A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor Review (Or Something)

To be honest, when I first heard that Hank Green had published a fiction book, I was skeptical. He’s a YouTuber and podcaster, and he does a lot of great stuff, but I was concerned he’d just gotten a book deal because he had an audience, and it was a safe bet that people would buy the book. Which I did.

But it actually turned out to be quite good. I read the first book, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, last year. I just recently reread it, and then went straight into the new book, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, which came out this month.

Warning: minor spoilers will follow.

     

A brief, spoiler-lite plot summary of the first book:

Twenty-three-year-old April May is walking in New York in the middle of the night, and she sees this huge Transformer-like sculpture. She gets her friend to come see it, they make a YouTube video, and it goes viral. The statues appeared out of nowhere in cities all over the world, and nobody knows what they are or where it comes from. Is it aliens? It might be aliens.

Because they were some of the first to post a video, and because April is a cute American girl, and because of luck, their video is the one that really gets famous as the first discovery of the statue that April calls “Carl.” She gets swept up in a maelstrom of fame and politics in the quickly polarizing debate about whether Carls are a benevolent force that will bring humanity together (her take) or whether they came to Earth to destroy us and should be feared (the take of her enemy, Peter Petrawicki).

This isn’t a review so much as me thinking about questions and themes that stuck out to me. Starting with…

How did our country get to be so divided?

When I first read An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, I found it to be a great framework for me to think about the 2016 election a few years after the fact. For instance:

[B]y engaging with him, I was affirming him and his wackos. Their ideas were getting more exposure through my larger audience, and I… was confirming the idea that there were two sides you could be on.

-An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

It wasn’t until after Mr. Orange actually won the 2016 election that I realized how all of our criticism and ridicule actually gave him attention, which turned into votes.

Also, this particular quote draws attention to the way that these binary spectrums on political issues are constructed. We didn’t have to live in a world where wearing a mask during a global pandemic is controversial. It could just be something people do, like putting on a seatbelt in the car. But we love to be angry, or at least websites want us to love to be angry, anything to keep us clicking through their content. So the stories about people who want the “freedom” to not wear a mask get amplified, and this becomes an increasingly polarized issue. (Not that the president helped with that. But the reactions of people who are pro-mask-wearing probably could have been improved.)

How should we respond to extremist violence?

I won’t go into details, because it really is worth reading for yourself, but there are moments in these books that address fear-driven mass violence.

That was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just ‘unstable’ or ‘mentally ill.’

-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Back to talking about the American president again. He does not have to say “I support neo-Nazis” to support neo-Nazis and strengthen their base. He can hint, and that is enough. And when something like the shooting in Charleston shooting happens, he is responsible, if indirectly. And when he says there are “very fine people on both sides” and acts of hate continue to happen in our country, he is not innocent.

It’s so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on other people’s fear and confusion.

We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder ‘means’ is that we’ve made it too easy to kill.

-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

The amount of shootings in this country is due to the amount of guns. I am reminded of this tweet from 2015:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

Sure, we can hold people accountable for their actions. Certainly it's important to call a hate crime what it is. But ultimately, we are all responsible for mass shootings because we haven’t done enough to limit the number of guns. It’s a systemic problem. We should have fixed it by now, but we haven’t.

How can I stop feeling like I need to be constantly productive?

I wouldn’t say this is one of the central themes of the book, but it really resonated with me. I often feel guilty for doing things that are relaxing instead of “productive,” whatever that means. I’ve gotten a lot better at letting myself relax since college, when I was constantly studying. But there’s still that voice in my head telling me I need to produce. It’s not always a bad thing. That voice is what got me to write tonight, and writing feels good. But rereading old favorite books also feels good, and I shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it.

Anyway, there were a couple of moments that I found helpful at the end of the second book.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

I actually watched John Green’s video about this quote before I reached it in the book, but I think it would have stuck out to me as regardless. My problem, ultimately, is that I am not good at treating my own happiness as something worthwhile. That problem makes a lot of sense for the world we live in. Capitalism doesn’t want me to be happy, because if I’m happy I’m not going to be so inclined to buy things. Capitalism does want me to be working all the time. Quotes like these are great for combating the ever-present whisper of Mr. Monopoly/Uncle Sam.

Do people actually believe _____?

“You really do believe that power must always go to the people who deserve it, don’t you? … If you didn’t believe it, you’d have to spend some fraction of your time not feeling like Jesus, and that wouldn’t be any fun.

