Speak your mind even if your voice shakes
The Star has started a series on poverty.
It is informative and heartrending but will anything change?
Red Jenny had an interesting post yesterday about empathy. Which included this statement
…possessing power itself serves as an impediment to understanding the perspectives of others. Through several studies, the researchers assessed the effect of power on perspective taking, adjusting to another’s perspective, and interpreting the emotions of others.
An article in the Star today points out that food hampers are low in nutrition and calories.
I think most of us could file this one under DUH! [Read more…] about Food banks fail on nutrition
I see much of what is occurring lately to be a fear response.
Can’t raise minimum wage for fear that business will suffer.
Does business not suffer when people do not have money to spend?
This is the obvious first step on the journey to the decline of capitalism. First you create an underclass, give them just a little, instill them with fear of having nothing and make them fight each other for the pittance that barely allows them to keep body and soul together. [Read more…] about “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
I had a bad feeling about this year, and I was unfortunately right about that.
Personally I lost a mom, a cat, two jobs, and had two serious health scares.
Politically saw the election of Harper and crew, a renewed and emboldened attack on women’s rights and freedoms, the realization that though the wheel was invented, many still want to put corners on it and have a nuanced discussion over who should be using it, continued death and destruction by the powerful who stand to gain more.. upon the many who have nothing left to lose, and the death of a puppet who had turned on his masters. [Read more…] about And so it ends..
Christmas Eve many focus on a birth of long ago, and so I give you a story of birth.
From the Independent
In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem – but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.
Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,” she says.
Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. “It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,” she says. She was already nervous about the birth – her first, and twins – so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.
They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”
Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.
I’m sure when foodbanks first started popping up they were considered a stop gap. A temporary fix to a major problem.
I’m sure there was an assumption that advocacy and research would be done to target the reasons for and solutions to most of the underlying causes.
Of course capitalism itself requires a certain level of poverty and unemployment to continue, it therefore, owes something to those upon whom the illusion is built.
Of course we know that despite the studies and proposed solutions the Liberal and Conservative governments have seen fit to reward corporations with tax cuts, and creating class warfare upon the poor.
The Conservative government has now taken the same approach to women’s issues. [Read more…] about Foodbanking Women’s Issues
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