as the LJHawk flies...

Ally is a passport; you may travel in these spaces but you must follow the law of the land. The word has no meaning if it has not been approved by the proper authorities. And the authorities are us.

We are citizens of this land and we continue to live here when you have gone home. You can read every travel guide, and know every intersection in our roads, but if you are not a citizen you are a visitor. 

Ally is not a ticket, a pass to sit down and enjoy the show. Activism is not a spectator sport, you are either playing or you are on the opposing team. If you want to enjoy the game you are going to have to shoulder some tackles for the players. Because we have bruises all over our bodies and you are wearing a suit of armor.  

Ally comes with a class. We are the teachers and you are the student. You will listen and will only participate when you are called upon. If you want to be an ally you have to first realize that your voice is not the most important one in the room. You are there to listen, and we will know if you didn’t do the reading. 

Ally is not a part of a gift bag you get for coming to the party. If you want the word you must come to the funerals as well as the parades.  

The word comes with work. It comes with struggle, inconvenience, and time. Ally is something you do. Not someone you are. It is a job, not a title. 

There are so many chronic illnesses for which there aren’t very effective medications or therapies. Even if your chronic illness has a few good treatments available, they might not work for you, or they might be out of your reach because your doctor won’t prescribe them or your insurance won’t cover them. 

If you do find a medication or treatment that works for you, it might only alleviate some of your symptoms and restore part of your function. It might come with unpleasant side effects that interfere with your life in new ways. 

Kristen Hawkes is an anthropologist at the University of Utah. She tries to figure out our past by studying modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, who likely have lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years. Groups like this are about as close as we can get to seeing how our early human ancestors might have lived.

Over many extended field visits, Hawkes and her colleagues kept track of how much food a wide sample of Hadza community members were bringing home. She says that when they tracked the success rates of individual men, “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. Which meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve.

So if dad wasn’t bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.

Mostly, they were digging tubers – which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.

She describes this finding as “mind-blowing.” In this foraging society, it turns out, grandmothers were more important to child survival than fathers. Mom and grandma were keeping the kids fed. Not Man the Hunter.

This finding led Hawkes to completely re-evaluate what she thought she knew about human evolution. Grandmothers were crucial in this environment to childhood survival. So maybe it wasn’t an accident that humans are the only great ape species in which women live so long past reproductive age. If having a helpful grandmother increased a kid’s chances of survival, natural selection may well have started selecting for older and older women. (This endowment would have passed also to human men.)

Why Grandmothers May Hold The Key To Human Evolution