So… my wheelchair can’t be repaired & Medicaid won’t pay for a new one bc I’m ambulatory. Pretty much if you can walk at all, they won’t help. So. Yeah.
If you can help, that’s great. Boosting is also very helpful. Thanks. 💜
Tumblr likes to spin its wheels and spend time yelling at each other, so here’s a nice comprehensive guide. Five Things You Can Do Now That You Know We Were Serious About The Antisemitism:
1) Accept that if you’re in this to be an ally, you’re going to have a tough road ahead of you. We’re traditionally very wary of outsiders in our spaces because when we welcome them, well … this happens. In fact, if you want to convert to Judaism, you traditionally get rejected three times, just to make sure you’re serious and not shitting with us. Expect wariness. Expect to get your feelings hurt, because a lot of us are very raw right now. Stick with us anyway–once we know you’re not just bandwagoning us, you’re going to end up with a lot of friends who are relying on you. Nobody said allyship was easy.
2) Learn about Judaism. Note that I DO NOT MEAN LEARNING WITH INTENTION TO CONVERT. We don’t proselytize and it would be against Torah for me to even suggest it. What I mean here is, you can’t call bullshit if you don’t know what we’re about. Some good basic resources are The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred Kolatch; My Jewish Learning; and for a strict Orthodox standpoint, Chabad. You’ll find that some things in these sources contradict each other. That’s pretty par for the course in Judaism; we don’t have a single dogma or point of view.
3) Consider calling a local synagogue and asking if they have volunteer work for a gentile ally. Introduce yourself, explain (briefly) what got your attention, and offer your services–to stand outside during services, to walk folks to and from shul (this is particularly important in Orthodox communities, where driving on Shabbat is forbidden), hell, to help stuff envelopes for whatever vigil or service they may be holding in memoriam. Anything will help.
4) You may wish to make a donation to a local synagogue or Jewish charity. I strongly recommend the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), which is a Jewish charity focused on combating antisemitism. Jews traditionally give monetary gifts in sums of $18, which corresponds to the numeric value of the word “chai,” or “life.” The last time this happened I made a post about this tradition and got accused of being a Nazi because of the whole 1-8 A-H thing, so let’s just nip that right in the bud: yes, we know. It’s a horrible coincidence. We’re not giving up a few-thousand-year-old tradition because of some dipshit with a bad moustache. If you can’t afford $18, consider moving the decimal over and donating in multiples of 18, like $3.60. Your meaning will still be perfectly clear, and anything helps. If you wish to make a donation in memory/in honor (which many synagogues appreciate), I suggest either choosing the name of one of the shooting victims–giving tzedakah, or charity, in their names is considered a great mitzvah and a blessing to their families–or using the phrase “am Yisrael chai.” It means “Israel lives.” Although the country in the MENA region is called Israel, this is not what the phrase refers to–the traditional patriarch of Judaism was named Jacob, and renamed as Israel following a wrestling match with a messenger of G-d. To say “am Yisrael chai” is to say his people, that is, the Jewish people, live.
And on that note …
5) In the coming days and weeks, you’re going to see a lot of people making this about Israel or Zionism. Please tell them to shut the fuck up. Israel, Zionism, and Jews are three completely different, albeit related, things. To wit: Israel is a geopolitical country situated on the site of our ancestral homeland and currently headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Zionism is the belief that Jews deserve a safe homeland; and Jews are a group of people spread across six continents and most countries who are united by a common group of ancestors from the Levant (the part of the world now occupied by the geopolitical entity known as Israel). Saying the victims of this shooting had anything to do with the political situation in Israel would be like saying I, personally, am responsible for Vladimir Putin because I have a Russian ancestor. I speak exactly two words of Russian, have never been to Russia, have no family left living there (and haven’t for four generations), but I’m totally responsible for Russia. You see how ridiculous that sounds? The same applies to Jews and Israel. Please, please, PLEASE do not conflate this event with Israeli politics. I’m not saying Israeli politics aren’t a topic worth discussing–I’m saying this is not a discussion they belong in. Don’t let the powers that be (or the alt-right sleaze that sucks the dicks of the powers that be) distract from the topic at hand, which is “out of control guns meet out of control xenophobia and antisemitism,” by throwing OMG ISRAEL AND ZIONISM AND GLOBALISM into the mix.
And finally: yes, gentiles, this is okay for you to reblog. In fact I encourage it. And I will answer any questions you have to the best of my ability, if they’re asked in good faith. Please just follow the most basic tenet of Judaism, which is: don’t be a dick.
If you’re ready to stand and help, now is the time.
Wind and her 6 year old son have been staying with us the last three days. They moved to Colorado from Alabama after Wind left her boyfriend. Initially they stayed with a family member, but that quickly became dangerous and abusive. Said family member ransacked their belongings, taking mostly his clothes (and his teddy), before throwing them out. That evening Wind met a man who let them stay at his place, but he turned out to be even more dangerous! On their way to Walmart they met us and when we learned what they were going through we insisted they stay with us. We live in a bus and this isn’t ideal, but they are at least safe.
Roy has been spending 80% of his day working with Wind’s son doing math, reading, writing, music, science, art, and (of course) LOTS of playtime. He is currently not enrolled in school and Wind is anxious to get him back in, but she doesn’t even know where they are going to end up living!
