Stray cats shouldn't be roaming Miami's neighborhoods, putting birds at risk
Re: the May 22 Miami Herald front page story, 'Miami-Dade sets thousands of stray cats free. Should feeding them be legal?' Miami-Dade County released almost 18,000 cats back into the streets in the past year. Statistics have shown that cats kill about 2.5 billion birds annually in North America alone. Bird numbers are dropping and this is just one of the reasons.
Cats are instinctive hunters. Just because people feed them doesn't mean they won't kill birds. Peacocks and iguanas are everywhere in the county now, but they're not killing other animals.
There is absolutely no valid reason for feral cats to be roaming our neighborhoods killing what's left of our wildlife.
Glenn Huberman,
Miami
Avoiding war
Memorial Day is dedicated to honoring those in military service who gave their lives serving their country. New York was the first state to recognize the holiday in 1873. After World War l, the holiday was recognized for those who died in any war. The poem, 'In Flanders Fields,' brought forth the idea to wear red poppies on Memorial Day. When Congress passed the National Holiday Act of 1971, Memorial Day (observed) moved to the last Monday in May.
Wars are caused by ideologies for control, power and authority. The memory of the military as our protectors and also as family members and the countless civilians who are the victims of war are always in our thoughts.
What must be done is to sit, discuss, debate, communicate, negotiate and mediate to avert war and harm. It can be done.
Louis Cohen,
Vietnam Veterans of America,
Chapter 23,
Tamarac
Keys Memorial Day
Take some time from your busy Memorial Day to honor and remember the sacrifices of our many 'Soldiers Killed In Action' during a ceremony in the auditorium of the Key Largo Murray Nelson Government Center at 11 a.m. on May 26. Doors open at 9:30 a.m.
Plans include a performance by our Florida Keys Community Concert Band, flag presentation by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Scout Color Guard, inspirational videos and insightful veteran and civilian guest speakers.
Immediately following the ceremony, free hot dogs, burgers, fries and discounted beverages will be provided at the VFW Post 10211's new and remodeled restaurant, 'The Armory Speakeasy,' directly adjacent to the Murray Nelson Government Center on the northbound side of U.S. 1.
John Donnelly,
Key Largo
Upholding the law
The Founding Fathers were revolutionaries. They started one, finished one and knew how to avoid another one. One way to avoid one is to not use the military to suppress dissent to enforce domestic law, which is a principal reason the founders rebelled against the British Crown.
Police are monitored by courts, but armies aren't. Although the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit a standing army, it does limit funding one for more than two years. After abuses in suppressing dissent were seen during the Civil War, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, which prohibits using the military to enforce domestic law.
An exception to the Act's prohibition is that troops can guard military installations, where vital national defense information is kept. In an apparent attempt to get around the Act, President Trump transferred federal territory along the border with Mexico to the military and began using troops to seize illegal immigrants.
Some of the hundreds of criminal trespass cases against those immigrants were thrown out by a federal judge, who concluded that claiming they trespassed on a military installation was a legal fiction and a violation of the Act. While preventing illegal immigration is a laudable goal, so is preventing the army from suppressing dissent, which is why the military is prohibited from domestic law enforcement and why the potential for that should not be permitted.
Fortunately, once again, the courts are doing their job by upholding the rule of law and curbing yet another possible step toward dictatorship, however innocently it may be portrayed.
R. Thomas Farrar,
Miami
Youngest voters
More than 50 years ago, the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted 18-year-old people the right to vote. It was at the height of the Vietnam War and the thinking was that if young people were old enough to fight — even against their will, as was the case with the draft — they were old enough to vote.
Now it's time for a new Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the vote to anyone who has started menstruating. Because if you're old enough to bear children — even against your will, with draconian anti-abortion laws — you're old enough to vote.
Katy Sorenson,
Miami
Jefferson's gaze
There are sincere citizens among us who believe that our founding fathers meant for our nation to worship only one higher being: theirs. Instead, the founding fathers built a nation whose government would be truly neutral on the issue of 'best religion.' They enshrined it in our Constitution.
President Thomas Jefferson championed freedom of religion his entire life. It is ironic that now his portrait hangs in Donald Trump's Oval Office. Jefferson often pointed to himself as someone whose religious views might differ from others, yet would be good for society. He said, 'Ask not of my religion. That is a matter between my God and me alone. If society finds that my life was just and moral, the religion that governed it cannot have been a bad one.'
