 Thank you so much for inviting me tonight. And thank you all for coming out on a mid-week adventure. Just showing up is already so important. I think no small active rebellion goes to waste. Maybe unpunished. We are in a surveillance state. But anyway, I just thought I just wanted to promote two books. And this one, we all happen to be in this one. It's called Radical Hope, edited by Carolina de Robertis, who's just a fantastic novelist and teacher at San Francisco State and a former grad student of mine. It so happens. And anyway, in it, we all wrote letters trying to navigate and contend with the disaster that has befallen us. And so I thought I would just read my letter, which is quite short. And it ends the collection. And I got the idea from the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation, which it's embedded in the essay, so it'll speak for itself here. But it's called Queridísima Palomita, a letter to my great, great, great, great granddaughter. Muy querida nietesita, I'm writing to you from some 200 years or more earlier than your birth. What I wouldn't give to have been there or at the birth of each of the previous six big-hearted women who preceded you. Why six? Because I'm trying to imagine a world, your world, seven generations from now. Why big-hearted? Because I trust the long line of women originating with Pilar Akiko Garcia-Brown, born 1992, my own luminous daughter and your great, great, great, great grandmother. I might be off on the greats, so just forgive me. I want to believe, believe fervently, that big-heartedness is a trait that can be passed on and lived fully, along with other precious bequathals. Generosity, spiritual beauty, creativity, a sense of humor, gentleness, a concern for others, hope, tolerance, a seeking nature, the ability to forgive, strength, vulnerability, encouragement, curiosity, sensuality, adventure, protectiveness, and a love for nature and all its creatures. May I call you Palomita? Yes, little dove, bringer of peace. In its plural form, Palomitas, it means popcorn in Spanish. Do you speak Spanish, other languages? Recently, I permitted myself an alter ego for the long-denied painter in me and named her Eva Perdiz, after a blue-headed quail dove in Cuba, where I was born. It's an endangered species, like so many others in our flailing world. What is your universe like, dearest child of the future? Is it too endangered? I'm trying to bring it into focus, but it isn't easy. Civilizations can last long and die hard. Changes often more convulsive than gradual. War, sadly, easier than peace. Are such painful derailments necessary for growth? Sometimes I think about how the end of World War II was a mere 70 years ago. How the world, as everyone understood it then, was believed to be over. In fact, the Germans had a name for it, Yarnul, year zero. Today, the times feel disturbingly similar, apocalyptic. And yet, I remind myself, humanity went on after 1945 and continued forging ahead in the face of ever-greater atrocities to keep rebuilding anew. Is your planet warmer and wetter than mine? Have the decisions we fought against, fought for, yielded a more just and verdant world? Have you read about our desperate times in your history books? Are there books? I hope technology isn't holding you hostage the way just so many of us today, fracturing our concentration, keeping us neglectful of those we love, surrendering our time to its empty seductions. Do you follow the cycles of the moon? The seasons? Are there breezes to cool your brow? I ask because you are on the cusp, as I write today, of very bad times, querida necesita, when the forces of destruction are lining up to dismantle and trample our very basic hard-won rites. Why must we keep traveling full circle to ground zero, reinventing ourselves to the same sacred places? I worry about what today's devastations will push forward to your generation, seven generations from now. Can you take any rights for granted, darling Palomita? Is there still injustice in your world? Poverty and equality, racism? How can we move ahead and trust that our progress is real, irreversible, that we don't have to keep fighting the same battles again and again? Or is that the nature of guarding one's rights, preventing us from ever taking them for granted, not even for a moment, it seems. But there are things we should be able to take for granted. Don't you think? Is your air clean enough to breathe? Your water fresh enough to drink? Can you love whomever you want without fear or discrimination? Walk the streets freely? Do good work and get paid fairly for it? Is your body your own domain? Are you at liberty to decide that children you will bear or not? Can loved ones and strangers alike travel openly across borders? How is the education in your time? Nowadays, young people like you are overly burdened with the financial debts from their studies. Can you imagine how unscrupulous it is to profit from another's desire for learning, for betterment? Seven generations from mine to yours. How much has everything changed? Yes, there is heartlessness in my world, do sebalomita, but there's also beauty. A few days ago, I took a long hike in the woods near my home. It had been raining hard after many years of drought in California, and the streams rushed with water. Neon yellow, orange mushrooms sprouted everywhere and others nestled along the fallen chunks of redwood trees were dark and leathery looking as if sun cured. Yet, as soft as I imagine your cheek would be, I spotted too a small unexpected waterfall. It was hypnotic. Seven generations from my world to yours. Does any of this still exist for you? The constitution of the Iroquois nation, sometimes known as the great law of the Iroquois, says in part that its people should, quote, have always in view, not only the past and present, but also coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground, the unborn of the future, end quote. And yet I see