Vounteering & Random Acts of Kindness Feels So Good

A few days ago, I happened on a piece in my Axios newsletter.  It has stuck with me and, because I am totally sick of US news lately, I thought I would focus my attention on it.  The idea was the benefits of paying it forward and acts of kindness.  We’ve all heard of little acts that actually make a big difference.  A prime example is a driver in the toll lane pays not only for him/herself but also for the driver behind.  It can have a ripple effect, with the other drivers in line inspired to do the same thing.

Or take the person in the Walmart line that is short of cash when the cashier is done ringing up purchases.  A person in line behind might be inspired to make up the difference.  It’s such a small thing but saved the first customer from embarrassment.  That customer might later do something nice for an elderly neighbor.

Kindness can spread just as well as a virus.

I have been in some tough situations in my lifetime.  One particular period of time was when my first husband, Rich, was recovering from heart surgery.  He was on medical leave and was receiving a very small portion of his salary.  I was working as a sign language interpreter for a school district but it was only part-time.  Rich needed a lot of help in those days and could only care for our baby a few hours at a time.  We were struggling to pay our rent, for food, and for expensive medications for Rich not covered by insurance.  We couldn’t bring ourselves to reach out for help.

Somehow, my cousin Mary figured it out.  She would come over to visit or to babysit Billy if I happened to pick up a freelancing gig.  Maybe it was what was in our fridge or what we wore.  One time when she dropped by to visit, she had a warm, full length winter coat for me.  I didn’t have any nice coats to wear when I went to work and this was an act of kindness that meant so much to me. 

When Rich was doing better and we were more financially secure, I felt a need to pay it forward, as it were.  We were going to church at that point and I learned that there were a lot of vets living under a bridge that was on our way to the church.  The church was providing cots to sleep on during the winter months and Rich became on of the volunteer drivers to pick the guys up and bring them to the church.  I joined a team of volunteers that rotated at Elizabeth House, where we served meals to those in need.  Many nights, we served families.

Here we live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and yet we have vets and families homeless and hungry.  It’s appalling.  When I give, I donate to food pantries and No Kid Hungry or the Harry Chapin Foundation.  Ted and I can afford our food so it’s a small act of kindness to try and see that others get a meal.

Before the pandemic, I was a volunteer reader at an elementary school.  I read one-on-one with students K-2 and these were children who struggled with reading but not so much they qualified for special services.  I loved reading to the kids, most of whom had never had anyone read to them before.  I loved talking to them, learning about them and their interests.  Many of them grew more self-confident with the individual attention.  It wasn’t a small act of kindness because reading helps children to succeed later in life.  It was mostly an act of kindness to me because I love reading so and wanted the kids to feel the same way.

The point of all this is that volunteering or performing small acts of kindness ends up being a win-win situation.  The people we do a kindness for receive something that they need and it’s a feeling of relief or joy for them.  Feeling relief or joy starts the feel-good endorphins flowing and they’re likely to be kind to someone else.  As for the person who volunteers or helps out some way, the feel-good endorphins flow as well.  There is a feeling of doing something positive in a world of so many negatives.

When I volunteer, I feel I’m doing something useful and beneficial.  Working people are often too busy to volunteer a lot of their time but it only takes a few minutes to perform an act of kindness.  I wish we would all do this.  It could be healing for us all.

 

 

 

 

Mass Shootings: Live With It?

 Today is the anniversary of the Allies invasion of Normandy in 1944.  I remember the 50^th anniversary and feeling amazed by how many years had passed.  In two years, it’ll be 80 years.  I saw “The Longest Day” when I was a kid in the 60s.  I thought it was a great movie but not too long ago, when I saw it again, I was saddened at all the lives lost.  My first dh Rich and I went to see “Saving Private Ryan” when we took a weekend vacation in 1998 or 99.  I couldn’t sit through the whole movie.  It was just too realistic.  I couldn’t handle the blood and gore.

Those rifles the soldiers used then weren’t like the automatics we have today but they were heavy duty and meant to kill people.  The automatic rifles some people like aren’t meant for hunting or protection.  Those weapons are to kill a lot of people fast, inflicting devastating and mutilating damage on the human body.

This morning I read an opinion piece by one of the surviving students from the Columbine High School massacre back in 1999.  I’d heard of mass shootings before but they were usually associated with organized crime hits.  These weren’t hardened hit men.  They were misfit teens who went into their school and started shooting.  They killed themselves.   The carnage was shocking.  We were all horrified by this awful tragedy but too soon it was forgotten. It was just one of those once in a lifetime things, right?