Today, everything that happens in the Oval Office is under the gaze of Jefferson. Maybe it will make those who populate the office a little more thoughtful. Maybe nervous?
Anyway, it makes me feel good.
Mac Melvin,
Key Biscayne
Disheartened
No matter how hard they try, Republican lawmakers cannot escape their connection to President Donald Trump's efforts to purge the United States of as many immigrants as possible. While South Florida's Congressional representatives may claim to be 'deeply disappointed,' they cannot afford to step on constituents' toes due to their reliance on the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan communities — the last of which were recently dealt a setback by the mostly conservative and Trump-influenced U.S. Supreme Court.
These lawmakers will ultimately behave as 'yes' men and women. They are hesitant to speak out, fearing backlash from their leader and the MAGA faithful.
As a Latino in Miami, I am truly baffled that the communities now facing persecution and deportation previously supported and voted for Trump and his fellow lawmakers. Those votes enabled the government to unleash ICE on immigrant families, mass deportations separating many loved ones, transfers to prisons in other countries, or returned to the places they fled to escape poverty, imprisonment, torture, or even death.
These communities have seemingly turned against their own. The level of hypocrisy is astounding, but the shift to dystopia is fearful.
Nestor Cedeno,
Miami
Medical advice
If Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, feels that people shouldn't take medical advice from him, then he should step aside in favor of someone who is qualified and head the national health agency.
Ted Burg,
Pembroke Pines
Rubio's troubles
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's parents and grandparents would be horrified that he's now in favor of eliminating Temporary Protective Status for Venezuelans and not defending Ukraine against democracy's archenemy, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I'm sorry to see him embrace our president and behaving more like a puppet. We were cheated. Shame on those who revoked TPS, a legal and democratic law.
Jaime Edelstein,
Pinecrest
Border policies
If former President Joe Biden had kept the border with Mexico legal, we would not have legal challenges today.
Joy Pargman,
Miami
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San Francisco Chronicle
14 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Mt. Tam railroad's last survivor restored and ready for new role at California museum
SACRAMENTO — Early morning commuters on Highway 37 Friday would have been taken aback by an ancient mode of transportation rolling alongside the old passenger railroad tracks that once connected Marin County to Vallejo and the world beyond. It was Engine No. 9, the last relic of the fabled Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, on a tractor trailer headed up the line to Sacramento. The steam locomotive, built in 1921 and lettered in gold, was bound for the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, where it will go on public display in August. This completes a seven-year restoration effort by Friends of No. 9, a nonprofit that sank $500,000 and 15,000 volunteer hours into arriving at this point. 'This is like a coronation for us,' said Fred Runner, President of Friends of No. 9, the Novato nonprofit that got the job done. The engine was delivered in a five-vehicle parade from Sebastopol to Sacramento, led by Sheedy Drayage of San Francisco, which transported the 36-ton load of iron and steel, free of charge. 'To be invited to the CSRM is like having a vintage car invited to show at the Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach,' Runner said. 'It's a very rare thing that just doesn't happen. But it did.' As a teaser for the railroad museum display, No. 9 was brought by the same Sheedy Drayage trailer to the Mill Valley Depot over Memorial Day weekend. It made its public premiere in the town parade, with its bell ringing and the whistle blowing and smoke coming out of the engine. 'There was a tremendous display of enthusiasm by people who loved the engine and thought it should stay at the depot,' Runner said. But by then the train was already rolling to Sacramento, a commitment made a year ago, when it was still in mid-restoration at a workshop. That was a job that took five years from the moment it was purchased at auction up near Eureka, where it had sat out in the weather gathering rust for 62 years. 'We are lucky that there is this marvelous group of obsessives that tracks these old steam engines,' said Runner, who led a team that outbid five other obsessive parties to muster up the winning bid of $56,240 to buy No. 9. There were 15 members of the bidding party, most of whom were devoted to the lore of the old Mount Tam railroad line and knew this was the last remaining piece of it. 'There is this whole fabric of stories about the lore of Mount Tam, and the railroad is at the center of it,' said Runner, a movie sound mixer who worked on 'Basic Instinct,' 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' 'Total Recall' and most recently 'Top Gun: Maverick,' which won an Academy Award for sound two years ago. 