Searching deep for that place of joy
July 5, 2025
I have a lot of almost-finished posts stacked up in my Stack, but on the 5th of July, the day after I asked my neighbors to speak from a place of joy and saw so many of them struggle, I just wanted to write these thoughts. Please excuse typos and thinkos—this is raw.
I am proud to be an American because…
My community radio station, KSQD, takes part each year in The World’s Shortest Parade—short as in distance, not time. From lineup at 8:30 am to getting to the actual end, this parade is looooooong. So I had lots of time to walk around with my microphone and talk with my neighbors.1
My mission yesterday was this: When working on my last post, about how the current administration is destroying the creative engine of science research in the US, I realized that I was proud of this aspect of being an American. I have a lot of criticisms of American culture, but our outsize creativity is not one of them. And that’s why I decided to ask my neighbors this particular question.
Find that place of joy
I walked through the crowd, looking for people who would make eye contact with me. There were many. If you believe anything that MAGA tells you about coastal liberals, you should come hang on the Central Coast for a while. We’re nice. We’re friendly. We talk to random strangers.2
I started by putting my hand on my heart, saying, “I’m from KSQD Community Radio and I’m asking people to find that place of joy.”
Almost everyone reacted the same way: they knew what I was saying. “Find that place of joy” is currently liberal code for “ignore everything that’s going on and access that deep, neglected place where you actually felt like we were making progress.”
Most of my neighbors found that place. They mentioned our wonderful community. They talked about how Americans help each other. At least one mentioned my own, our deeply creative spirit fueled by the aspirations of immigrants present and past.
Some of them then thanked me for asking them to dig in and look for that joy.
How can you keep your joy when your neighbors hate you?
At his Fourth of July speech, our current president admitted that he “hates” us. Our president hates the almost half of American voters who didn’t vote for him. This morning when I got up and read that quote from what he called a speech, I just had to sit with that. Our president hates us. His followers love him, and thus he has made what we suspected official: our neighbors (metaphorical and literal, given that 20% of our county voted for him) hate us.
These are not normal times in the US. I was a young adult in the Reagan years, when our president was starting the restructuring of American life that has culminated in the July 3 Big Ugly Bill. Never once in that time did I think that the large majority that voted for Reagan hated everyone who didn’t. Americans understood then that we had deep disagreements about policy. We understood that there were others in this country whose lifestyles mystified us, maybe even repelled us. But I never felt a large scale hatred coming from any segment of our political society toward another.3
I have deep sympathy for those few people that I approached yesterday who told me they just couldn’t get to that place of joy. They had come out to be with their neighbors not in celebration, but in commiseration.
This is the piece I did for KSQD, people reaching for that place of joy.
We can’t keep doing this
We have allowed deregulated commercial media and unrestrained social media to nearly destroy American life. When we were able to retreat into our silos, me to NPR you to Sinclair, me to New York Times you to Washington Times, we lost our sense of a shared reality. When on social media we found out how much we really disagreed with the people we shopped with, learned with, and worshiped with, we started to physically move away from each other.
Yesterday I asked my neighbors to speak from a place of joy, but this morning I am giving voice to my despair. This has to stop. We have to realize that as Americans, we have always had a shared destiny at the same time as always having deep disagreements about what that destiny is. Disagreement is what makes democracy; it’s fundamental to the process. We have to talk to each other; we have to live near each other; we have to work together or this has been a struggle of nearly 250 years for nothing.
Conservatives, most liberals don’t hate you
The fact is, that vitriol coming out of the mouths of those talking heads you adore is not poisoning liberals—it’s poisoning you. It’s making everyday Americans like you think that a large portion of other Americans hate you and are out to ruin your lives, which is simply not true.
I know a lot of liberals. Yes, like in any group of people there are a few who are really quite nasty. Welcome to the human spectrum. But the fact is—and this is a fact that is not opinion and not an alternative fact—that most liberals are pretty OK. We probably dress a bit weirder than you and sure, we have different ideas of what our government should look like, but hating us will only hurt you. Hatred will turn you into an ugly shell of a human being just like that man you think is saving you.
You must resist.
Liberals, we have to nurture that place of joy
I get up every morning and do my duty as an American and a voter and I read the news. And the news this morning made me cry. It made me to go that place of ugliness and anger. Yes, it’s true, the president of our country hates us, and his followers seem to think that’s just fine. Yes, it’s true, the people in charge of our federal government are dismantling science, they are plotting to take away the vaccines which are why half of us even exist, they are torturing hard-working immigrants who should be thanked for doing jobs that Americans won’t do, they are taking away healthcare first from women, now from all of us who don’t make enough money to buy the most expensive healthcare in the world.
Yes, I also have that wall of shame and despair and pure anger that wants to block off my place of joy. But we can’t let it do that. We can’t let that wall block off the light that feeds our souls. We can’t let them—a very small number of very bad people from amongst the many people who count themselves as conservative—steal our joy.
Take it back
In 40 minutes after typing this, I will go to our local farmer’s market. I will buy sustaining food grown with love by my neighbors. I will get a fresh wheatgrass box for my cats (in biodegradable cardboard, no less). I’ll wave at the neighbors I know and probably chat with some complete strangers, because that’s how we roll here on the Central Coast. Then I’ll pack up my mic and PA and I’ll go sing songs written before I was born to people in a memory care facility, people who can’t remember their grandchildren’s names but remember all the words of the songs of their youth. Then I’ll come home and my husband will cook me a wonderful meal made from the ingredients we bought from our farmers, most of them immigrants. We aren’t religious, but our Saturday meal is a sort of ritual tribute to the bounty of the land. After I clean up, I’ll finish the pretty crappy fantasy novel I downloaded on Libby, a library app that may go away because the few dollars that support it were just taken out of the federal budget. Maybe we’ll watch a movie or show. Maybe we’ll hear the Great Horned Owls that live in our forest out for an evening chat. And before sleep I’ll reach deep for that place of joy, because my body doesn’t sleep when it’s thinking about that wall that I keep having to dismantle as it grows around my joyful place. I will pick up a few of those bricks and toss them aside. I will end this day thankful for another day on this gorgeous Earth, eating its wonderful bounty, loving my neighbors and my cats and my yard and my family.
I’ll reach for that place of joy and I’ll find it because the alternative is simply not acceptable.
Where will you find your joy?
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This shy person discovered too late in life that I get particular joy from donning an unofficial badge with a squid on it and shoving my microphone in the faces of strangers. I change from someone who quakes at the idea of making a phone call to someone I don’t know to a cheerfully gregarious extrovert.
The first time I went to a cafe with my future husband in Santa Cruz (when I was still living in San Francisco), a man at the next table turned to us and joined the conversation we were having. We chatted for a few minutes then he said, “Nice talking with you!” and left. My future husband said to me, “I bet you think I know that guy” and I agreed that had been my assumption. “Nope,” he said. “That happens to me all the time. That guy was just being friendly.”
I’m talking about hatred by one political group for another. I would never downplay the intense hatred of non-white people and queer people that defined that time. Never.
Hate is the result of coming from a place of fear, always. Many Americans are coming from that place on both sides now. For some it's a defense mechanism. For others, it's ingrained from how they were raised. I feel like I've been pushed toward fear by the vitriol around me. But I refuse it. Love is so much more powerful. We've fallen apart as a nation because that's been lost. When we stop reaching across the aisle, stop communicating--mean literally, not speaking at one another---we lose our souls. Thank you for continuing the conversation.