July 6: What Really Happened Last Week

Syria, Gaza and LL Cool J

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Hi there, Golden Hour readers. I’m Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about building kinship and community, with a focus on supporting other people’s families and loving other people’s kids. If you like today’s news roundup, I hope you’ll come check out my newsletter and subscribe!

Once upon a time, I was a high school social studies teacher. Every day for nine months of the year, I started each class session by asking students to explore the biggest current events of the day. The act of helping teenagers make sense of the news taught me so much about the workings of the social world… and it pretty much burned me out on keeping close daily track of the news forever after.

So when Anya invited me to do a news roundup for her newsletter, I honestly felt a little daunted. These days, here’s where I get my news: I read weekly roundups like Anya’s and commentary from newsletter writers I respect, and beyond that – after Fran Lebowitz – I rely on the random remarks of others.

Yet here I am offering you my take on the news that matters this week. I take this task seriously, and I did a lot of homework to make myself informed. I also spent a lot more time reading and listening to the news in real time this week – which affirmed my commitment to minimize my exposure. For me, a wise orientation to the news is to get it from trusted sources, in small doses, and save most of my energy for showing up for my communities. I’m grateful to Anya for the “What Really Happened” approach – I think it’s spot on.

This week:

1. Elected officials lacking moral compass behave predictably

2. Syria navigates reconstruction under the leadership of a new president who might (???) not be terrible (???)

3. UN report lists companies complicit in Israel’s genocide, starring a bunch of US tech and energy companies, of course

4.Philadelphia municipal workers on strike, starring LL Cool J and Jazmine Sullivan

5.Wild card/good news, starring the world’s scrappiest dachshund

1. Elected officials lacking moral compass behave predictably

The big story of the week is that the House and Senate passed a bill and the President signed it. The outcome is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

Multiple national polls in June found that the bill’s cuts to crucial social services are hugely unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s possible that elected Republicans who knuckled under to their party leadership will face backlash from voters, and Democrats are certainly planning to exploit the bill’s unpopularity.

“Our job is to point out – when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up – that this is because of what your Republican elected official did,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). “This is their fault.”

If you can stomach a comprehensive rundown of everything the bill enacts into law and why it matters, here’s Jessica Yellen explaining what the megabill means for you.

If you’d like a compassionate perspective on how to feel and how to move forward, here’s Garrett Bucks responding to the essential question, What do we do when our government says that it hates us and doesn't care if we die?

2. Syria navigates reconstruction.

Root for this guy. Ahmed al-Sharaa, Wikimedia Commons

I was teaching high school social studies when the Arab Spring began, back in the early 2010s, which means that I watched this modern day comparative case study in democratic uprisings unfold in real time, alongside 160 teenagers. We became very informed, and we were really rooting for the Syrian people. You may recall that the Arab Spring began as a series of large nonviolent protests, and in Syria in particular, women courageously held out for nonviolent tactics even as more and more men were taking up arms.

Whereas some Middle Eastern dictators made concessions or fled, Bashar al-Assad cracked down on the Syrian people, the nonviolent women were (of course) overruled, and they wound up in a brutal civil war that continued up through November 2024. Then, unexpectedly for pretty much everyone including the opposition themselves, the opposition won.