'As a moviemaker I'm interested in stories, and the stories about Mount Tam are tremendous,' Runner said. The story of the Mount Tam railway, which called itself 'the crookedest little railroad in the world,' was told in the 1980s in 'Steaming Up Tamalpais,' a short documentary by Mill Valley filmmaker Cris Chater. Runner saw it at the Mill Valley Film Festival and started tracing the tourist railroad line, which was built in 1896 and scrapped in 1930. Its 8.1 miles of track from the Mill Valley depot to the Mount Tam summit — 281 turns later — had been ripped out, as was the 2-mile spur into Muir Woods. Only Engine No. 9 survived, probably because it was still new with life left in it when the railway closed so it wasn't sold for scrap. It worked an additional 25 years hauling lumber from the forest to the mills. 'Amazingly it didn't get melted down to turn into weapons during World War II,' Runner said. No. 9 was no longer in running condition when the Friends bought it at auction, and it is still not in running condition because the boiler would need to be rebuilt and certified at a cost of $150,000, he estimated. The engine is 34 feet long, 12 feet high and 9 feet wide, and every aspect including the nonworking boiler was taken apart piece by piece. It was all repaired, cleaned, greased and then put back together — tender, cab, boiler, frame, even the assembly for the steel wheels. 'The restoration of the No. 9 represents the very best impulses of the preservation community,' said Ty Smith, director of the California State Railroad Museum. 'Although the locomotive won't steam passengers up Mount Tamalpais, it serves as a window into a remarkable episode in California history. We're grateful to be able to share in telling this important story.' When it arrived by caravan Friday morning, No. 9 was put onto the museum's railroad track and pushed along to its display stage. At that point, Runner was allowed to sit in the engineer's seat and listen to the valves open and close while No. 9 was actually moving on live track for the first time since 1953. It went only a few hundred feet, but the ride was smooth, thanks to 16 new springs. 'To feel the engine actually moving and hearing it hiss was a thrill,' he said. The engine was then removed to storage space, to allow museum staff time to finalize the exhibit. No. 9 will be up for six months with a possible extension, but it still needs a permanent home. 'While it is in Sacramento, we are working on it,' Runner said. 'It's an extraordinary piece of local history that deserves to be remembered.'
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Jim Crow meets ICE at ‘Alligator Alcatraz'
A few years ago I came across a profoundly unnerving historical photo: A lineup of terrified, naked Black babies cowered over the title 'Alligator Bait.' As it turned out, the idea of Black babies being used as alligator bait was a beloved trope dating back to the antebellum South, though it didn't really take off until after the Civil War. The image I saw was created in 1897, just one year after Plessy vs. Ferguson established 'separate but equal' as the foundational doublespeak of segregation. With formerly enslaved people striking out and settling their own homesteads, the prevailing stereotypes deployed to justify violence against Black people were forced to evolve. We were no longer simple and primitive, in desperate need of the civilizing stewardship of white Christian slave owners. After emancipation, we became dangerous, lazy and worthless. Worth less, in fact, than the chickens more commonly used to bait alligators. White Floridians in particular so fell in love with the concept of alligators hungry for Black babies that it birthed an entire industry. Visitors to the Sunshine State could purchase souvenir postcards featuring illustrations of googly-eyed alligators chasing crying Black children. There was a popular brand of licorice called 'Little African,' with packaging that featured a cartoon alligator tugging playfully at a Black infant's rag diaper. The tagline read: 'A Dainty Morsel.' Anglers could buy fishing lures molded in the shape of a Black baby protruding from an alligator's mouth. You get the idea. When I first learned of all this, naturally, I was unmoored. I was also surprised that I'd never heard of the alligator bait slur. Why doesn't it sit alongside the minstrel, the mammy and the golliwog in our cultural memory of racist archetypes? Did it cross some unspoken line with the vulgarity of its violence? Perhaps this particular dog whistle was a tad too audible? Or was it the plausible deniability? Did people (including historians) wave it away because babies were never 'really' used as alligator bait? It's true that beyond the cultural ephemera — which includes songs (such as the ragtime tune 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait') and mechanical alligator toys that swallow Black babies whole, over and over again — there are apparently no surviving records of Black babies sacrificed in this way. No autopsy reports, no court records proving that anyone was apprehended and convicted of said crime. But of course, why would there be? The thing I found so unnerving about the alligator bait phenomenon wasn't its literal veracity. There's no question human beings are capable of that and far worse. Without a doubt, 'civilized' people could find satisfaction — or comfort, or justice, or opportunity — in the violent slaughter of babies. Donald Trump's recently posted AI clip 'Trump Gaza,' which suggests the real world annihilation of Palestinians will give way to luxury beachfront resorts, is a shining example. The thing that haunted me about alligator bait was the glee with which the idea was embraced. It was funny. Cute. Harmless. Can't you take a joke? Now here we are, 100 years after 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait,' and the bigots are once again using cartoon alligators to meme-ify racial violence, this time against immigrants. Just like the title 'Alligator Bait,' the Florida detention center name 'Alligator Alcatraz' serves multiple ends: It provokes sadistic yuks. It mocks. It threatens. But most crucially, it dehumanizes. 