New eyes

Hello, friends. Although I haven’t been writing much, I’ve been living plenty. Today’s post comes to you from a tiny room in a rambling 115-year-old inn on Vashon Island, and I have a feeling I’m going to ramble a bit, too, but that’s OK.

Until Monday, I’d never been to Vashon, even though it is a 20-minute ferry ride from West Seattle, and plenty of people commute from here — remotely or twice a day on the ferry. It remains mostly rural, and it is graced by many parks and laced by miles of trails. I’ve already hiked many of them on this brief visit, about 15 miles over the past two days, mostly through forests but also along the shores of Puget Sound.

My new apartment in Seattle is great. It has the quiet I crave, but it has little natural light and no views at all. So as long as I live there, and I hope it will be a few years, I will have even more incentive than usual to go outside — not that I need much incentive. That’s why, when I saw the forecast for plenty of sun and little rain for a few days early this week, I decided to make a quick trip somewhere I could spend most of the daylight hours outdoors. Vashon has not disappointed me.

How I wound up in the Marjesira Inn is a mystery, but it’s clear I was meant to come here. I went to Airbnb and looked at a little beach shack I rented on the Washington coast last February, but it wasn’t available. I zoomed out, saw a $45 listing, and landed on Vashon Island. Why not? As I said, I’ve never been here. The reviews and the price point made it clear that the Marjesira isn’t for everyone: It’s a funky blend of hostel and rooming house. You’re sharing a kitchen and bathrooms. You hear your neighbors. But it’s a magical spot steeped in history, and I’m sure I’ll be back.

In my last post, I mentioned the Free Will Astrology horoscope I found on my last trip, during my January stay in Astoria, Oregon. “You will receive substantial assistance from life whenever you work on the intention to clarify and define the specific longings that are most essential to you,” Rob Brezsny wrote. A quiet place to live was my most specific longing, and now I have that. But my longest-lived longing is my desire to travel — and I travel frequently because it helps me keep my eyes and perspective fresh. At sunrise this morning, alone in the inn’s front room, I spotted a book, Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by … Rob Brezsny.

Sharing a bit of conversation with Marjesira’s caretaker this morning as we made our breakfasts, I mentioned how, although I am a dedicated minimalist, I was enjoying the century’s worth of accumulated stuff packed into this old inn. As always, travel was helping me see with new eyes.

As we talked, Jacqui was braiding her hair — something she hadn’t done in a while, she said, but she was on her way to a school visit as a wilderness educator and she wanted to feel like a kid again. She wanted to see the world through their eyes.

The world is in a world of hurt right now, big time, and there’s one man who certainly is not conspiring to shower it with blessings. Travel is a tonic unless it’s a forced march, and my heart is with the refugees streaming out of Ukraine toward an uncertain future. It’s hard for any of us to know what is going to happen next: with this unnecessary war, with the climate, with the pandemic, or with baseball. (Sorry, I know that the breakdown in the sport’s contractual talks are far from a key global concern, but my part-time job at the ballyard is a big part of my income and my social life.)

Yet I do know this, and I mainly know it because I travel: The world is a beautiful place, my stay here is finite, I am here for the adventure, and I am bound by the beauty. This gorgeous song from Jane Siberry pops up in my head every so often when I am feeling especially deep gratitude for the world. Enjoy — and to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, happy almost-spring.


A few housekeeping notes: Two recent posts have disappeared off the main feed here at Surely Joy. It’s a mystery, but you can find them here, if you missed them:

Presenting my word for 2022

Pandemic postcard #56: Better days

As always, thank you for reading Surely Joy.

Window of opportunity

I wrote last week about how we are never sure when we might be doing something for the last time. Since then, I realized I had a very narrow window of opportunity to ride Amtrak along the Puget Sound south of Tacoma before passenger rail service stops taking the long way around this Thursday. So I did, catching the 2:20 pm train from Seattle today for a quick round-trip to Centralia.

There was so much to love about this stretch of tracks: the brief glimpse of a waterside village that’s only accessible by boat. The soaring Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The stark beauty of Chambers Bay Golf Course, and of cormorants in shadow, sunning themselves on pilings along the Nisqually Reach. The ferry from Steilacoom to Anderson Island. Families strolling along the beach, waving at a train that won’t be by again after Wednesday.

