Highlights
I write to you today because I have apparently made it look easy. ⤴️
The ruling class (law and policy makers, oligarch businessmen, celebrity, hedge fund managers buying up single-family housing, etc.) want you literate enough to be able to work for them, but not so literate that you realize how badly the working class gets fucked over in this world-making. ⤴️
Read enough to be able to consume and to execute, not to consider critically, certainly not enough to create. ⤴️
If you were labeled a problem, difficult in class, slow… I bless and keep you. ⤴️
We live in a world ran and ruled by the written word. Similar to money, right? ⤴️
Tie plenty of guilt, shame, and fear in the process of returning to reading in adulthood. Make them feel like it’s an innate talent— you have it or you don’t— rather than a skill you need to learn, hone, and practice. ⤴️
The internet age is the most collective access to information we have ever had as humans in every iteration of our timeline— and most of us cannot read it well enough to allow it to change our lives. ⤴️
Most of my paternal family is not written-word literate, functionally or in any sense. Which meant: my parents would buy me a book sooner than they bought us groceries, if it came down to it. ⤴️
They don’t have access to the research because most of them cannot read what’s been written about them. ⤴️
I write for the same reason I keep track of my dreams, for the same reason I meditate and practice being still— to stay in touch with me and not let too much slip by me. We’re about building a nation; the inner nation needs building, too. ⤴️
I am in the business of revolution, page by page, meal by meal, moment by moment. The world I wish to see has seas of makers, millions and billions of distinct fingerprints all over a brand new mode of being, which means learning. ⤴️
reading is still uncomfortable in certain seasons of life, especially seasons that require high screen time from me. ⤴️
I have stronger retention of the maps I hand-drew from a world atlas in the fourth grade than I do of the internet games we played to learn geography. ⤴️
Reading and writing are disciplines distinct from other forms of literacy: aural and oral proficiency (speaking and listening), media literacy (video watching, noticing ), financial literacy, social literacy, numerical literacy (shoutout to the baddies with math anxiety rooted in the same oppressive upbringings). ⤴️
If that was not important, we would not lock university libraries behind several hundred thousand dollars paywalls. If there was not agency and power to be found in reading, the empire would not work so hard to burn your hands away. ⤴️