Rebecca Solnit
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rebeccasolnit.bsky.social
Rebecca Solnit
@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

Raised on Coast Miwok land, longtime resident on Ramaytush Ohlone land, writer, climate person, feminist, wanderer. Just started a newsletter at MeditationsInAnEmergency.com.

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.

Source: Wikipedia
Sociology 24%
Political science 21%

Oh his feelings! Of fatigue! A nap is due! May it be of considerable duration!
New — I spoke to eight people who were present at the ICE protest on Saturday in Portland, Oregon when federal agents deployed tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of families, children, elderly and disabled people, and their pets.

These are their stories:
What it's like to see ICE tear gas kids
Attendees at a Portland, OR protest describe a vicious, unprovoked and sudden attack
www.thehandbasket.co

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

Anyway the real heroes of Minnesota are the countless volunteers doing boring shifts where nothing happens. The mom of three delivering food to 40 families in her kids’ school. The dad standing at the door of an elementary with a whistle for hours. The drivers endlessly looping, seeing nothing.

I don't do a lot of hustle about it, and I set it up so free and paid subscribers get the same stuff, but I did want to say HERE IT IS THANK YOU READERS AND SUBSCRIBERS.

Well she thinks Trump is spectacularly healthy, so there's that but what was that interplay? Were people shouting "fuck the rich guy" or "we really don't care, do we" at the screen?

At the very heart of the conflict raging in the United States is a conflict about human nature, a deep moral and philosophical conflict. I believe the isolationists will lose in the long run because they are not only out of step with the majority but they are out of step with reality....
When Love Thy Neighbor Is a Cry of Resistance
Today marks one full year for this newsletter, and here's the 77th post (I thought once a week was going to be a lot, but there's so much going on I wrote almost 1.5 times a week over the past year). ...
www.meditationsinanemergency.com

Reposted by Dawn J. Wright

My newsletter is a year old today, and 77 essays in. www.meditationsinanemergency.com

There are some stunning opinions about that as in "if I make a burrito at home what do I do with all the leftover stuff" from people who do not know you can make many burritos or many dishes with said ingredients and what a stocked kitchen is to a regular cook.

I like to cite Mark Rudd, because some, er, violence fans think that if you reject violence you're insufficiently something or other, and so someone who was part of a movement that tried it addresses that nicely.

Reposted by Waleed Hazbun

But the biggest and most influential source of my thinking on this is Jonathan Schell's under recognized masterpiece: Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

I might add that this seems to assume violence works, and as @chenoweth.bsky.social has shown, as Minneapolis is showing, it often doesn't.

Q: How has your experience with the Weather Underground affected you?
Mark Rudd: The biggest way it’s affected me has been to make me a total pacifist for completely pragmatic reasons: only nonviolence has a chance of being effective. www.satyamag.com/mar04/rudd.h...

You might like Virginia Woolf's much earlier essay about going to buy a pencil: "Street Haunting: A London Adventure."

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

"At the very heart of almost all our crises is a conflict between two worldviews, the worldview in which everything is connected and the world of isolated individualism... I call the latter the ideology of isolation." @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

www.meditationsinanemergency.com/when-love-th...
When Love Thy Neighbor Is a Cry of Resistance
Today marks one full year for this newsletter, and here's the 77th post (I thought once a week was going to be a lot, but there's so much going on I wrote almost 1.5 times a week over the past year). ...
www.meditationsinanemergency.com

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

Woke 2.0 back with a vengeance. You love to see it.
Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

"Hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. ...we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."

From @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social's Meditations in an Emergency

No one is sure -- marching, showing their faces among the hoi polloi, isn't really a billionaire thing, for starters.

So 37 of them march and 37,000 throw eggs?

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

I’m sorry, this is so funny
March for Billionaires — San Francisco, Feb 7
Stand up for the entrepreneurs, innovators, and risk-takers who build our economy. February 7, 2026.
marchforbillionaires.org
More than 34,000 Minnesotans signed up to be trained as ICED observers with various activist groups in recent weeks, many of them since Jan. 7, when a federal agent shot and killed Renée Good.
Thousands of new ICE watchers hit the streets after two killings
Minnesotans outraged by the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti have signed up in large numbers to monitor and protest ICE with other activists.
www.washingtonpost.com

The great film critic Pauline Kael loved to cite what the audience said or snickered as part of her reviews. And sometimes size IS everything, when it comes to glorious visuals on a giant screen.

I miss San Francisco's Castro Theater in particular and the old days when you just went to a movie theater on a whim and there were lots of them. It's like going to church--sitting together in the hush and dark all sharing an experience (which is why move popcorn is sacramental to me).

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit

Email to Jeffrey Epstein in 2017: "i m at your door but I will wait for my time=. i don't want to come early to find trump in your house😁"

Here's a chunk relevant to the above:

There are lots of other forms of quick food--super-simple recipes, frozen entrees, etc.--that don't entail the massive packaging waste and exploitative labor food delivery does. But mostly I'm interested in how convenience and efficiency get valued and meaning, pleasure, connection often don't.

Of course lots of people feel they don't have enough time and often they don't (leaving aside discussions of how a lot of us waste time these days), and that is a question about how the brute economy and other factors made so many so frantic in recent decades.

But barring special circumstances -- sick, contagious, just need hot soup -- delivered food is the worst of both worlds, experientially, without the sensory pleasure of preparing food, or the social pleasure of being out and about...