Amtrak had planned to abandon these tracks four years ago. On December 18, 2017, trains were slated to begin using the Point Defiance Bypass, an inland route intended to shave a few miles and minutes off the schedule. But the very first train to attempt the new route that morning derailed at a high rate of speed, killing three people and injuring 62.

Given the thorough investigations and the pandemic, it has taken a while for everyone involved to ensure that the bypass is safe. I’ll actually be back on the train this Thursday, boarding one of the first trains scheduled to use the newly resurrected route as Amtrak tries again. I didn’t plan it that way, having booked a southbound ticket to California several months ago, but I guess I’ll help make some history.

Am I afraid? I am not. Am I happy I made time to take the train on one of its final trips along the Sound? Indeed I am. I’ll miss that run, and of course I will always question the wisdom of forsaking sublime beauty to save a little bit of time. Rest in peace, long way around.

Summer reading report 2021

It’s Labor Day, the unofficial close of summer, and the season’s passage feels especially acute this year. We’ve had a summer, but it has seemed at turns precious and precarious, fulsome and fleeting. There’s a chill in the air many mornings and a few leaves are turning, and I am nowhere ready to trade my T-shirts and shorts for sweaters and jeans.

Tonight is also the start of the Jewish High Holy Days. Last fall, I signed up for Do You 10 Q, which helps participants reflect on life’s biggest questions, including ones that have loomed larger than usual for most of us during the pandemic. Given the vicissitudes of the past year-and-a-half, I’m trying more than ever before to be in and of the moments in which I find myself. This feels a little harder than it was a year ago, when life was less full and less complicated, but also more important as new opportunities and relationships emerge. This is a too-long way of saying I haven’t done as much reading this summer as I did in 2020, but I did read several good books — and interestingly, they’ve mostly been by or about girls and women finding their power and their strength. I’ll recap a few of them here.

I started with The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, a slim middle-grades book that I impulse-bought at the Columbus UU church on my last trip to Ohio back in 2017. Mick Cochrane writes of Molly Williams, an eighth-grade knuckleball pitcher who wants to play on the boys’ team. It’s a good little baseball book, and it’s also about friendship and how our parents never really leave us. It’s funny how long I carried it around, through several moves, before I decided it was time to read it. I’m glad I did.

Early in the summer, I signed on to update my Idaho Off the Beaten Path guidebook for a 10th edition, so next up were two books set in the state. The first one, Daredevils, is a novel by Shawn Vestal. Set in the 1970s, it’s kind of about Evel Knievel and kind of about Loretta, a rebellious Mormon teenager. I recognized many of the places and characters in this story, which made it a fun blend of identification and escape.

Speaking of escape, years ago, while driving through a polygamist town on the Arizona-Utah border, I saw a little girl walking down the street and felt seized with a desire to liberate her from her fate. Daredevils reminded me of that — as did Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir of a fundamentalist-end times upbringing in Idaho, not so far from where I lived. It was a hard book to read; I had to put it aside several times, appalled by the mental and physical abuse Westover endured. Ultimately, though, Westover learns that she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and that knowledge helps set her free.

In late July, I traveled super-light on a solo trip to Alaska, but I made room in my pack for one book (which I’d picked up at the wonderful Bonners Books in North Idaho a few weeks earlier for that express purpose). Tisha is, as its subtitle says, “the wonderful true love story of a young teacher in the Alaskan wilderness,” but lest you think that gives the whole thing away, it doesn’t. Robert Specht’s as-told-to book is also a story about active antiracism on the early 20th-century frontier, and it’s yet another story of a girl growing into womanhood and learning that she is capable of handling whatever life throws her way.

That’s a lesson we keep learning, too, no matter what our age or gender. In Mud, Rocks, Blazes, Heather “Anish” Anderson was well into adulthood when she attempted to set a speed record on the Appalachian Trail, and even though she’d already won fame and acclaim for her extreme hiking exploits, she continued to harbor self-doubt. My main takeaway from Anderson’s book (as from my peripatetic journeys into Buddhism) is that everything is temporary, so relish the moments, keep going, and keep practicing gratitude at every turn.

I’ll end with a book that I’ve been dipping into all summer — one I finally decided to buy after renewing my library copy several times (and buying a copy for my daughter), one that, should I ever have a grandchild, I would hand to her to say, “Here, this is what it was like.” There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is a book of essays about the collision of pandemic, climate havoc, police brutality, and the possibility of change. Most were written in the summer of 2020 but still resound today, such as this from Héctor Tobar, who evokes ash falling over Los Angeles: ash from wildfires and protests, ash through which anthropologists will someday sift to try and understand this confusing epoch “in some future age, when justice reigns.”