your face somehow, balomita, round and gentle as my own daughters. It isn't easy to change the world, corazón. No easier for you in your time than it is for us in ours. But what I wish for you is to keep trying, perpetuating our most precious bequizals, living with grace and dignity and passion and ensuring those possibilities for all. Keep trying too for the seven generations who will come after you and after them and after them again. See, I wish for you an adventure and loving protection both and for you to help sustain the unbroken chain of hope. Sending all my love to you in the future, tu abuelita, Cristina. Thank you. So I had the good fortune as well to be included in Radical Hope, and I hope that you all will have an opportunity to pick it up. I decided not to read from it because it was such a sweet piece about my great-grandmother and just how I learned hope from her and my family. And, but we wanted to talk about other things that we were feeling post-apocalypse. And so I got in touch with my anger. And so I wanted to write a little bit about that. And one of the things that I love, Leah Garchik quoted our local, wonderful political comedian, Will Durst, in her column in The Chronicle. And a story, I guess, Will Durst told in which he goes into a bar in North Beach and there's a woman bartender and he's sitting there and he's bemoaning our fate and he's bereft. And he keeps saying, oh my God, they won and they have all the guns. And the woman bartender says, but we have the lesbians. And I don't know if that actually happened but I just love that because it gets in touch with how I felt in the 70s. The anger as a lesbian feminist for me was so strong. We all felt like guerrilla warriors. And I say guerrilla because people couldn't quite necessarily identify us or if we wanted to take off our plaid shirt, they definitely couldn't identify us. And so we could be everywhere anytime we wanted because lesbians were largely invisible and in fact that's still true. So that shock and anger post apocalypse was not new for me. It was ancient and enduring. Back in the day, those ripe moments of the movement, we were hyper conscious of being marginalized and ostracized. Nobody was planning their wedding or buying baby bassinettes. Didn't mean we didn't have children or do ceremonies to unite ourselves but that wasn't a focus. More of a focus was getting apartments from landlords who didn't want to rent to lesbians or not coming out accidentally at your job so you wouldn't get fired. We were afraid for our lives and we were angry. One of the sparks of a lot of that anger was the way that lesbians were murdered constantly and how it went unnoticed. And so in the lesbian community, we were always finding out about these things and it's still happening today. One of the first murders paradoxically of a lesbian was so well reported without the information that she was a lesbian and that's the murder of Kitty Genovese. Everybody knows that story pretty much. And so they amputated the lesbian part of it to make Kitty Genovese an example of how horrible living in an urban area could be and they twisted the story, misled the public about a lot of the facts of that story. But she's kind of the first lesbian murder that I hold in my head. Then in the 2000s, 15 year old lesbian, Saskia Gunn was killed coming back home from New York to New Jersey from a party with friends. To 2013, Brittany Cosby and Crystal Jackson were killed by Brittany's father in their Galveston home where they lived with Brittany's great grandmother. Lisa Chubnekova killed by a fellow Coast Guard soldier in 2013. 19 year old University of New Hampshire student, Elizabeth Marriott killed in 2014 by a man whose advances she rejected and it goes on. Rebecca Wright, Roxanne Ellis, Michelle Abdel, Simonata Shrestha, so many other lesbians, too many others whose deaths we never hear about. And I raise the ghost of these murdered lesbians because all women live under a cloud of anxiety about rape and murder, even if they're unconscious of it. And because when it happens to lesbians, we will probably never hear about it. I could just as easily listed the number of times Native Americans were massacred or their treaties betrayed by the US government. Or I could list the number of African Americans who were lynched or the number of Asian Americans who died building our railroads or the names of women who dared to report their rapes or the number of people who died of AIDS before the US government and scientists kicked into gear. So I'm not so surprised by the results of the November apocalypse. Having grown up with the legacy of slavery and the murderous tradition resulting from sexism, nothing surprises me. Number 45, that's what I call him. Number 45 deliberately and directly appealed to all of those potential murderers. And to those who are afraid of people of color and those who don't trust women to control our own bodies and our own lives. And those who think people who were infected by HIV deserve to die. They were all waiting in the shadows to rise up and grab back the reins of power from the emerging groups that threatened the status quo. So I'm not surprised. And the MO of our progressive social change activists has most often been so mild as to be almost apologetic. They give us well-written speeches when we need strategy. They give us milk toast when we need Alice Paul and Sitting Bull and Denmark Visi. My lack of surprise doesn't mean I wasn't stunned momentarily and depressed, but now I feel fortunate to have my anger to fall back on. Women aren't supposed to show anger. We're always told to smile, but anger is a fuel. The sooner we get in touch with that anger and stop talking about how upset we are, the quicker we can resolve this disaster. In 1903, suffragette Emeline Pankhurst said, quote, deeds, not words. That's what I hope for next. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. I too am, this is actually not an official book event for this book, but we are all, we're among the many writers that were asked by Carolina to contribute something to this anthology. I write about politics every day right now. I run and coordinate a nationwide network of feminist activist groups called Solidarity Sundays and I run a Facebook group. We have about 19,000 people in it. It was about 700 the day before the election and we've grown since then. But every day, I write a post almost every day where I kind of summarize what's going on and I include a bunch of really direct calls to action. So I'm kind of in a mode right now of writing daily in response to what's going on. If you're interested, you can find us on Facebook, Solidarity Sundays. But so I don't rant necessarily, but my anger and rage is always there in my kind of description and breakdown of what's happening, whether it's today's news about the Paris Accords or my post tomorrow about rolling back the mandates on birth control coverage for federal employees. So stay tuned for that one. Anyway, so I'm in a practice of kind of writing daily about what's happening and it's an interesting process and I'm glad for it because I feel like when I look back, it'll be like a record of kind of everything. It was almost like a diary for me of writing daily what crazy things are happening. It is exhausting, however. But I too was gonna read a little bit from my piece in this anthology and then there's a little bit of an echo of Jules' piece and then I also include kind of a list of names that I hope that we can recall and keep in mind. So the prompt for this book again was for us to write a letter to anyone or anything in response to the election. And we all got asked to contribute in the weeks after the election and we had an incredibly tight deadline which was less than a month. And so the whole book came together in that crazy surreal period between the election and before the inauguration. So it's a real time capsule of that really tumultuous time and we could choose who we wanted to write to so I decided to write to white people which I'm glad that I did. It was a challenging piece to write but it feels even more important. It feels important every day especially in this past week. So I'm gonna read just from the center of the essay just a couple pages. Dear white Americans, we have nothing in everything in common. Did your family come here from somewhere in Europe? Yes, mine too. Did they come through Ellis Island? Did they raise many children? Did they work hard and struggle? Did they learn to speak English? Were they seeking a better life? Did they find what they wanted? Yes, mine too. Did they fight in wars? Did they own property? Did they own slaves? Yes, mine too. Dear white people, what would it mean to love ourselves so that we may truly love others? What would it mean to fully recognize our whiteness, our privileges, our horrors and our missteps? To admit and allow the identity lost danger that James Baldwin wrote of over 50 years ago. To accept and acknowledge and to vow to resist. Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being white and nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can't push it away and pretend it's not us. We are not colorblind. We are not post race. We do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad. We can't just dole us all our way out of it because to do so would be to employ the very privilege that we want to deny. Do you know what I mean? It is precisely because of our perpetual place in the center that we can even consider a journey to the margins. In school, we learn white histories, but even those are limited. They're the stories of white power and supremacy of patriarchal dominance. They do not show us white resistance, white solidarity. I'm not talking about white saviors. I'm not talking about Abraham Lincoln. Dear white people, we need to know about the Grimkey sisters and Lucretia Mott and Julia Ward Howe and Emma Goldman and Jane Adams and Viola Liozzo and Jesse Daniel Ames and Adrian Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt and Polly Spiegel Cohen. It's okay if you don't know these names. They don't teach them. Let's look them up, get to know the names and faces and stories of our ancestors who were not afraid to resist the system designed to benefit them and who, even as they fought for their rights as women, saw and acknowledged that which their skin afforded them. Good men too, John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner and the Reverend James Reeb and Richard Loving and now this is not in the book but I would add to that Talasin Meche, Rick Best and Micah Fletcher, the three men in Portland who stood up for two women being attacked and harassed on a train, two of whom lost their lives. There are heroes in our histories and they have much to teach us all. Dear good white people, you know who you are. I have a secret to tell you. There is no such thing. There are only white people who work to do good, just things. You are an ally because of your actions, not because you say you are. You're an ally when you call out racist comments, when you listen and learn, when you work in solidarity with people of color to dismantle institutional racism, when your efforts and actions are felt by others, not just when you wear a safety pin. Ooh. Thank you for that moving excerpt and that roll call of important names. So it was interesting hearing all three of your wonderful excerpts and I noticed they were all non-fiction and I was wondering if, yet you're all genre crossers, you work in different genres, poetry, playwriting, fiction, non-fiction and I've been curious since the election, have there been genres more than others that you've been drawn to or feel more urgent and did you look at your past work and wonder what's this all about? What does this matter anymore? Christina. Yeah, I've been actually drawn to theater more vehemently since then and I think