The Little Things

From around 9:15 this morning until about 2:15 in the afternoon, I sat in a small and very warm windowless room with no airflow. There were four other people in the room, and none of us had expected to be there for quite that long, so some of us had stupidly not eaten anything all day. By the time we finished and stumbled out into the street, I was borderline comatose. Two hours later, as I sat down to try and write this newsletter, I was only marginally more sentient. My brain lost all the threads it had been pulling on the past few weeks, and when I tried to find them again, all I could think about was the news, the Epstein Files and the Melania documentary and the Washington Post. So I decided I would pivot this newsletter, as the industry likes to say, and tell you a bit about my day.

If you were a reader last fall, you may remember this newsletter I wrote about community. I told you a little about my friend with the immigration problems, and how I jumped in to help her and her family as best I could. You may not know, but after I found them a new lawyer and got the whole process moving, I continued to help by acting as a sort of project manager. I also moonlight as an occasional, if mediocre, interpreter and a fundraiser when necessary. My main job is essentially to be the best middle-aged white American lady I can be: I make phone calls, I write emails, I ask people for money, and I make sure all the shit we need to do for their legal case not only gets done, it gets done right. Legal services are expensive, but people also want to feel useful in this terrible time. If you know people who make a good living, and if you're willing to put your mind to it and to not care what people think of you, you'll be surprised at how quickly you can cobble together nearly $20,000—which only pays for part of the legal and filing fees, mind you—without even using a GoFundMe.

Now, this experience is very much not about me, but it has been transformative for me just the same. I spent most of a lifetime worrying about what other people thought of me, and social media certainly has not helped with this issue. But if you, like me, tend to shine in a crisis, you know that nothing gets you out of your own way like going into problem-solving mode. When I jumped into this situation, suddenly nothing was more important to me than the work I was doing to help my friend and her family. Nothing. Not how I came across, not how I looked, not whether the lawyer was sick of me sending messages every day or whether people still liked me after I asked them for money and demanded they actually help if they said they would. All I cared about was that nothing bad happened to this person I love or to the people she loves. Whatever it took to make sure that didn't happen, I was going to do it.

So far, nothing bad has happened, although obviously in this landscape, there's no guarantee. Even the lawyers we work with now say as much: This isn't like anything they've ever seen before. They also say that their immigration work was much busier last fall, and much quieter now, because people are terrified to do anything. This breaks my heart for many reasons, among which is that it feels like letting the bad guys win. There still is a lot people can do—both for people who need help with immigration cases, as well as for people who want to find a way to help. But everything feels so fractured and fragmented, and despite all this work we supposedly did to make the world more connected, so many people are swimming in seas of AI slop and misinformation, or stuck in echo chambers.

One of the things about being on social media, as most of us know, is that you're basically living in a sort of fractal. You only see slices of the story, and people only see fragments of you in return. We're in a town square of 300 million people, or we're seeing the pieces of a life that someone carefully arranges through filters and photo ops. We discover that we somehow know too much about strangers but not enough about our friends. But I think we've reached the end of what social media is actually capable of. It feels like a lot of people are ready for something very different, something that's less about how we appear to one another and more how we connect to and care for one another.

Today I watched the lawyer go through piles of paperwork. When she got to the good moral character section, she started to laugh and shake her head. "In the 13 plus years I've been doing this, I've never seen good moral character evidence like this. It's extraordinary. Not just the quantity, but the quality. Letters, testimonies, community involvement, all the incredible accomplishments of your children." She looked at me and I said, "I told you they were the greatest people I know." It has felt like such a small thing to only help one person, one family. But in these past years of billionaires and billions of users, I think we've forgotten how meaningful small can be.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx

PS: If you're interested in what I've done to help my friend and how you can do similar work, please let me know. Or if you know someone who, like my friend, needs help, let me know that too. I want to try and put my knowledge to use, and I do enjoy telling other people what to do.