Climate of Fear, Climate of Hope

By worrying, you can tell yourself you care without actually having to do anything. Worrying is a replacement for taking responsibility and action, a passive substitute for doing the brave, hard things in life.

1. Walk

If you didn’t ace this test, gently put down your Wii console and head outside. If you’re lucky enough to have a place to walk once you get out there, then start walking. If you don’t have a sidewalk or a quiet road or a path, then carefully dodge the Hummers, Minivans, and Hemis whizzing down the six lane roads that surround you all the way to City Hall and demand something better.

Moving into Green

what I mean is that I’m not interested in talking about taking your cloth tote to the supermarket or using the other side of the piece of paper. That stuff is good, but it’s like blowing into a fan. What I’m talking about is complete rehabilitation. From flat on our face to remotion. I’m talking about saving ourselves–not our lifestyles but our lives.

SarChasm

I had not realized that being a fiction writer disqualified one from being able to write with authority on any real topic, as in the sense that

a fiction writer = a liar; someone who just makes crazy stuff up.

This was news to me, and my mind argumentatively ran through a random list of folks who had, despite their membership among the suspect fiction writer gang, managed to have a profound impact on the politics and society of their time and also to write worthwhile nonfiction (LeGuin, Swift, Defoe, Camus, Sartre, Zola, Cervantes, Dreiser, Hawthorne, Huxley, Koestler, Walker, and on and on; some of these people were likewise slammed for their work).