The Same Moon Rises Over Us All (Help for Puerto Rico)
One of these days (soon, soon), this space will be organized, with categories and jazzy menus and subscription spaces and all sorts of neat little widgets.
Today is not that day.
But I’m not letting this month go, blueblood supermoon eclipses or no, without fulfilling one of my resolutions: to use the new site, in part, in support of causes needing people’s attention, public and political support, and especially funding. I had planned to feature a different cause each month (at least), but I had also, I think, unconsciously already decided 1) what the first one would be, and 2) that it would not be limited to January, but continue throughout the year.
Because the need is that dire.
On this night, a whole month into the new calendar year, the same moon rises over us all . . . yet you’d never know it based on the collection of criminals running things into the ground in D.C. I know a thing or two about colonization, and this country has been colonial from jump. It’s also treated its colonies as variously as property, as serfs, as subhuman, and as disposable and dispensable and discardable when they become slightly inconvenient (well, when it hasn’t just slaughtered them outright).
I and mine know a little a thing or two about genocide, too, and about this country’s propensity for exterminationist tactics. Some of us, in ancestral terms, survived it; some did not. And now, courtesy of the hellspawn in Washington, that offspring of the union of Klan and Nazi now slouching toward anyplace but Bethlehem, another colonized population is staring down the barrels of its own impending genocide.
What’s happening in Puerto Rico is deliberate ethnic cleansing.
People are dying. People who should already have their lives back.
A friend who is from there has returned, and he is working on the ground, in the heat and the humidity and lack of electrical power and the absence of potable water and the spreading disease that should never be an issue in the Twenty-First Century and the complete and utter abandonment of all humanity by the criminal enterprise squatting in the White House and its Republican fellow travelers in Congress and elsewhere.
Bobby is working the old-fashioned way, the way indigenous peoples the world over have always done: person by person, task by task, making things a little safer here, a little more liveable there, organizing generators for power and tarps for roofs and clean water and food and meds and compassion and human kindness and the saving of lives, lives abandoned by FEMA and its political handlers are not merely unworthy of saving, but more useful in dying.
I don’t have a PayPal address for sending money yet; when I do, I’ll add it here. For now, you can read Bobby’s account of some of the recent work he and his colleagues have been doing in Puerto Rico. [Update: Unless and until I hear otherwise with regard to posting his contact info publicly, e-mail me at Ajijaakwe [at] gmail [dot] com, or message me on Twitter or FB, and I’ll send you his PayPal address (or, if you want to send a check/money order, his snail-mail address).] If you’re a member of Daily Kos, you can Kosmail him for instructions on how to donate to help Don Feliberto, the gentleman whose home and existence they are at this moment working to save. There are a host of charities out there raising money for Puerto Rico, and some of them, like the efforts of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chef José Andrés, are eminently worthy of money and time. But I know Bobby. I trust him, implicitly and without question. And whereas larger efforts necessarily also have to fund a lot of overhead, Wings and I are always in favor of efforts that put money and resources directly into the hands of the people who need it most.
We’ll be adding in our own contribution in the days to come, as soon as we’re able. And we’ll continue to do so. A couple of thousand miles distant, people are suffering and dying unnecessarily. We may not have met them, but they’re our brothers, our sisters, and they deserve to have their lives back.
Because the same moon rises over us all.
All content copyright Aji Wings, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may be used for any purpose whatsoever without the express written permission of the owner.
