If I blow out all the candles in a single breath

[swan_tower]

Many years on September 1st I make a “birthday egotism” post, tallying up my accomplishments in the past year.

But for the last nine months or so, the first of the month has been reserved for my tikkun olam posts (and DW versions, which are much livelier).

The latter means more to me right now. If you want to wish me a happy birthday, do it by looking for a way to repair the world. Some little corner of it that is local to you and within your reach, however long or short that reach may be. Help someone who needs help. Find an active way to be a good neighbor, a good friend. Donate money or goods or time. Have you been meaning to start recycling or carrying reusable bags into the store? Now’s a great time to start. Speak up against hatred and fear and greed.

And then, if you’re willing, leave a comment here about what you’ve done. Because sometimes it feels like nothing when you’re doing your little bit, but then you look at everyone else’s little bits and realize they add up to a pile, a hill, a mountain. One bit at a time, we can move the world.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[watersword]

Monthly donation to Planned Parenthood. Kept on composting.

[longwhitecoats]

I donated money to the Houston Food Bank a couple days ago and to the NAACP on August 28 in memoriam of Emmett Till.

I revamped my syllabus to address head-on the crisis of white supremacy and anti-semitism in the field of medieval studies, and I educated myself more about the intersections of white supremacy and anti-semitism.

I bought a pride flag for my desk in the hopes of making my students feel more welcome.

[rachelmanija]

I've been using Resistbot to fax my politicians, mostly to say "Keep up the good work" as I'm in California.

I help people with PTSD put their lives back together. ;)

[marycatelli]

Monthly donation to the food bank.

[rosefox]

Several donations, and I'm helping friends get through an awful crisis.

[mtl]

If you want to wish me a happy birthday, do it by looking for a way to repair the world.

I said pretty much the same thing on my FB. I'd rather people give to others/pay it forward for my birthday this year.

ETA: for my own donations: I've donated to local food bank and to 2 women entrepreneurs via Kiva, on top of my usual monthly donations.

[ashnistrike]

Coming back to local social justice activities after a long summer of travel and intensive editing and intensive Dayjob deadlines. I feel very strange about my resistance stuff this month, because my sister was in Charlottesville and had friends near the truck attack, and everything I do is pretty suburban-house-mom. But I guess someone's gotta feed the Rebel Alliance.

We hosted the Democracy sub-meeting of our Resistance group, which is normally full of state-level legislative wonkiness, but this month we agreed that "stopping the rise of fascism" really needed to be at the top of the agenda. And then we broke that down into some actual possible things to do. (There was also state legislative wonking related to making absentee ballots more accessible without letting them be mass-hackable from Russia. If anyone knows good resources on the accessibility side of that, please let me know, because that research is on my Tikkun list for September.)

I donated to Portlight, which does disaster relief for people with disabilities.

Our town is having a small festival where performers put on shows on people's porches and everyone wanders around to watch; we're providing a porch.

[juliet]

Weekly Amnesty letters. Various regular donations. Composting (one of the loos in our house is a compost loo! it is doable even in central London :) ) and solar panels and recycling and so forth.

Getting involved in an attempt to create a "family bike library" locally, which would let people try out cargo bikes and trailers and tandems and other means of transporting your too-small-to-ride-independently kids on a bike. We have a handle on money to buy some bikes, but need somewhere to store 'em...