Per Usual, Subject Lines Elude Me Before My Second Cup Of Coffee.
Hello, my dearests, it’s been a spell since I wrote to you. While I’m normally someone who can find an iota of humor in a garbage fire, the last week has been challenging for even eternal optimists like me, and I found myself closing my laptop in the mornings and going for walks instead.
So consider this Missive me getting back on the horse, trying to find a way to make sense of all of this via very-public morning meanderings.
Like every privileged white person and aspiring ally, I need to address my own role in a racist society. I need to learn and I need to be better. For this week’s anti-racist education, I started reading White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
If you need some form of good news, British Columbia—and the world!—has a new superhero in Dr. Bonnie Harvey, the amazing Provincial Health Officer who has worked over 150 days straight keeping the province safe in times of COVID. If you’ve been following the differences between the Canadian response to COVID and the American response, which I have… WOOF, what a difference when a civilized society listens to experts and makes choices based on what those experts tell them to do. So go read Dr. Henry’s Wikipedia page, because in addition to working tirelessly to protect British Columbians during the pandemic—and coining a Missive-adored tagline of “be kind, be calm and be safe,”—she wears John Fluevog’s, a quirky Canadian shoe line I was obsessed with in high school. And while I tend to refrain from mentioning what a woman leader wears, Fluevog designed a shoe in her honor and donated all of the profits to Food Banks BC, and I love that, so it makes it a worthy mention, because I’m looking for joy wherever I can find it, people.
Sometimes, karma has such a delightful sense of humor: US Military Could Lose Space Force Trademark to Netflix Series. According to CBR, it seems like “Attorneys for the U.S. military have done little to secure the Space Force name as a registered trademark” whilst Netflix lawyers are ON IT. It probably won’t have a huge impact, but it’s still a delightful pebble in some White House lawyer’s shoe, and that makes it worth it.
So remember how a rich eccentric buried a million dollars worth of treasure in the Rocky Mountains and told the world to try and find it? And four men died attempting to determine where he hid it? Well, someone found the treasure, and all because they deciphered the clues in a 24-line poem in the eccentric rich guy’s autobiography. 2020: it isn’t all garbage fire murder hornet totalitarianism! It’s also a not-quite-as-but-still-deadly-at-times-Dangerous Game!
One day at a time, poppets. Be kind to each other.
xoxo Amy