Wrong.  This is a list of school shootings since Columbine. https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-05-24/a-look-at-some-of-the-deadliest-us-school-shootings They just list the deadliest, which killed 169 children.  This only happens in this country.  Other countries have sensible gun laws and the number one killer of children is not gun violence.  But here, in the US, gun violence kills more kids than car accidents.  It kills more kids than cancer.  The statistic is absolutely monstrous.

Craig Nelson wrote the column about gun violence and surviving Columbine.  He was 17 years old then and recalled the trauma of friends being killed while he and other classmates hid.  Now he is the father of four children and this could likely happen again and to one of his children. 

That’s because, lately, it seems mass shootings have become the “new norm”.  You don’t know if it’ll happen at the grocery store or the movies or a clinic or a mall or a concert or a church or a parking lot or night club … you don’t know where and when the next one will happen.  It’s bad enough the Rethuglicans refuse to do anything about gun control reform.  Now there’s a new poll:  almost half of the formerly respectable Republicans think we have to just live with mass shootings.

My brain is exploding.  My brain is being overloaded with: shock, disbelief, outrage.  I think those people need to see pictures of the Alverde kids and Buffalo seniors who were killed with those vicious, deadly AR-15s.  Completely mind boggling.

Mr. Nelson had suggestions about what we can do instead of just sitting on our hands, shaking our heads.

This has to be politicized.  Those of us who are tired of children being shot up in schools and people of color being slaughtered at churches and grocery stores need to get up and use our voices.  Join a protest march.  Go to your local government council meeting.  Call your senators.  Call your representative.  Volunteer to help elect people who will be willing to make a change.  If we sit back and do nothing, it’s like condoning gun violence.

Mass shootings, the new norm?  Is that who we are?  Is that who we want to be? Check out Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States

Mr. Nelson’s opinion piece: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/survived-columbine-school-shooting-watched-uvalde-repeat-cycle-death-rcna31338?cid=eml_nbn_20220605&user_email=13660bfeb26f12d44f84b122ca5ed8d5f1acd1ca439a25e7fe835ee487c11d11&%243p=e_sailthru&_branch_match_id=897534115306322423&utm_medium=Email%20Sailthru&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAAzVO7WrEIBB8GvvPJH4klxaOUij3GkHXzSlnVPxI6NvX%2Figss8PszjC21lQ%2BxjFoCHiVQaU0eBdeo0ifhEuR7rgV5Xy1ub11IWb3dEH5rWV%2Ft39mIr4If%2FS5rmv4j4F4dKXantR3TC64GDorLZ%2FuREMh%2BnZoF5AWsDF6WjpWF570UhVs%2F2in8gZpxoSqUvgBj9R0ammGoAQTYiXiAc4Q8Y2H34IOG584n5ZpJnxpBfOGR6%2Fe70wsy6R31HzZGTdS7qvUjHNQM5rVzDtTYBgoKd4Vn%2FG24ypmRLnegDHD2C9Kxm%2BmJgEAAA%3D%3D

Do Something. Please.

Robert Reich had a very moving newsletter this morning, for me, anyway.  https://robertreich.substack.com/p/empathy-and-activism?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web He wrote about the different types of empathy and its opposite, indifference or numbness.  The article meant a great deal to me because I am an empathic soul with an inner warrior that comes to the surface when there is injustice.

The slaughter of the elderly black citizens in Buffalo, the 19 children and 2 teachers in Alverde, TX has awakened that inner warrior.  The massacre of these innocent people is a gross injustice.  They deserved to live out their lives in whatever path they were led.  In addition to all those people killed with yet another AR-15, seventeen were wounded at the elementary school.  It makes my blood boil.  I can’t even begin to imagine the devastation and grief the families feel.

I saw a post listing all of the mass shootings, all of them carried out by an AK-15, an automatic weapon that fires many rounds within seconds.  They kill people because of the devastating and mutilating wounds they cause.  Citizens do not need automatic weapons, which were designed for the military.  The primary and only purpose is to kill a lot of people which makes it appropriate for soldiers but surely not for 18 year old disturbed or supremacist kids.  Hunters don't need automatic weapons.  They wouldn't be able to use the meat from an animal blown to pieces.   Access to those weapons has to be changed and it's up to people with empathy to bring that change about.

Robert Reich wrote that some people are so empathic, they feel as if these tragedies are happening to them.  They so strongly identify with the victims it becomes almost debilitating.  They are unable to act because they are so devastated.

