More Than Just a Map, The Art of the Endless Distraction, & How Much Is a Dream Worth?
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Sit. Stay. Heal. (Or help to heal others.)
The Shameful Verdict: If it comes with no fanfare, does it still count?
Video Break: Bandly does gymnastics.
The Scandal That Never Ends: Why we stopped noticing the $4 billion elephant in the room.
The Price of the California Dream: A conversation about what we owe our neighbors.
What I’m Watching: Bob Marley: One Love
Jukebox Playlist: Nat King Cole & Harry Belafonte “Mama Look A Boo Boo”
Kareem’s Daily Quote
"You have to pick the places you don't walk away from." Joan Didion
There is a specific kind of wisdom that comes from Joan Didion—author, screenwriter and essayist who spent her life looking at the fractures in society and the messy, often chaotic reality of being human. The quote above,“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from,” is from her A Book of Common Prayer. It’s a line that feels particularly heavy when you look at the world we’re navigating right now.
America is a country that was built on walking away. Nearly all of us were conceived from immigrant stock, no matter if those ancestors were from Trinidad (like mine) or from Europe, Africa, the South Pacific, what have you. The Pilgrims may have landed on the East Coast but many ventured to the West, to the North and the South. If we don’t like something, and we have the opportunity to pick up and go, we will. Few of us still live in the house our grandparents built. Fewer still in a town that looks like it did seventy years ago. Marriages crumble. Friendships get sidelined. Churches, synagogues and temples empty out. Walking away is not just a default to find out who we “really” are…it’s our primary defense mechanism against the overwhelming noise of modern life.
But Didion’s point is that if you walk away from everything, you eventually find yourself standing nowhere.
Commitment is a messy business. When she talks about “picking the places,” Didion isn’t just talking about a house or a city. She’s talking about the values we choose to defend and the people we refuse to abandon. It’s about where to dig in our heels.
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the stories we’ve been tracking this week, the ones that make you want to throw your hands up. It’s easy to walk away from the debate over how we fund our hospitals because it feels too complex or too dominated by billionaire-funded PR. It’s easy to walk away from the struggle for voting rights because it feels like a battle that’s been fought for a hundred years and still isn’t won. It’s easy to walk away from the fight for accountability when corruption starts to feel like a permanent part of the deal.
But these are the exact places that we can’t afford to leave.
Picking a place you won’t walk away from is a radical act of hope. It’s an admission that even if “the magic trick” of public life is designed to confuse us, and even if the antiseptic and even obtuse language of the law is designed to hide the truth, the outcome still matters. It matters because there are real people—kids in schools, patients in ERs, voters in the South—who don’t have the luxury of walking away.
People who eventually change things aren’t necessarily the loudest or the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones who remain in the room.
We’re all tired. We’ve been “flooded with the zone” until we’re gasping for air. But the strength of our community, the “American Experiment,” doesn’t come from those of us who find a clever exit strategy. It comes from those who look at the mess, look at the wires and the pulleys, and say, “Nope. I’m staying put.”
