Look for a physical newsletter this week!

Hey all, I spent my usual Sunday writing time putting together a physical mailer that I'm going to send out to everybody on the City of Montague postal routes.

(Sorry Township and Whitehall folks! You are equally important, I just don't have an extra $2k laying around to send it out to everyone. If you want to sponsor sending it to your local mail route, let me know. It can range from less than $50 to more than $300 depending on how many people are on your route. )

It's been a rough week this week, both as someone who has been studying how radicalization works for more than twenty years, and as a visible lefty in rural Michigan. In the past few days, I've had multiple people in real life take their anger out on me because of what their media has told them about people on the left. And I'll be honest, it really sucks.

I'm still wrestling over what to do with the footage of the guy harassing us on Friday. He was clearly in extreme emotional distress. The researcher in me really wants to use the footage to walk you all through the conspiracy theories that he's been exposed to, and the self-sealing arguments that were keeping him trapped in that distressed state no matter how hard we tried to de-escalate things. But my inner organizer's top priority is not making this guy's life worse, and hopefully getting him some help. And that means keeping it off the internet if at all possible. If you have any ideas for how we could get him some social support without making it seem like we're trying to dox him, let me know.

The other thing I want to mention on the radicalization front is the importance of understanding online troll culture. Trolls love to make fake accounts posing as the other side and post outlandish things to make that side look bad. It's particularly bad for the trans community, because we're a very small percentage of the population and most of us have lives. So posts by actual trans people on social media are relatively few and far between, while screenshots of fake posts made by anti-trans trolls get boosted to the top of millions of people's feeds. If someone is trying to get you to look at an anonymous stranger's post and telling you to be angry at a whole group of people, ask yourself why.

Anyway, onto acorns!

I found my first batch of ripe acorns on Saturday, so I'm declaring the season officially underway! Mickkayla and I shot a bunch of video on identifying types of oaks and figuring out which acorns are worth harvesting. She'll be sharing that over on the Commoners social media feeds over the course of the next week or two. I'll be out gathering in the cargo bike this week, so stop by and say hi if you see me. Saturday at the Artisan Market, we'll be starting the sorting and shelling process, and over the next couple of weeks we'll add in the steps to take it all the way to flour.

That's it for this week's newsletter, because I've done a lot of writing this week and I'm wiped. If you're in the City of Montague, you can expect your physical newsletter in a few days. Here's this week's nails: