Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 4: in which we realize the sign we have allowed to be placed in our window is a lie

and ponder the sign we want to put in our window

Beautiful Magicians,

Over time, my body has fallen into a week-ending rhythm to write my Sunday Notes from the Field on Saturday afternoon. Often finishing it just ten or eleven hours before it arrives in your inbox at 5am Eastern. It’s taken me a while, several years in fact, to settle into this rhythm. I used to write it on Friday, leaving time to edit on Saturday. In theory, that was a smart plan, and with all that editing time, there might be fewer typos or missed ideas.

I confess that when I read my newsletter on Sunday, I invariably think, sheesh, how did I let that slip through? Or, jeez, Janet, you should have added this or that. Or come to a better conclusion. It’s a writer thing. Writers NEVER stop editing! I’m often still editing it in my mind on Monday.

But, setting aside the writer’s visceral need to edit, I have found that I simply cannot write my newsletter on Friday.

Because life. Life happens. News happens. Monsters do monstrous things. And my newsletter, if written too early, doesn’t match your reality. Doesn’t meet life where life is. Where you are. Where I am.

And so, I wait to put the hands on my keyboard until Saturday afternoon.

It just happened. Again. I had what I thought was a lovely plan for today’s letter based on a provocative idea on how to skip AI and access your own creative intelligence. A perfect reminder for Magicians Reporting for Duty. I’m sure I’ll write about that someday, but not today.

Because today we woke to another murder in Minneapolis. A 37-year-old American man from Minneapolis was taking pictures at an ICE protest when ICE shoved a woman. As he stepped forward to help her, ICE goons sprayed pepper spray in his face, beat him until he collapsed, pistol whipped him on the ground, and shot him. Nine times.

Put more accurately, they executed him.

Within the hour, we knew he was Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse, who served veterans.

He was taking pictures at a massive anti-ICE protest. He was taking pictures.

• After Renee Good’s murder….
• After seeing a five-year-old in a blue bunny hat surrounded by men in battle gear….
• After reading about the horrifying conditions in homeland security detention centers….
• After learning that a man's death in a detention center has been labeled a homicide….

Surely now, there is no one who doesn’t equate ICE with the SS.

What do we do? What do we do in a time of emergency?

I have two suggestions.

Let’s start with the brilliant Black author Octavia Butler, who described our situation perfectly in the fictional sacred text she has her protagonist Lauren Olamina write in the Parable series, which was published in 1993.

Octavia Butler was a prophet. A prophet we did not listen to. Perhaps it’s not too late.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
by Octavia Butler

Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool
is to be led by the opportunists
who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.

To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

Well, here we are, led by a coward, fool, thief, liar and tyrant, who relishes watching his goon squad, his SS, rampage the land.

So, what do we do?

I think Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, answered that question brilliantly in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Here is just a segment of it. Go online and watch or read the entire speech. Then read it again. We are living through a total shift in the world order. It’s hard. It hurts. But someone has to see it, name, and, most importantly, lay out a path through it.

And Carney did exactly that.

As soon as he finished, people began to declare that Carney and Canada are now the leaders of the free world.

Pretty good hands, I’d say.

I found it particularly interesting that Mark Carney quoted Václav Havel in his speech. If you are unfamiliar, Havel was a dissident playwright in Czechoslovakia who was imprisoned by the Communist regime from 1979 to 1983. He was arrested for the first time as he participated in a protest. See the pattern?

While in prison, he wrote to his wife. The letters were later compiled into a famous book, Letters to Olga. I read and reread that book when my son became a political prisoner in 2013.

Havel’s story, like Nelson Mandela’s, ends with being elected president of his country. So that alone gives me some hope.

Listen to this portion of Carney’s speech quoting Havel:

“In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

His answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He does not believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway – to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this ‘living within a lie.’

The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack. It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

I couldn’t stop ruminating over this idea of a sign in the window that everyone knows is a lie.

What sign does America have in its window right now that everyone knows is a lie? I think that’s obvious.

What I want to ponder is: what sign do I WANT to put in my window?

original photo by Markus Siske of Unsplash

A sign or symbol or image or phrase that captures the hope, the heart, the possibility of the life we want to live. The world we want to create. A world that rejects tyranny. A world without feckless sycophants who bow and kiss the ring of a clearly demented tyrant.

What sign would that be? I’m deep in pondering that.

Life is fragile, freedom is fragile, peace is fragile, dignity is fragile, handle with reverence

Janet
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