'Alligator Bait' suggests that Black people are worthless. By evoking the country's most infamous prison, 'Alligator Alcatraz' frames the conversation as one about keeping Americans safe. It suggests the people imprisoned there are not vulnerable and defenseless men and women; anyone sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz' must be a criminal of the worst sort. Unworthy of basic human rights. Fully deserving of every indignity inflicted upon them. 'Alligator Alcatraz' cloaks cruelty in bureaucratic euphemism. It's doublespeak, masking an agenda to galvanize a bloodthirsty base and make state violence sound reasonable, even necessary. It has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Oft-cited studies from Stanford, the Libertarian Cato Institute, the New York Times and others have shown conclusively that immigrants, those here legally and illegally, are significantly less likely to commit violent crimes than their U.S.-born neighbors. If those behind 'Alligator Alcatraz' cared at all about keeping Americans safe, they wouldn't have just pushed a budget bill that obliterates our access to healthcare, environmental protection and food safety. If they actually cherished the rule of law, they would not deny immigrants their constitutionally guaranteed right to due process. If they were truly concerned about crime, there wouldn't be a felon in the White House. As souvenir shops and Etsy stores flood with 'Alligator Alcatraz' merch, it's worth noting that none of it is played for horror. Like the cutesy alligator bait merchandise before it, these aren't monster-movie creatures with blazing eyes and razor-sharp, blood-dripping teeth. The 'Alligator Alcatraz' storefront is cartoon gators slyly winking at us from under red baseball caps: It's just a joke, and you're in on it. And it's exactly this cheeky, palatable, available-in-child-sizes commodification that exposes the true horror for those it targets: There will be no empathy, no change of heart, no seeing of the light. Dear immigrants of America: Your pain is our amusement. The thing I keep wondering is, would this cheekiness even be possible if everyone knew the alligator bait history, the nastiness of which was buried so deep that 'Gator bait' chants echoed through the University of Florida stadium until 2020? Would they still chuckle if they saw the century-old postcards circulated by people who 'just didn't know any better'? My cynical side says: Yeah, probably. But my strategic side reminds me: If history truly didn't matter, it wouldn't be continuously minimized, rewritten, whitewashed. There's truth in the old idiom: Knowledge is power. Anyone trying to keep knowledge from you, whether by banning books, gutting classrooms, denying identities or burying facts, is only trying to disempower you. That's why history, as painful as it often is, matters. Remembering the horror of alligator bait isn't about dwelling on the grotesque. It's about recognizing how cruelty gets coded into culture. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is proof that alligator bait never went away. It didn't evolve or get slicker. It's the same old, tired cruelty, rebranded and aimed at a new target. The goal is exactly the same: to manufacture consent for suffering and ensure the most vulnerable among us know where they stand — as props, as bait, as punchlines. And no joke is more vulgar than one mocking the pain of your neighbors, whether they were born in this country or not. Ezra Claytan Daniels is a screenwriter and graphic novelist whose upcoming horror graphic novel, 'Mama Came Callin',' confronts the legacy of the alligator bait trope.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
She was the bard of loneliness — who thrived on human connection
Having never read her letters before, despite my enduring fandom — it was Dickinson's wry humor that first turned me on to poetry — what struck me was how committed she was to the virtue of human fellowship, even as she pursued her famously solitary art. It wasn't just birds and irony that saved her from despair. It was the love she had for her family, friends, and fellow citizens. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'Love is its own rescue,' she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer and abolitionist — not a line you'd expect from a poet who encrypts her pain and longing into frosty hymns and riddles, and whose poems are some of the best descriptions of loneliness available. Yet there she is, year after year, mailing birthday messages, valentines, and kudos, sometimes enclosing pressed flowers or clutches of rowan tied with ribbon. She wrote letters consoling friends on the deaths of their young children. She mourned the loss of her Massachusetts neighbors during the Civil War. She seemed to believe that our caring for others constitutes the only paradise we should ever expect. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland in 1877, she asked: 'Is not the distinction, of Affection, almost Realm enough?' She wanted to be alone but to be known too I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was 16. That summer, I was visiting my grandmother in Ripon, Wis., home of Ripon College and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln's (and Samuel Bowles's) Republican Party in 1854. Dickinson's 'Complete Poems' was 700 pages long — a daunting but worthy reading project for a shy aspiring writer who was drawn more to literature than to the politics of his country. It was a wonderful, haunting experience. I liked her dark, obsessive mind, her wicked sense of humor. But it was the fierce longing her poems exuded that kept me reading into the night. 'It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness,' she writes in a poem from 1862. Elsewhere, she calls loneliness 'an Omen in the Bone' and 'the Horror not to be surveyed.' By 16, I had accepted the fact that I liked spending time by myself. And I found that poetry, like prayer, was a socially acceptable if quirky use of solitude. Writing was also a consolation for my frequent inability to communicate to family or friends exactly what I was feeling. Dickinson had this problem, too. Why else would she write a thousand poems and leave them all behind in a drawer? In Dickinson's letters, one can glean the artist's core paradox of desiring personal privacy and social recognition. I'd felt this paradox myself while cooped up in my dorm room writing poems I would never share. Was I going to be a hermit? Would the horror of loneliness swallow me up? Was the urge to write poetry a blessing or a symptom? What would a therapist say? In 'Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development,' the psychoanalyst Otto Rank makes a useful distinction between the neurotic and the artist, both of whom resist the crowd and run the risk of loneliness. A neurotic, he says, is a person whose neglected creative urges become corrosive to the self. An artist turns them into art. I didn't know how lonely I was in my 20s until I reached my 30s. After college, I gave up writing in order to find a proper career, which meant that I became one of Otto Rank's neurotics. It took me a long time to revive my creative urges — to borrow the bleak Freudian term — and part of the process involved reading Emily Dickinson's poems again. This time, it was clear to me she was writing about depression. 'There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.' There is indeed. And Pfizer could have used these lines for the opening of a Zoloft ad: 'I felt a funeral in my brain.' 'I heard a fly buzz when I died.' 'Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.' These are the poems that helped establish Dickinson's reputation as a sly gothic eminence, her distressed meters and slant rhymes striking a fatally minor chord. And it's true that she often 'thought of the Grave,' as she puts it, apologetically, in one of her early letters. But Emily Dickinson died of heart failure, not suicide. This fact was very important to me, and also — not to be macabre — a little bit surprising. She was always so at odds with herself, after all, gnawing at psychic wounds or diving back into the wreck, as the poet Adrienne Rich would say. The question is, what sustained her? I think it was other people. To read Dickinson's letters is to witness just how deeply embedded she was in the social world of her day, despite her famous reclusiveness. With editors, she was coy, ironic, and self-mythologizing. 'You ask of my Companions,' she writes to Higginson during their first exchange. 'Hills — Sir — and the Sundown.' But she also wrote long, gossipy letters to her brother, Austin, when he was away, and she corresponded frequently with the far more adventurous writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who scolded Dickinson for her reticence. Her notes to prominent religious men, including Edward Everett Hale and the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, crackle with wit and genuine theological curiosity. And of course, this latest volume of her correspondence also includes her hundreds of 'letter-poems,' many of which she sent to Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in-law, for amusement and commentary. ('Is this frostier?' she asks Gilbert when sending a newly revised draft.) Her humor never flags. At age 50, she wrote: 'We have had two hurricanes within as many hours, one of which came near enough to untie my apron.' She sends honey to a friend with this note: 'Lest any bee should boast.' Still, that longing one feels in her poems gusted through her entire life. 'There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill,' she writes to her friend Abiah Root at the age of 16, half in response to a religious revival sweeping through her hometown of Amherst. She's pleased for those who were saved by God, but she herself demurs. The whole idea of Eternity, she writes, appears 'dreadful' to her. She assumes that she is 'wicked.' And yet she consistently honors her friends' belief in the Christian afterlife. Heaven was an abstraction, but the people she loved were real to her, and letter-writing offered her a way to remain in communion with them, to express her otherwise wholly Christian kindness and devotion. 