it's almost, it gives me more of a sense of immediacy and the things get enacted more quickly. It just feels like right now, I don't know, after 25 years being a cave dweller, writing novels, I wanna hit the streets. I want things to happen. I feel that those long silences are a kind of complicity for me in this day and age and I mean, I don't doubt I'm kind of a natural cave dweller that I may trickle back occasionally but right now I'm just so activated that connection, that catching people's eyes, the immediacy of the theater, of audience, of that communication seems utterly essential to me. That's really interesting. Joel, you write plays as well. What have you been working on these last few months? Well, I'm trying to do the third play in a trilogy. The trilogy is meant to look at the lives of artists, African-American artists in the first half of the 20th century and I picked that period because it felt like hope was still alive in the African-American community. People were still counting on each other, counting on that sense of community, that education was still a possibility and then everything kind of went to hell. People seem to feel like capitalism was gonna be what was gonna save them, not community and it seems to have gone downhill from there. So I don't know how I'll work that into my next play but it did interestingly enough make me go back to my vampire novel because last year was the 25th anniversary and I had a really good responses and I had started writing kind of a sequel to it and the chapters in that are a bit darker in the sense of more of the psychological and emotional interior life of my main vampire. So you get to see, well, it's not all long life and champagne and blood but that there's a price to pay for any of the advantages that she has and this period seems- You're crushing my illusions. Well, there's still something funny about it. It's made me go back and I started working on the sequel again to think about consequences and both psychological consequences and physical consequences when you abuse your privilege. And so you think it's these times that are, that's what's making your work more urgent? Absolutely, absolutely. Cause I mean, abuse of privilege, how deep can it get? Yes, vampire in chief, Kate. Oh man, yeah, so I've spent the last few years really focusing on writing nonfiction aimed at younger readers about badass women from history and that feels very timely and I'm very glad that that's what I've been working on and what I'm continuing to do. I mean, this election has definitely added a kind of undercurrent to that work that I'm doing and I have a new book that I'm working on and it feels even more urgent. I really hear you, Christina, on the kind of that feeling of urgency though, right? Like, you know, the novel that'll come out two years from now, right? Like there's, you wanna get stuff out there now. So I think that I'm posting regularly on Facebook it's like, not that that's a genre, maybe it is at this point. But no, I was also gonna say that I actually do have a novel that I have been finishing for quite some time as many of us do. And I think that I was starting to feel a little disconnected from it and it's a historical novel it's set in the 1960s but it deals with an unplanned pregnancy and maternity homes, kind of the secret history of maternity homes in the years before Roe v. Wade. And it now has a very new urgency and I'm feeling a lot more motivated with it and just feeling the importance of telling, going back to histories, to feminist histories, to the histories of reproductive rights and to contextualize what we're experiencing now and what we could see in the future. So I am actually as a fiction writer feeling like really called to be going back to that and getting that out there so it can come out in like four years, however long it'll take. And time for the election. Right, that's great to hear. Yeah, I wanted to, you guys touched upon something that there was a Grace Paley profile that was in New Yorker a few weeks ago and it struck me as relevant tonight and she was often asked about the connection between her politics and her fiction and the article said she initially suspected her work would be considered trivial, stupid, boring, domestic and not interesting, which is all these coded words for saying your story as a woman doesn't matter. I mean, and it's this sort of attitude it's like queer women, women of color, your stories don't matter, they're meant to stand the margins or to be invisible and given all of your long careers in sort of activism and writing, how do you push past that and how do you, what advice would you have for writers who are here tonight? Just how to keep going given all this, all these voices saying no, you don't matter. Well, that's just bullshit. There's just that, like, I mean, if you hold that, you know, if you hold that central that that's just bullshit and your response like that is just as uninformed and women read books, women buy books, women are the primary consumers of literature and that's just total absurd. So I would just hold that central. Yeah, I think, I know for me it took me a long time to actually start writing because I didn't see myself reflected anywhere and it wasn't till I saw Antizaki Shange's For Colored Girls, her play, not the movie and I realized, oh yeah, I would be writing about myself. That's what I should be writing about. That's the thing that's gonna be interesting to me and interesting to other people and for writers who feel uncertain, certainly women writers who feel uncertain, I'd say go and read some of the work that is out there and around there. I mean, I recently reread with probably a hundred million other people, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and I remember when I first read that in 1979, that was one of the feminist texts that really sparked me to wanna understand more about feminism and how it would inform both my