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Our political divides have become our personal divides.

Ben H. Winters

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.
BEN H. WINTERS

Issues Moral Play Real
We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.
BEN H. WINTERS

Educational Long Opportunity
That one lesson that African American communities have learned over the centuries in America is that you can’t just take for granted that things will steadily get better and better and better until they’re great. It is fits and starts. It is backward and forward.
BEN H. WINTERS

Community Country Get Better
There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
BEN H. WINTERS

Detectives Littles Novelty
Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
BEN H. WINTERS

Even Fallen Feel History Impossible Now
I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.
BEN H. WINTERS

Culture Interested Lives Personal Politics Sports
Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERS

Fiction Prophesy Special
There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions – including literal slavery – all over the world.
BEN H. WINTERS

People Slavery World
I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.
BEN H. WINTERS

Imagination Mind Thinking
I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.
BEN H. WINTERS

Gift Great Press Sense Support Think
It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We’re seeing, there’s no question, that we’re seeing a renaissance of that.
BEN H. WINTERS

Country Journalism Renaissance
I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
BEN H. WINTERS

Real Sports Thinking
The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible.
BEN H. WINTERS

Campaign Personality Political
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
BEN H. WINTERS

Blood Blue Depression
We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.
BEN H. WINTERS

Dangerous Instinct Little Think Way
We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don’t rise to be literature, and I’m speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.
BEN H. WINTERS

Different Hot Post Zoom

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

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Our political divides have become our personal divides.

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