All but one of the links above are to my online bookstore, The Optimist, where you can buy a book and support both my work and that of independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Win-win-win. I’ll also put in a plug here for one not-quite-yet-a-book that I had the good fortune to read as copy editor earlier this year. One Heart With Courage is Teri Rizvi’s collection of essays that spans decades and continents, a timely and timeless book that details Teri’s blended Pakistani-American family, the power of faith, and the beautiful bonds of lifelong friendships. (Teri and I met at Ohio University in 1979, part of a group of friends that has endured all these decades.) The book is coming October 1, and you can pre-order it now. Finally, here’s a very early link to the next edition of Idaho Off the Beaten Path (even though I’m still writing it!) and another to my 2020 summer reading list. Be well, and happy reading.

Tradeoffs

Hello, world. This is me, poking my head up for what now seems to be a monthly dispatch. It’s hard to believe I was writing weekly pandemic postcards until a few months ago. It’s difficult to fathom I’ve just begun volume #5 of my “pandemic journal,” the notebook I write in almost daily (though that, too, has become a less-regular practice this summer).

So here we are. I want to talk a little about tradeoffs.

Tradeoff number 1: My new upstairs neighbor threw in a load of laundry at 11:30 last night. I’d been sleeping a while, but the thumping woke me up. The neighbor seems to be up all night, so I guess they work a swing shift and probably get to bed around the time I wake up–but I still hear the floors creaking at 6:30 a.m. as I write this, so who knows? Then there’s my improbably loud refrigerator, which runs about 30 minutes every hour. I hoped I’d be used to it after four months, but it’s still annoying, especially in 499 square feet.

Ah, but I like this apartment, especially its east-facing windows and sliding glass door out onto the tiny fire-escape-sized balcony, where I sit and read or listen to music, and where the hummingbirds have been gathering all summer. I’ve enjoyed its evening cool during our heatwaves, and the low-angled light will warm my apartment this winter. I value the fact I’m a quick stroll to the bus stop and the grocery store, yet within a few blocks, I can access miles of more ambitious walking terrain where the city blends into the suburbs and fat blackberries are now ripe for the picking. It’s a tradeoff: the realities of urban living.

Tradeoff number 2: The pandemic is still very much with us, and like most people who chose to be vaccinated, I’ve lost patience with the arguments of those who’ve opted to keep the virus spreading. At the same time, I know that no good comes of castigating people for their doubts and fears, so I’m opting, as usual, to give them grace. I do know that I will live my life as the delta variant runs rampant. I’m masking up again indoors, but I never saw the need for outdoor masking a year ago and I don’t now, unless you’ve chosen not to get the jabs. I’ve been traveling and will continue to do so, and for sure I’ll take that booster shot just as soon as I can get it, thank you.

It sounds like we may all be destined to get the delta variant, vaccinated or not, though it is much worse if you’re not. I’ve finally heard of the first breakthrough case among two people I know personally; they’ve had flu-like symptoms for a week, but as vaccinated people, they’re pulling through. I mostly fight despair over my relatives whose faith-based fear causes them to doubt science, and over the plight of children who have little protection as they go back to school. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is what it is. I’m grateful we had a few months of relative freedom from COVID earlier this summer. It’s been nice to go maskless at the ballpark, where I love to give fans a welcoming smile. It’s been delightful to get to know my new companion, to hold hands and hug and kiss without worrying too much about making each other sick. Yet it seems likely we’ll all need to be vigilant over this thing for a lot longer than any of us had hoped.

Tradeoff number 3: I don’t know what I want to write about Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban. My country has been involved in Afghanistan for decades, but never with a clear, cogent mission. People — in this case, the Afghani people, working toward a shared destiny and the quest for human rights — need to hold each other to account. Just as we can’t beat a virus if people don’t accept shared moral responsibility, there are limits to what one country can do for another.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. By the way, if you get these dispatches via email, my previous post from about three weeks ago seemingly never went out that way, so you can read it here. And if you’d like to get future dispatches via email (since I post so rarely these days), you’ll find a link to sign up elsewhere on this page.

Be well and don’t despair. There is much good to celebrate, even amid this unsettled, uncertain season.