personal life but what I would choose to write about and so I think reading other writers is very helpful for us to get ourselves sparked. And gain strength. Yeah, yeah. What they said, absolutely. No, yes, I mean, that's also ridiculous. I think they don't get to define us, what our interests are, what our obsessions are, what our subject matter is and I think we have to be vehemently omnivorous about what we do and what we write about. I think this meaningless empty theater that passes for democracy these days is absolutely unacceptable and I think we need to tackle it head on and I think the more that we, the more we speak truth, the more we hold the gaze, the more exposed the charade and we can't let up whether we do so through novels, plays, blogs, Facebook, whatever, I mean, I think we should use everything in our arsenal to contest as fictitious, these fictitious realities and this corporate coup d'etat that has happened here on top of everything. I would add to that, we can't underestimate the power of women's disdain. I mean, yes, like look at what it does to Donald Trump. Like he's like blocking women on Twitter who say mean things to him, like he truly can't handle it. Covex. Covex. Covex. You know, I mean, he is like, they can be brought to their knees by our disdain and our disapproval and are just calling them out and really, I think, are laughing at them. I think that actually is not to be underestimated. I think also it's interesting when you talked about theater, I think theater, you're right, because it's personal, people are standing or sitting right in front of the actors, the words are coming to them directly. There is a literal energy traveling between the audience and the actors. Something new is being made in the theater every night. Every night. And I think that's a very powerful mode of communication. I just went to see Hila, which is about the Henrietta Lax cells. And it was really stunning because it was a platform for telling the story of her life and what had been done to her unknowingly. But also connecting it to how women are treated in the medical establishment, how African American women are treated. It had a whole cultural and historical context woven in, I thought, finely crafted that was very, very emotionally enlivening. Like you came out of there and you wanted to go pick at a hospital. Or make sure that women knew what they were getting into when they went into a hospital, being a patient advocate or something. So I do agree theater is quite, quite powerful in that way. So how do you, it's interesting, it was something that I wanted to ask, like how do you write work that has a message or kind of reflects the progressive spirit or politics but yet isn't preachy or too on the nose? Or can you talk about the ways in which you can still be artful an artist but still convey the things and the concerns that you have about the world around you? I think you have to be true to what you see. I mean, ultimately what we learn about history, ancient history moving forward is what the artists have left. We are, we bear witness to our times and however we do so, whether it's through fiction or all these other methods, these are the documents we have, the Chinese poets telling us about the Chinese dynasty or whatever it is. And right now our times are very dire and I think I went to hear a lecture by Chris Hedges in Berkeley last week and he talked a lot about how war has become the product of what has become a kleptocracy. This is what we're living in right now and that it's eviscerating. It's eviscerating our cities. It's turning us all into debt peons. So however, I mean, I think all the best work throughout history has always been innately political. That doesn't mean it hits you. In other words, it's not propaganda. It tells the truth about people's lives at the time and junctures that they're living and that can't help but be political if you're observant and unsparing with the truth. And so we just have to keep, as I said earlier, keep holding the gaze and turning it this way and turning it that way and be unsparing with our gaze and unsparing with our words. Yeah, definitely when you illuminate what's hidden, that's political act. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. One of the things that I think about more and more is not evidenced in what I read today but is how humor helps people take things in more the play that I just finished about Albert Hunter for me was somewhat difficult because I was writing about a character from the 20s and 30s who was very popular and very famous and could not speak about being a lesbian. And that was very hard for me. And then I started infusing the play with a sense of humor, both from her and the characters around her. And I think, and some people don't feel like they can write funny, I never thought of myself as being able to write funny, but there is something about being able to step back from the emotional depths and look at it from a kind of cockeyed angle and what will come out is often a laugh but I can't remember which writer said this but that people really learn a lot when their mouths are open and laughter. And I think that's true. I mean, I think there's so much power in storytelling and if you're just telling a good story and you're telling it directly, you can get so much across. And because I've been writing for a younger audience it's helped me kind of distill these stories and to focus on just telling a compelling story but I know that there's these messages in there that I'm getting across. And I'm not, again, I think the concept of something being preachy is kind of problematic in itself, right? What does it even mean? I think we... Or is it sort of gendered sometimes? It's I think it's gendered. And I also think it's, this is maybe a bigger conversation but I think that we don't have a rich intellectual tradition in America of talking about politics, right? We avoid it, we treat it