Some thoughts from a while back that are always relevant:

There's something really wrong in Morris County, New Jersey (and beyond). I bet you can feel it too, but maybe you don't realize the scale of it. Are you having a hard time? Struggling with the cost of living, with loneliness, with not feeling free in your own life, or other general bad feelings about the way we live? You're definitely not alone.

One of the ways that we are kept from making change for the better is the way we've been raised to not share our problems with each other. We individualize it all and keep it secret, like it's shameful or a personal failure. But it's not, if everyone is impacted by the same problems. If we talk to each other, we will learn this. We can understand that the problem is much bigger than any one of us.

As a co-founder of Morris County's mutual aid group Mutual Morris, I have been able to meet thousands of people in almost every town and community here and I have heard their stories. I am able to see beyond my own personal struggles to understand that our problems are widespread and shared.

I talk to many people about the obstacles in their way. The price of rent, groceries, transportation, communication, healthcare, and other essentials for living keeps going higher and higher but income and opportunities for increased income are not. The safety nets we think we can rely on are under-resourced and full of impossible bureaucratic obstacles to qualifying. And the fact that the things we need for survival are locked up and accessible only when we have enough money is dangerous and causes everyone who can't get enough money a lot of pain, as well as the community in which they live. Because we all are interconnected and affect each other.

Read more at ko-fi.com/post/Theres-somethin…

#MutualAid
#Loneliness
#Poverty
#Homelessness
#Community
#Solidarity