A young woman who comes into my orbit is thinking about how she will approach her future.
In every way, she's accomplished: Great grades, stunning public service as a college student, warm and personable too.
But when I meet her, her talk is largely rushed. It is about how she will be measured and whether those measurements will measure up and how, though she will go to medical school, she can't get dig into any pleasures because first there is this and then there is that and . . . take a breath.
Like so many people now, especially those of her generation, she appears too busy to have ever not had something to be doing, some goal to live up to . . . a stress that must be attended to.
When have you felt relaxed? I ask, or done something without a plan?
In Rome. For a week. She stayed with a family which would have long meals without any agenda. She could not get over the openness of it, the freedom, the ease. The only point was to eat and enjoy.
I offer the story because it is Sunday morning and yesterday Max wrote to remind me of brunches we attended when we were both in Johannesburg. The brunches were for teachers but the only point was to meet and eat and gab.
And because Max was prompted to write by the shooting in Texas.
What are we gonna do? He asks.
Well, I certainly don't know anything beyond the obvious. Like, it would help if Democrats ran candidates as sacrificial lambs in Red Districts, people who actually stood up and said: “Yes we want to come and get your guns. No, you do not understand what the Second Amendment actually says or how it has been used as fraud against you, how the NRA is not just making you less safe but it's picking your pocket.”
Such candidates would lose by a landslide, and I regret to say, would have to plan on moving their home address and wearing body armor. But politics is about division and the left needs to be clear about the division it seeks here, work to make the case far better than it has. Not much will pierce the echo chamber of those trapped in their own rhetoric of insecure male ego, militarism, and a not-so-secret love of blood, but the left can do better than it has in making an argument for civilization as preferable to a war of all against all.
And then, of course, it would be cool if the base came out, swept into office a new breed of politician such that we can unpack the court, undo gerrymandering, and take all the money out of politics.
But as we hold our breath for that, I suggest brunch.
Brunch with friends, brunch with colleagues, brunch as one tiny anecdote to too much stress in the system.
Because Senator Murphy asks his colleagues in a desperate plea “what are we doing?” we might well ask ourselves the same.
What are we doing?
I ask this to my friend Cinema. What are we doing?
We are looking at our phones, she says.
Of course we are.
We are TikToking and obsessing over Johnny Depp and Miss Heard. We are deep in the thrall of a pretend life.
And maybe that’s great. Gossip on a global scale.
But it looks like nothing too. Or it looks like a terrible response to, and multiplier of, the stress we cannot back away from.
It looks like false and faux connection telling us we are doing something cool when in fact we are doing something toxic, something dangerous.
It looks like we want to not imagine and excuse rather than imagine and act. (Warning, this is a tough video, in which a senator imagines her own child in a mass shooting.)
We all see everything now and yet see nothing, least of all each other.
Brunch with friends or colleagues won’t solve local problems let alone school shootings. But maybe brunch with no agenda is a revolutionary act in an era that never lets its young people breathe and a country which refuses to add together the two plus two of treating guns as they are treated in Japan or Australia or England or a hundred others.
Maybe we start by doing no harm, by not making the problem worse, which eggs, coffee, and conversation never do.