The Most Important Question

Today: President Lulu won in Brazil, which is a win for the Amazon. Celebrate the good news wherever you find it!

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Today: A one-year-old boy was killed after a police officer fired three shots into a car pulling away in a Walmart parking lot in Mississippi, following a call that two women were suspected of stealing diapers. No one should have to steal diapers or be killed for trying to provide for their children.

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For two years something has been missing from *Actually* Pro-Life.

Obviously, you guys didn't even know about it until recently, but the point is, we had these 1,400+ actions we'd been recommending, reviewing, and refreshing for years.

And on the other hand, we had these eight Principles we really talked about, and we polled people about, all very old to humanity, but we were trying to newly define them for ourselves and to arrange this whole thing.

But even after we decided on what those were gonna be, between the two groups, the Principles and all these Actions, there was this gap.

Cause it's one thing to walk around never questioning that, yes, obviously, I am a human, not a fucking monster, who holds the principle every person should have a home, right? It's another to take the leap and to fight for it, to donate to Habitat for Humanity, or even to step up in real life with a hammer.

Unless, of course, you're one of the many millions of people who never got to choose, get to choose, who've had to fight for one or all these principles from day one, right?

Either way, between the belief and the hammer, there are questions that need answers, such as:

Positions are how we answer them.

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Produced by Willow Beck

Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Take a nap you deserve it

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Today: Three children and a 25-year-old teacher in Bend, Oregon are dead in yet another school shooting. Police arrived in three minutes, the school had locks, cameras, and drills and it still wasn't enough.

What Can You Do:

• Donate to end gun violence https://www.whatcanido.earth/results/?verbs=donate&nouns=gun-control

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What is the price of exclusion?

Well, if your family paid the price, if your people were ever left out of a textbook you don't need this new book to tell you.

But the title is just the verdict. The book is the evidence. It is the names, the dates, the receipts, and in this case, one family story that somebody dug up before it disappeared. My guest has a name for that work.

It is ancestral intelligence. Her book belongs alongside The Warmth of Other Suns and How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, who has also been on this show.

So here's the question: What can I do about a history I think I already know?

My guest today is Nicole Carr. Nicole is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist and a journalism professor at Morehouse College. Her book The Price of Exclusion, follows her great-grandfather, Dr. Lawrence Sinclair Ferguson, a Jamaican World War I veteran and Howard-trained physician her family barely spoke of.

Nicole and I went a lot of places in this conversation. Her great-grandfather, ancestral intelligence, and why books like these have to be read and have to be handed on, whether you lived the story or your family lived the story or not.

Your first job is simple, which is to read it, and then it is to pass it on. It is to continue to do the work, to do your part to answer the question: What can I do?

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Today: We've gotta aim higher than simply meeting a "do not rape" threshold. We've gotta actively work to prevent harm through conversations about consent and concrete actions.

What Can You Do:

If your state still taxes menstrual products, use Alliance For Period Supplies resources to change that https://www.whatcanido.earth/action/alliance-for-period-supplies

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Today: Key word in the Trump Accounts promise: eligibility. As in, only children born after Dec 31, 2024 and before Jan 1, 2029. So, children born before 2024 or earlier get zero dollars, even though we already know what reduced child poverty, like the expanded Child Tax Credit.

What Can You Do:

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In 1904, somebody noticed a sick tree at the Bronx Zoo.

Within 50 years, the fungus killing it had wiped out about four billion American Chestnut trees from Maine all the way down to Georgia.

In 2018, Richard Powers wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, which I loved. He set it in the early 20th century and made the American Chestnut tree the main character.

This fabled tree, which most of us had probably never even heard of at that point, was a tree that fed families and wildlife for generations, and yet most of us had never seen one fully grown, and we still might not, unless a small team in Syracuse pulls off a caper.

But last month, for the first time, the USDA cleared a forestry engineered to bring a wild species back, an American Chestnut carrying one gene from wheat.

Over the last 37 years of work, there has been progress made and mistakes made, new generations of researchers and partnerships that have ended. That's just called science. But we, and I use that term loosely, may be on the cusp of a breakthrough, and not just for the chestnut tree.

So what can I do about bringing back the trees we've lost?

My guests today are Dr. Andy Newhouse and Sophia Soriano. Andy directs the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Sophia is a PhD student on his team, digging literally into the soil under these trees, inside and outside, and into the disease now spreading through our beech trees.

We talk about what we've lost, how one gene can help a chestnut survive, the mix-up that nearly sank the whole thing, and why anyone would give their life to a specific tree that they may never see full-grown.

You will leave this conversation knowing exactly how to help, from a walk in the woods to the next public comment period.

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Today: Your algorithm may have spent the last week scaring you about the plague, but probably the wrong one. Pennsylvania has reported over one thousand measles cases, with 198 hospitalized and five dead...yet the CDC is only reporting two measles deaths in the whole country.

What Can You Do:

• Call your reps to get them to make the CDC count measles deaths the way states do https://www.whatcanido.earth/action/make-the-cdc-count-measles-deaths/

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After launching What Can I Do to collect all of our recommended actions in one place, we received feedback from you that you still didn't feel like you were participating in collective action.

So, as part of a "brain transplant" through the whole platform, we have just launched opt-in notifications to alert you to new actions on saved issues and locations, and that will show you when others take action because you did.

Searching remains free, but if you want notifications, the ability to save locations, and follow other Shit Givers, upgrade to become an Important Member (with a 30-day free trial) at whatcanido.earth.

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