A Conversation About Love, Politics and Revolution
Join Anna Lekas Miller and Sarah Jaffe for a conversation about love, politics and creating a new world - this Wednesday.
It is officially election week in the UK, and I have gone from being only peripherally involved in British politics to fully invested—I’ve been working for Novara Media, creating videos and infographics about the political parties and it has been a crash course in the politics and priorities of the country that I now call home.
As it turns out, it is very similar to what we have going on in the United States—a terrible Conservative party that has been in power for far too long, and a lacklustre Labour party that is still pushing for the privatization of social services and doesn’t offer anything particularly revolutionary. Of course, there are other parties—the Greens, for one, who not only call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but also the end of the occupation of Palestinian land and promote policies that allow refugees safe passage to the United Kingdom, but this party is not taken seriously.
Instead, the party that might shake up this country’s version of bipartisan politics is the Reform party, which literally blames everything on immigrants. NHS waiting times too long? It’s because there are too many immigrants—not because doctors are overstretched and underpaid. They believe that people should prove their Britishness in order to qualify for social housing.
I wish I were kidding, but hating immigrants truly extends across borders.
And then, of course, us Americans had to endure the Presidential debate—a painful reminder that our next leader will either be a convicted felon, or have dementia and definitely has a few things to say about golf while shamelessly facilitating a genocide.
What are we to do?
All of this has me thinking, a lot, about how we engage with politics when our political leaders are shambolic, how we find hope in a world that is quite literally on fire. Where do we put our energy when we are trying to change the world, and how do we not give up? I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year, watching the way that writers, activists and organizers engage with Gaza, the beautiful student movement that showed us, Americans, that our people are very much not our government, the ways that people are still relentlessly imagining and reimagining the world, in spite of unimaginable darkness.
I’ve had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of author and journalist—and long time beloved friend of mine—Sarah Jaffe’s upcoming book, From the Ashes (preorder here) which is a meditation on exactly these things, from the personal grief that becomes political to the political grief becomes personal and how this loss, whether it is a loved one or a world as we knew it forces us to imagine new worlds, to grasp onto hope and the things that are important to us and imagine a better tomorrow, in spite of everything.
I’m so pleased to invite you to a conversation between the two of us—it’s happening this Wednesday at 7 PM BST/2 PM EST (that’s 11 AM for the PST crowd) online, and you can sign up here.
We will be discussing love and politics in the time of elections—issues close to our hearts, what to do when we don’t see politically eye to eye with our loved ones, and how we write to process the world around us, and create when everything feels like too much. I’ll be asking her many questions about her book and creative process, so if you’ve ever wanted to know what its like to be a journalist or author writing about these topics, now is your chance to ask your most burning questions! We are excited to co-create this conversation with you, and hope it will be the first of many.
It is also the kick off of what will hopefully be a much larger series of similar events, through an exciting new platform called Chorale—but until that officially launches, we will be doing them on Talk.ly—so please download the app if you plan on joining us (it’s user-friendly, I promise!)
Did I mention that you can sign up here? :) Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions that you’d like me to ask, and I can’t wait to see you there!
In solidarity,
Anna