Reading List: Consider This The Sign That You Should Go Out And Buy Yourself A Bouquet Of Flowers To Brighten Up Your Weekend.
Hello, friends! If you’re in the US, you’ve likely been enjoying the joys of a four day week, which of course means a full week and more crammed into 96 hours. What can I say, I am le tired.
To the long reads!
Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either (The New York Times) - We’ve had such a hard year that we have official government discussion of UFOs (including previously unreleased videos!!!) and it isn’t the only topic of our discussion. It seems the truth is out there, but we’re all too damned exhausted to care about it.
Katherine Eban, The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair) - Haven’t read this yet, but am very curious to what it posits about how we got here [gestures wildly at the universe in 2021]
Meena Harris, Honest Reasons Why Women Don’t Want To Go Back To In-Person Work (McSweeney’s) This is silly and I appreciate it, especially the bit about needing to remember how to cry in an office.
(TRIGGER WARNING FOR THE NEXT TWO PIECES: discussion of residential schools and slavery)
Andrew Nikiforuk, ‘The Story of a National Crime’ (The Tyee) - I hope you all saw last week that the remains of 215 children were found buried near a residential school in Kamloops, BC. Writing about Canada’s terrible history of violence and erasure of Indigenous people is difficult, especially since the awful reality brings the fiction that is the “Nice” Canadian narrative bestowed upon us by other countriesand internally embraced into sharp and terrible relief. When I was in college, I heard a lot about how Canada was “so much less racist” than the US, and at first, I agreed, knowing there hadn’t been a full-on war fought over the owning and enslavement of humans. But that was a privileged and naive perspective I’d developed after never learning the full extent of the actions that destroyed Indigenous communities in my homeland. Actions that included the forced removal of children from their homes and families into boarding schools rampant with disease in which these children could not speak their own language or practice their own culture, and in which many were physically and sexually abused. It’s horrific. In 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Committee released a damning report on this system that operated from 1831 to 1996 - OVER 160 YEARS - that found the residential school systems amounted to nothing short of cultural genocide. I encourage you to read the report. So I don’t have much else to say, just that I need to continue reading and learning, and I hope the remains of those children (and others like them) can get the respect and peace they deserve. Thank you to my dear cousin Kate Henderson for her guidance and direction to sources on this topic.
Michele L. Norris, Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same? (Washington Post) - I haven’t started reading this one yet, but will be reading it in the spirit of the above. How do we as a society face and learn from atrocities committed in the past upon which so many structures of the present are built? I don’t know, but I’m going to keep reading about it.
Be kind to yourself. I appreciate you.
xoxo Amy