This year I developed a new habit with books. As I finish a book, I make the decision: Will I ever want to read or refer to this book again? Will I want to lend it to a friend or give it to someone as just right for them?  A couple of years ago, I went through my books and sorted out the ones I knew I’d read but didn’t like well enough to miss. Even so, I have thousands of books. Whatever anyone tells you, you CAN have too many books. When there is no longer room to place one more bookcase against a wall, start making the hard choices.

attempted comment on “Aspirational Clutter”

My comment (above) is awaiting moderation on a website I frequent. It’s been there for an hour. I cannot see how to either delete it or fix it. I do not know what I should fix. That’s never happened to me before. I was invited to describe personal decluttering challenges, and that’s what I did. I understand there is some sort of logarithm that determined my post might have violated the site’s “community standards”, I just can’t figure out what I did wrong. Can you? No vulgar words here. No personal attacks. It does not contradict another person’s comment—quite the opposite. Is the use of all caps in “CAN” the problem? But someone else did that too.

The editors are not censoring me. They only want me to be polite. At least I hope that’s the goal. They also want to protect their brand.

Of course I monitor all the comments on my own blog. I try to address them immediately, though I can do this only from my laptop. The only ones I do not let through would be spam, and the WordPress filter pretty much always catches that before I do.

That got me thinking: Surely the filters for FaceBook and Instagram could do better than this. They must. Assuming the effort is made to keep lies and cruelty off the sites?

On the other hand, the reason I left FaceBook was that I was tired of putting out fires. Metaphorical fires, but the similarity to the literal fires we are suffering from here in Oregon might stand. Ugly lies are spread because people believe them and fail to factcheck. Factchecking was about 20% of what I did when I was grading persuasive essays written by teenagers as a teacher. I got to be pretty good at it. And as a teaching professional, I took it upon myself even before FaceBook to confirm or debunk claims.

In the 90s, a medical resident who was also poetry editor for a prestigious literary journal foolishly (imo) revealed on a literary chat-site how he sorted the poetry submissions as they came to him. The first cut was whether they got his name right on the outside envelope. Then he tossed the ones that were not typed, had typos, etc. People were outraged, they threatened his safety, questioned his humanity. To be fair to the editor, the man received thousands of submissions in a week. Working through his inbox would be a nightmare for anyone, and he was almost a doctor. He was an unpaid volunteer doing the best he could. Plus publication in the highly-respected journal he worked for would be a professional coup for any poet. If the submitter didn’t care enough to spell the editor’s name correctly or know enough to type their work, they probably are too new to have earned publication. Let those who have devoted years to their craft advance to the front of the line. Younger, newer poets found his strategy for shortening his to-read pile arbitrary and cruel. I tried hard to balance acknowledgement of understandable outrage with the overwhelming and unpaid task the editor faced.

There have been other verbal firestorms I have attempted to douse and nearly always without effect. It was hard for me to accept that. I wanted to help, my intention was always to be helpful, but there is a kind of arrogance in that thinking—assuming I know best, and all that. Most people do not appreciate being corrected even if they are actually wrong and will resist changing their minds on principle. While trying to put out fires I sometimes fanned the flames.

Literal fire, on the other hand, is dangerous in other ways. The West is on fire and the very air we breathe is unsafe. However much we might want to place specific blame—the campfire that got out of hand, the homeowner allowing brush to build up to close to their home, the lack of funding to research wildfires and develop a proactive approach to fire—the truth is complicated and deadly.

The West is on fire, and I came to understand why east coast newspapers were giving so much space to the smoke when I realized it had drifted over Iceland and was approaching the European mainland. What happens here affects people many thousands of miles away.

Gary has a brother in Tennessee and a niece in Kentucky, but the rest of our close family lives in the PNW. Some of our friends and relatives are Trump supporters, some are solidly democratic. We have a friend who recently transferred his loyalty from Trump to Jesse Ventura. There is just no telling people what or who to believe.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin explored the roots and responses to systemic racism. That is another fire we seem finally to have decided to fight—the burning devastation of bigotry. I highly recommend Baldwin’s book. Baldwin is brilliant, compassionate, and true. And yet, the feds have recently outlawed training that confronts “white privilege”. That term comes from an essay by feminist Peggy McIntosh, who made it simple in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” There are many versions of this 1989 essay available, and I can recommend it. I can also recommend a powerful response from another woman: “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person” published in 2014. Between the two, they might just start a fire for anyone willing to read and think about them.

Some foresters have been trying for decades to explain why not all fires are bad, that some are necessary to make us safer in the future.

What we do here and now affects not just those around us but our entire world. What we are willing to research and factcheck makes a difference. Many fires are burning. The solutions are not simple, but they rely on all of us if we hope to thrive.

I have too many books, more than I can find space for on shelves. That doesn’t mean I will stop reading.

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