My parents came to visit me last week.

 

They hadn't intended to do so, but I was talking to my mom, and I said something like, “I wish you could come see my garden.”

 

See, I can't really send her photos and have them be legible. She is, at this point, legally blind, and so photos, even expanded to the point where she can see them, just become grainy and hard to take in. She can see colors, though, and get sensations, and her ability to navigate the world (when it is light out) is not horrible.

 

“I wish I could, too,” she said. And then she went and told my dad that she wished she could see my garden, and maybe they could put it in the calendar for next year.

 

My dad thought about it, and thought about my mother's eyesight (which is still getting worse), and said, “I don't know if you'll be able to see it next year.”

 

So they bought plane tickets.

 

It was nice having my parents here. I was able to take my mom out in the garden. She could sit by the beds and I would tell her what was in them, and she could lean in and see and smell the plants, and touch them, and ask me what they were, and I could break off ripe tomatoes or cucumbers and she could taste them.

 

But I also wanted to have tea with my mom.

 

My parents don't drink tea (for religious reasons) and so this is not something I am able to share with them. But I had been thinking since the last time I had tea around them, and I had ordered something that I thought would work.

 

This was green-tea processed Hainan Rosewood tea. The taste is shockingly similar to real tea, but it has no caffeine and is not tea, and therefore, my parents are allowed to drink it. The preparation of this tea made it work really well for gong fu style separate steeps and pours. It was sweet and earthy, and the earthiness grew with successive steeps until, around steep four, it slipped away, leaving only a tiny hint of lingering sweetness on the tongue.

 

I told my mom that tea was a process, and she said, “right, you sit around and chat,” and I said, no. You sit and appreciate the tea.

 

It was nice to be able to appreciate the tea with my mom.

Green-tea processed hainanese yellow rosewood tea comes from Jesse's Tea House, and it is absolutely delightful for anyone who likes tea.

One of the things I have been thinking about is this: how do we fix what is wrong with this country? In order to answer this question, I have to answer a first question: What is wrong with this country?

 

So one of the things I see people talking about from time to time, with various degrees of seriousness, is that the solution to what is happening right now with Trump--which, to be clear, is fascism, ethnic cleansing, and authoritarian military rule--is some kind of shooting war. Civil War. Secession. Etc etc.

 

There are many issues with a second US Civil War. The first one is that the casualties from such a conflict will probably make this one of the bloodiest and most painful in history, and given how things work, I strongly suspect that the most vulnerable people in our nation--immigrants, non-white people, queer and especially trans people, homeless people--will be targeted at a differentially high rate. I do not think we should lightly speak about a course of action that would result in tens of millions of violent deaths, and even more people dying of starvation, grid collapse, and other failures of infrastructure.

 

But the other issue I have is this: I imagine a civil war. I imagine the best case scenario, which is that we win.

 

Cool. Now what? We will still have a belligerent, angry, hostile population numbering in the high tens of millions, if not a hundred million. There will still be pressure and resentment. And--this is a point that matters--I do not think any of us have the stomach to just outright murder a hundred million people because we don't like their political beliefs, and I don't think anyone who does have the stomach for that should be anywhere near power.

 

But we will have approximately a hundred million people with a burning hatred for immigrants, Democrats, people who violate social and gender norms, people who count as “diverse” in any way, and a culture of using weapons. 

 

So what are we going to do at that point to bring about a nation at peace? Military occupation, probably, but that just prolongs the inevitable. What do we do to discharge that burning resentment so that we will have actual peace?

 

Whatever you're imagining… Is there any way to do that now, before tens of millions of people are slaughtered and we ramp up the bad feelings times one hundred?

 

Here is a thing I believe: The United States no longer agrees on a unifying principle among its people.

 

A plurality of this country is being taught that the sight of a Black woman with a decent job is proof that she's a quote DEI hire, when the reality is that she's probably hyper competent and has worked four times as hard to get to that point as the white man who preceded her. They're taught that “immigrants” are lazy and criminals who are invading our country. They believe that half this country tolerates things that didn't happen, like entire cities being burned to the ground, and that instead of being upset about all losing our homes, we encourage it.

 

Those people they are being encourage to hate are part of this country. We are standing at a point where it is clear that half this country hates the other half enough to watch it burn and eat popcorn while it does so. If we were to talk about the United States as if it were another country, we would say that warring factions in the United States have reached the point where we are unable to find common ground, and our hatred for each other exceeds our desire for peace.

