Pour love like syrup (What I'm Reading)

Another strange cutie ^ that surfaced at the thrift store--made in Japan, so probably 1960s. With an amanita mushroom! They are all the rage now, have you noticed? Foraging started to come in. . . a dozen years ago? and now mushrooms are on everything. "Put a mushroom on it!"

At work I'm sorting boxes of Xmas stuff that've been saved for two years, or more... It's being brought down from the rafters, and I've been throwing out half of it. For instance, components for Victorian Christmas Villages, which don't really sell and we already have a lot of. Hanging wooden plaques that say 'Magic' and 'Believe' do sell, but we have too many. MORE resin Santas.

Yesterday when I left work, the Xmas shelves were still pretty full, and it's getting too close to the holiday for everything to sell.
I think.
This is my first year tracking Xmas sales, but I notice Michael's Crafts has already put their holiday stuff on sale--for 70% off. Of course the thrift store has no plan or pattern... I'll suggest we put ours on sale too this week.

I got a pile of books at the store yesterday.
I'd given away my copy of The Long Haul (1990) and was happy that one finally came in. It's the autobiography of Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School, where people learn nonviolent tactics for social change.
Rosa Parks didn't just decide one day not to give up her seat (though many others did)--she'd attended a workshop at the school.

The Spanish kids books are for my sister, who is tutoring a girl from Ecuador in reading.

 

A couple others are for Marz, because she'll be studying the Soviet Union next semester: one of Martin Cruz Smith's Soviet mysteries featuring detective Arkady Renko, and The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, though the last Romanovs died this week in her Russian Empire class, on the last day of the semester. (The author, Robert Alexander, lives here in town.)

I don't know how much they'll look at the Cold War pop culture in the US, but Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture (2001), below, is fun, with lots of lurid movie posters and the like.

I started reading ^ Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023) last night.
It follows the trail from Ruby Ridge and Waco to McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, and on to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The book was published in 2023, and now here we are, and their friends have been elected to power.

I don't know that I'll keep reading the book though--I don't need to know, step by step, what TmcV did, and with whom, and it's a lot of that.

I prefer the related American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), by Chris Hedges.
And, have you heard Christian Piccolini, who was a white supremacist leader in the 1990s?
He writes and talks about being young and disconnected and ignorant, looking for "identity, community, and purpose"--and, most importantly, belonging-- and finding it in hate groups, who recruit exactly those youth.

In Christian's TED Talk: "My descent into America's neo-Nazi movement & how I got out" (Dec. 2017), he says,"Hatred is born of ignorance. Fear is its father. Isolation is its mother."And what brings people out of hate groups is "receiving compassion from the people they least deserved it from, when they least deserved it."

He ends with a challenge:
"Find someone who is undeserving of your compassion---and give it to them."

It's not this simple, because it isn't literally possible, but I do wish we could pour love like syrup & butter, all around, on all sides.
Some people are hardwired-psychotic, but most people are pancakes, and a lot of them are dry.
And sometimes we are dry...

Pouring love is a practice, not a feeling.
(Hope is not a strategy. Wishing is not an action plan.) 

What fills our pitchers?

If you ain't gonna study war no more, you gotta study something else,  offer something else, and PRACTICE and do something else--
as Myles Horton's Highlander School teaches: "Conflict can be used to encourage people to work for a better society."

I see some people, some friends going down the rabbit hole of 24-Hour Bad News, so they are swamped with fear.
I suggest we only need, and can only tolerate, a little bit of bad news. A little bit of awareness of conflict spurs us on;
too much drags us down. (Everyone has a different tolerance.)

But this stuff--the Bad Stuff--has a pull. It radiates Importance. It makes us  feel we are Doing Something by reading about it.
But really, it can drain on our abilities. And with the Internet, it's constantly on tap.

I have a friend who used to read the news obsessively. She said it was our "duty" to be informed. But there's no inherent virtue in knowing the news, and she never DID anything because of what she read.
She just told you about it, vibrating with distress.

She was--and is--a good, nice, loving person in general, but I didn't like to spend much time with her. Being informed about bad things seemed more like an addiction that drained her, not a practice that sustained and supported her.

Then, a year ago, she had a brain injury that damaged her ability to read and, slightly, her memory. She came over for tea a few weeks after DT won the presidential election. I'd invited her, but actually I was dreading seeing her, thinking she'd be radiating terror.

Instead, she said nothing about politics.
It was great!
Did we really need to work ourselves into a lather of distress, without coming up with something to do, to boost our resilience, to HELP others (and ourselves!), like we would have in the past?
No!
I always found that useless and self-indulgent.

Yes, things are bad.
Things are always bad, and they can get worse. It's the law of nature: things fall apart. Entropy wins.
It's truly terrifying to consider. And it is the work of consciousness, the work of civilization to consider,
What helps?

My friend Kathy Moran, who died at fifty-seven, used to say, "There's a million ways to make a better world. Find your way."
And find things that sustain you on your way. Solace.

Here endeth my sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent.
But I don't mean to be preaching like I have answers, I am trying to figure this out for myself...
And it is literally pancake day--I make pancakes with ripe bananas for sweetness for bink on Sundays.
Yay!