Look how they’ve exceeded their goal:
I am Samierra Jones, a Senior at Coppin State University and a graduate of Baltimore City Public School system. Baltimore City Public Schools are currently operating with an inadequate heating system. Students are still required to attend classes that are freezing and expected wear their coats to assist in keeping them warm. How can you teach a child in these conditions? This fund raiser will help in purchasing space heaters and outerwear to assist in keeping these students warm. To raise $20,000 would be enough to cover the fees of Go fund Me and purchase roughly 600 space heaters, outerwear, and it will cover the processing fee for Go Fund Me.
A lot of the comments on this are rightly castigating American society for creating a situation in which strangers have to pitch in to heat a classroom for students to learn. That is disgusting. It’s ridiculous that we can fund a plane that doesn’t take off or land, and a war that won’t ever be won, and a tax cut for a billionaire, instead of funding heat in our schools. It’s absurd.
And maybe the most absurd thing about it is the way in which it points out the lengths to which decent people of good will will go in this society to continue upholding the social contract no matter how often their leaders tell them they don’t have to.
Look at what happened here. Strangers pitched in. Strangers exceeded the $20,000 ask by more than $50K. Strangers covered the costs for people they have never met and will never meet. Strangers kicked in small amounts and it added up to enough to solve a problem no one person could have solved on his or her own.
That’s government. That’s all it is. Pooling a small amount of our resources to provide resources for everyone.
And in the absence of government, in the face of the deliberate abdication of government, after 40 years of tax cuts and posturing about graft and fairytaling about our supposed desire to not have any government ever because welfare queens or something, people all over the place are trying to say through the Internet that fuck your selfishness, we will do this anyway.
This isn’t me justifying private charity being a substitute for government action. It’s me saying that our natural impulse is to take care of each other. Given the chance, given enough high-traffic retweets and attention, we respond to these things. We push and change and fight for each other. It’s what we’re made for. It’s how we live and that instinct is knit into our muscles and bones.
It’s why it took them so fucking long.
It took Republicans YEARS, years on every level from municipalities to the White House, to destroy the human voice that wakes us, that says our fate is your fate. It took them DECADES of daily propaganda, of beating their drums as if the sun never set, saying no, no, no, no. Saying we can’t afford to be brave and generous and decent and true. Saying we can’t afford to help one another, to open our hands and offer our shoulders. Saying we shouldn’t do this anymore. It took them AGES to get us to where we are, to make us this small and this mean.
And still, people say, I can help. Let me help. Still.
We pass the word. We give what we can. Some give more. Some give less. But we give, and instead of just being infuriated by the idea that you should have to beg for your very life, we should be looking at examples like this and saying they signify the will to care for one another still remains.
No matter what they tell us. No matter how loud they shout. No matter how many lies they thread into the tax code and how many cautionary tales they spin about fraud and waste and inefficiency and paralyzing fear.
We are big enough for things like this. And we will keep doing them, whether you want us to or not. Candidates for office should take note, and call this what it is, this extension of what we have to care for all of us. They should call it government, and run on it as much as they run for it.
A.
