Moral Power of Fiction

Jesse McCarthy, "Finding the Other," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020.  - Virginia Woolf''s faith in the moral power of fiction allowed her to say that the lived quality of a black person's experience, however dimly appreciated, was not ultimately divorced from the deepest self-understandings of white people. Woolf, in other words, dared to insist that there are "other" people in our midst; all around us (and within us) are different facets of humanity. Part of this invisibility is our collective responsibility to make us safe from the objective of living in a society built on the foundations of violence and stratification, we assure ourselves that such a status belongs to a well-defined stranger.

Toni Morrison is a dispassionate social theorist, a moral anthropologist, someone who offers acute and even scathing  readings of America's contemporary malaise, civic and moral decline in an age defined by the mindless boosterism of laissez-faire capitalism. [She sees a] "warped projection of our fears of homelessness" and "our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging, reflecting the  anxieties produced by the privatization of public goods and commons, and the erosion of face-to-face association." Everything comes "together around a set of core concerns about the degradation  and coarsening of our politics as we cast one another as 'others,' and how this process often manifests itself through language." "Journalists," she insisted, "must take up the cause of [using] language          against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastaizing lies."

Eric Alterman, "Inequality and the City," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what    tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing --often by people who could't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all but three of the 22 largest cities in the United States, and by far the lowest among cities with growing populations.

Laura Wolf-Powers, an urban studies professor at Hunter College, has said: "While Bloomberg's ambitious five-borough development program created new destinations and boosted job growth in some sectors, it also imposed high costs on low-and moderate-income neighbor residents and small businesses. The result was that according to the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement, fully 42 percent of New Yorkers lived in households whose incomes could not cover the cost of housing, food, transportation, health care, and other basic necessities.

Atossa Araxia Abraham, "Offshoring Asylum," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - What the agreement to force asylum seekers to register in another Latin American country does is to make it virtually impossible for them to gain asylum in the United States, thereby reducing legal immigration to the bare minimum. Powerful countries can essentially strong-arm weaker states into doing the things they would rather avoid on their own turf. The U.S. ropes Honduras or El Salvador into fulfilling international obligations, and those countries don't have the resources or the clout to say "no." And people seeking a safe place to live (for reasons linked to politics, war, climate change,or personal circumstances) will be shunted to nations unable and often unwilling to give them the support they need to survive, let alone have a good life.