like it's something we're not supposed to talk about, right? And in a lot of other cultures, talking about politics and having robust conversation about these issues is much more of a part of your daily cultural and intellectual life. So we have this concept that if you are telling people what to think or you're talking about an issue that you're being preachy or you're pushing your agenda and all this bullshit. And I mean, someone has recently challenged me on my books like I just feel like you have an agenda by putting in your book. I feel like there's an agenda in you writing about a transgender woman and then reading it. I feel like there's an agenda there. And I was like, yeah, of course there's an agenda. Like it's my book. I wrote it. It's in the title. I wanted to tell the story about this woman. Like that is my agenda. Sure. And I don't think there's anything wrong with having an agenda. I don't think there's anything wrong with being biased toward a particular kind of truth and being biased toward justice and being biased toward illuminating everything that we're talking about. By the way, this never happens in the Cuban community. Right? Yeah. I mean, everyone always has an agenda and they're unapologetic about it. So that's, I mean, there's, you know, there's like we can talk about like ways that we can like slip these messages in and make it subtle. But also I feel pretty unapologetic about being very political and very opinionated and really knowing where I stand and wanting to make that clear, both in my kind of everyday existence and to the mild chagrin probably of my neighbors and other people that I interact with. But also, you know, I'm very comfortable doing that in my work, you know, and I did think that that would be, you know, kind of limiting when we wrote what my illustrator and I did Rad American Women A to Z, we really didn't think it would be a book that would sell many copies outside of like the Bay Area. I was like, well, feminist moms will like it and activists in early, you know, certain cities will really like it and that's about it. So we were surprised when it had a bigger reception, but I wasn't that concerned kind of beyond that. Yeah, I was talking to Innosanto Nogara. He's an Oakland author of... It's for activism. It's for activism. You were activist, yeah. Which my kids love. And several others. And several others, yeah. And he was saying that his book sales have gone up nationwide. Is it the same case? Weird silver lining. Exactly. Yes, we did see a spike in sales right after the election. Thanks, everybody. Well, it's that weird thing. Has anyone written Beas for Bitch? Yeah, exactly. I want that one. How exactly? Come on up. Christina has dibs on that. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, but I was talking to another mother writer friend and she was saying that these books do appeal to kids because they have an innate sense of justice and fairness and when somehow we get away from that. I mean, and I answered this question a lot, you know, because sometimes people ask, you know, I don't know, like, if it's appropriate, you know, you write about racism and sexism and all these things in your books. Is that really appropriate for kids? I'm like, no one knows more about justice than children. Like, if anybody's going to tell you what's fair and what's not fair, what's right and what's wrong, who should have this, who shouldn't have this. I'll forget it. My three-year-old once stood in front of me, her little hands on her hips, she's now 25. And she said, who made you the boss of me? Yeah, yeah. Like, all right. My mom actually had a shirt when I was a kid that said, I'm the mommy, that's why. I think she wore it in direct response to my constant challenges. Yeah, I did love that essay recently where they said it was an insult to four-year-olds to compare them to Trump because four-year-olds are better behaved than Trump. 100%, I have a four-year-old in no way. He is on point. Do any of you have other advice on how to kind of pass on these progressive values to our kids, whether it's through books or taking them to marches or exposing them to things, or like, how are you helping the kids in your lives? Think about these times. Well, I didn't, my daughter's grown, but I was very pleased. No sooner did the first Muslim ban go down than she was at JFK airport. So, and again, and again, and again, and she's been in front of, she lives in New York and Trump Tower is like her second home. She's always on the barricades there. So I think that's good. I think just basic empathy, how would someone else feel? And also to stand up for those who are being ridiculed or bullied or marginalized, to stand up for those kids too, because they can get vicious in middle school. I mean, you're not there yet with your kids, but boy, I'm telling you, it was, you know, to be locked up some of those kids. They're kitchen with chocolate chip cookies. But no, no, but I mean, yes, just basic empathy. And I think with all of this running around, I mean, I raised my daughter in Los Angeles and there was all this talk when I was raising her about their fragile egos. You can't criticize them. You can't hold them to account. And then they're all little autocrats. It was impossible. Yeah, no, no, basic empathy, basic consideration, looking out who's sitting alone at the lunch room, just making eye contact. I don't know, these little acts of allegiance and kindness go on to be bigger acts of allegiance and kindness and community that we all benefit from. Yeah, definitely, I mean, because I think part of the fear and anxiety people have these days is the sense that people, societies become more callous than we're not looking out for each other or we're not thinking about each other. So either of you. You know, I was, it makes me think, I feel like the shock for my kids, I have a four year old and eight year old, and I think the shock for them will be the point