Happiness as a choice

“You always seem so happy,” my ballpark colleague says to me. “Are you always so happy?”

I’m a bit thrown by such an existential question, this change-up amid the usual between-innings banter. I agree that this is true, and I mumble something about having a hopeful orientation. Orientation is one way to put it, though perhaps not the most elegant. I wish I’d replied with my favorite quote, “Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” (Thanks as always, Br. David Steindl-Rast.) Yet there’s little reason to overthink my reply, in the moment or in hindsight.

Am I happy? Why yes, I am. It beats the alternative.

Mixed emotions are human, and June 19 is a day that will forever bring mixed emotions for me. I mostly feel joy for the birth 65 years ago today of a man whom I had the great luck to love over the last five years of his life—though of course that joy remains tinged with regret that he is no longer here. I may have a longer essay (or two) to write someday about Tom’s last few months and the anguish I felt after he was gone.

I can’t say I was happy during those hard months. But looking back three years, I guess I was joyful even amid the depths of that anguish. Scratch that: I know I was joyful, because that’s how we survive the worst things that life and death throw our way. Joy is also how we recognize the glimmers of goodness that are always glinting in our peripheral vision—for example, people who recognize our happiness because they themselves have chosen the gift of seeing life through an optimistic lens.

(As an aside, today is the first official Juneteenth, and that brings more mixed emotions: We should celebrate how far we’ve come as a country that we can now recognize the end of slavery with a federal holiday. No, this doesn’t right all the wrongs that centuries of human bondage have wrought in our country. The work for representation and reparations will continue. But can we make it joyful, generous, perhaps even playful work? Can we curb the tribalism and bickering, escape the confines of our identity silos, and give each other some room to breathe and grow?)

(Putting my soapbox away …)

I’m uncharacteristically rambling here, so I’ll stop, but after two months without a post, I wanted to check in. Life is good: I have just the right amount of work, I’m grateful for my family and friends, I’m enjoying my new-again neighborhood, and I’m plotting all kinds of adventures for this summer and beyond. It’s a beautiful life—and yes, a happy one. I’m joyfully greeting this season of sun and light and a return to the world, and I wish that for you, too. Thanks for reading Surely Joy.

A few words about the music for this post: Last night, I went to my first live music show in about 18 months, at my fave music club. Here’s a 10-year-old radio listener lounge version of a song LeRoy Bell and His Only Friends played last night, “Everything About You.” And a few days ago, I saw the glorious, raucous, sexy “In the Heights” at my favorite movie theater. The first eight minutes are below. Enjoy!

Pandemic postcard #54: Postscripts

When I wrapped up my series of 52 weekly posts a month ago, I said I’d write when I had something to say. Sixteen days ago, I wrote that I’d decided to move–which is mostly what I’ve been doing since then, although I’ve also managed to do a few other things. So here’s an update.

My new place is good. I moved two-and-a-half-miles and I am back in the neighborhood where I first landed in Seattle when I arrived here in 2013. At that point, I chose Lake City for its proximity to Tom and his suburban home a short bus ride away, but also for its affordability and diversity. I quickly grew to love Lake City for its human-scale character, and for the way, a couple of blocks off the gritty main drag, the streets feel nearly rural–perfect for the sort of aimless walks I enjoy each morning. I’m having a good time getting reacquainted with my new-old neighborhood, and I’ll write more about that in my next another post.

Here on the courtyard side of my new complex, I’ve mostly found the quiet I seek–though who knew a brand-new refrigerator could run so loudly, that people sometimes fly drones at the exact treetop level of my balcony, and that dogs (who may outnumber people here) like to bark at all hours. I hear one howling now, though that’s actually a much nicer complement to the birds’ dawn chorus than the staccato yips I hear around midnight. I had a few moving-in hiccups, including a minor water leak that the property manager swiftly addressed. She didn’t know about the drones, though. No place is perfect, but this place will do. I have the same sublime morning light I enjoyed at the last place, and a little more room, and a neighborhood I already know and like.

What else is new? I wrote five weeks ago about my then-uncertain prospects of getting vaccinated anytime soon, as a healthy 59-year-old in a state where there was then no timetable for anyone under 65 getting their shots. By early April, Washington state (spurred by leadership in the other Washington) had finally announced that everyone under 60 would be eligible on April 15, so I’d been prepared to wait a looooong time for my first jab–and likely not be fully vaccinated until well into May. But then, on the very day I gave notice that I’d leave my former apartment, I got an email from the property managers there noting that a mobile clinic would be on site to offer the one-and-done Johnson & Johnson vaccines that Friday. Everyone was welcome. So just like that, I got my shot. Of course, a few days later, the J&J “pause” was announced, but as a post-menopausal woman, the news was a mere stress blip on my moving-focused radar. I am grateful to be vaccinated; I tucked my CDC card into my passport, for it represents the same kind of freedom and sense of possibility. It’ll still be a while before I go abroad again, but it won’t be another full year.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken one more step back into life as I knew it pre-pandemic. Last Wednesday, 13 months to the day since I’d last seen a film in the theater, I returned to my favorite movie house and saw Minari. I was the only person there for the late-afternoon matinee, but I left my mask on anyway. That was weird, but it was delightful to see a movie on the big screen. Four days later, I returned to watch Nomadland, this time with a handful of other folks. (Although I’d already seen it twice on Hulu, I couldn’t pass up a chance to see its gorgeous cinematography of the American West in widescreen splendor.)

Yet more signs of spring: I am going to a ballgame today–I have one of about 9,000 tickets to see the Mariners and Dodgers play from socially distanced seating–and I return to my ballpark ushering job next week. A friend has invited me over for a small dinner gathering of five fully vaccinated friends this weekend, and I was delighted to be able to say, yes, I’ll be there.

Best of all, just a few weeks from now, I will be on a road trip to see my daughter for the first time since last July and to hug her for the first time since December 2019.

It won’t get any better than that.

We haven’t left the pandemic behind yet, but with fans in the stands and newly vaccinated folks reuniting every day, it feels like we’re on the way.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. I write for a living, so if you enjoy my work, feel free to hit the tip jar. If you’d like to get future posts via email, look for the link on the right side of this page (or maybe below this post, if you’re on a mobile device).

Pandemic postcard #52: Last in a series (for now)

One year ago tomorrow, I wrote the first of what has become a year’s worth of dispatches from our pandemic year. Although I’ve been blogging since 2003, I’d never been especially faithful about posting here at Surely Joy, but that changed last March. “I am going to write here every Friday, as I am able,” I said a week later — and I have. (Well, sometimes, I’ve posted on Thursday or Saturday. Close enough!)

We’ve all been marking anniversaries this month: the last time we went to an office, a classroom, a concert, or a religious service. The last unmasked visit with a friend. The last time we got to see someone who is no longer with us. So much lost. And yet so much gained, too, in understanding and perspective as we’ve navigated what Sophie Gilbert recently described in The Atlantic as “our unholy era of perpetual March.”

This is my last weekly pandemic postcard; I’m going to return to posting here when I feel I have something to say. As I conclude this year’s worth of weekly musings, I’d like to leave you with an exercise you can do to mark the end of your year in the pandemic, something I am borrowing from my friend Laura, who suggested it on her blog earlier this month. Laura described re-reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning and seeing anew a passage about how we store memories, “the full granaries of the past” into which we bring the harvest of our lives: “the deeds done, the ones loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.”

Laura writes, “The passage from Frankl’s book prompted me to begin a list of things I have done during this pandemic year, which has also been a time of change and loss in a different way. I have often felt unfocused and wondered where the days have gone. Have I lost them?” She continues, “My list included everything from caring for my husband post surgery to writing every morning (finally) to holding yoga practice with friends in my front yard. I quickly realized, this wasn’t a list of accomplishments, but rather a list of experiences. I had so many valuable memories that I quickly ran out of room on the page.”

At this time last year, we all had many ideas on ways we could bring meaning to a time that seemed devoid of any sense. We thought we might have a few weeks of isolation and weirdness, so most of us felt compelled to use it wisely. Then time folded in on itself; weeks became months and months became a year and here we are. Forget everything you didn’t do (or that you didn’t do as much as you had hoped). Think about what you’ve done — your storehouse of experiences and memories. Make a list or a drawing or a collage to capture it. Maybe write a letter to yourself to read a year from now.

I’d also love to leave you with these words, which I recently read in Creative Care, a book by Anne Basting. She writes, “Happiness or joy can spring from immediate pleasure in the moment. Meaningfulness, on the other hand, needs more cooks and more time to cook.”

This past year, we’ve all been part of creating something the world has never seen — a stew that has been seasoned by tears, laughter, despair, resilience, and hope. The kettle is still simmering; we’ll need to stir it from time to time.