There’s empaths more like me.  We grieve deeply but then are moved to act and try to do something to make things better.  I’m disabled so marching and carrying signs aren’t for me now although I once did participate in a sit in at the formerly called Health, Education & Welfare (HEW) building in Washington, DC.  It was 1976 and the law to protect people with disabilities had been passed in 1973, but the HEW secretary never signed them. 

I was 21 and volunteered to go in with a group of Deaf, blind, and wheel chair bound protesters.  I would be one of the interpreters there for the Deaf.  The police were reluctant to move in and remove us because it would have looked really bad in the press.  Instead, they did their best to drive us out, denying us food and phones, ratcheting up the AC although it was April and cold, and making us remove our shoes before going down the hall to the bathrooms.  I slept on the floor with everyone else, my purse as a pillow. 

We left the next morning because many protestors needed medication and other necessities that were denied by the police.  We weren’t angry about that; we were trespassing so we knew we wouldn’t be coddled.  Similar protests went on at HEW offices around the country.  Secretary Califano signed the regulations.  I totally value that experience.  I felt I was doing something positive about correcting an injustice. 

I can’t do that but there’s a lot I can do from home and have already contacted organizations to volunteer my time.  I can write letters, send emails, join a phonebank, address envelopes – whatever it takes.  It’s not much but when people get involved and do the same thing, it’s amazing what we can do.

On the other end of the spectrum, Reich wrote about the people who either don’t care because they’re narcissists (like the “illustrious” 45), because they’re too focused on what’s going on in their lives, or because they feel nothing they do will make a difference.  I can’t say a thing to change a narcissist and some people really have very overwhelming issues already, but I can say to the people who think what they do doesn’t matter:  yes, it does.  Doing one small thing matters.  Stepping up and. Like Howard Beale from Network, proclaiming: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Harry Chapin was a singer/philanthropist and his cause was hunger.  He would say, “When in doubt, do something.”  Well, that applies here too.

Please.

Step up and do something too.

Michigan Parents Want ASL in Schools

I was grabbed by a headline I saw the other day and only just got a chance to read it.  It’s called “Parents of deaf kids push for more American Sign Language education” and this is the url: https://www.wxyz.com/news/national/two-americas/parents-of-deaf-kids-push-for-more-american-sign-language-education.  It grabbed me, of course, because these were *hearing* parents of deaf kids requesting ASL education. 

I wrote before about the times in which my parents grew up and hearing parents were mostly very much against deaf children learning sign language.  I also wrote about my experiences as an interpreter for Deaf students in the school system.  There, there were 3 different methods of communication and 3 different kinds of interpreters: sign language, cued speech and lipreading (oral method).  We were beginning to see the spread of cochlear implants, the newest thing in “fixing” a Deaf kid.

 When Deaf parents have a Deaf baby, that child learns sign language right from the beginning.  When they begin school, they have a language in place: American Sign Language.  They have an easier time with English and don’t lag behind as much as the deaf kids with hearing parents. 

Why?  Those kids don’t have language from the get go.  It takes a while for the parent to realize there’s a problem.  The first thing they do is take their kids to doctors and audiologists who still view deafness as something pathological that needs to be “fixed”.  They recommend testing to see if the kids qualify for cochlear implants.  Meanwhile, other hearing kids are in preschool learning and signing deaf kids are in the process of acquiring more language too.

By the time deaf kids of hearing parents enter kindergarten, they’re lagging behind their hearing and signing deaf peers.  They may or may not have been implanted.  The white coated specialists have advised hearing parents NOT to use sign language because it might “impede” language acquisition.  This is the same bullshit reasoning used when my mother attended an oral-only school for the deaf.  Everyone told my grandparents that learning sign language would prevent my mother from speaking proper English.

Hearing educators think they know what’s best for Deaf children.  They don’t.  They know little to nothing about sign language and how much it benefits and enriches the lives of Deaf people.  I’m very happy that, in this article, mothers in Michigan with deaf kids are united in trying to get a bill passed in their state legislature that would allow for ASL in schools.  “These women are now behind the fight for Lead-K, a legislative campaign calling for the state to put ASL learning on equal footing with English, and ensure deaf kids are at age-expected levels by kindergarten.”  I hope it passes but don’t hold out with too much hope for it because of the mindset of the GQP: they are determined to set the clocks back any way they can.

Even after the Deaf President Now and Deaf Pride movement, there is still so much ignorance about deafness.  I think many people think ASL is just uneducated English.  It’s not.  It’s a beautiful expressive language with its own grammatical rules, syntax, and idioms.  Here’s a better source explaining what ASL is from the National Association of the Deaf’s website: https://www.nad.org/resources/american-sign-language/what-is-american-sign-language/