By the way, there are some very good essays in
the link Gregory P. provided, too, and I encourage people to check them out.
I wish Toni Morrison's essay didn't focus only on the most extreme cases of racism. Yes, doing so drives the point home that racism is horribly still present in modern American society, and a very serious, ugly thing. But it is dangerously easy for white readers to grade their own racism generously, on a curve skewed by such atrocities: "Yes, bombing and shooting up black churches certainly is terrible, but I'm not doing those things...so how dare anyone think I'm at all racist when I support the actions of my police force without question, and when I advocate the deportation of millions of people who don't look like me?"
As a Californian who is a big fan of John Chiang--obviously, I have a weakness for nerdy, Democratic, Roman Catholic, Chinese-American engineers, since I married one--my favorite was the essay by Evan Osnos titled "On Saying No."
I also found Jeffrey Toobin's essay, "The Highest Court," riveting. It included a very poignant simile:
Quote:
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If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant.
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But I'm digressing from Gregory's point.
Mary Karr's essay entitled "Donald Trump, Poet" makes much the same point I was trying to. Words matter.
Quote:
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If you ever doubted the power of poetry, ask yourself why, in any revolution, poets are often the first to be hauled out and shot—whether it’s Spanish Fascists murdering García Lorca or Stalin killing Mandelstam. We poets may be crybabies and sissies, but our pens can become nuclear weapons.
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Clearly she uses that image because she means us to admire words' power, whether used by poets or politicians or protesters. But it occurs to me that, like nuclear weapons, certain kinds of language (such as demonization of one's opponents, thus robbing them of their human dignity) should be regarded as toxic to both attacker and attacked, and as inviting retaliation. No one wins a nuclear war.
I like her last three paragraphs.