“Putin’s team,” Gary Shteyngart writes in a recent New Yorker article, “has discovered that racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism bind people closer than any other experiences.” We have to change this. It feels impossible: “People want to rise from their knees. Even people who weren’t kneeling in the first place,” Schtenygart writes. Can Americans, who have been bathed in rugged individualism since the inception of our country learn how to be there for each other as so many of our writers, activists and empaths are pleading we do so? We simply have to. Shteyngart continues: “My parents and grandparents never fully recovered from the strains of living in an authoritarian society. Daily compromise ground them down, even after they came to America. They left Russia, but Russia never left them. How do you read through a newspaper composed solely of lies? How do you walk into a store while being Jewish? How do you tell the truth to your children? How do you even know what the truth is?”

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