We may never know when it’s done, but I still look forward to seeing how it turns out.

Thank you for reading Surely Joy. A special thanks to these people who offered support via my Patreon page over the past six months: Natalie, Jeff and Kevin, Rebecca, Laura, Marge and Lew, Jim and Kitty, David and Carrie, Chris and LeAnne, Anita, Jan, Nancy, Marianne, Joanne, Victoria, Tara, Scott, Kevin, Felicia, Eileen, Linda, Karen, and Mari. If you enjoy my writing, you can continue to support it via sharing my posts, hitting the tip jar, or buying a book. And elsewhere on this page, you’ll see a place where you can sign up to get Surely Joy via email when I write again — which I will. See you again soon.

Pandemic postcard #46: Don’t move this goalpost

When it comes to doing right by our planet, I am a perennial optimist. In 1971, inspired by the first Earth Day a year earlier, I started the John J. Audubon Nature Society at my elementary school. As a young reporter in the 1980s, I organized my newsroom to start recycling. In 2007, I took my 12-year-old daughter to hear Al Gore. And in 2012, I signed on to work for a nonprofit that organizes religious people to address climate change. Turns out they really needed a fundraiser and a data base wrangler, not a communications pro, so we parted ways after a year–but amid the ongoing politicization of climate science, I was inspired to learn how people from many faith traditions saw protecting the planet as a moral calling.

I am also a realist, which is why General Motors’ announcement that it will stop making gas-powered cars by 2035 strikes me as a very big deal. President Biden has already reversed many of his predecessor’s anti-environmental moves, which Donald Trump had in turn reversed from the Obama era. But GM knows it prefers certainty over the regulatory roulette of policy by executive order, so the automaker isn’t waiting for government to tell it what to do: It’s proactively committing itself to electric cars. It’s a bold and important move for a legacy American company, especially since transportation is the number one source of carbon emissions in the United States.

The year 2035 also is the Biden team’s target for zero fossil fuel emissions from power plants, which are the second largest source of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, after transportation. As climate reporter Coral Davenport said on “The Daily” from The New York Times this week, this benchmark, coupled with another Biden goal to eliminate all carbon from the U.S. economy by 2050, “is also exactly in line with what scientists say is required to avoid the most devastating effects of a warming planet.” We all know that those effects—severe storms, fires, drought, and rising seas—have already begun, and they’re not going away. Rather, this is about keeping the planet safe for people to inhabit at all.

American business and the new administration agree: It’s time to think big. Think about how, within 14 years, we could slash pollution as big transportation companies go electric and our electric plants go renewable. It would mean good new jobs for the folks who used to work in the oil, coal, and gas industries. It would mean America leading the world in a cause that really matters. Yet 14 years is not a long time at all. It’s been 14 years since I took my kid to hear Al Gore say that yes, the country that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, fought World War II on two fronts, beat communism, beat apartheid, fought for civil rights, and went to the moon could win over global warming.

We all used to talk about 2020 vision, and we all know how that worked out. Now, 2035 vision appears to be in sight. It’s not as catchy as 2020 vision, but if we can stick to these timetables—if we refrain from moving the goalposts yet again—we have a decent chance to halt the ultimate pandemic.

Click here to hear “The Daily” on Biden’s climate plan and here to read my account of Al Gore at Boise State in 2007. Thank you for reading Surely Joy!

Pandemic postcard #44: Let’s go, Joe

I’ve never understood people who loudly dislike and distrust government yet still seek to run it–or, more likely, run it into the ground (or drown it in the bathtub, to quote Grover Norquist). But a whole bunch of them have lost power in the past week, and thank goodness for that. Government alone can’t solve all our problems, but its might can do plenty of good. We’ve seen glimpses of that this past year in the pandemic relief packages and in government support of vaccine development, but not nearly enough was done under our dire circumstances.

And now comes President Joe Biden, who clearly loves government and who has stocked his White House with people who, like him, know how to use big government to get big things done. In his first two days on the job, Uncle Joe–no stranger to the West Wing–got right down to work. Even with just a narrow Democratic majority in Congress, we could be in for one of the most productive times for our government–and by extension, our country–that we’ve witnessed in decades.

But arresting the pandemic and its accompanying economic fallout is Job One. Biden refers to the fight against the mutating spread of COVID as a war, and he noted in his inaugural speech how the pandemic has already killed more Americans in one year than died in all of World War II. On Thursday, officially releasing his 200-page pandemic response plan, the new president noted that COVID will likely claim its 500,000th American victim by February.