'A Letter is a joy of Earth,' she wrote in 1885, less than a year before her death. 'It is denied the Gods.' Elsewhere, she compares a letter to 'immortality.' It was in the realm of her mind where she and her friends could coexist forever. As the late scholar and Harvard professor Helen Vendler puts it: 'The thought that on the Last Day she would be reunited with those she had loved was so moving to Dickinson that she wrote some of her most gripping poems about that imagined reunion.' She made her friends immortal One reason Dickinson's correspondence seems heroic to me is that there are 30,000 unread emails in my inbox. Many of these are spam, but a truly unacceptable percentage of them are not. I am so behind on email that I fantasize about changing my name and creating a new email address to achieve the illusion of a fresh start. My grandmother wasn't like this. She wrote and received letters all the time. She was active in her community — the college, the church, the golf course. She played gin rummy once a week. She babysat the kid next door. She helped me join a baseball team so that I could stand in center field and sniff my glove while mulling over Emily Dickinson's imagery. In contrast, I find social life mysteriously exhausting. Especially the digital version. I just cannot seem to keep up with all the requests, notifications, invitations to follow, and so on. Part of my struggle has to do with a garden-variety case of the blues. But if Emily Dickinson, whose blue periods often lasted for weeks at a time, could remember to wish her cousin a happy birthday, why can't I? One possible answer is that there's something wrong with me. Maybe I never recovered from my early preference for solitude. Maybe I, too, have an 'aching void' in my heart that the world can never fill. Or maybe — this is my most recent hypothesis — we all do. In her 1963 essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness,' the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that loneliness results from the ego's desire for wholeness, what she calls 'an unattainable perfect internal state.' Poetry is one way of pursuing that unattainable state. Perhaps that's why Dickinson wrote the same poem again and again with slight variations. She never achieved wholeness. 'Full and permanent integration is never possible,' Klein writes, 'for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists.' I think that's what I responded to in Dickinson — that 'polarity,' the tension between a desire for connection and an equally strong desire for isolation. I wonder, because I'm a teacher now, what that tension feels like to young people today, who report being lonelier and more depressed than ever. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps for teens, including a growing number of AI chatbots designed to teach coping skills or simply offer companionship (the psychologist Paul Bloom calls this ' Recently, I've begun to consider assigning Dickinson's letters instead. At the very least, they model how to weather a bout of depression without forgetting to send buttercups to neighbors for the centennial. More important, they demonstrate that community is the work of imagination to a surprising degree. The author Marilynne Robinson makes this point in one of her essays. 'Community,' she writes, 'consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.' In that same essay, she refers to this love as the 'essence and genius' of democracy. To overcome our loneliness, we do not need to join a church or a bowling league, as Robert Putnam suggests in his landmark book on civic decay, 'Bowling Alone . ' But we do need to find ways to exercise compassion. Compassion feels in short supply these days, and it's tempting to blame our digital culture for exacerbating our epidemic of loneliness. But Kristen Radtke, author of 'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, ' is skeptical of the claim that the internet is the primary cause of social isolation. People made this claim about the telephone and the radio, too. Yet there is clearly something unique about 'the portal,' as Patricia Lockwood calls the internet in 'No One Is Talking About This,' her novel about the absurdity of life on social media. 'Why did the portal feel so private,' the narrator asks at one point, 'when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?' In an interview, Lockwood confessed that what attracted her to Twitter was the chance to become 'a spirit in a void.' A Dickinsonian sentiment, and maybe a universal one. But the lesson of Dickinson's letters is that she wasn't just a spirit in a void. 'I know I love my friends,' she writes to Louisa and Frances Norcross in 1873, adding: ''tis love for them that sets the blister in my throat, many a time of day.' These bonds were important to Dickinson, especially in seasons of grief. Wherever else her friends had gone, they lived on in her memory, a verifiable afterlife, and remained eternal companions. As she writes in a letter to Mary Hills: 'To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven.'
