take me to the meadows...

Union Strong

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Dear compassionate souls, I come to you with a heavy heart, burdened by our story, our lives shattered by the ongoing onslaught of violence in Gaza. Since the beginning of October we have been suffering from terrible conditions and difficulties. Living in Gaza is terrifying during these times, bombs are constantly falling and our lives are in danger. Our house was completely destroyed and we were forced us to move from khanyounis to el mawwasi with minimal personal belongings. I am Ahmed Al-Agha, 25 years old, a graduate of media and mass communication from Al-Azhar University in Gaza. I was a volunteer in the Public Relations Department at the University of Gaza. Due to the difficulty of jobs in the Gaza Strip, I had to register for a professional diploma in culinary arts, but I did not complete it due to the terrible war. After my father passed away in 2021, life pushed me to grow up early and take responsibility for my family, including my mother (samah), my brother(omar)and my three sisters,abla 20years old,yomna17years old and jody 9years old. I dream of owning a small restaurant in order to support my beautiful family. Allow me to introduce you to my family, the very core of my existence: Samah, my great mother, an Arabic language graduate, a strong, courageous, compassionate, and extremely generous mother. She loves her kitchen utensils more than anything else, and becomes very sad if a plate or cup breaks. Her main goal in life is to gain her mother’s approval and the happiness of her children in all possible ways and to do the impossible for them. Omar is an accounting graduate from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. He is an ambitious young man with big dreams. He loves going out with his friends and driving cars. He used to work for Atlas , but at the beginning of November the company's headquarters was completely destroyed, and he is now without work. Abla is an intelligent and educated girl,she loved children and reading novels, My mother depends on her to manage the household. She prepares us the best shawarma fattah in the world and many wonderful desserts. She studies English at Al-Aqsa University and dreams of becoming an English teacher, but her dream will not come true because her university was completely destroyed. Youmna is a wonderful girl, a student in the second year of secondary school. She has a leadership personality. She was a camp leader in the Association for Culture and Free Thought. She has a talent for drawing and participates in art exhibitions in her school and in civil society institutions. She loves drinking Nescafe and listening to music when she draws. She has courses in drawing. The characters: Her dream is to create her own art gallery and to study at the College of Fine Arts. Jody, my little sister, is 9 years old. She is smart and beautiful. She worked and dreams of becoming a model in the future and has the talent of acting. She participated in an advertisement for a bridal chalet and was the heroine of the advertisement. I felt very happy to participate in the advertisement. She suffered from severe psychological disorders at the beginning of the war after she saw several children dispersed as a result of the bombing of the house opposite ours. I try to maintain her psychological state by going together to the seashore and meeting her friends in the nearby tents and playing with them so that she is not distracted by the terrible news and scenes shown on the Internet. , the war has shattered our lives, leaving us without a safe haven or a place to call it home. We are human beings, just like you. We eat, drink, watch Tom and Jerry, love to travel, and love life . The only solution to save my family is to get them out of Gaza by paying an amount of 5,000 US dollars for each of the above-mentioned people to . If the money is available, it can get them out within thirty days. ‏Please consider that the above mentioned people are your family. How would you like them to be helped ? Your help, even if it is just one dollar, Im sure that it will never forget your help

Donation link⬇️⬇️

this is a new fundraiser and the blogs vetting fundraisers are all on hiatus currently so it hasn’t been verified, but the notes say that no duplicates turn up in reverse image search

in addition, @maxellminidisc left these tags saying that the co organizer is a palestinian living in the uk

His Instagram account is here.

Disclaimer: I'm not an official vetter, but there aren't many people vetting right now so I will provide evidence for you to use your own judgment on. I do encourage you to share and donate if you feel comfortable.

Here are some options y'all seem to insist on and why they're fucking stupid:

Vote Third Party :: Until we have ranked-choice voting (and probably even if we did have ranked-choice voting), it is practically impossible to make a 3rd-party candidate viable. There's not enough of the population that's far enough from moderate to give up their "safe" blue vote for some "revolutionary."

