Sarah Jaffe

We have been productive.

We have been so productive.

We have sent thousands and thousands of people down holes in the ground to dig up black rocks to set on fire.

And what it has gotten us is a rapidly warming planet, exhausted, and a lot of people with horrible diseases that died young.

And what would it look like to actually say that, like, we want to run the world for the good of of all of us rather than the good of Elon Musk getting richer?

The good of everybody who drives a car or takes a train or a boat in New York Port Authority or New Jersey or.

So it's everybody who takes a Staten Island ferry.

Which is one of my favorite public institutions.

I love the Staten Island Ferry.

It's free and you can get a beer on it.

You know, these things, like, wouldn't that be amazing if we had more public transit that was free and you could buy a beer on it?

Maybe not everybody needs to buy a beer on it, but still.

My father died in 2018.

So to look around at the stories that I was covering and the work that I was doing and realize like, oh, there's grief everywhere.

You know, I had lost people.

I lost my grandparents.

I had certainly had my heart broken before.

But losing a parent was something totally different.

And it was so destabilizing and so transformative.

And suddenly everywhere I looked, there was grief.