On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself — on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
In the early days of the pandemic, storied community
activists and those newly unemployed, or working from home for the first
time, came together to join or form mutual aid networks across the
country. And with states opening back up despite the pandemic
wearing on, some are trying to shift the resources and energy to fight a
mounting challenge: food insecurity, which will outlast the pandemic.
Some projects aim to rewrite entire lanes of our food
system: seeds and gardening advice distributed to hubs around the
country, a quickly growing network of free fridges
to store fresh food, and fleets of cyclist couriers ready to fill in
the gaps. The new movement is also centered around food dignity: letting
people eat according to their preferences, rather than subsist on
whatever donations are available at a food bank that week.
“We don’t want this to just be a fad. We want this to be a
movement where we can be sustainable over the winter,” says Ash
Godfrey, one of the people behind Chicago’s Love Fridge project. “This is something that 10 years from now could be a thing. We want people to do it right.”
Of course, being able to produce your own food with consistency is the
most secure thing. This is what Nate Kleinman hopes to inspire with the Cooperative Gardens Commission,
which he helped start in March to collect and send seeds to hubs across
the country. Kleinman learned the potential of mutual aid when working
with Occupy Sandy in New Jersey in 2012, which was key to helping dig
out homes and provide supplies to people deeply affected by the
hurricane.
The group is working with local partners across the
country to get seeds to disadvantaged or marginalized communities,
places that were dealing with food insecurity before the coronavirus
hit. Unlike other mutual aid groups, which tend to be located in
population centers, the seeds can reach people in rural areas, with hubs
in Mississippi, Texas, western North Carolina, and more. So far,
they’ve set up 217 hubs across the country and reached an estimated
10,000 gardens, Kleinman says. And they’re accepting more resource donations on their website.
The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an
ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that
community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward.
“When I sparked this up, I never thought about, ‘What’s
the government going to do for me?’” says Ramon Norwood, the founder of
the Love Fridge. “That’s what we’re learning with the pandemic. It’s not
enough. It shouldn’t just be the bare minimum.”
During the intial days and weeks of the pandemic my wife erected a Little Free Library, planning and construction of which were initiated well before the pandemic. I stocked it with initial books but also the jams, relishes, and chutneys that I make.
In the processing of preserving more now. Look forward to putting them out in a few weeks.
March 17, 1991: The Soviet people voted to preserve the USSR.
The referendum held on March 17, 1991, stated: “Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?”
In defiance of the counter-revolutionaries who had seized the governing apparatus and the leadership of the CPSU, an overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens IN EVERY REPUBLIC voted “Yes.” The only exception was in a few republics where the “democrats” in power did not allow the vote to take place. Elsewhere there was 80 percent voter turnout.
For: 113,512,812 - 77.8%
Against: 32,303,977 - 22.2%
Despite the vote, the U.S.-backed Gorbachev-Yeltsin leadership illegally dissolved the USSR on December 26, 1991.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
