Thanks for posting this speech—I agree about the problems that arise from expecting a new open-hearted moment of darkness speech every year, and this seems like a good approach.
I think that if I were the person in the community, in the audience, hurting, the focus on how the community has Not Done Enough wouldn’t land for me. Usually in that situation, I feel pretty anti-conflict-theory and want to be seen in that. In that situation, I would get more out of it if the passage focused on… illegibility between people who are trying hard to communicate about their needs, their un/willingness to fulfill the needs of others, and their material constraints?
Unrelated: when I looked into it earlier this week, it seemed like in New York City mid-2021 to mid-2022, on any given night about 60,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters and about 3,000 people were sleeping rough. 640 homeless people were thought to have died during that year. Seventeen of those deaths were of exposure.
I’ve been in live contact with how horrible it would be, to die like that, the last few days, and plenty of people who don’t actually die just suffer a lot. But I’m also a little proud of humankind in general and New York City 2022 in particular, for making this horrible thing happen less than it otherwise would.
Mmm. Yeah I don’t really know what the right thing here is. The thing I was trying to respond to and counter is a vague sense of Solstice giving a false impression of communities taking care of each other, in a way that felt sort of “add insult to injury” to people who weren’t actually getting taken care of.
I’m not sure I quite parsed your suggestion (or, like, it made sense as a concept but I didn’t quite grok it well enough that I could write a paragraph expressing it). Could you say more words about it?
I’m interested in others expressing opinions on this as well.
Thanks for posting this speech—I agree about the problems that arise from expecting a new open-hearted moment of darkness speech every year, and this seems like a good approach.
I think that if I were the person in the community, in the audience, hurting, the focus on how the community has Not Done Enough wouldn’t land for me. Usually in that situation, I feel pretty anti-conflict-theory and want to be seen in that. In that situation, I would get more out of it if the passage focused on… illegibility between people who are trying hard to communicate about their needs, their un/willingness to fulfill the needs of others, and their material constraints?
Unrelated: when I looked into it earlier this week, it seemed like in New York City mid-2021 to mid-2022, on any given night about 60,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters and about 3,000 people were sleeping rough. 640 homeless people were thought to have died during that year. Seventeen of those deaths were of exposure.
I’ve been in live contact with how horrible it would be, to die like that, the last few days, and plenty of people who don’t actually die just suffer a lot. But I’m also a little proud of humankind in general and New York City 2022 in particular, for making this horrible thing happen less than it otherwise would.
Mmm. Yeah I don’t really know what the right thing here is. The thing I was trying to respond to and counter is a vague sense of Solstice giving a false impression of communities taking care of each other, in a way that felt sort of “add insult to injury” to people who weren’t actually getting taken care of.
I’m not sure I quite parsed your suggestion (or, like, it made sense as a concept but I didn’t quite grok it well enough that I could write a paragraph expressing it). Could you say more words about it?
I’m interested in others expressing opinions on this as well.