First of all, thank you for reading and sending me so many nice notes about yesterday’s New York Times essay. It was so nice hearing from so many of you. On the Times site, the article attracted more than 1,300 comments, which is a lot even for them. What I take away from that is that more and more people are ready to have conservations about what ails us that welcome complexity, that look for what we have in common despite our apparent divides. The A.I. situation only makes it more vital.
Today I want to pivot from sharing my thoughts on the question of abandonment as our shared experience of modern America — to hearing all of your thoughts.
How do you experience this sense of abandonment? What do you think are the remedies? Do you struggle to find common cause with others who may also feel deserted, but for different reasons? What might make those rhymes easier to hear?
And a personal request. What has occasioned this conversation is the three years I’ve spent working on my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR. I am beyond eager to share it with you. This work changed me and grew me in so many ways, and I hope reading it might do something similar for you. When we go deeply into the stories of other people’s humanity, we come away seeing everything a little differently.
If this conversation we’ve been having has meant something to you, I’d love for you to read the book. And if you know you want to, I’d be grateful if you ordered your copy now. Preorders make a real difference in helping a book find its way to more readers — and, most of all, it would mean a lot to know that many of you will be reading it in tandem when it comes out.
You can order a copy here. And eternally: thank you for reading, for thinking with me, and for being part of this community.
I don’t feel particularly abandoned, but I believe that is in part because I got a lot of therapeutic help in my 30’s with the early loss of my father. I spent much of my 40’s and 50’s in supportive groups: group therapy, yoga studios, UU church with a deep understanding that I need people. I rely a lot on groups of people especially when times are rough, including my family. They sometimes disappoint me, but I seem to hold faith in people when I gather with them. Thanks to everyone who I know. Thanks Priya for Art of Gathering.
On a city-wide level(I live in DC) lots of bike lanes have been built, but there’s an abandonment of responsibility to follow any roadway rules. It is now the norm to ride a motorized or electric bike the wrong way on a one way bike lane. There’s no enforcement of rules of the road. I don’t have answers here, but I wonder if at some point now in my 60’s I will give up commuting by bike because it’s too dangerous. That will really be a loss for me and I’m not sure how I would feel.
Abandonment of enforcement of rules, abandonment of collective responsibility, all within the context of a madman doing what he wants with our city without any enforcement of rules or sense of collective responsibility. That’s where I’m at. Thanks Anand. I look forward to reading your book.
I pivoted from a relatively successful career in big cities to return to the region where I’m from, Central Appalachia, which until recently was completely gutted and abandoned. My husband and I came back to the region during a different America, in 2011, to learn a lot of do it yourself skills and start a farm.
I came back to do something about where I was from, and until 2024, a lot of of us, under the radar, had shifted the narrative for that region about what was possible – – the pinnacles for us being federal investment in training people for renewable energy, and a grant that I helped achieve for regional local foods logistics to support over 40 farms. Both the kinds and sizes of federal investment in people that signaled actual sector build.
During this time, I even wrote a book, reflecting on how the coalfields of Appalachia got here, extracted and abandoned, and traced the mix of private capital, state capital, and federal capital that props up and creates any economic sector in the United States. Working together, a lot of us attempted to mimic that with a different vision for our local future. Both of our federal infrastructure grants around these new visions were killed in the last 19 months.
And suddenly our region is back on the radar to be controlled by data centers, rare earth mineral projects, and sites for large scale industrial projects that people and other places wouldn’t tolerate. But that’s the macro.
Add to this, the flaming medical system shit shows that were the deaths of my elderly parents, one poor, and one middle class, which brought home a different kind of abandonment. A friend of mine and I discussed how, in the end, even being middle class or rich (her family, not mine) in the US is not enough to escape an absolutely undignified death. You needed to be wealthy. You had to be wealthy enough to set it up all yourself, and to your point, to do it yourself.
I roll this into the delusions of my neighbors around libertarian fantasies of radical family and self-care, and their choice to birth at home and, I sit with the knowledge that the healthcare system that was supposed to be a good regional system, failed me in the birth of our son, whom we only found out 10 years later that through the tremendous bungling of his birth, has a kind of brain based blindness. The medical professionals here in the US we paid out-of-pocket (not covered by insurance) to help us figure out why suddenly this very bright child was failing at school, took our money and comfortably misdiagnosed or put him through treatments that were not only expensive, but absolutely ineffective and unnecessary.
I’m still here in the US working. I’m the one to wrap up a lot of the activities on our farm, which we luckily downsized tremendously early last year in the face of what we anticipated to be the tremendous economic downturn that we're in right now and the continued severe escalation of prices to farm. Last summer my son and husband moved for now to Germany. There, while not perfect, within a half hour at an ophthalmologist who sat and listened to us, asked the questions herself, did the examination herself rather than outsource it to an assistant– she came back with what turned out to be an accurate diagnosis of our child’s issue. I had several doctors in Germany and the UK hear the birth story and immediately suggest the potential problem. Had the potential for litigation kept the doctors in the US from suggesting it?
Several years back, my husband and I used to do speaking engagements around sustainable agriculture, and we’d open it with: neither Calvary nor the cavalry is coming to save you.
All of this above is not even counting what we saw near us with Hurricane Helene. The region mobilized first by DIY, because most literally, no one else could get in to save people….
I have a PhD; I’m versed in the language of existential and unfathomable risk.
But most of all, your article brought home for me that my recent self admonishment that I should have known more about birthing my child, that I should’ve taken a full how to help others have a baby class and learned how to birth a baby, that the REAL mistake I made was relying on anyone actually to help us to show up. That I was the problem that I just had not done it myself enough.
I have friends that stockpile thinking they’re going to survive with buckets of beans and cabinets of guns whatever it is that the next proposed apocalypse is supposed to be.
I know that we only survive in community and through communities of care.
There are a lot of rural Black folks where I still live (my family is mostly white), and they have rightly retreated to their farms and their families and their communities for that care because they know no one‘s coming to truly help them and by no one, I mean the people in power.
My late father used to explain to me how older people that could no longer work, and that had no means of paying for medical assistance, all of this prior to Social Security and Medicare, would just sit down on the front porch in a rocking chair and, within short time, die. He reminded me how Social Security was called the communist scourge then. He remembers people just sitting down on the front porch and soon being dead.
I have younger friends and activist friends who deeply participate in mutual aid. It’s interesting that James Talarico leaned on the love thy neighbor message recently. Unprovoked, never with any political message on a T-shirt or on our vehicle, I’ve had people put their hands on me and lash out at me where I live (all and only since 2016). The farm that we bought is now surrounded by white Christian nationalists and replacement theory Libertarians.
Kumbaya.