Tag: Peace

Some Resources

They’re accepting support, and offering support. Snippets here; there is more info about each on the page here:

https://www.them.us/story/trans-mutual-aid-funds-donate-support

This year’s Transgender Awareness Week (the leadup to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 19) has felt particularly macabre, arriving on the heels of a presidential election that will be disastrous for trans rights. Still, there’s never been a better time to help trans communities across the U.S. find shelter, obtain medical care, and protect themselves from state violence — and if you’re reading this, you can help by getting involved in mutual aid.

Although there are plenty of well-known LGBTQ+ nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups throughout the country, mutual aid funds prioritize giving directly to marginalized people in need, in order to survive crises and improve their material conditions. Numerous trans-led mutual aid funds exist on local, state, regional, and national scales, and while many may not be tax-deductible, we think that’s a small price to pay in order to help trans folks find safe shelter, obtain gender-affirming care, change legal identity documents, and more.

The phrase “we keep us safe” may have originated in prison abolition organizing, but it definitely applies to LGBTQ+ folks as well. Below, we’ve highlighted just a few trans mutual aid funds that are open to donations — or applications for assistance, if the trans person in need is you — as of November 2024. For more, check out our state-by-state list of mutual aid funds and advocacy groups. You can also search for #TransCrowdFund on your preferred social media platform to find individual trans people fundraising for their own needs.

Black Trans Fund

Organized by the Louisville, Kentucky-based nonprofit Change Today, Change Tomorrow, the Black Trans Fund offers “unrestricted assistance” for Black trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. According to organizers, the fund has distributed over $35,000 for “bills, travel, food, medical needs, and recreational needs” over its four years in existence. Donations are tax-deductible. (snip)

Genderbands

Based in Utah, Genderbands offers individual grants for trans people seeking help with medical costs (including surgeries for those over 18), travel, name and identity document changes, and special grants for trans youth with parental consent. Any trans person in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico may apply, although surgical grants are limited to U.S. residents; the application period for 2025 grants, including one dedicated grant for a masculinizing top surgery procedure in Salt Lake City, ends November 30. Donations of gently used binders are also accepted. (snip)

Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund

A project of the Iowa Mutual Aid Network, this fund is dedicated to providing aid for gender-affirming medical care throughout the state, and has distributed over $100,000 since 2021, according to its website. Grant seekers may apply every month, and may receive funding for hormone therapy, surgeries, therapy, and some other medical fees, as well as name change costs, travel expenses for medical care, and gender-affirming clothing. (snip)

Point of Pride

One of the largest trans-led mutual aid networks in the U.S., Point of Pride has raised millions for trans mutual aid through its annual TikTok fundraisers. The organization funds gender-affirming surgeries, hormone therapy, hair removal, clothing, and more through its various dedicated funds, and offers free binders and shapewear for those who cannot afford to buy their own. In 2024, Point of Pride reported giving $163,000 to 117 trans people through their HRT Access Fund alone, including 49 Black recipients thanks to funding from the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition. (snip)

Socialist Trans Initiative (STRIVE)

Based in Pensacola, Florida, STRIVE’s anticapitalist organizers say their mission is to “provide moral and material support to trans people who need it,” in the form of emergency housing, hormone therapy, food support, transportation, and “any other items needed for our survival.” In addition to its aid funds, STRIVE also holds trans community events and weekly political organizing meetings. (snip)

Transitional Justice

Although most of its organizers are based in Missouri, Transitional Justice seeks to facilitate travel and “temporary, transitional housing” for trans people fleeing harmful legislation throughout the U.S., as well as “people who have been evicted from their homes, fired from their jobs, or denied access to healthcare.” Applicants can request assistance by filling out the organization’s web form. (snip)

Trans Love Fund

Founded in 2013 through the South Carolina nonprofit We Are Family, the Trans Love Fund offers microgrants up to $200 for assorted “medical, legal, and emergency living expenses.” Grants are available to trans South Carolinians ages 16 and older, with applications opening one week out of every month (usually the first week, per the fund’s FAQ). We Are Family also operates the “Closet Case Thrift Store,” which offers free gender-affirming clothing to trans and gender-nonconforming youth. (snip)

Peace & Justice History for 11/15:

November 15, 1917
About 20 women peacefully picketing for universal suffrage (right to vote), who had been arrested in front of the White House a few days earlier, were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia.
The National Women’s Party and other organizations had been picketing the White House and President Woodrow Wilson as he traveled around the country ever since the inauguration of his second term.

