And he makes you guffaw, hoot, chortle, snort, LOL and moan all at the same time. Like I said, he is funny. The kind of funny that sandblasts illusions and leaves behind raw clarity. In fact, several support groups for nonprofit professionals have formed as a result of Le's blog posts and talks. For all his ferocious criticism of the sector's problems, Le is absolutely aware of its beneficial place in our world:
"I always say that our sector is like air, whereas other sectors are like food. Air and food are both vital, but air does not get the same level of appreciation. Because it’s invisible and automatically consumed, no one appreciates air until they are forced to pay attention, like when they’re planning to dive underwater or climb a tall mountain, or when it’s not there." (9/12/2023)
Alex Steffen
When I lived in Seattle back in the late 1990s, freelancing interviews and book reviews for a holistic alternative newspaper, there was another publication on the streets presenting a scrappy, urban-design-savvy, environmental futurism that looked technology in the eye and snorted, "Huh. Think you're so great, do you?" The publisher and main writer of Steelhead was Alex Steffen. I sorely wished I were smart enough to write for that rag. It felt like Alex Steffen was onto something.
Thirty years on, Steffen has earned respect and renown as a smart, relentless speaker and author on sustainability, urban design, social innovation, technology, and now climate change. He is called a "planetary futurist," one who writes from hope and inspiration rather than rage and despair. The Snap Forward is the title of his newsletter, Substack, and an upcoming book, his fourth. (The link is for the Kickstarter - which ran in 2019 - funding the book's preparation for publishing.) But what does "snap forward" mean, anyway? This is Steffen's explanation, from his Kickstarter page:
... our strategies are based on old thinking, and old thinking is dangerous now. We’re going through what futurists call a “discontinuity” — a time when previous experience can’t ready us for what is coming — precisely at the moment when we’re all being forced to make a bunch of hard, serious choices.
It's not easy to figure this stuff out for yourself. Much of what we read, see, hear and learn about the planetary emergency is out-of-date. When our thinking suddenly catches up to the scope, scale and speed of the problems we face, we often get a sort of mental whiplash. I call this experience "the snap forward."
However, once we see the disruptive new forces emerging around us — once we snap forward — the moment we’re in begins to look less like a long losing battle and more like a set of opportunities for breakthrough victories. This short book shows how fresh thinking can help us win the climate fight, and win it fast.
A set of opportunities for breakthrough victories. That's the stuff that keeps me SANE!
Alex Steffen
Teri Kanefield
Oh Lord, where to start with the lawsuits that surround us? How to do more than gape at the democracy-punching legal issues and decisions and delays and slick spins that spin us round and round in these stupid political times?
Well, I start with reading Teri Kanefield. She was a prolific presence on Twitter before it became "X," and seeing her name come up meant a fog would soon lift off of my brain. Kanefield has a law degree from UC Berkeley. She has been a criminal and appellate defense lawyer, and a legal analyst for major mainstream news outlets. Her appellate practice provided defense for people who had the right to appeal but could not afford to do so (she was paid by the State of California). She has done trainloads of good works for asylum-seekers, voting-rights organizations, and she has a special interest in elections and elections law. Guess what she's been blogging about since 2020? Right there, you can see how she keeps her readers SANE, with readable, relatable analysis of The Former Guy's attempt to subvert and reverse the results of a free and fair election when he was not automatically declared the winner.
Funnily enough, she also has a master's in English with an emphasis in fiction writing. "Motivated by a desire to make law and civics accessible to America’s future leaders, I took breaks from handling appeals to write books for the young readers. Writing for middle and high school readers is much like writing for appellate justices: Appellate justices want everything broken down and digestible. I won’t carry the comparison too far: Ninth graders are usually more open-minded and a lot more fun," she writes on her bio page. "When I taught literature at the college level, I came to believe that the purpose of literature is to expand our sympathies. Both my legal work and my writing have been informed by my belief in the importance of sympathy as a humanizing emotion."
Kanefield was quite deliberate about her decision to leave Xitter (we who use this moniker are faithful to the Chinese pronunciation of "X" as "sh"). What I want to link for you now is her blog post describing the many different X alternatives where she has tested the waters. This is a place where Kanefield's steady voice and clear analysis is desperately needed, and I am grateful for it.
#Civica #communities #justice #climatechange #urbandesign