Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, art, science, nature, and life. Come in, have a cuppa and a cookie (or three!) and join us.
Before I get into this next anecdote, a disclaimer. I never did this. Know how you can tell that’s true? Because I am alive today. (You never met my mother. Lucky you.)
There’s the old, tired story of being given a stack of cookies (or maybe a bag of M&Ms, but you get the idea) by your mother and being told, “Share that with your little brother!” So you try to figure out, how well can Little Brother (LB) count? Will LB notice if I give him 1 and keep 5? How about if I give him 2 and keep 4? What’s the least amount I can “share” and still have more for myself before he wails, “MOM!”?
I’m still on Twitter. (I’ll be playing violin on the deck when that ship sinks.) It’s the main contact I have with a young friend in Scotland. People here have suggested other ways we can connect easily, but she finds Twitter’s DMs as easy for us to use as texting is for people I stay in contact with in the US. And I really want to stay in contact with Jenny, every day. I send her manuscripts as I write via email, (I have a novel, and I’m currently working on a second one, plus a companion book of novellas) but she prefers DMs for casual correspondence. My daughter keeps in contact with her through another platform but I don’t remember which one. (I wrote a novella for Jenny of her very own. You can read it here: Jenny’s Gifts.) Jenny does the historical research for my writing when it’s based in Scotland.
Scrolling through Twitter, though, distresses me. BfitzinAR, who started our Helping Humpday diaries at Street Prophets, has taken over a project started by our own Aji, called “Help Folks Live.” I follow bfitz, so these items show up in my TL all day long. There are so many people on the verge of eviction, and every week some of them fall over the edge. And I can’t fix it all.
What I can do, and sometimes it isn’t enough, is highlight our own needs here on DK. We have people in need here. Check the Community Needs List for this week. One person is asking for enough to stay stable for a year, and she is two-thirds of the way to the goal, with a deadline two months out. Another person, though, is only half-way to the goal of stable, safe, affordable housing, with less than a week to raise the rest.
There are enough resources in the world. They just aren’t distributed evenly.
We’ll be glad when Michelewln is back and able to share her art and recipes on Sundays.
This thread is open. Any topics are welcome.
A note: When you add tags to a diary, on any platform, use capital letters for each word. It makes it readable by a screen reader for people with vision problems.