where they realize that the rest of the country is not like the Bay Area, right? I mean, I'm incredibly privileged to be raising my children here for so many reasons, you know, but they're, I mean, they're growing up in an activist household. They're growing up in an incredibly diverse community. They have friends from many backgrounds, many different kinds of, I mean, they're exposed to so much here. Not that it's all gonna be smooth sailing or that it's perfect by any means, but they're really growing up with a different experience than so many kids in other parts of the country. So that'll be, I feel like my, for my kids, they'll be a big education part where we, I don't know if we're gonna take some kind of crazy road trip at some point, but just kind of. For the red states. I don't know if you know, I mean, maybe, you know, and I also have a very progressive family. They're not, you know, they're, my kids are definitely growing up in a major bubble. I'm pleased with it and it's the kind of bubble that I'm happy to be in, but there will be some tough learning for them when they realize that this is not, this is not the norm. I also think, you know, I don't have any children, but of course I have an opinion. Yeah. But, um. That, that Trump's having children for sure. Yes. But you know, having expectations for your children is very, very important. Like you were saying, they're too fragile, you can't, you know, I think one needs to have expectations of one's children, whether they're your sons and daughters or nieces and nephews, cousins, because younger people are looking for guidance. They're protesting all the way, but they are in need of guidance. And if you have expectations, expectations that go from, you know, that they say thank you when someone gives them something or that they pay attention to who's walking behind them through a door or that they think about what they wanna do about the person who's sleeping in the doorway. I mean, having those expectations of young people gives them a path to try to follow. And I think too often, and you know, this is of course a generalization, but we feel like kids, wait till they get older. Wait till they get older and then they can, you know, see all of the heartbreak. Well, they're seeing the heartbreak already. You need to give them a context so that they don't feel helpless around it or feel like they have to close their eyes and not see it. Yeah, and I think also just to give them permission to stand out, to not just accept the status quo, whether it's in a classroom or on the playground or whatever. And I think that applies to all of us now, you know? I mean, one of the things that, my other favorite book that I got when it first came out called Don Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, who's a terrific historian and specializes in Eastern Europe in that period, you know, the Hitler-Stalin era, but he talks about people who anticipate authoritarianism or they anticipate the rules and they obey ahead of time without even being asked, you know? And so there's, you know, resistance starts at a very young age and grows with experience. And so I think that's really important. And I think also it's very important to not circulate the propaganda or cliches, to use very specific language to your experience and to other people's experience and to keep it, you know, individual. I think it's through that acute individuality that we make contact, not by all just reciting the same bromides. I think there is a dehumanization that happens with that kind of language. And I think especially in this day and age, language matters, language matters. What we say, how we say it matters desperately, especially with all the garbage that we're supposed to be, you know, absorbing is truth. I just wanted to kind of maybe take a step back. All of you have been long-time activists and writers and I'm wondering if you see this moment as different than any other like moment of upheaval like after 9-11 or the anti-war protests. I think it seems particularly pernicious now because I feel that the checks and balances that at least I for one used to take for granted no longer exist. You know, it's becoming almost a one-party system. Congress is not checking the executive branch and the judiciary is sort of doing what it can but it's also compromised because, you know, they're feeding into the whole, you know, the prison industrial complex, the for-profit prisons. So it seems to me that our institutions are in danger and I think one of the things that we can do in terms of resistance is adopt one or two institutions that you care desperately about and support them, whether it's, you know, print newspaper or whether it's a public library. Public library. All those for democracy. ACLU, whatever it is, if all of us do that for one or two things, then there's many people. We can't take for granted this that our institutions will stand under this endless assault and the corporate interests that are kind of cannibalizing our lives. So I think it's Adopt an Institution Day here. Yeah, that's a great idea. I think one of the reasons it feels so scary is because a part of the population elected a leader who doesn't necessarily believe in the Constitution or our institutions, that's very, very scary. I mean, we've had terrible leaders in the past and it's really bad when, you know, Trump is making Bush look good. Yeah. That's really upsetting. That's Bush's silver lining. Yeah. He's like, yes. So I think that's what's different. It's not like America has suddenly turned a corner and become this horrible thing. It has been this horrible thing for a long time, which is, you know, sad. I think it's very helpful that in the last several years we've had activism like Black Lives Matter and before that the Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street. Thank you. Occupy, I always can never remember that word. Occupy Wall Street. I mean, there's been this