Stay Cool
On Media Distractions, Political Manipulations, Corporate Exploitations, and the Deadly American Heatwave
On Tuesday of this week, after walking the dog, I sat in my yard to catch my breath. I needed a minute or two. It was over a hundred degrees in the shade.
While I was sitting there, I had a thought. I pulled out my phone, recorded the thought as a video, and posted it to social media. This is what I said:
It’s been hot and heating up for a very, very long time. In a lot of ways. But today it’s over a hundred degrees in New England and heating up. And it’s heating up for people who don’t look like me, who live in every community in America. And it’s heating up for all the people in the Middle East. And we live under a government that thrives in the heat. And we live with algorithms that encourage the heat. And we live with corporations that profit from the heat. And it’s our job to stay cool, and help each other stay cool, and to remember that there’s another way.
I post it again now because it’s still with me, this impromptu statement of purpose.
“Heat.” It’s metaphorical here, but it’s also painfully literal.
Global warming. War. Interment Camps. Genocide.
We’re being led into a violent, deadly nihilism—a literal and metaphorical American heatwave—because our politicians and the media and the corporations all profit when the heat is turned up as high as it will go.
The heat gives them all a reason for being, and a reason to exploit, and a way to manipulate the otherwise-innocent.
The heat gives them life, as it kills the rest of us.
For this week’s episode of my podcast, Be True, I interviewed my friend Claire Thom, founding editor-in-chief of the
. We talked about Claire’s work to create an international community based on poetry and charity, and about the hope she provides to writers, readers, and podcast listeners around world.Toward the end of our chat, Claire mentioned her friendship with a young poet named Haia Mohammed whose book, The Age of Olive Trees, is available from Outspoken Press.
Unbeknownst to us, while Claire and I were talking, Haia was fighting the heat again. This time she was raising money to repair the water well for the Al-Mawasi area of Gaza, her home.
I think she succeeded this time. I think the well in Al-Mawasi is running today. But for Haia there’s always another struggle on the horizon.
The whole world, and Haia’s world in particular, is too fucking hot right now. We need to lower the temperature. I don’t mean our righteous anger. Or our resistance to fascism. Or our insistence on justice, on life, for all. I mean our confused, homicidal, artificially-induced frenzy.
We need to step outside of the chaos that manipulates us—the chaos by which they manipulate us—and try to see the world a little more clearly, with a cool eye.
I suspect that if we can turn down the heat, even a little—if we can ignore the political opportunists, the media hacks, the algorithms, and the corporate shills, even for a moment—we’ll realize that it doesn’t need to be this fucking hard.
Some water. Some rest. A poem or two. It shouldn’t be this fucking hard.
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In this one I speak with Claire Thom, founding editor-in-chief of The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, about creating an international literary community, the power of poems, the importance of giving, and…hope.