Mary Winsor
The incident became known as the “night of terror.”
Wilson had led the country into the European war (later called World War I), by characterizing the U.S. mission as “making the world safe for democracy.” The women demonstrating outside in Lafayette Square called attention to the need for complete democracy at home, where half of its citizens lacked complete voting rights. Many women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, had been arrested several times, usually for obstructing the sidewalk, and imprisoned before. When a judge learned of the abuse he freed the women. Public outrage over their treatment increased sympathy for the suffrage movement.

left: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, Washington, DC. right: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; Member, Ex-Officio, National Executive Committee, Woman’s Party, ca 1915.

Amazing resources from the Library of Congress on women’s suffrage 
November 15, 1940
75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription.

Draft inductees leaving Wilmington, Delaware in November, 1941
November 15, 1943
Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s head of the SS (Schutzstaffel or protective rank), Gestapo, the Waffen SS and the Death’s Head units that ran the concentration camps, made public an order that Gypsies (more properly the Roma) and those of mixed Roma blood were to be put on “the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”

Gypsy prisoners arriving at a Concentration Camp


Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, such as hardcore criminals. Gypsies fell into both categories according to the thinking of Nazi ideologues and had been executed in droves both in Poland and the Soviet Union. The order of November 15 was merely a more comprehensive program, as it included the deportation to the Auschwitz death camp of Gypsies already in labor camps.
The Gypsies in Germany 
Gypsies: Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust  
November 15, 1957
U.S. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was founded. Thirty years later on November 20, SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze organization (dedicated to freezing all nuclear weapons testing worldwide) at a joint convention in Cleveland to form SANE/FREEZE. Its successor is known as Peace Action, the largest U.S. peace organization.

Sane Nuclear Policy poster, 1960
SANE history  Peace Action
November 15, 1969
Following a symbolic three-day “March Against Death,” the second national “moratorium” against the Vietnam War opened with massive and peaceful demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“New Mobe”), an estimated 500,000 demonstrators participated as part of the largest such gathering to date. 
It began with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House (while Pres. Nixon watched the Purdue-Ohio State football game on TV) to the Washington Monument, where a mass rally with speeches was held.

Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical “Hair” entertained the demonstrators. The rally concluded with nearly 40 hours of continuous reading of known U.S. deaths (to that date) in the Vietnam War.
November 15, 1986
A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA operative, of delivering arms to Contra rebels and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He had been arrested when his plane was shot down by Sandanista troops. He was pardoned a month after his conviction (his last name means “rabbit’s foot” in German).

 Hasenfus under arrest

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november15

Poem-a-Day: Miscarriage

Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Gauzy film between
evergreens is a web

of loss. Get closer. Reach
to touch the shimmering

gossamer and your finger
pushes through. Remember

filling that space with desire?
Someone else might grieve

the spider who abandoned
this home; others grow anxious

waiting for a deer’s walk
to wreck it. But you—

you grieve the net of thought
spun inside your own womb:

intricate and glossy and strong.

Copyright © 2024 by Christine Stewart-Nuñez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More about this poet and this poem here.

Legacy

Ted Kooser 1939 –

I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you,
to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written,
to remember my people as if they’d been yours—
to flesh out in evocative detail my parents,
my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts—
knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me
to remember them, the poems I’ve written
will have to go it alone. I owe my people
so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not
immortality—a few more good years in the light,
my grandfather patching a tire for a quarter,
his brother weaving a rag rug on his sun porch,
my mother at her humming sewing machine,
my father un-thumping a bolt of brocade,
measuring for new draperies. Perhaps they were
for you, to draw open and see on your lawn
Cousin Eunice Morarend playing her accordion.

Copyright © 2024 by Ted Kooser. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More from this poet here

Peace & Justice History for 11/14

November 14, 1910
Eugene Ely performed the first airplane takeoff from a ship. His Curtiss pusher flew from the deck of the U.S.S. Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia.By January he would execute the first (takeoff and) landing on a warship, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania. Captain Washington I. Chambers of the Navy Department had been interested in the military uses for the seven-year-old invention.
Naval flight training started shortly thereafter.

More of the whole story
November 14, 1954
“Ten Million Americans Mobilized for Justice” began a campaign to collect 10 million signatures on a petition urging the Senate not to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). The motion of censure against Senator McCarthy was for obstructing a Senate committee and for acting inexcusably and reprehensibly toward a U.S. soldier appearing before his own committee.
McCarthy had used his Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee to publicly denounce thousands as subversive, especially within the federal government, many without any justification. The political views of most were painted as treasonable and conspiratorial, rather than differing political views.
The petition effort fell about nine million signatures short.
More on Joe McCarthy 
November 14, 2000
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, simultaneously co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida presidential campaign organization and the public official responsible for the conduct of the election itself, certified Governor Bush’s fragile 300-vote lead over Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.

