Reading History; Finding Hope

Grounding myself in a history that isn't even my own.

(Written for previous publication on LinkedIn)

With the changes that have taken place in America in the last seven days, it feels like the whole world has been recreated. It hasn't. It's deeply and seriously threatened by the President of the UnitedStates. But you don't need to let that happen. You can resist. We all can no matter where we live for whom we voted.

My career was one of creating inspiration. I was responsible for holding a community together and offering them tools of hope, arguing incessantly that "hope without a hammer", with no plan for making it real, was useless. For the rest of this term of American politics and beyond into its rebuilding, I offer you this "hope with a hammer": Heather Cox Richardson's, Letters from an American.

Before the internet and television, in days of war and strife, to learn what was happening, people gathered around the radio, sometimes alone, sometimes with families, sometimes as a community where radios were scarce. The news was the news, back then: told straight and often hard, it informed those at home what was going on at the front or around the world and how the nation's welfare was being protected or threatened by those events.

Sometimes, it came only on paper, folded in an envelope, days or weeks old. Still, whole communities were informed by what one person's relative wrote or the paper another received. Becoming informed was a community thing.

Letter from my grandmother, Margaret Ann (Gretta) Haycock. November 11, 1917

It isn't anymore. It's individual. It's you reading this. It's your neighbour reading something else. It's millions of people on the app of their choice reading content curated by whichever member of the oligarchy of truth they believe is being honest. In fact, too often we merely choose the truth we think will preserve our illusory worlds.

Ms. Richardson doesn't choose truth; she tells it. She's not an opinionated blogger. She's not a journalist sharing a viewpoint demanded by a publisher. She's not a partisan eager to promote a party line. She's a historian and she puts everything in context in a way that can take America, and the world, through to a new stability.

Each day, Letters from an American explores the news of the day through the lens of American history, drawing on its well-known tales of bravery, courage, devastation, and its little-known stories of strength, failure, recovery. She publishes them on Substack where an AI reader makes them same-day available. But she reads them herself, as well, on Apple podcasts and they are remarkable.

I read Letters from an American as they are posted and listen to them when the Apple podcast goes live. When I do, I feel myself pulled into that great companionship of valour, the story of how democracy grew, was threatened, waned, and revived. I remember the heroes of my own past, my gay great-uncle who spent WWI in prison as a conscientious objector; my dad who enlisted when his mother bought a farm to keep him safe at home.

Gather your family and neighbours. Listen to Letters from an American. Learn your history and then go make some. The link to subscribe is below.