When will this end? And other questions with no answers.

Friends, I hope you don't come here for answers. At best, I offer my own explorations, suggest frameworks, make connections. Like many of you, I'm struggling with the moment we're in. It's all sooo much and impossible to make sense of fully.

In the midst of our current maelstrom, I know this: pockets of hope, spacious, capacious pockets exist in our country and world. I know this because the former governor who shall not be named is getting a run for his money from Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander in the New York City Mayor's race. I know this because my friends in Los Angeles tell me about being in the streets but also protecting individual immigrants they know. I know this because some of us will not be distracted from the genocide in Gaza. I also know this because I spent last week among 100 writers - of all ages, races, genders, published and not.

One of my biggest fears right now is that our imaginations are suppressed because of sheer exhaustion from being on the defensive and from fear for our own survival – as individuals, families, organizations. When writer after writer read from their work last week, expressing themselves in poems, stories and essays, I saw evidence of our creative spirit, of the power of words fueled by imagination, personal experience and community struggle.

My group of 100 at the Kenyon Writers' Workshop are one pocket of hope. Across the country, an estimated five million people formed pockets of hope on Saturday, June 14. Hope can feel like an empty word, especially after the Obama years. We need hope and…action. Through rebellion, through creativity, through understanding that everything is connected, through building new avenues for collective liberation.

One of those avenues is dismantling the supremacy of hustle culture, of work as our saviour. College graduates are facing a tough job market, with unemployment among their peers as high as 5.8%. That's one more reason why young people can see through our bullshit systems so clearly. They not like us. And by us, I mean people like me who thought the systems could change with our involvement, who were caught up in a neoliberal dragnet of incremental victories. In fact, the systems themselves are rotten at their core–not just the ones we easily villainize–like government or private equity–but also the ones we've joined and revered–like nonprofit, philanthropy and yes, publishing.

So, f*#k ICE, and f*#k gun violence and f*#k colonialism. They all exist in (dis)harmony: let's fight them all at the same time.

Sayu