As Biden said, the “brutal truth” is that it will take many months before most Americans get vaccinated, especially since the current supply can’t easily be increased when the manufacturing capacity simply doesn’t exist. But our new national CEO has already ordered other steps that should help in the near term, including using the Defense Production Act to produce more testing supplies and protective gear and even a special syringe that ekes another dose from every vaccine vial; mandating masks for federal employees and on interstate travel; and asking FEMA to open community vaccination centers.

Taken together with his swift actions on other policy priorities–especially advancing another economic relief package and rejoining the world community’s fight against climate chaos–I am excited by Biden’s commitment to action. Joe Biden is a get-it-done guy, Kamala Harris is a formidable partner/tie-breaking Senate president, and that’s exactly what we need now: as much progress as possible, as fast as possible.

I was working in politics the last time we had one party holding power in both the executive and legislative branches, in 2009 when Barack Obama became president with Biden as his VP amid another economic crisis. (Here’s a remembrance of that year’s inauguration, which I attended.) Within days, Obama and Biden faced Republican stonewalling over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Obama nevertheless signed into law within a month of becoming president. Within months, the Tea Party–unfortunately abetted by some “Blue Dog” Democrats–rose up to oppose most of what Obama wanted to do, especially the Affordable Care Act. “Obamacare” passed in March 2010 but Democrats lost the House in that year’s elections and the Senate in 2014.

In the past dozen years, as Biden so memorably put it, hyper partisan politics has become “a raging fire destroying everything in its path.” (I blame Fox, MSNBC, and especially antisocial media, for enabling this decline.) But Biden said it doesn’t have to be this way, and I’m inclined to think that most Americans–weary of a fight that has nearly cost us our country–will agree that we can disagree on plenty of issues and still accomplish a lot of good.

As Charlotte Alter writes in her upcoming cover story for Time magazine, “Unity is not the same as uniform opinion or even widespread agreement. By these standards, the United States of America has rarely been unified, and never for long.” But earlier generations still managed to pass social safety net programs, environmental protections, and voting rights for women and people of color (which, extensively rolled back in recent years, must now be restored and strengthened).

“Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for war,” as Biden put it.

How refreshing.

Let’s go.

I’m sure you watched the inauguration, but you might want to read President Biden’s speech. Here you go.  And of course you want to hear the incandescent Amanda Gorman perform her poem again. See below. I’ve also included two of my favorite highlights from the “Celebrating America” show. Thanks for reading.


Pandemic postcard #42: Back from the brink

They filed back into the House a little before midnight Eastern Time, the young pages bearing boxes of electoral vote certificates, Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Senate in their wake. It was a powerful scene of rebuke to the insurrectionists who, hours before, spurred on by a pathological president, had stormed the seat of our democracy.

January 6, 2021, has already been sealed and seared in our consciousness as one of the most surreal days in American history. The day began with news that Democrats would take control of the Senate, as the Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first Black man from the South elected to the Senate and Jon Ossoff, 33, became the youngest person to claim a Senate seat since Joe Biden won weeks before his 30th birthday in 1972. Together with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, their victories mean an end to the gridlock that has plagued Washington for many years.

The woman Warnock had narrowly defeated, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, began the day intending to object to the certification of electoral votes—that is, to continue upholding the conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, the same web of fiction that Trump continued to spin as he urged his shock troops to march down Pennsylvania Avenue from a White House rally on Wednesday. But the day’s events had compelled her to reconsider, she said, “and I cannot in good conscience reject these votes.”

What I saw on my phone a few hours ago. I’d turned off the TV after debate began on the objection over Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, but I woke up in the middle of the night wondering where things stood.

Loeffler was joined by men who had been enabling Trump far longer than she had, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. In the end, all but a handful of Republican senators decided they’d had enough, and enough Republican House members joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to overrule the objections and certify that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election.

I know that many people who share my progressive views want to blame everyone who voted for Trump for yesterday’s events. I don’t agree. But I do hope that after yesterday, everyone who has supported Trump can look into their hearts and see what most of the Republican senators and many Trump staffers were finally able to realize yesterday: that our nation has barely survived four years of this president and we will be better off when he is gone.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. I write for a living, so if you enjoy my work, feel free to hit the tip jar.