Hi there
That sentence has been running through my head since Saturday, Jan. 24, and the murder of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital in Minnesota.
I expect a few of you will say, No politics, just books.
First, this is not about politics.
It’s about values, my country, its constitution, the rule of law, justice. Since you read my books, none of those should come as a shock to you. Some years ago, I went to a candidate forum. I had a few questions. (That shouldn’t surprise my readers, either.) By the end, different people on stage had called me a soft-hearted liberal and a rock-headed conservative. (It was a time when more people held back their rudest instincts. Some of us still do.) My neighbor/friend chortled at me ticking off both “sides.” I was fine with that. They didn’t have adequate answers and the sides I care about are values, my country, its constitution, the rule of law, justice.
Second, there will still be books.
But I’m not going to censor myself about real life. It is vital to stand up for what I believe in. My parents were the WW2 Greatest Generation, with Dad in combat for months in North Africa and years in Europe. Whenever he was Stateside teaching what he’d learned, Mom traveled with him, with their quarters including a whitewashed pigsty and another place where Dad shot rats in the bedroom. I have had the incalculable good fortune to be able to coast on their sacrifices. Now, it’s my turn.
I’ve called my three congresspeople nearly every day for more than a year, along with the White House comment line when it’s open, and a few other politicians as they have encouraged or enraged me. I’ve sent letters. I’ve attended protests (first time in my life.) I’ve donated – more than I ever would have dreamed of before this. I’ve made (unprofessional!) videos on tips for calling, on resources for info, on my thoughts. I’ve altered my spending, not only to have more to donate, but to not give my money to people doing things that go against my values ** (after verifying from at least two reliable sources, because – here’s a shocker – Internet posts can be wrong. OpenSecrets.org is a good resource. I’ve also called a few places directly. If they hang up because you ask a question, that’s a hint.) I’ve also been conscious of my attention habits – from not adding to the audience of entities that do not have integrity, to clicking on good reporting by (especially local) news as encouragement, to not contributing juice to hateful/ignorant/bot comments on my or other posts by not responding to them.
In addition to continuing those efforts, I’m looking for more. I won’t deliberately shoehorn such matters in here, but neither will I avoid them.
On social media, I will share more. I tend to go for info, so you’re most likely to see things like the names and office phone numbers of the Senate and House DHS oversight committee chairs, who have failed to exercise any oversight. I previously shared that on Instagram only. It will go more places now.
**I am wrestling with what to do about Amazon and, to a lesser extent, Apple. I don’t buy from either of them. But my books are for sale there. A while back, I advertised with Amazon or included links to one or both on ads. No more. Over the past year, I’ve eliminated the book packages where they took 70% of each sale. But, still, 30% of every sale of one of my books goes into their coffers and that is some portion of the millions they’re paying this administration to try to curry favored treatment. I don’t want even a fraction of a penny from my work to go to the destruction of the East Wing or the accursed ballroom . . . among other things.
I also abhor what Bezos and his ethics-challenged CEO have done to the Washington Post, where I spent 23 years. It is both inspiring and heartbreaking to see the good journalism being done by people in the newsroom despite this antithesis-of-leadership.
So. I am weighing pulling my books from those sites versus the benefits of using income from them to donate.
I am deeply grateful to so many of you who have made shop.PatriciaMcLinn.com this close to being my top earner. I can’t say that gives me the option to do without Amazon and Apple, because I would be willing to pull the plug on them even if it ends my business. But it has allowed me to both donate and keep some of my team on board as the publishing biz has become much more constrained.
But those considerations are small potatoes.
I come back to where I started this.
This is the moment. To know who I am. To be open about what’s important.
In this video I speak further about this topic: This is the moment.
Here is my YouTube playlist of all of My Thoughts & Observations.