Radical Change or Nothing

Some of my dearest friends chipped in and bought me a Kindle for my sixtieth birthday. It's on back order so I have some time to get accustomed to this new electronic device in my life. I'm a reader: I subscribe to The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and I get the New York Times delivered on Saturday and Sunday. My daughter's subscriptions to The Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair were sent to me this fall since she was studying abroad. Unlike my husband, I do not read every article in every magazine. I skim, I cherry pick, I only read what keeps my attention.

I read several books at a time. I have a well-worn library card, because I have a forty minute each way commute to work and am addicted to books-on-tape, now books-on-cd. I refuse to buy them, because they are far too expensive. Instead I pressure my local library to improve the quality of their purchases, so that I have more choices. This week I am listening to Toni Morrison read her new book A Mercy. Not an easy task since it is breathtakingly sorrowful and so poetic that sometimes I don't quite understand what is happening, and have to wait patiently, until Morrison is ready to fill in the gaps.

With a Kindle, I will have to download books, for a price, from Amazon.com, abandoning my allegiance to my local independent book store and the library, except for my books-on-cd, although I understand I can download those and listen in the car from my Kindle.

Having spent a lifetime touching books--my grandfather, the same one who taught me about opera, gave me a book every time he saw me, using the Kindle will be a radical change for me. I once spent a dismal plane ride, circling Philadelphia for hours because we couldn't land at LaGuardia, seated next to an artist who designed the interior of the bookstore I never opened. Way before anyone else did it, I thought about having a book store and cafe. But like my idea to have a singles bar in a laundromat, I never got around to it.

I won't be touching books anymore, but will have the opportunity, according to my friends, to underline and write notes, and store multiple books on my Kindle, so that I can access them later. I do deface books regularly, which is the reason why I buy many of them instead of relying solely on the public library.

Eating Christmas dinner with friends last night, we talked about what needs to happen in order to change the course of this downward tailspin: retail sales down 5-8% (much of it the result of falling gas prices); Bergdorf Goodman, the most luxurious department store in New York, having an on-line sale advertized on nytimes.com, sharing its spot with the film "Doubt,", Neiman Marcus, and "Revolutionary Road"; daily reports that this charity, every college and university, or that social justice organization begging for funding because of the hedge fund collapse, Bernie Madoff, or the dive in the world stock markets; labor unions panting from the accusations lodged against them after they worked so hard to elect Barack Obama, mostly because unlike most of us, they have fixed-benefit pensions still. The list could go on forever, I suppose.

What we concurred on was this: despairing times call for radical change. It's the only time radical change is feasible. So dump Caroline Kennedy as the choice for New York's new Senator and absolutely forget about Jeb Bush as Florida's Senator in 2010. Haven't we learned that dynasties are a waste of time. Read Paul Krugman about the need to have radical change, but squeaky clean radical change. Read Frank Rich in his suggestion that the brightest might not be what we need right now.

This is our opportunity to think outside the box. To be radical. To move the stream.