“But then someone else gets the power, and you lose some of yours, and you don’t like that power has gone somewhere else. But you also can’t stop believing that power organizes itself correctly because your entire understanding of the world is based on that single idea. So, instead, you convinced yourself that they’re cheating or corrupt or lying.”

-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

This quote is not written about a certain person currently occupying the oval office, but it could be. It helps me understand a bit more about how Orange and his followers think. I often wonder if they genuinely believe the lies they tell. I don’t know the answer to that question, and it probably varies from person to person, but this is part of an explanation.

And it is terrifying that he is so intent on believing what he wants to believe. How do you argue with people who will just believe whatever suits them best?

What is reality?

Sometime in elementary school, I read a book called Philosophy Rocks. It was a philosophy book for kids, and it discussed what I later learned was Descartes’ idea about dreams. How do we know what’s real? Could I be dreaming right now? That book led to what I think of as my first existential crisis. I was standing in the living room, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no way of really knowing if anyone else is real. After all, I interact with people in my dreams, and believe that they’re real while I’m dreaming. Or maybe it’s some elaborate simulation. How can I ever know? What if I am completely alone in the universe? I was ten or eleven at the time.

I won’t get into the context of how this question comes up in Hank Green’s books because it’s fairly spoiler-heavy, and it’s worth reading them without knowing exactly where they’re going.  But here are a few quotes:

…the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?

-An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Every night, you brush your teeth, you change out of your clothes, you lie down in bed. And every morning, you wake up. There’s that period in there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren’t anymore…. how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don’t control? Like… what?!

-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

I think about this a lot. Dreams are bizarre, and sleeping is bizarre. The only reason I’m not constantly existentializing about this is that it happens every night, so I’m used to the idea.

And finally…

Here’s one last quote that I feel really gets to the heart of the book.

               The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

               -A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Thank you for reading! Let me know if you read this book—I’d love to talk about it.

My Thoughts on "Abolish the Police"

I've been meaning to start blogging again for a while, but it took something really important to get me to actually do it. That thing is the movement to abolish the police.

If you feel opposed to that idea, please hear me out. Please give me a chance to explain.

When I first heard the phrase "abolish the police," I thought, No. We can't do that. That would be chaos! In the last few months, I have consumed a lot of podcasts and articles and had a lot of conversations, and I have completely changed my mind.

It's important to understand that "abolish the police" does not mean getting rid of law enforcement. It means getting rid of this specific institution. Look back at the American Revolution. Colonial Americans weren't happy with the government, so they got rid of it. They didn't get rid of government and turn to anarchy, though. They created another, more democratic government-- one that worked better for them.

The policing system we have is not working. It makes me, a white woman, feel safe. But I feel safe at the expense of so many people who have been killed by police. Countless people, really, because how many do we not know about? And if being "safe" means that cops are killing people of color, then I don't want to be safe.

The institution of police was created to maintain white supremacy. See The New Jim Crow or this episode of the podcast Throughline to learn more; both are very well-researched. I am no expert, but I'll give a quick summary.

Chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow talks about how initially, a lot of labor was done by white indentured servants as well as Black slaves. Then, Nathaniel Bacon "managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite." The plantation owners realized they had a problem on their hands: they were outnumbered. So, "Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves... white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias" (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow). I won't give you my money or my land, but I'll give you a class of people that you can feel superior to. I'll give you some kind of power.

Then, after slavery ended, there was a set of laws called Black Codes that "for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms" (Throughline). It was illegal for a Black man to be unemployed. Through those laws and debt peonage, white people policed the actions of African Americans. An idle Black man was a threat-- not because he was likely to hurt white people, but because he wasn't putting money in white landowners' pockets for little to no pay. 

Do you remember when a Black man was arrested just for sitting in a St. Paul skyway? That kind of thing happens all the time, and the narrative that a Black person existing in a space doing nothing (read: not working for the white man) is somehow dangerous dates back to slavery and Reconstruction. In reality, the only "danger" is to the white person's ability to exploit them.

Police reinforced the laws behind segregation. They attacked peaceful protesters with fire hoses and dogs during the Civil Rights Movement. They arrest and use force against Black people disproportionately. Often this is rationalized by the rates of drug use in Black communities, even though "[s]tudies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color" (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow).

And simple reform isn't enough. I was having a conversation with my roommates the other day, and one of them commented, "You can't reform something that is doing what it was made to do." We know that the police force was created largely to police and hurt people of color. We have tried to reform police departments. Here's an article about reforming the Minneapolis police, published in 2016. It says, "Other changes include the requirement for officers to intervene if they witness improper use of force by their colleagues, and to report it to their supervisor and internal affairs." In addition to Derek Chauvin, there were three officers present when George Floyd died. Nobody intervened. The attempt at reform didn't work.

I want to be able to call someone if I hear someone breaking into my house. I want to know that there is help out there for me if I feel unsafe. But not if there's a chance that the person I call might see an unrelated Black man walking down the street and kill him just for existing in his body. Maybe I want the person I call to be able to defend themselves; but there are ways to defend yourself without killing anyone else in the process. There is no need for officers who are trained to fight offensively, and there is never any need for lethal force. It's 2020. We are technologically advanced. We are capable of protecting people without killing in the process. And that's the only kind of protection I want.

I know "abolish the police" sounds radical. Maybe it even sounds scary. That makes sense; change can be frightening. But we need change. Imagine if your brother, or husband, or father, or cousin, or boyfriend was killed for just walking down the street. And then, in the aftermath, the person who killed him gets off free and nothing changes. And then the next day it happens to someone else. What's scary is this violence that is happening every day. What's scary is that police are supposed to "protect," but so many of the people they should be protecting are terrified of them instead-- terrified because they are worried about being the next hashtag. (For some more insight on this, give a listen to the episode of the podcast "Today, Explained" entitled "The Talk." Or this beautiful, heartbreaking Alicia Keys song.)

And honestly, this is exciting. Just imagine if we were able to gather together and discuss: what would a genuinely peaceful world look like? A world where instead of putting people in prison for drug addiction, we try to help them. (It worked in Portugal.) A world built more on love than on fear and hate. In this moment when everyone is paying attention, we have a chance to build something new. And maybe in one generation, or two, twelve-year-old boys won't have to think about what exactly they will do if a cop stops them when they aren't even doing anything wrong.

I'll say it again: this system helps me, a white woman, stay safe at the expense of the lives of people like Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice (the list goes on for a very long time). And I don't want that.

It's a hard truth, but it is true: if you say you want to maintain this system, you're saying you care more about the safety and comfort of the status quo than the lives of people of color. It doesn't matter what your intentions are. This system hurts people, and by protecting this system for whatever reason, you are hurting people. This sounds blunt but I'm saying it anyway, because it's a truth we need to reckon with. A truth I've been trying really hard to reckon with these last few months. It isn't easy, but it's vital.

Yes, we need a system to protect people. That's important. And we can build that new system together. But first, we need to get past the resistance. It's hard to have a conversation about what a new system would look like if we're busy arguing about whether we keep the old one.

I want to be safe. I want you to be safe. I want everyone to be safe. So instead of talking about whether we need to abolish the police, let's re-imagine the concept of law enforcement. Let's do this together.

I want to finish up with a quote from an episode of the podcast FANTI, which provides a glimpse into what a "defund the police" world might actually look like. (And it is not at all the post-apocalyptic scary story seen in ads for the current president.)

I think it's important to recognize: defunding the police is something that people are discussing because, number one, there are myriad ways that we could reallocate that money, those hundreds of millions of dollars that go to police departments, that could go into things that inherently reduce crime, right? If we improved education, if we improved economic situations, if we had housing, right? Instead of all of those police officers having to police the homeless, those homeless could be either living somewhere or in some kind of program to better their lives. And we would reduce the crime that comes from homelessness. We would reduce the crime that comes from, you know, being undereducated or not having a job, or living in a difficult space, or whatever it is... The idea is we spend so much money on policing these people but we could also spend a lot of money on making these peoples' lives better so they wouldn't need to be policed.

~~~

Below are some additional resources. This is by no means an exhaustive list; it's just some things that I happen to be aware of.

• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
• Reimagining the Role of Police (ACLU)
• John Oliver on Defund the Police
• Six Ideas for a Cop-Free World (Rolling Stone)
• Amid cries to defund the police, what are the alternatives? (Boston Globe)
• It's not so hard to imagine a life without police (Crosscut.)
• "Who will protect you from rape without police?" Here's my answer to that question. (The Guardian Opinion)
• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police (New York Times Opinion)
• 10 Nonfiction Books on Why We Need to Defund the Police (Electric Literature).
  (I haven't actually read these yet, but I plan to.)
• A "Black Lives Matter" playlist on Spotify