My Complicated Relationship With NPR

I confess. I am an NPR junkie. I listen to it in the car, while I cook, while other people are watching the Super Bowl. I use ideas I get from NPR in my teaching. I drop NPR nuggets in conversation with friends. It's the best thing going in terms of intellectual stimulation and reliable news. And, yet, I get irritable with its liberal leaning, romantic meritocracy. When I say liberal, it's not because I am a conservative who sees "liberal bias" of the media everywhere. I say liberal because NPR is not radical enough for me. Coverage of issues on NPR stops short of calling it like it is, that corporations have high-jacked democracy, the the top 1 percenters control the lion's share of the wealth (and the means to get their message out to the masses), that we're going to hell in a hand basket environmentally, that we are a hair-trigger's millisecond from nuclear annihilation. I want NPR to get off its polite, liberal ass and take a stand for the social overhaul that I think is necessary for our survival rather than placate the very corporations that continue to fleece the rest of us, that will suck the last bit of living breath out of the planet to keep from giving their gold to those who most need it. It's time, NPR. It's the eleventh hour.

The Most Important Work

When time opens a window, when the air clears enough to see what really matters, when distractions settle and you can feel your beating heart, you have a chance to get it right. The tools you need for this challenge are imagination and action. Your imagining what might be that is the remedy for what pains you in the middle of the night, for the undone curriculum of your soul. In the still of morning, right before the dawn, you can see it if you look hard enough, are courageous enough to sustain your gaze on what you know needs to be done. The work is to hold that close and not forget as the day gathers momentum and then to take one step, and another, in the direction of that vision, to seek out others who have listened and join them in building a better world.

COVID as AFGO

Crisis turns existing ways of operating inside-out or upside-down, and that, my friends, might have have a silver lining. COVID may contain within it an AFGO, "another f#&king growth opportunity." While not what I would choose if I had a say in how life should go, this pandemic presents us with an opportunity to overcome "separation syndrome," or the idea that individuals are not affected by, and responsible for, other humans and our natural world. COVID, for one thing, underscores the idea that the health of others affects the health of each of us as individuals. The peeing in the pool analogy works well in this case. If we support behaviors that increase infection, that condone people getting sick, sooner rather than later, we too, more likely, will be sickened. We are connected whether we want to admit it or not. We are, as one good book says, our brother's (and sister's) keeper. It's time to re-assess how well the myth of radical individualism, of taking care of me-me and letting the rest of the world go to perdition, serves us, and look to composing a story that values the common good, that restores a social contract, a worldview that bypasses the idolatry of the self. It ain't just about you no more, and that might not be such a bad thing.