Just a little (link) love: Max the cat edition
June 11, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Hasan Minhaj’s much-needed call to action for immigrants and people of color. I will never understand immigrants I know who supported 45.
I’m glad Abby wrote this: Why I stand with the protesters. Property damage sucks, but preventing the continued injustice of taking human lives is far more important. I see counter protester types out there ready to and armed to protect Ross and Hobby Lobby – why don’t you folks care more about actual living breathing humans?
I’m glad to see Joe and Tawcan discussing racism, privilege, and inequity. I’m glad to see Deb choosing to speak up. I’m glad to see Jim seeing what he’s been missing all these years and speaking up. Same for JD. It matters, and it’s important for people who haven’t been seeing racism or seeing but not speaking up for fear of putting a foot wrong to try anyway.
I never learned about the Ocoee Massacre of 1920.
Donate to These Orgs to Support Black Trans People: “Black trans people often face a specific set of structural, institutional, and personal barriers to accessing basic needs like housing, employment, and safety due to the intersections of their identities. According to 2012 data from Lambda legal, nearly one in two Black transgender people has been to prison, and Black trans people are also much more likely to face discriminatory policies and threats of sexual assault once behind bars.”
24 LGBTQ+ Organizations You Can Support Right Now: “After the unconscionable killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd at the hands of the police, LGBTQ+ advocates are using Pride 2020 as an occasion to speak out on against the racial injustices that still plague our country.”
How Asian Americans Are Reckoning With Anti-Blackness In Their Families
Huge news that the Minneapolis PD is supposed to be disbanded. I’m waiting to see how this will really play out but in the meantime I’m blown away by these rates of ineffectiveness against crime they have been.
A few good things:
A tiny bit of levity, the Pixar dog.
Corina Newsome and #BlackBirdersWeek and in NatGeo
More #BlackBirdersWeek, bird hieroglyphics, and tiny bat!
Do you know about ponies?
Are you spending or saving or both?
I’d like to see this cat, please
I feel for people with cat allergies but also I feel for this cat who just really wants to be in a library. I want to be in a library all the time too, Max.
I fail to see how protecting Ross is not caring about living human lives? It is a place of employment for many local people. Destroy it and you push numerous people out of work. And I would guess that lots of those people don’t have much savings to live on either. Then you have people who shop there. Maybe you don’t have Ross store in your area and you don’t know, but for me it is a source of inexpensive clothing and it is where I go when I can’t find what I want in Goodwill. Destroy it and you remove that option from the local not-so-well-to-do folks. Not to mention people who don’t have cars to drive to a further location. Especially those without credit cards and ability to order what they need online.
No hard feelings, I love your blog, but I feel like you live in a Silicon Valley bubble where almost anyone can work from home and shop from home. It’s not how life is for most of the people though. I see you care in your posts so I guess you just didn’t know about Ross stores.
I shopped at Ross for 20+ years when I was very low income and I have one down the street so I’m quite familiar with Ross stores. I haven’t forgotten what purpose it served for me and still serves for people who need the lower prices. I worked retail for years to put myself through school and pay off debt. I haven’t forgotten what life is like when you do shift work and can’t eat as many as two meals a day or fill up a tank of gas for lack of money. I know what living on the edge is like, I know what loss of employment is like, I was there for a long time. And even now, through my work to support the Lakota folks, of course I know how frustrating it is that people don’t have the means or ability to order what they need online. I am incredibly fortunate to be where I am now today in having the means to work remotely but I don’t speak from a place that’s ignorant of the reality of people less fortunate, that was me ten and twelve years ago and still is a lot of my family.
My point wasn’t specifically about Ross (which I still love and appreciate) or saying it was unimportant to local lives. I mentioned them specifically after seeing photos of people armed and sitting in darkened empty parking lots of Ross and Hobby Lobby where no one was even around, to guard closed stores that weren’t at risk at all.
I was speaking to the greater point: the deeper roots of the real problem. We are currently in turmoil after hundreds of years of racism and injustice and Black people being murdered in the streets after being asked politely and through the system over and over (and over) for justice and for the murder to stop. We saw people agitating for the right to *get haircuts* a few weeks ago and they got their wish within days. Black people have been asking to not be murdered for years and for clean water in Flint and for fair medical treatment and still aren’t getting it. Surely those kinds of harms to those lives, which also has overlaps with the people who work in stores like Ross and need it for their livelhood, are big harms that deserve to be addressed at the root.
The property damage, if it happens and if it’s even because of the protestors which isn’t a given, is a side effect of many years of pent up anger and frustration. It would be real damage, yes, but so is choosing to go protect those storefronts instead of listening to the pain and fear and trauma our fellow citizens are protesting, and doing something about that. This choice is starkly symbolic of why we are where we are with the protests. This wouldn’t be happening if more of us cared enough about living human beings being murdered to stop that instead of ignoring them/us until they can’t take it anymore and then arming up to go stand outside storefronts. We’d be so much better served if those folks took their armed selves to the places where we’re pushing for real change and lending a hand with that push, constructively.
Only good comes from building the structural change we really need to treat our fellow citizens humanely and well, and there would be far less anger if more people heard those pleas for justice and cared about THAT as much as they care about standing guard in front of empty closed stores that weren’t being threatened. Lives *are* being threatened and we see that every day in so many ways.