I have a hard time seeing a 7-months pregnant woman being part of a gang of thieves and running from a store with her arms full of bottles of alcohol.
And if she was part of the gang, you record her license plate and get the security camera pictures and call her in. What the hell are cops being taught?
Going small-focus here: I like following fashion. I don’t buy a lot, but I get a kick out of looking at it. However, “Fast Fashion” is a human rights and environmental disaster. What do we really need? Three sets of every-day clothes (one to wash, one to wear, and a spare) and two sets of fancy clothes. For the sake of argument, I’m ignoring “protect you from the elements” clothing.
When I look at my closet, there are a lot more than 5 sets of clothes. I have more than 10 sets of clothes. I think it may be more than 20, to be honest. But how many do I actually wear regularly? 5-10 would be my guess. I buy durable and repairable stuff, fair-trade or locally made as much as possible. The vast majority of my clothes are over 5 years old. But I certainly don’t need them all.
From this narrowly focused aspect of clothing, what can we do? Repair. Repair your clothes. Don’t throw away a ripped shirt, don’t replace it with a flimsy new shirt made by underpaid workers. Sew it. Patch it. Check your library for books about mending, go to YouTube and seek out basic repair videos. A packet of needles, a thimble, a spool of black thread, and a spool of white thread will take care of the majority of repairs. What you can’t do yourself can be handled by your neighborhood laundry or dry cleaner.
Practice radical repairing. Mend your way to a better world.
Tie that with the studies showing people are less stressed and more sociable when they have trees nearby, and the one about people in hospitals having better outcomes if their room has a view of a tree… well, it sure seems like we should be mixing more trees into our environments.
If you run into a financial ditch and don’t have emergency funds, contact the electric, water, medical, phone, credit card, etc. billing departments right away. Don’t wait until after you’ve already missed a payment or two! Jump right to it and set up payment plans. I helped a friend through a financial crash and was impressed how much leeway billing departments will give you if you reach out before you miss a payment.
The important thing is NOT to read the numbers and odds when/if it happens to you. Treatments are progressing rapidly, and odds are based on people receiving treatment 5+ years previously.
Healthcare. So many of my friends working in healthcare are so profoundly burned out. Skipping meals and breaks because they have too many patients or that’s the only time they can do charting, coming in early and staying late to prep or chart or care for patients (because there are more patients than time to care for them).
When your staff is routinely getting urinary stones or urinary infections because they don’t have time to get a drink of water or go pee, something ain’t right.
Golf courses use huge amounts of water. Streams get diverted to water them. The countryside dries up without its water, and then catches fire. It’s not good.
I always feel my heart sink when someone maligns “welfare queens.” There is only one person among my friends who was ever on public assistance; and it was me. During months of chemo and surgeries I couldn’t work, and I was sucking off the government teat.
I have a friend with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. She’s a woman, has always been a woman, is married to a man, and has two adopted kids (AIS means she’s sterile). She has XY chromosomes.
Is someone going to walk up to her and say, “Sorry, ma’am, you’re male now”?
Her gender assigned at birth was female. She was raised as a girl, always identified as a girl, and had no idea anything was different until she started having health problems at puberty.
I’ve been wanting to do this ever since someone gave me one that said “You make a difference.” I treasured that card for years.
I don’t even remember what I did to help her at this point, it was something that seemed minor at the time, but she thanked me and gave me the card.
Do it! It can have quite an impact!