More mutual aid. Accounts that I trust or who are vetted by people I trust:1
Bigger giving options:
Donations to the Whitney Museum help them pay their staff while the museum is closed; they are continuing to support their employees instead of cutting their pay or hours.
Fleurty Girl is also continuing to pay their employees - money raised from the T-shirt goes to Hurricane Ida aid.
And updates from organizations I’ve posted on here:
From House of Tulip:
“via @houseoftulipno on IG: As of 10:24 pm I am sitting in a state of deep gratitude. House of Tulip has been able to redistribute 40,000 to Louisianians in need.”
via @readbeansparade on IG: "our amazing roofers are now at work - thank you for the donations :) first house shown here - Mr Benny Jones of the Treme Brass Band who had a tree fall on his home during Ida”
That’s all for now….
A Note:
We mutual aid cash because we care and we commune together and we will have each others’ backs regardless. This is how we have survived.
We also do it because our federal and state institutions have failed the most vulnerable, the most marginalized and they are dead set on continuing to fail (hi there Entergy and SWB, yes you, yes deregulation and laissez-faire economics, yes you too). We do it because these failures are also enclosures that aren’t “oops, I forgot” but are failures that occur on purpose so that specific corporations and specific political blocs can make profits, feel secure, and expand their accumulation on the backs of others. Read Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn. He already told you.
In Black World Seminar, we read Vincent Harding this week (more in this week’s scrapbook post) and
"Our ancestors did not wade through rivers of blood so that we might surrender the interpretation of their lives into the hands of others."
So thee interpretation is this: We shouldn’t have to mutual aid anything, not with the blood, sweat, and tears that have been poured into these waters, fertilized this ground. Not if the motto is being in right relation with this planet and so with each other, with the Gulf waters, with the swamp, with the air. Our need is a symptom of extraction. It is as symptom of enclosure. It is a symptom of disaster capitalism. Don’t get me started.
This is still an unnatural disaster.
More Ida notes to come,
jmj
I believe in giving no questions asked and not needing stamps of approval, but some reading this may need this extra information to open their wallets.