Don't Vote At All :: I'd prefer to pick my enemy. If I'm going to be working in spite of the government, or even against it in some ways, I'd rather the people I'm working against not already be targeting me for being queer, for example. If my options are "bad" or "much, much worse" I'm gonna pick "bad" and try to improve things from there.

Violent Revolution :: It's a cosplay power fantasy in the same vein as the Right-wingers looking for a reason to shoot protesters. Assuming you even have enough people organized and enough firepower to pull that off in the first place…have you prepared a plan to keep the innocents alive and safe? Are you sure you can keep supply chains for food and medicines intact? Are you sure there will be resources available for the disabled, the scared, the young and old, those who won't be able to fight and still need to be taken care of? Turns out revolution is ugly and causes a lot of undue collateral damage. Are the lives "saved" really going to outweigh those whose lives will be upended and destroyed? It's not like a newly-toppled, unorganized country will be able to do anything about Israel/Gaza, so you're just hurting and killing far more people than you're saving.

As for the power you do have to better things (and make Leftism more viable as a political stance in the US)?

Work at the level of your local government. If you're in a small enough town or neighborhood and think you have what it takes, run for local office. Be a local face of the left wing; you're far more likely to sway a small town to your views than the whole country, and each small town with a socialist-leaning government is a dot on the map for larger-scale viability, and you can help keep your community safe while trying to build up in scale.

Build community so we can keep each other safe if worse does come to worst. Push mutual aid initiatives, help at food banks, grow produce to donate to those in need, apply to work at your local free clinic, empower local businesses whenever possible so that if there is a socioeconomic collapse, you and those you love aren't left completely without resources.

Protest, and make it disruptive. You can be disruptive without being violent: graffiti, blocking roads, encampments, sit-ins, to name a few examples. Create inconveniences so it gets people's attention whether they like it or not.

Above all, FUCKING VOTE BLUE. You're choosing your enemy. You get to help decide if the government we're working in spite of is run by milquetoast neoliberal war hawks who do, on some rare occasions, actually make things marginally better…or full-tilt Christo-fascists who want to kill some of us for kissing people with the same genitals as us. There aren't any other options that are going to be picked. It sucks, but at the bare minimum we can pick the option that isn't going to actively murder us while we try to build up viability for a candidate who won't sell out brown people to an ethnostate.

I won't keep you long. Here are the facts:

Siraj Abudayeh @siraj2024 is a Gazan journalist and a father of three.

He and his family have been displaced 7 times.

They have survived multiple recent massacres in Khan Yunis.

They live in a tent that feels like a "convection oven".

He can hear tank fire across the street.

His parents and siblings escaped Deir al-Balah and are now homeless; he has to care for them too.

He needs to raise $5,000 CAD / $3653 USD by the end of the day.

He's probably gotten a hundred thousand notes on his posts at this point.

This has been meaningless. His campaign moves at a glacial pace.

The Palestinian genocide is the fault of the US, UK, Israel, and the imperial core in general.

When we in the imperial core do not donate to people like him, we perpetuate the genocide.

[GFM LINK]

contact @malcriada if GFM is giving you trouble

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yeah, the electoral college means your vote doesn't count unless you win your state. it's a terrible undemocratic bullshit system. it's not going to change before this election,* so there isn't much point in complaining about it right now.

if you hold the belief that there's no point in voting because your voice will just be downed out by a chorus of bigotry- chances are other people in your state feel the same way. and because those people are not voting, it's impossible to know how many of you there are. the reason it's important to vote EVEN WHEN YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE is to make this number public.

when the minority in a state still goes out to vote:

- other members of the minority party know they aren't alone in their state. this encourages MORE people to vote in the next election

- the majority candidates are forced to divert some of their campaign resources away from swing states to secure a state they were already going to win

- the minority candidates are encouraged to spend some time campaigning in your state instead of abandoning it as a lost cause

- assuming you also vote in local elections, the minority is more likely to win representatives in the house

- who knows there might be so many of you that you fucking flip it by mistake

there has been a 700% increase in new daily voter registrations in the few days since Biden dropped out of the race.

thousands of people are deciding, right now, that voting is worth it. some of them live in your state. there is going to be a spike in blue votes across the country. this election is going to have the youngest voter turnout in history. this is the best possible time to join them. join us.

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