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Please, please, please don't pour milk on peoples' faces who have been sprayed with any kind of chemical irritant. Milk, for a variety of reasons, may provide a momentary relief but is dangerous for our bodies in the long run. It can trap particles against your skin for longer prolonging your exposure to the chemicals, cause infections, and put bacteria in your eyes and face. Which is the opposite of what you need when dealing with chemical exposure. Additionally, the thick white substance will mark them clearly to the cops.

1. A clean water bottle with a sport top cap that will allow you to control the stream of water

2. Have your comrade kneel, ask if they have contacts in. If they do - have them take it out. I know it's painful but contacts need to come out.

3. Ask them to try and keep their eyes open/blinking while you rinse them out. You are physically pushing the particles out of their eyes, which is easier when their eyes are open. Blinking will help too as you do this. That is our bodies natural way to clear out irritants.

4. Use a diagonal motion starting at the bridge of the nose and use a steady stream of water to flush out towards the corner of eyes away from face. You are physically removing the chemical irritants for someone's faces. Repeat on other side.

5. You may need to do this multiple times. IT IS WORTH IT. Think of it like an eye wash in your high school chemical class. This is actually removing the irritants from your face.

6. Contact free spray water in their mouths and if you can have them rinse their mouth and spit far away from you (this is tough with COVID).

7. When they get home do not wear contaminated clothes into the house as much as possible. Put them straight into a washer at high heat. Run an empty cycle between to get rid of the chemicals.

8. Get in the shower right away. Use sturdy soap and let the water run off of your body. Do your best to avoid contaminated water entering your face or genital areas. That is not comfortable.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UG7YCgkXTo

Also also claudette Colvin wasn’t the only one who was forgotten during the Montgomery bus boycott. Do y'all know who Jo Ann Robinson is? Home girl was the backbone to the whole movement tbh. Yeah rosa (a trained activist btw) was the igniting flame and yes in her documents and Jo Ann’s Claudette was credited as the inspiration, but jo Ann really kept the movement running. She organized car pools for all the black folks in Montgomery. Y'all the Montgomery bus boycott lasted for a year! People still had to get to work and shit. Jo Ann was on it! Plus she had a whole committee that was pushing for regulation changes and the end of segregation in busing. And hell, Montgomery buses were damn near reliant on black commuters so they eventually had to give.

Plus my all time fave is the homie Ella baker. Home girl ensured the founding of sncc when fuckboy Mlk tried to make them the youth chapter of the sclc. SNCC is the group that made sit ins a popular form of protest during the early civil rights movement. They founding students had their first sit in in 1960. Ella baker was like these students need their own separate movement and the sclc ain’t it. Plus she was a true proponent of self determination which was clear in everything that sncc did.

Just to add some more, let’s not forget the importance of Shirley Chisholm. She was an unapologetic black feminist who fought for the rights of women and the poor in her community.  She was a founding member of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Women’s Caucus. 

She was the first black women ever elected to the US congress and was the first woman and black american to ever run for the president of the US. Her campaign to be the democratic nominee was treated like a joke, and although she had the support of her loyal husband she received NO SUPPORT  from black male leaders. Her campaign went underfunded and the men of the black caucus rallied around white male candidates instead because they were pissed off that she was getting attention and wanted a black male candidate instead.

In 1972 Dennis Walker, a black aboriginal Australian cofounded the Australian Black Panther Party (ABPP).

As always black women made up the back bone of the movement, organizing, protesting, and working in the ABPP schools/medical centers. Marlene Cummins, one of the first black women leaders in the movement recently spoke about about the abuse she and other women endured. Marlene and Dennis dated for some time and she has admitted that he was verbally abusive, violent, and cheated on her with white women. She once saw him smash a broken bottle onto a women’s face, which eventually led to their breakup.

She also revealed that she was raped by two indigenous leaders at the time (one aboriginal and the other torres strait islander) which was recorded on tape.

“There were men who are immortalized in history as heroes. Some of them are and some of them aren’t. [Some of them] are not heroes. They were rapists and perpetrators.”

“There were no support systems and women’s refuges weren’t as prevalent as they were today. Women’s rights were not voiced…[So can you imagine] what it was like for young girls with no support networks in those days, when those things – rapes by uncles – were not spoken of. How can you deal with that?

“…Even if you did report a crime, you were questioned whether it happened to you because you contributed to it: you asked for it!”

I’ve see a lot of people leaving comments asking for more information/resources to look into these women. A bit a googling will bring you plenty of reliable resources.

She was 28 years old.

She was playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew in her own home.

She was INSIDE THE HOUSE.

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are mostly Muslims, and number about 11 million in western China’s Xinjiang region. They see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations, and their language is similar to Turkish.

But in recent decades, there’s been a mass migration of Han Chinese (China’s ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Oppression has been in place for years, but has worsened massively in recent months.

- Uighurs can no longer openly practice Islam

- Men are not allowed to wear beards. Exception only for old people

- They can no longer learn their native language at school

- They cannot move freely around the country and cannot leave it

- All mosques have been turned into shops and office centers

Beijing has also turned Xinjiang into a security state that is extreme even by China’s standards, being a police state itself. The provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone - twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. 

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints - tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

Checkpoints are installed in every district of the city. In simple terms, you can not get from one area of the city to another without passing the checkpoint and the police.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace – from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months.

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

Uighurs are very intimidated and refuse to talk to the press, even if they miraculously escaped the country. 

What’s happening in China is terrible. Maybe some people finally realize that the concentration camps are the reality of our time. There are concentration camps in America too. Don’t forget that. 

source 

“I’m a therapist and keep this poster in my waiting room, apparently it’s saved a few lives.”

I don’t like the phrase “a cry for help.” I just don’t like how it sounds. When somebody says to me, “I’m thinking about suicide. I have a plan: I just need a reason not to do it,” the last thing I see is helplessness.

I think your depression has been beating you up for years. It’s called you ugly, and stupid, and pathetic, and a failure, for so long that you’ve forgotten that it’s wrong. You don’t see any good in yourself, and you don’t have any hope.

But still here you are: you’ve come over to me, banged on my door and said, “HEY! Staying alive is REALLY HARD right now! Just give me something to fight with! I don’t care if it’s a stick! Give me a stick and I can stay alive!”

How is that helpless? I think that’s incredible. You’re like a marine: trapped for years behind enemy lines. Your gun has been taken away, you’re out of ammo, you’re malnourished, and you’ve probably caught some kind of jungle virus that’s making you hallucinate giant spiders.

And you’re still just going, “GIVE ME A STICK. I’M NOT DYING OUT HERE.” “A cry for help” makes it sound like I’m supposed to take pity on you, but you don’t need my pity. This isn’t pathetic. This is the will to survive. This is how humans lived long enough to become the dominant species.

With NO hope, running on NOTHING, you’re ready to cut through a hundred miles of hostile jungle with nothing but a stick, if that’s what it takes to get to safety.

All I’m doing is handing out sticks.