Dear friends,
May you be blessed with kindness, patience and love. Eid Mubarak!
Today marks the end of Ramadan, best known to non-Muslims as a month of fasting. Among New York City’s 800,000 Muslims, it is a time of service and charitable giving, known as zakat.
Calls to 311 asking for locations where food resources could be obtained doubled in the first quarter of 2022, compared to the same period last year.
The zakat funds and food trucks are beautiful things and provide meaningful relief to people suffering from food insecurity. The growth of community fridges as a form of mutual aid has also been invaluable during difficult times and provides the additional benefit of addressing the problem of food waste.
AND these efforts do not obviate the need for public benefit programs. In this season’s budget negotiations, council members want to guarantee that New Yorkers who need food assistance are able access public benefits. The pandemic highlighted the problem that eligible people are too often not enrolled in programs intended to assist them.
Contact the mayor to urge him to increase funding to the city’s Human Resources Administration to assist people to enroll in public benefits programs. This ready-made action will take 30 seconds!
We’ve been sending comments on the state’s Climate Action Plan and fighting every fossil fuel industry project that comes down the pike. Tomorrow, our friends at NY Renews are
mobilizing a huge turnout for a rally and press conference before the public hearing in Brooklyn to push back against false energy solutions and misguided narratives that claim a transition to a reliable, cost-effective, and socially just renewable-energy economy is impossible. It’s up to us to ensure that the CLCPA is put into action in a way that ensures environmental justice, public health, and a just transition for workers and communities.
Sign up to attend tomorrow’s rally if you can!
Environmental justice is a local, state, national, and global issue. Climate catastrophe hits the most vulnerable populations because they don’t have the luxury of higher ground or the political standing to win protections from the worst abuses.
“It’s just plain Jane boring lanes, more and more lanes,” said Fabian Ramirez, a structural engineer whose property in Houston’s Northside district is set to be flattened as part of a controversial $9bn project to widen and realign the city’s highways. “There’s no train, there’s no bus, there’s no anything that supports mass transportation. It doesn’t exist. They [Texas DoT] love concrete. I mean, geez. I love building stuff, but I also have a moral compass.”
Ramirez said repeated expansions of highways in Houston have invariably destroyed homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods like his. “All of these Black and brown neighborhoods are being attacked by this expansion,” he said. “I should be able to enjoy being Mexican in Houston in 2022 without somebody trying to push me out of my neighborhood.”
The Biden Administration’s Justice40 initiative, which requires that at least 40% of federal investments in climate-change mitigation and clean energy benefit neighborhoods and communities that are “marginalized, underserved and overburdened by pollution,” is based on a faulty screening tool that does not take race into account.
Well, there’s a giant blind spot. Transportation Secretary Pete has the authority to do better where road-building and expansion are concerned.
Tell Secretary Buttigieg to adopt the five pillars of transit equity! This 30-second action is from the National Campaign for Justice.
A friend of a wiffijista has been involved in the making of a new film about reproductive rights. She wrote this about Battleground, which will be showing in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Battleground is an urgently timely window into the intersection of abortion and politics in America. It is about three women who are present-day leaders of formidable anti-abortion organizations and the student activists who follow them. The film also depicts those on the front lines of the fierce fight to maintain access to safe and legal abortions in the United States.
It is widely expected that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe this summer with its decision on Dobbs vs. Mississippi. This film hopes to answer the question: How — when 7 in 10 Americans support access to abortion — is this possible?
Get tickets to see Battleground at the Tribeca Film Fest. Tickets go on sale today.
There was so much going on last week — and at all times, it seems — that you can be forgiven if you missed the fact that the decision by the NYS Court of Appeals on the disputed district maps will delay primaries for Congressional and state Senate seats.
But every other primary – for Assembly, U.S. Senate, governor and lieutenant governor and lower level offices such as district leader – is still expected to take place on the originally scheduled June date. That means New York will briefly return to its old model of bifurcated primary elections, a practice the state only recently abolished when it consolidated congressional and state primaries in 2019.
The postponed primaries are set for August 23.
The Assembly district maps were not named in the original legal challenge, which is why those primaries are scheduled for June 28. But last night, the head of the NY Young Republican Club filed a motion to block the Assembly maps, too.
The only up-side to this chaos is that our attention will not be divided among so many important races. This is an admittedly positive spin on the August primary, as we await new maps.
In my desire to transcend artificial boundaries — in this case, the end of National Poetry Month — I offer this beautiful poem by Danusha Lameris.
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
with love,
L