The Distance Between Eastern Coasts - Letter Four
A letter exchange with Farrah Berrou that unpacks how our two homes are undergoing linked crises.
This is part 4 in a 6-part correspondence between Lebanese-American writer, Farrah Berrou, and me, Kara Daly. Farrah will be writing parts 1, 3, and 5 on her Substack, A’anab News, and I will respond in parts 2, 4, and 6 here.
Links will be added as the letters get published: letter 1, letter 2, letter 3, letter 4, letter 5, and letter 6. A final recap post will be shared late-November.
Hey Farrah,
We’re writing letters at a time where each day feels a week long, aren’t we? In the first month following the hurricane, I logged information as it came out, knowing my memory would fail me—things like who raised funds and when the first cold front arrived. Since your letter, so many messed up things have happened; I want to begin by grounding in the moment and logging what’s been going on.
After 53 days, the water boil advisory here in Buncombe County lifted but some surrounding counties still don’t have drinkable water. My community is working hard to clean up and keep people housed. The day of your last letter, Biden’s 30-day ultimatum on Israel ran up. His terms were: let more aid into northern Gaza or we might suspend military support. Well, Israel didn’t let more aid in, and even though he no longer has a political career hinging on it, Biden continues to send weapons to Israel. Anyone who’s ever been to an Al-Anon meeting knows that this is called enabling someone’s behavior. The reports out of northern Gaza are becoming more dire and Democracy Now! reported that Palestinians feel they are witnessing their own extermination. Human Rights Watch released a report validating that Israel is breaking international law, Israel struck a civil defence center in Lebanon killing 15 emergency responders, and the night before this article was published, it continued to attack Beirut.
Over the last week, Donald Trump has appointed loyalists to every highest position in the U.S. government, including a Christian nationalist who believes that Israel’s warfare is biblical prophecy and a necessary step towards Christendom. I drove up the East Coast to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, a trip I’d been planning for almost a year, to taste the wine. Added to my itinerary: re-evaluate entire life. I do my best thinking when I’m traveling alone, and the drive up was devoted to podcasts unpacking how mutual aid works and the interconnectedness of our struggles, from Appalachia to Lebanon.
Donate to the mutual aid fund for Beirut’s relief kitchens who are preparing thousands of daily meals for the 1.4 million internally displaced people of Lebanon.
On this episode of Rednecks Rising Podcast, Chelsea and Tiara are in conversation about the important role that subscriber platforms (they reference Patreon) and social media play in getting stories directly from people like you, on the ground in Lebanon. This is a quote from their conversation, to which they each contributed:
“It really is…allowing us to redistribute wealth according to what we find valuable—they underestimated humanity when they gave us social media and things like that; they thought we were going to use it for stupid shit and they didn’t realize that…we would use it to support and love each other.”
Social media has also leveled the playing field in wine media, and in turn, the culture of wine. With the arrival of influencer marketing, the gatekept position of tastemaker has led us to open pastures. And here we are, saying what we’re not necessarily paid to. Still, there’s pressure not to bring our whole selves to the conversation—to be “boundless as a writer” as you wrote in your last letter. You made a good point when you said, “but the idea that food & wine are neutral products of a culture is utopian because it denies the violence that has been swept under the same table.” Cloaking food communication in a veil of neutrality is doing the dirty work of the State violence that we’re grappling with here. We are implored not to use one of the greatest access points for conversation, the dining table, to talk about injustice when it’s a legitimate part of the story.
I’m reminded of this one time when, working as a server, I thought my paycheck looked short. At this restaurant, servers and bartenders pooled our tips and received a weekly paycheck. When mine looked off, I laid it on the unopened patio bar and asked my coworkers to compare. The bar manager came over and tried to shut the conversation down, suggesting that I was breaking some kind of company rule by discussing my paycheck. Well, we figured out that I was missing payment for two shifts the week prior, and when the owner double-checked, he discovered he hadn’t paid the entire FOH staff for one of those shifts. I think it was an honest mistake on his part, but the bar manager, who had nothing to do with payroll and everything to do with why some men shouldn’t be in management, would have ensured that I performed free labor that week had he succeeded in scaring me with his made up rule.
Leading up to the election and following the results, I’ve been disenchanted with the way conversations around Israel have been going among some Democrats I’ve chatted with. While we endured endless Harris ads consisting of women sharing stories of rape and incest, no one seemed to want to contend with the deep injustice of a two-party system forcing us to choose between two genocidists. That our president might be a woman of color for the first time as well as a genocidist is a slap in the face to me.
I think people want less complicated political issues to pick and choose from, and maybe Trump’s straightforward, tell-all approach to destruction will motivate people to remain politically engaged, but will we contend with colonialism in an impactful way? I do not know. The Democratic party is notorious for positioning women and queer people as its mascot, using our legitimate fear of violence as a stepping stone to political power. Knowing my state would likely turn red (it did), I did vote for Harris, but coming to that decision was distressing. I’m grieving the loss, yes. But the loss existed before the election and had she won, would have lived one. I want people to know that moving forward, the work cannot exclude women, children, and queer people globally like it has so far. Their struggle is literally ours—this is something I’m learning.
Is there anything you want people who voted for Harris to know?
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to lose faith in our ability to course correct as a species. I’m finding myself cognitively where I was in 2020, with the kinds of questions that led me to study wine. How did we get to this point? Is there a point where we went wrong, and if so, when was it and what could we have done instead? Is there an alternate storyline where we don’t voluntarily make our environment inhospitable to the point where we can’t survive it? Or is this our story no matter what?
Someone I love dearly, who I sometimes find myself in really upsetting arguments with once wondered out loud if it was in our nature to oppress each other. My response is that if it’s in our nature to oppress each other, then it’s also in our nature to resist that oppression too. Which do you want to do? I’ll leave you with a list of things I do to stay regulated in all of this: talk to friends who understand my worldview, eat treats, pet my cat and walk my dog, dance, deep breaths, short meditations, jump around and make funny noises, drink wine and putz around my house, journal and write poems, write about wine, sing.
What about you? Are you able to find space to regulate and recharge in all of this?
Stay boundless,
Kara