...so I can sleep

“How do we go home at night after talking people off of ledges and respond to the question, “How was your day, honey?” How do we fight with our spouses? How do we manage at cocktail parties where the conversation feels superficial and hollow, and we’ve just come from the trauma trenches? How do we work with our own tendencies to get depressed and anxious and self-doubting and — who knows — maybe even a little suicidal? How do we try to practice “self-care” and — you know — fail at it?”

Keyshia Cole - Love I Thought You Had My Back

Trust is not just for others, but more importantly for ourselves.

B = Boundaries

R = Reliability

A = Accountability

V = Vault

I = Integrity

N = Non-judgement

Starting from the front of the pig: Pork shoulder (also called pork butt or “Boston butt”) is generally sold as a 5 to 10 pound boneless roast at the grocery store. (Pork shoulder chops are sold with bones, but those are less common.)

How to Cook: “It’s a really great thing to roast,” says Mylan. It’s a relatively tough cut, well layered with fat, and is good for braising, slow and low roasting or barbecue. “Shoulders are good for when you’re going to cook for a long period of time and want it to stay moist,” he says. A typical preparation? Pulled pork.

Side note: Why is this cut sometimes called “pork butt” when it doesn’t come from the actual rear end? “The word butt has its roots in old English, which is a quasi Germanic language, and butt means ‘the widest part,’” says Mylan. “On a pig, the widest part is the shoulder, not its actual ass. And that’s why it’s called the butt.”

“You know, unfortunately, you have a lot of people involved in this that are running around telling a lot of stories, you know, and without pointing fingers, it serves to benefit people’s causes by making a lot of things up that really didn’t happen and really doesn’t exist. But don’t underestimate the need for attention, especially young girls.”

That’s not all. You also found it important to announce that “girls have as much culpability in this world as boys do” when the filmmakers asked you about the case. When the filmmakers alleged that the boys in Coleman’s and in alleged second victim of that night Paige Parkhurst’s cases were guilty, you replied with a chuckle and then, “Were they?” 

http://sacompassion.net/poem-breathe-by-lynn-ungar/

Breathe, said the wind.

How can I breathe at a time like this, when the air is full of the smoke of burning tires, burning lives?

Just breathe, the wind insisted.

Easy for you to say, if the weight of injustice is not wrapped around your throat, cutting off all air.

I need you to breathe. I need you to breathe.

Don’t tell me to be calm when there are so many reasons to be angry, so much cause for despair!

I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind, I said to breathe.

Saving forever. The entire article is so amazing.

A few excerpts:

“Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.“

“Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.“