Wind is signed up to work where roy and I work and she has an appointment with the human resources place downtown that helps us so much. They should be able to get this amazing family into a home asap.
All four of us are living in the bus now. They take the bed while roy and I have an air mattress on the floor.
They have nothing but two little backpacks. They each have about two sets of clothes, a Bible, and their shoes. Neither of them have socks and he has NO toys. He told me his favourite thing to play with is my deck of playing cards.
You can send Wind money directly to her cashapp ($Lakey28B) or you send money to roy and I (paypal.me/roydieud).
Please leave a note with paypal if you want the money to go to Wind.
Check the notes of this post to stay updated. I’ll add a wishlist for school supplies and winter clothes soon, as well as her own PayPal. I don’t have service on my phone so putting this together is taking a while.
This is everything they have besides the clothes on their backs and the white bag is pretty much just her father’s antique Bible (if you wanna say shit about her having that, you can go ahead and eat shit until you die instead).
I put this together for him out of the things that I have, and he was overjoyed when I gave it to him, but like. Come on. Look at this. This is EVERYTHING he owns in the world that isn’t clothes.
You guys have been keeping gas in our bus all week and food in our bellies. We have enough food for a couple days, but we’re close to running out of gas again.
Wind completed her orientation and her and Roy are keeping one eye on the job list all day for something they can both do.
Wind needs steel toes asap. A cheap pair is about $30, and she can work whenever she wants, as much as she wants, until she can get a permanent job.
We’ve received so much love and encouragement over the last few days, we just need a little bit more material “love” right now.
Thank you thank you thank you all of you (except you, orphanage anon) for the support and kind messages.
If you have any items you want to send us directly, hmu and I’ll give you an address.
Hey folks I’m a teacher and I just lost my job because of ableism!
We are a three person household, and my partner’s mom lost her job a while ago- but luckily she just got an offer with Oreck for a sales/commission position, but her first check won’t be for a few weeks. As of this moment my partner is financially carrying our whole household.
We applied for a home equity loan and were denied. If you can, please consider donating to help us out while I search for a new position.
I know a lot of you guys don’t want to reblog those posts about the wildfires in Greece because they’re too long, so I figured I would make a shorter post for y’all.
Here is a link on how to help and what the current situations are, and here is a direct link to the fundraiser.
As someone who has personally been affected by fire, I would really appreciate if y’all could sb this??
This is wonderful information, but it’s all so *exhausting*. People shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops to get the meds they need. it’s a fucked system and people are dying.
One thing I would also add is if you are having issues with a medication, you may want to check the delivery system of that medication. I couldn’t ever take a specific migraine medication which is very effective because it tore my stomach up, and since I already have nausea with my migraines, it was basically useless…
… as a pill.
Now, my current healthcare won’t pay for the more expensive migraine meds which are gentler on my stomach than the one which tore up my guts and made me throw it up, but they WILL pay for me to get basically an EpiPen of that medication.
It’s like magic. I get a certain number of injectables every 21 days. I haven’t been to the ER for my migraines since they changed the delivery system of my medication from pills to subcutaneous injections.
I don’t like needles at all, but it’s an EpiPen kind of injection so I just go ‘ah yes, my anti-migraine hypospray’ and my Star Trek heart is gladdened and there you go.
“A medical professor who has tracked the cost of insulin over the
years says that a one-month supply of a popular version that cost $45
wholesale in 2001 cost $1,447 14 years later, an increase of almost
3,000%. That’s the wholesale price, not the retail price that an
uninsured patient would pay.“
Yeah, that’s messed up.
Wow, it’s really rare I see something cross my dash that’s actually directly tied to my life on a personal level, but yea, I’m Diabetic Type 1 and this is a problem.
I’ve been off insurance for the last three or so years and have been working around through channel I can to continue to obtain insulin and supplies for my insulin pump (of which is currently a problem, fun) for free or at reduced costs.
The Lilly Cares program is one I heavily endorse if your insulin is a Lilly product. They’ve been incredibly helpful to me.
Please spread the word on this. There are a lot of young Diabetics like myself that do not have a support system, do not have insurance, and do not have jobs. Insulin is literally a life-sustaining medication for T1 Diabetics. Please do not just ignore this.
T1 diagnosed over 20 years ago here. Back when I was out of work in 2009 I contacted Lilly Cares and I swear I would not be alive if not for that program. T1s need insulin to live. Daily. Our bodies do not produce the hormone because our immune systems backfired and killed our pancreas’ islet cells.
These days one bottle of insulin costs me approx $600 (before insurance) and lasts 2-3 weeks, tops. Less than ten years ago the cost was closer to $200/bottle. The insulin manufacturers keep “tweaking” insulins like Humalog so the patents can be extended(*), so we don’t even have access to a generic option.
The price gouging on insulin in this country is cruel and damn disgusting.
Please, please boost this info. It WILL save lives.
(*) a fact that even my endocrinologist has confirmed!
Lilly Cares saved my husband’s life when he had no prescription drug coverage. Please, please utilize this program if you can. It’s wonderful.
Kirkwall Was Totally Built On a Hellmouth 