kind of bubbling up of a consciousness, so I think it's good. It's building. It's building. I gave a commencement speech for women and gender studies at UC Berkeley last week and I said, I'm really tired of giving you all these people dire news. I talked to young people. I could see them pulling out razor blades, you know, just lift their wrists. I feel terrible. So I suggested, think about what you can do to help things in hand that you think are important and here's the paragraph that will help you do that and you can just pluck from it the principles and I read them the preamble to the Constitution. And each statement tells you an area where you might work in your community. So I think that's what we need to be doing. I can't quote the preamble to the Constitution off the top of my head any longer, sorry. But it's on Google. I love that so much. That reminds me, so back to children in our future. My eight year old is like a really intensely voracious reader, which is obviously wonderful. It's subbed for what I'm trying to get her to do literally anything and she doesn't listen because she's reading it. So we've actually had to institute a no reading at dinner policy. Stop. I know, because she was not eating her food. She'll find another way. So, and it's literally for the first five minutes of dinner, no books at the table, just so some food goes in your mouth. Anyway, we were trying this policy for a few days and I came into the dining room and she was reading and I said, no, no reading at the dinner table and she looks up and she goes, but mom, I'm reading the constitution. And she had a copy of the constitution that someone had given us for free and I was like, okay, fine, okay, you got me there, kid. I'm not gonna make you stop reading the constitution. So she probably knows the preamble. But to the question I'd say, I'm of the baby on this panel, I defer to your guys' wisdom and all you've seen over the years. This feels entirely new to me for many reasons. It's my first major emotional global crisis as a parent. So I think that feels different. Where were you in the Reagan years? I was younger, youngish. Yes. But you know, I had a consciousness around it, but I was still youngish. But I think that when I was, during the kind of lead up to the election, I was researching my most recent book, which is Rad Women Worldwide, which tells stories of women from all over the world, from all throughout history, over across the centuries in the continent. So that was giving me a lot of kind of context and was really kind of cathartic and therapeutic and also really grounding to be reminded that, okay, like wow, like what we're dealing with right now feels really crazy, but also look what she dealt with in the 18th century in this country. Look what she was up against in the 16th century. Look what she did with literally no resources in colonial occupied country. And so that's given me both a lot of strength and a lot of perspective. And also I think in terms of the how do we keep going? I mean, that historical perspective that yes, it's really crazy what we're dealing with, but compared to even the rest of many places in the world right now, it kind of ain't shit. And it is shit, it's gnarly, but we still have freedom of speech. We can still pick up a newspaper, hopefully. We can still put what we want to put on the internet. We can still have conversations. We can be up here having this discussion and we're not gonna be arrested when we step out of the building. And that's not the case in a lot of parts of the world. So maintaining that perspective and kind of grounding in our privilege, at least for me, kind of helps motivate me to kind of to continue. Yeah, as long as we don't grow complacent because I think we're really just a heartbeat away from losing a lot of that. We're all under surveillance, one form or another. I don't know where I read, but like sending an email is like skyriding, seriously. But I do think on the hopeful front that I don't think we can underestimate the power of ordinary people, individuals, you know, when you look sometimes at just big up evils they often happened with something that you would have thought was rather unassuming that gained momentum. So I think I started off earlier saying that no active rebellion, no civil disobedience, nothing like that, you know, just believe in the power that each one of us can do something and the collective power of all those individual somethings add up to massive resistance, you know, and I think it's easy to think, oh, well, I'm not, I'm not that person, I'm not Rosa Parks, not this extraordinarily rad person of 16th century India, but in our own ways we can resist and we should do something every single day to resist, to resist these narratives that are being imposed on us that have nothing to do with the truth, you know, and I think it's that adhering to the truth and moving forward that will get us through these times day by day by day. Yeah, I think I would just add that like, I often tell people when they're like, I wanna be an activist, but I don't really know, it's like you get in where you fit in and the spectrum of activism is really wide, right? And like not everybody's gonna go lay down in the street and chain themselves to the police station and get arrested and you know, that's not for everybody and there's a wide range of things that you can do and the important thing as Christina says is that you're doing something. Yes, because I think- I mean look at the great symbol that came out of the first march, pink pussy hats, I mean- All of us toiling in the to the night. How could you go wrong with such a woman's craft and out of that came a sea of hats. Yeah, I think if we abandon the truths as we know them, we're abandoning freedom and we're complicit in our own annihilation here. So I think we can't let up every day, every day. Well, thank you, nasty women for your wonderful words of wisdom and fight.