PSA for These Difficult Times

Letting my snaggle tooth hang out

You're exactly where you're supposed to be this moment. I tend to project all my fear out into the future, but you know what? It's my present that's terrifying at times, and I have to tell myself that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be this moment, over and over and over. Sometimes cliches are necessary.

Here's the PSA part of this post:

Do you listen to The Daily? It's a daily podcast that digs deep into a pertinent issue for twenty minutes, five days a week. The New York Times does it, so I suppose some of you out there reading will say it's fake news or liberal biased media or whatever lazy cliches are being thrown about. I say lazy because we're all subject to lazy, particularly intellectual laziness, and these times call for us to gird our loins and pay attention and read quality journalism and listen to careful, investigative work. I think The Daily does important reporting, and from what I've listened to for many months, it appears to cover sides of an issue when that's pertinent but also THE FACTS as they appear to our eyes and ears.

Truth is always truth, contrary to what you might have heard out of the Powers That Be's very own mouths.

Today's podcast was Part One of a two-part series called Divided: How Family Separations Started, 

and it'll blow your mind and break your heart.

Recently, I wrote a post detailing my happiness at Sophie finally starting her new adult day program. One of my Anonymous commenters wrote this:

What, you are happy with a great program for Sophie. That is wonderful. But what about all the children separated from their parents at the border?

I replied:

Anonymous, what do you mean? Have I forgotten that our government kidnapped thousands of children and put them in internment camps. Never. Doing what I can — do you need info or resources on how you can help them?

I suspect that this is the same Anonymous who spent a lot of time on an earlier post of mine defending the separation policy, so I'm hoping that she listens to the podcast. I wonder, too, whether her feelings about the great tragedy on our borders have evolved at all. The reason why I'm wondering is because I think it's going to take as many people as possible to exact justice. Yesterday, the POSPOTUS himself blessed and spoke warmly to those who work for ICE and for their actions at the border. 

So what can we do about the clusterfuck beyond educating ourselves? The obvious solutions are to pressure your representatives to work toward reuniting these children with their families, to vote for those people who fight injustice, to donate money or even donate and subscribe to the ACLU, to protest whenever there are gatherings, to hold your government responsible, to speak the truth and refrain from arguing that there's any reason at all to separate any child from his or her parent because they are seeking asylum or a better life for their families and happen to have brown skin.

Here are some more ideas that I found on the Internets.

1. Become a child advocate.
2. Become a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for young people in foster care or donate to your local CASA program
3. Donate to Comfort Case which gives backpacks of comfort items to kids in foster care
4. Volunteer to visit people in immigration detention.
5. Help transform your faith community or business into a sanctuary space.
6. If you happen to be a lawyer, paralegal or law student, a number of organizations are looking for pro bono volunteers.

Click HERE for more information and links to explore the above.

The Daily

#familiesbelongtogether

#resist

END EPILEPSY

About a year and a half ago, I participated as a board member with the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles in a presentation to an organization here in Los Angeles called Women in Film. Along with two other women, I told my story of Sophie's diagnosis and our life living with her seizure disorder. Some of the women in the audience cried openly and nearly all told us later how moved they were.

We didn't know, someone said.

Our organization won the grant and Women in Film produced this amazing and very intense public service announcement. There are four of them -- three depict a different type seizure and the long one is a sort of summary of the campaign to END EPILEPSY. I hope you've seen it on national television, but if you haven't, here you go (and watch the other three on YouTube):

Do me a favor, and pass it on.