EDITOR’s NOTE: This was posted this weekend and is being reposted now. The blogger, Kathy, is about $200 short of her goal as of Monday. Please read this (if you haven’t yet) and if you agree, perhaps you can help her out. Here’s her UPDATE.
About two years ago I lost my father to lung cancer. I also just learned that a high school music teacher who was a mentor and dear friend to me in high school (whom I thought had passed away many years ago) had not done so until recently. By tracking down his son (he is a now famous author writing under a pen name) on a high school classmates website – I’ve looked for him for many years — I found out what was happening and learned that my favorite teacher and adult friend died LAST YEAR and all these years I had lost touch when he was ill and could never visit him to cheer him up and let him know how much his guidance and friendship meant to me.
There are many stories like this…many events that make me shake my head because maybe I didn’t acknowledge someone’s friendship, love or encouragement enough, or didn’t try to help them enough in their hours of need.
But like others I get so wrapped up — obsessed, really — in my daily fixation on the bills that need to be paid in a time of decreasing resources, my obligations real and self-imposed — and for those of us who read or write blogs we get this idea into our heads that these little words we throw out here on cyberspace are what life is all about. The country’s history will be changed. Minds will be swayed. We can change the course of elections.
Get away, kids I have to finish this post!….Not tonight, honey, I don’t have a headache — but I have a post to do!…I can’t take you to the game since this story broke and I have to get something on the blog and maybe I can get linked!… What’s this I hear? Octomom has a blog?? Don’t bother me! I’ve got to ask her if she wants to exchange a link. WAIT! She’s OCTOMOM: maybe she’ll exchange LOTS of links!!
But what really matters are the way all of us who — whether blog writers want to believe it or not — are on this earth for a LIMITED amount of time use our time here. How can we try and make the world a little bit better before our part in this ever ending play ends?
Even though we all like to think that the REAL way to make an impact is to do a post that’s linked to by all and sundry — there is a reality beyond the Internet. And a way YOU can have an impact RIGHT NOW in a REAL way.
Kathy who blogs at Llberty Street and Comments from Left Field has a MAJOR financial crisis now due to the recession. And she needs help. Full details are HERE as well as button for you to donate.
This isn’t a right, left or center issue. And, yes, we all have problems: I’m writing this from Hidalgo, Texas where I’m doing an event during a time when, due to the recession I’ve greatly stepped up efforts to book all events as we now see how income offering writing outlets are now few or paying less as newspapers close, downsize, and magazines restructure. I have my OWN worst case scenario which could happen — as someone who doesn’t have a salary but works on a per show or per writing piece basis. I have a $700 property tax bill due this month and limited savings. We ran a fund raiser here at TMV a few weeks ago which didn’t meet its goals to reimburse me for some $900. None of that MATTERS right now. Go the link.
Despite my own “challenges,” when I read the MUST READ link above (which you should, too) and donated what I could. Why? Because I don’t have finite time on this earth; none of us do. Because I lived in India where I saw extended families and I came to believe that in the end whether we treat people as such or not we are all part of a big extended family. Because I myself know the pain of huge financial problems, particularly during the year my father was ill and I went back and forth to the East Coast or last year due to several huge problems in March 2007. I KNOW the pain and am also close to a young family that I’ve helped who had no where else to turn, and I’ve actually helped raise their now-teen kids.
Perhaps it’s because I’m not 20 anymore, but there IS more to life than blog posts and politics — and even more to life than just helping yourself. When I started blogging, Kathy — whether she liked my posts or felt they were full of crap — would send me a nice, supportive email. She was never asking for a link. Just reaching out to another human being whose ideas she felt were not always like hers. Out of the blue, she’d email me. And in recent years, she’d still send me a nice email, even if she felt my stance on an issue was full of crap. I never met her. I never talked to her. But she became a friend.
So GO TO THE LINK. And if you can, give $5 or $10 or whatever because maybe it’ll be enough to help another human being (forget about party, or ideology or anything) through one of the scariest times in history when no matter what you think about the stimulus plan, health care, or stem cell research we can each do maybe just a little to ease the pain of someone who feels at this moment more pain and stress than we do.
The Internet, political parties and blogs may not be exactly why we’re all here. Even $5 may be enough to help someone who reached out so often, and it’s your way of reaching out beyond immediate family to our extended family, humanity.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.