Katherine Harris
Florida Judge Terry Lewis gave Harris the authority to accept or reject a follow-up manual recount from some counties where the count was open to question. Harris rejected the manual recounts.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november14

The Warrior’s Plume

Bertrand N. O. Walker 1870 – 1927

On the plains and in the vales of Oklahoma,
     Grew a flower of the Tyrian hue,
The color that is loved by the Redman,
      That tells him light and life,
               And love are true.

Long ago it flamed in beauty on the prairies,
      Lighting reaching vistas with its glow;
Ere advent of the whiteman and his fences,
      Told the care-free, roving hunter
               He must go.

The throng, the herd, and greed have madly trampled
      Prairie, woodland, valley, and the height;
Crushed the feath’ry flower and rudely blighted
      Its pride and life and beauty,
              And its light.

Today ’tis found in silent glades and meadows
      Where by twos and threes it greets the May.
Like the scattered braves who loved its color,
      It has passed, been trodden out
               Along the way.

As the oriflamme it flaunted through past ages
      Went to gladden the fairness of the earth;
So the greatness of the Indian will linger
      In the land that loves them both
               And gave them birth.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More from and about this poet on the page.

Peace & Justice History 11/13:

November 13, 1933
The first recorded “sit-down” strike in the U.S. was staged by workers at the Hormel Packing Company in Austin, Minnesota. When the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) went on strike, the company tried to bring in scab (strike-breaking) workers.

“ Four hundred men, many of them armed with clubs, sticks and rocks, crashed through the plant entrance, shattering the glass doors and sweeping the guards before them. The strikers quickly ran throughout the plant to chase out non-union workers. One . . . group crashed through the doors of a conference room where Jay Hormel and five company executives were meeting and declared “We’re taking possession. So move out!” (Larry Engelmann, “We Were the Poor — The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor History, Fall, 1974.)

The tactic worked: within four days Hormel agreed to submit wage demands to binding arbitration. The success of this strike reinvigorated the labor movement, which had been in decline throughout the 1920s.
November 13, 1956
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional in public transportation. The case, Browder v. Gayle, was brought by four women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who had refused to surrender their bus seats to whites in Montgomery (months before Rosa Parks had done so), and had been arrested for violating Alabama law which required segregation on public buses.They challenged the law and the Court agreed, finding the law under which they were arrested in violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Aurelia Browder

A roadside monument was dedicated in 2004 to the four plantiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case.
Colvin, a 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School, boarded a bus in 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus, as she screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. 
More on Browder v. Gayle 
November 13, 1960

Over 1000 Quakers (members of the Society of Friends) surrounded the Pentagon for a silent vigil to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first Quaker Peace Testimony issued to King Charles II in 1660.
From the original Peace Testimony: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever.
And this is our testimony to the whole world….”
The complete text of the 1660 Declaration
November 13, 1974

Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist (Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers’ Union) at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium fuels production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, was killed in a one-car crash.
Read more about her story  
November 13, 1982
Maya Ying Lin
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. Carved into black granite are the 58,260 names of those Americans who died in Vietnam. The designer, Maya Ying Lin of Athens, Ohio, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University, was the winner of the competition that drew 1,421 design entries: “. . . this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.” Eventually, the Memorial included three elements, the Wall of names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.

The Wall of Names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial

Read more about the memorial

Stunning photo gallery of the Memorial including interactive panoramic images

Interview with Maya Lin and filmmaker Freida Lee Mock, who made the Academy-Award-winning documentary, “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision” (My apologies about Charlie Rose; it’s PeaceButton’s link, and it’s good info, Rose notwithstanding. -A)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november13

𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟/Wahzhazhe/Osage

Elise Paschen

Wa-zha’-zhe, name of the Osage tribe . . . who came from the stars.
—“The Osage and the Invisible World: From the Works of Francis LaFlesche”


                                                   The first language

𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 which Eliza,

                                                                              her grandmother, spoke.

                                           I try to learn

              the words 𐓣𐓟

                                                     from a book, a dictionary.

What was my mother taught

                                                                              as a young girl sitting

                                          on the front stoop

              of her grandma’s house

                                                      inhabited by half-brothers

she revered. Her favorite,

                                                                             Hunky, hand outstretched,

                                           showed her how to catch

             the wild horse

                                                       𐓤𐓘𐓷𐓘 𐓷𐓘𐓲𐓟𐓸𐓣

unbridled in the pasture.

