Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 2
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what over here.
A colleague in the aid and development sector wrote an obituary today for USAID. As much as I have been working on questions of how to transform the sector — and as much as USAID has been too often paternalistic and hegemonic in its policies and practices — the demise of the agency and the folding of its corpse into the State Department is a nightmare. People are going to die, all over the world, because of abrupt work stoppages and supply chain disruptions. They’re going to die from hunger and lack of medicines. They likely already are.
Next to this, perhaps of lesser importance but still concerning, is the complete gutting of the workforce — again, perhaps bloated with non-local staff and high-paid consultants (I’m don’t think I’m in that class — feel free to ask me why) — and the entry of these people into a fragile employment market. The sector, already on its knees because of Gaza and Sudan, now feels like a withered husk. In the space of two weeks. It’s an awful state of affairs, one that is mirrored in every other sector that has just been shivved.
But I started this daily writing practice as a pathway to hope. For me. Perhaps for you too. So to close today’s piece, I’ll leave you with this: Tonight I joined the “We Choose to Fight” action call by the Working Families Party and Indivisible. The first speaker was Representative Maxwell Frost, a man who looks painfully young and speaks with the passion of a freshly minted politician but also with the old wisdom of a lifelong activist. He reminded us that even when hope and love (and I would add joy) seem dim — or especially when — we have to choose them. A few years ago, I wrote a piece about creating hope and the actions we can take to move towards collective progress. I’ll come back to that theme again soon. For now, we have to wake up every morning and make the active choice to commit to hope. It really is fuel for solidarity and collective action toward mutual care.
The image I chose today is from a print by one of my favorite artists, Kathe Köllwitz. In the image, a woman is straining and fighting against the shadow of Death, and being pulled by a shadow of her child: Life. I like to think, when we fall over the right edge of the painting, we’ll see that life has won the fight for now.
Essay 3 is here.
