Core Values

Jason Kottke posted a response to an interview I hadn’t been aware of until now: Ezra Klein interviewed Ta-Nahesi Coates for the New York Times, contrasting the way they each see the current situation in America. Andrea Pitzer took a look at what they said, and contextualized the different ways they see things: It might sound pessimistic to see, as Coates does, the likelihood of many losses looming ahead, even as we fight for wins. But if you consider the long history of the problem at hand, it releases you from bright-kid syndrome, from the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world. You understand that to do so is impossible. You are—at most—going to be one piece of that solution in a chain of many people that begins before you were born and continues after you die. Her take on things is really smart, I think, and sums up a lot of what I’ve been struggling with for the last ten years: I can’t fix everything, but I have to stick to my core values and…