                                                                              She knotted a paisley

                                            bandana around her

             neck. This language

                                                    for throat 𐓰𐓪𐓲𐓟

and tongue 𐓵𐓟𐓺𐓟 –

                                                                                words she learns

                                            to speak but then

               forgets. She loosens

                                                     𐓷𐓟𐓵𐓣͘ the rope

from the horse’s crest. 


 

The Osage orthography

𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 Osage
𐒻𐒷 words
𐒼𐒰𐓏𐒰 𐓏𐒰𐓊𐒷𐓐𐒻 wild horse
𐓈𐓂𐓊𐒷 throat
𐓍𐒷𐓒𐒷 tongue
𐓏𐒷𐓍𐒻͘ rope

Copyright © 2024 by Elise Paschen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More about this poet on the page at https://poets.org/poem/wahzhazheosag

Peace & Justice History 11/12

November 12, 1969
Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, revealed the extent of the U.S. Army’s charges against 1st Lieutenant William L. Calley at My Lai, a Vietnamese village.Hersh wrote: “The Army says he [Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968, in an alleged Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.'”
The same Seymour Hersh first wrote about abuses of Iraqis held in Abu Ghraib prison by Americans in 2004.

Seymour Hersh

The My Lai massacre by Seymour Hersh
An interview with Hersh on Iraq
November 12, 1982
The Polish government freed the leader of the outlawed Solidarity union movement, Lech Walesa, after 11 months of internment. His release came only two days after riot police used tear gas, water cannon and phosphorous rockets to disperse large pro-Solidarity demonstrations in Warsaw and other cities.
Read more 
November 12, 1989
Tens of thousands of Americans joined “Mobilize for Women’s Lives” in more than 150 cities and towns nationwide. They sought protection of women’s rights to reproductive choice, including abortion. Their focus was on state legislatures in their own states where laws were being introduced to put limits of a woman’s right to choose when she should bear children.
More than 2500 defenders of legalized abortion gathered at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Kennebunkport, Maine, just a few miles from President George H. W. Bush’s summer home, to hold a candlelight vigil.
Watch Helen Reddy lead “I am Woman” at the D.C. rally 
National Abortion Rights Action League / Pro Choice America 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november12

Cover Snark: Yet Another Terrible Wolf Placement

by Amanda · Nov 11, 2024 at 3:00 am

Welcome back to Cover Snark!

Welcome back to Cover Snark!

One Kiss by Traci Hall. A brunette man and woman are lying on a striped towel on a beach. Their proportions look off with big heads and tiny shoulders and arms. A scraggly terrier that also looks both too big and too small is looking at us the reader while the two people go in for a kiss.

From Mabry: This guy is suffering from sliding bicep syndrome, plus his forearm seems to be stolen from a 7 foot tall basketball player. And then there’s the nipple that’s trying to leave the scene altogether.

He also looks like one of the Property Brothers.

Sarah: Ok the proportions and perspective here are really weird to the point I feel like I should give everyone a warning. Like, uncanny valley vaguely nauseous proportions.

The ARM. the size of the head! his neck! I’m queasy now.

Lara: They must have used a funhouse mirror filter of some kind.

Sarah: Did he get stung by something?

Wolf Instinct by S.R. Griffith. A shirtless man is putting on a camo colored baseball camp. A white wolf his howling at his crotch while full moon rises in the background.

From Jen: Awkward wolf placement. Is he a wolf shifter? Or is he banging this wolf? The wolf appears to be complaining about the dude behind him.

Lara: Oh that is some champion poor placement! Worst/best I’ve seen!

Sarah: Please stop making covers where it looks like some indifferent dude is about to hump an animal.

Amanda: Isn’t the saying, “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes and bad animal placement on shifter romance covers”?

Jacked by Dixie Painter. Two headless figures of a man and woman are most of the cover. He is shirtless and she has on a blank tank and leather jacket. A jaguar prowls between them, but the bottom third of the cover is just a stack of logs.

From Susan: Blow it up for best effect. Lots here to play with.

Sarah: Wood.

Elyse: WHAT COULD ALL THE WOOD REPRESENT.

Sarah: Honestly I have no idea. What could it be?

Burning for Love by Evangeline Anderson. A shirtless bearded man is surrounded by a lot of lens flare. His arms are crossed. His right arm is made of metal and he appears to have a metal lens around his right eye.

From lils: Well “something” is burning! Is it love or an effect of the mess hall?

Sarah: This is a visual representation of what some of my headaches feel like!

Amanda: What in the J.J. Abrams is with all the lens flare?