 

 A certain number of people do this calculus and think that we should find common ground by picking out a scapegoat from the list of the hated people and saying, “oh yes, immigrants are bad, we need a huge crackdown on immigration, with less process” or “I think that trans people are a problem too, and maybe we can bond over that and take away their rights.” 

 

#

 

Not to change the subject abruptly, but let's go back to the topic of my parents.

 

When I was a kid, we did not have a TV. On occasion, we'd have a movie weekend--we'd rent a TV and a VCR, and everyone in the family could pick a film and we'd watch them all in order of age together. The little kids picked cartoons. Older kids might pick something they'd heard about from a friend--this is how we all first watched Princess Bride: as a family, laughing so hard we were falling down.

 

My dad would pick one of those decades old movies: Ben Hur or Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia or East of Eden.

 

I tell people sometimes that my parents were deeply religious, but I don't think this captures something my parents deeply believed: that questions were sacred, that doubt was necessary, and that faith did not require closing your eyes.

 

One of the movies my dad chose was a movie called Inherit the Wind, which was not kind to organized religion. It is a fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where a teacher was put on trial for teaching evolution in a schoolroom instead of creationism.

 

The main character of the movie is a fancy Northern lawyer named Henry Drummond, the sort of godless fellow that small-town Tennessee despises. (In real life, the actual lawyer was Clarence Darrow.) He shows up to represent our hapless school teacher. Sentiment in the small town is burnt to a fever by the local preacher and the arrival of a nationally-famous Southern Democrat, a politician and lawyer of the strength by shouting style, who shows up to represent the state. (In real life, this was William Jennings Bryan).

 

In the movie (and also in reality), Drummond brings scientific experts to speak about evolution. Those experts are barred from court, and so instead, Drummond calls his legal opponent to serve as an expert witness on the Bible.  (This sounds fake. It did happen.) Drummond then proceeds to demonstrate all the ways the Bible contradicts itself and/or probably cannot be taken as literal truth.

 

One of the things I appreciated about the movie (and this part was definitely fictional) was the depiction of strength and shouting as an apparent unifier on the surface--one that brought crowds marching with torches and pitchforks--while watching it break families down and harm people because strength and shouting demands an enemy, and anyone who questions the shouting in any way becomes part of the enemy.

 

At one point in the movie, the godless Henry Drummond quotes a Bible verse that encapsulates this problem: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” At the end, Drummond's opponent collapses with a heart attack. (This a mild dramatization: in reality, it took William Jennings Bryan five days to die after the trial.)

 

This is the kind of movie that would make my father cry, because he believes in questions and freedom and learning over shouting and strength.

 

#

 

That, I think, is where we are now as a country: strength, shouting, and setting ourselves up to inherit the wind.

 

To bring ourselves back to the “let's pick a scapegoat and try to make common cause on their backs," I hope this makes clear why I believe this is not a solution. Quibbling over which room in our house we should trouble or whether we should trouble that room in different ways is not a solution.  It, in fact, exacerbates the issue, because it sends the message that yes, it is okay to hate a portion of this country and to deny them human rights. It presents the real question as a negotiation over whose rights are we allowed to take away.

 

So how do we stop troubling our own house? The purpose of the house is to protect the members of the house, not to decide which of them don't matter. The great work of our time is that: reestablishing a unifying belief that we should live in a country that protects everyone's rights. Not some people's rights; everyone's rights.

 

There are many, many moving pieces here. There are the billionaires who don't want us unified because if we are, we'll regulate their activity. There are media organizations (increasingly owned by the billionaires) who want to send messages that keep people angry instead of seeing humanity.  There is the fact that so many extremely wealthy people got massively more wealthy during COVID, and I think they're hoping that we'll get more bad outcomes so that they can make more money that they absolutely don't need.

 

There is also a deep current of racism and xenophobia in this country that presents a massive national security threat, making us vulnerable to division and incitement. There are foundational myths and poor understandings of history and so, so much more going on.

 

There is no single answer as to how we get there. Just as there are many moving pieces, there are a hundred million answers. The project of our lifetime is convincing enough people that we can actually protect everyone's rights: that we should live in a house that exists to protect people, and not to trouble them.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.