Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 35.2 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
Ok, everybody up.
We have work ahead of us. It seems the ‘president’ is not interested in conceding, as I’m sure you’ve seen. But that’s just the first step—the less we put pressure on Biden, the more likely it is that he’ll fail to actually do anything (see: Democrats, the last 4+ years) and will just make way for an even scarier iteration of what we’ve been dealing with. As Bhaskar Sunkara warns:
“As bad as the last four years have been, we’ve been lucky to get the actual – bumbling – Trump, as opposed to a more effective politician, an American Narendra Modi or Jair Bolsonaro.”
What does standing up to this look like? So many things. All eyes are on Georgia, whose two senate runoffs will be, in the words of my housemate, ‘the most expensive races in the history of the universe.’
We need a movement, because there’s so much that can’t wait four years for an actual progressive—we have to make Joe Biden the president we need, not the president he’d be inclined to be otherwise. While a Republican-controlled Senate would make meaningful climate action, among so many other things, more difficult, there’s a set of things that President Biden could do without any congressional involvement.
[An aside—there’s a slow but present debate about abolishing the Senate. The late John Dingell had some thoughts about it, as did the first Socialist member of the House of Representatives back in 1911.]
This election comes on the (almost) heels of the most devastating hurricane season in recorded history. In Boston, it’s been a balmy 68 degrees for the last five days. The climate crisis, unlike the rest of us, did not spend the last week refreshing the news, and is not easily distracted.
Fortunately, it looks like the pandemic is turning people into climate-conscious gays. And, it’s November—a great month to take some extra time to learn about and from the Indigenous people of the land you live on. Try out the 21-day Indigenous racial equity challenge, which is a big list of resources you can engage in this month and beyond.
Also, it is with great pleasure that I share this video, which is the best thing I saw on the internet yesterday. Thank you Sam for sending it along.
[Because we cannot just have nice things—Ava DuVernay has recently been caught up in a bit of controversy about a film she’s been involved with, Funny Boy. The film is about a Tamil boy, and is set against the backdrop of escalating conflict between Tamil and Sinhalese people. From what I understand, this film was made without any involvement of actual Tamil people, which is an unethical way to tell a story.]
*Hot Goss*
Back next week from the superb Latifah Azlan.