THANK YOU ALL! This is a message from the St. Hyacinth Pantry’s director to everyone who donated:

I want to thank you and all of your generous friends for their overwhelming support. With the money already raised, we can provide emergency food for over 300 families this month, which is especially important during this very busy holiday period, our busiest time of the year. Separately, if anyone is in the Milwaukee area, and would like to visit the Pantry to see our facility or see us in action, please feel free to contact me.

Respectfully submitted – Steve Pollock, Acting Director, St. Hyacinth’s Food Pantry

300 families. That’s something, guys. Great job.

UPDATE: WE DID IT!!!! We raised $1,125 for the St. Hyacinth Food Pantry in Milwaukee! You guys are AMAZING! Do you know how much food that will buy? 11,000 POUNDS of food.

I love this blog.

Update 11/15: Wow! Now up to $850. Only another $150 to go for our goal of TEN THOUSAND POUNDS OF FOOD for hungry folks! Great job so far and thank you to everyone who’s contributed.

UPDATE 11/14: We’re up to $650 now! That’s 6,500 pounds of food. You guys are completely amazing. Remember, if you give by check, let me know in the comments so I can add it to the total. 

UPDATE: In the past seven hours we have raised a little more than $400, or 4,000 pounds of food! Go everyone! Keep it going! 

This is what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been texting and e-mailing friends I know who are vulnerable and saying things like, “Hi. Fuck all this shit forever” and “I love you.” I’ve been cooking for whoever will come over to my house, and cleaning that house so that people can come over to it and not sit next to a dust bunny taller than them because that calms down no one. My Clinton/Kaine sign is staying in my window because that seems like the best way to indicate a safehouse. I am trying not to snap at people who say stupid shit.

And I’ve been reading 457 thinkpieces every single day about what happened and why it happened and what needs to happen next, and no disrespect to any of their authors at all but I’m done now.

I’m done wondering if I was rude to the entire rural population of the United States this one time, or if rural people should go to the city more. I’m done arguing whether Democrats should have been more like Republicans or more like Greens or more like Tories or something. I’m done boring on about what I heard and what I saw and what I think about who said what to who.

Any digging into Russia, the FBI and the general clusterfuck that is the  Trump Organization’s financial ties will be done, and done by reporters or those at sites much, much larger and well-financed than this.

The Democratic Party is going to do what it’s going to do. It’s going to become more liberal or more conservative, dumber or smarter, more open or more closed, despite whatever the fuck I say, and I know that because if they’d listened to me for the last 14 years we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess.

How I feel about various protests and types of resistance is not relevant to those protesting or resisting. Nobody needs one more person auditing the outfits of people who are willing to put their bodies on the line. Stand up however you gotta stand up.

None of that matters to me. It’s mattered to me tremendously in the past. Maybe it still matters to you, and if so, good. I’m not telling you what matters to you. I’m saying I’ve got two hands, and I no longer find jawing at people who aren’t going to listen to me anyway at all a productive use to which I can put my time.

I’m not a party strategist. I’m not a professional pundit and in this scenario, the scenario in which we just elected someone on a platform of (being generous) rabid anti-immigrant sentiment, I’m not a professional anything. My job now, and I think yours, is the same as it ever was here on Earth.

It’s to save as many people as we can.

My uncle and aunt run a food pantry in Wisconsin. They live in serious Trump country and they do this. Late on election night or early into the morning after, I e-mailed my aunt and said okay, what do you need?

This is what she wrote back:

We are an emergency food pantry. Clients who live in the area are allowed to come once a month for food. We are a choice pantry which means they shop for the food they want. We are open on Tuesdays from 12:30-2:30and Wednesdays from 4 – 6. We serve about 170-200 families each week and the majority of our clients are Hispanic. We get food from Hunger Task Force and then also buy our own food from Feeding America (this is a requirement of the government/Hunger Task force that we have to match their food with our own). We are totally staffed by volunteers, most of them elderly. Money is always welcome – $10 buys 100 pounds of food.

$10 buys 100 pounds of food. 

Can we buy 10,000?

Can we feed some people, please? Some people who are going to be overlooked, disregarded, forgotten even more than they usually are? Can we do something with all this despair, this directionless rage, this fear, this horror?

During the BP oil spill we saved pelicans and during the worst days of journalism’s clusterfuckery we funded student papers and during the worst of the war we sent care packages and we gutted a house in NOLA and we collected coats for people who didn’t have any.

I think we can do this. I’m in for the first $100. $900 more to go.

You can hit up our Paypal, put “food pantry” in the comments, or just send a check directly to St. Hyacinth Food Pantry, 1414 W. Becher Milwaukee 53215.

We don’t know how far down this goes yet. It’s barely even started.

Let’s save who we can.

A.