Solidarity Hall (Newsletter)

[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here and Part Three here.] I witnessed the workings of the pride economy—and its slow-motion collapse—when I made a temporary move east across northern Indiana to South Bend in 2020. My motive was to collaborate with a project related to resisting gentrification. The idea was to increase the number of homeowners who could be coached into becoming small developers—incremental development being the term for this approach.

For over ten years, Elevate’s annual conference has brought together worker-owners, caregivers, administrators, and movement leaders committed to building a stronger home care cooperative sector. When big financial interests buy up a local software company, its own employees may feel the change but its home community will likely not even notice. Not so with businesses providing social care—child care, elder care, disabled care.

The Purgatorio opens with a vision of a boat filled with souls, sailing toward shore, its motion propelled by the wings of an enormous angel “pilot”. Dante is never more self-consciously the poet and the artist, conversing and musing with his fellow artists, than in the second major section of his great poem, the Purgatorio. If the Inferno was the favorite of 19th century romantics, the Purgatorio has been claimed by modernists, especially the poets and artists.

Why are Italian social co-ops famous for delivering community-owned high-quality social care? How could we recreate their model in the U.S.? Matt Hancock is an expert on employee ownership strategies, speaks Italian, and has engaged with the Italian social co-op over several years. This conversation will be a chance to "go under the hood" with Matt! Join us today, Feb. 4, at 1 PM EST. Get a zoom link here: https://lnkd.in/eVE5thQb Solidarity Hall is a reader-supported publication.

Dante’s dream of being transported by a giant eagle occurs in the Purgatorio (not the Inferno). I used it here simply to suggest the ravishing power of the Comedy in general. The illustrator is Gustave Dore whose vivid Romantic style contributed much to Dante’s popularity in the 19th century. I’ve been reading and occasionally teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy for most of my adult life, starting back in my undergraduate days at UT Austin.

This is a little unusual for me—a personal pitch letter. So apologies in advance! But I want to share with you a brilliant crowdfunding project which is hosted on the Small Change platform here. If you care about community wealthbuilding, here she be. You may recognize two of the key people behind the project: attorney Jenny Kassan and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who died a half-century ago, has never been more in the news. Her work on tyranny–which focused primarily on Nazism and Stalinism–offers powerful insights into our Age of Trumpism. Given her personal history as a refugee from Nazism, she became an expert witness testifying as to how the forces of nihilism quickly rose in service to raw power. That’s why you’re seeing her quoted everywhere today.

[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here.] I have not read Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir of Vice President J.D. Vance, whose successful escape from Appalachia and his troubled family put him on track to political fame and even the White House. Some reviewers wanted to take the book as an insider’s explanation of Red America, especially the Heartland and its forgotten-man culture of Trumpism.

Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. –Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow In what feels like a long time ago--mid-April 2020--there reigned ever so briefly a Great Silence in the world. Do you remember? As the Covid pandemic was beginning to pour across the planet like an invisible tidal wave, a quiet suddenly fell over everything. For a few days and weeks, the whole unstoppable whirring machine of modern civilization shuddered to a halt.

Bardo…1. noun: an intermediate, liminal state between death and rebirth; 2. In Tibetan Buddhism, the state between two lives on earth; 3. A metaphor for the shared but unacknowledged condition of American society in 2025—life in suspension, always on the way, with mutual grief never reconciled or consoled. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Introduction (first post in a series) How to understand this moment in American life—are we not all trying to do this?