After the election, I felt as though I wanted to do something. I’m a journalist, not an activist, but this clearly was an all-hands-on-deck moment. I would have happily spent an afternoon a week doing anything to help save the country from what I knew was coming.
But nobody was telling me where to show up, or what to do.
It was like playing tennis with a partner who had disappeared. (Was it the Democratic Party?)
We had originally talked to the events organizer at the wonderful Village Well bookstore in Culver City, California about an event to promote our magazine’s anthology. This quickly morphed into a panel of really, really smart folks who could give people 1) an understanding of exactly where things stood on crucial issues like immigration, the environment, and upcoming elections, and 2) actions they could take that would be effective, not just feel good gestures.
Zahra Aghajan, neuroscientist and disinformation researcher;
Jason Berlin, founder of the highly effective voter registration organization Field Team 6 on how we’re positioned going forward;
Marc Cooper, longtime Nation columnist and USC journalism professor who has reported on two coups d’etat;
Jean Guerrero, New York Times columnist, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda on immigration, and
Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times climate correspondent.
I rather awkwardly moderated, hiding from the camera as the diehard print journalist that I am.
I hope you’ll take what you need from this panel. I read the news for hours every morning, but I learned a lot.
We are grateful to all the panelists and to the Village Well, a fantastic bookstore.
We thank you for subscribing.
Susan Zakin, Editor
Journal of the Plague Years
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