Hello Everyone! This is Lisa Hickey! Today is Friday, August 6th, 2021! Welcome to another Friday Call with the Publisher. I am super excited to be here, as I have been every Friday for the past 9 years. And I want to thank all of you who keep showing up as well. YOU are what make these calls so great. We are like podcasts but you are in them. So if you are listening from home or elsewhere — join in next time! Call-in info is in the show notes.
I want to quickly give you some highlights of themes we talked about on other calls this week.
Working backward from our Thursday call, where every week we discuss Climate Change. The topic was biodiversity, but it ended with us talking about the cascading effect of crumbling ecosystems. And that is what people don’t yet understand — if you hear the news of the Gulf Stream collapsing, and the dead zones in the oceans, and the wildfires and the floods and the COVID variants — these are not isolated events. They are indicative of a systems collapse that is going to cascade. It’s all happening faster than I personally could have imagined, and we have to do more than we are doing now.
But the call last night also gave me this insight. Capitalism used to make sense to me. I didn’t necessarily like it — but it had a certain logic, and I remember only a few years ago saying things like “well capitalism isn’t going away anytime soon.” But now, capitalism no longer makes sense. There was a stat I read that said that the average household has one quarter of a million things in it. A quarter of a million things that were manufactured (often by people in work environments that can’t cover their cost of living and may be abusive). Those 250,000 things are then shipped — in big polluting trucks or airplanes. They are then sold in stores — again, by people who get paid a minimal amount of money. And then that becomes item number 250,001 in someone’s household — which then needs to be disposed of at some point. And the best companies are rewarded for selling more at lower costs. They interrupt us in almost everything we do shouting BUY MORE, BUY MORE! Often without paying taxes.
How on earth does this make any logical sense?
On Wednesday we talked about Sports: The Good The Bad the Ugly. In particular, competitive sports. The kind that have sexism and racism baked right in — and even sports that don’t seem quote-unquote dangerous — often have a high degree of danger baked right in. Synchronized swimming for example — it’s often used as a joke “not even a sport”! And yet 25% of synchronized swimmers had suffered at least one concussion. And… I hear this a lot … well, there IS such a thing as “healthy competition.” And I think “what, so you can learn the skills needed to become a good capitalist? You can learn how to create systems that have sexism, racism and homophobia baked right in, and learn how to hide and minimize the abuse of others while you make a decision to win at all costs?” Does THAT make sense?
And on Tuesday we had the #StopRacism call. We started with some examples in the Olympics, but we also talked about history — how to give racism the appropriate cultural context so we are not ignoring it nor excusing it. And how badly we need reparations right now — not sometime in the future, not tomorrow — today. We have at least try to undo hundreds of years of harm, lost generational wealth, and a lack of access to basic resources that exist to this day. (BTW, we will not allow you to argue against reparations on this or any call. You will be muted and blocked. Just like we will not allow you to argue that climate change doesn’t exist or spout anti-vaccination misinformation.)
Here’s the way people should think about reparations:
Has racism caused harm? Unequivocally yes.
Do we need to undo that harm? Also unequivocally yes.
That is what reparations are. Not arguing about it.
And finally — on Monday we talked about Being Friends with Your Exes. And the week before that we had discussed How to Take Care of Yourself and Others During a Break-Up. And the relationship calls may seem to be the anomaly, right? They are “just” (and I’m putting just in air quotes) just about relationships. But learning how to navigate relationships is going to become *more* critical in the days ahead, not less. How do you break up with someone who is perpetuating systems of harm? How do you say goodbye to someone who is dying of Covid because his family didn’t get vaccinated? How do you help take care of yourself and others when you’ve lost everything in a wildfire? How do you have really difficult conversations with the people you love and talk about these issues in a way that doesn’t overwhelm everyone? Or here was a question I had this week — do you say “Happy Birthday” to a racist family member on Facebook? I like to think I’m woke, but I didn’t have a good answer to that question.
The thing I love about these calls is the way they start tying all the themes together. We have to understand what is most valuable to us, and what kind of life we want to be living in the future — and we need to start building stronger systems that help people instead of harm them. And that may start with one conversation with a friend, with one insight — or it may be finding or creating a social movement.
OK! That was a lot — but that was the week that was on The Good Men Projectand I am going to open it up now!
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Listen to the recording above to hear the entire call! And hope to talk to you soon!
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Join us next time!
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These calls are a supportive and inclusive group that aims to “first do no harm” and will not tolerate any racism, sexism/misogyny, or homophobia. Recordings of The Good Men Project Convocasts available here: https://soundcloud.com/goodmenproject
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