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#the war on Ukraine
call-me-maggie13 · 1 year
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My late 40s to early 50s boss just asked what’s wrong with 18-25 year olds these days
And as a 21 year old all I could think was
The world has been on fire since we were born and we’ve been told the adults are putting it out and now we’re old enough to realize they’ve been pouring kerosene on the flames instead of water.
Before my first birthday, 9/11 happened and the world wouldn’t let us forget it. When I was 6 years old, on September 11th, my teacher sat us down in front of a tv and showed us footage of 9/11 and then told us we weren’t allowed to cry. She said that it was real and those were real people jumping from the building because jumping was a faster death than burning.
When I was 7 years old, the economy collapsed and my family went from lower middle class to poverty, we went from healthy home cooked meals every night to mac and cheese and beans for weeks in a row. We started skipping holidays because mom and dad couldn’t keep the lights on and buy us new toys. We started wearing clothes and shoes until they fell apart.
When I was 11 years old, Sandy Hook was attacked by a grown man with a gun and 26 children and teachers were brutally murdered. My teachers never looked at us the same and I haven’t felt safe in a school since. After that, once a month we would have active shooter drills and we were taught to fight and cause as much damage as possible if an armed man entered our classroom because it gave other classes a few extra seconds to escape, it gave our siblings a few extra breaths of safety. We were taught to cover ourselves in other students blood and play dead if we weren’t hit, we were taught that we weren’t safe and we wouldn’t be safe as long as we were in school.
When I was 15 years old, my high school art teacher locked us in the classroom and told us if we heard gunshots we should line the desks up lengthwise so that they reached the other wall because that would be harder to break through than a barricade. She told us that she knew about the threats and she wouldn’t judge any of us that wanted to leave. She told us to get our siblings and stay in the buildings as long as possible, to duck in between the cars so we couldn’t be seen until we got to ours. She told us about the trail behind the auto shop that was lined with trees and led off campus. I got my brother and his friends and we left, we spent the day sitting on the floor in my living room waiting for a phone call that the people we left behind were dying.
Two weeks later, one of my friends dragged me out of a football game and forced me to go home with him. He grabbed my brothers and my best friend and forced the six of us into a two seater car before he would tell us anything. His mom worked for the school board and had told him the police found an active bomb under the bleachers in the student section, and they weren’t informing anyone because they didn’t want to incite panic.
When I was 16 years old, ISIS set off a bomb at a pop concert in Britain and killed 22 people, injuring at least 100 more. The next day at school, our teachers went over how to stay safe if we ever experienced something like that. They told us the most important thing to remember was to not remove any shrapnel because it could be keeping us from bleeding out, they said it was more important to get yourself out safely before you worried about anyone else.
When I was 18 years old, my teachers stopped teaching and put the news up on the projector and we watched as the Notre-Dame burned. The boy I had sat next to since second grade spent the entire day trying to call his sister who was studying abroad in Paris, I watched this kid I had never even seen frown fall apart in English because she wouldn’t pick up the phone. We didn’t know it at the time, but she was okay.
Six months later, my history teacher put the news on the projector again for another fire. This time, we watched as an entire continent burned for three months. We watched their sky turned orange from the smoke and their wildlife drowned in pools because they were trying to escape the heat.
When I was 19 years old, the whole world shut down because of a global pandemic. I didn’t meet a single new person for eight months, despite the fact that I had just moved across the country. I watched as people didn’t wear masks and spread it to everyone around them, I was so scared when I went back to my room every night because my roommate was immunocompromised and I was terrified I would give her Covid and kill her.
Just two months later, I watched a video of a black man being murdered by police officers. I watched the world around me explode after George Floyd’s death, people destroying businesses and police stations. I watched some of my friends realize police officers didn’t exist to keep them safe, they existed to keep the people in power in power. I learned that some of the people I had grown up with would rather watch a black man die than admit that maybe, maybe, the system was broken.
When I was 20 years old, I went to the mall with a friend to buy a birthday present and I was pulled to the ground by a twelve-year-old girl after gunshots went off in the mall. I held this child’s hands as she cried for two hours until we were evacuated by police, and then I waited with her outside and helped her look for her mom. I gave her my phone to call her mom and I watched as she called the number over and over and never got a reply. I waited with her until a police officer took her to the station to try to find out more information about the girl’s mom, I hugged this girl I had never seen before and I wished her the best. I never found out what happened to her or her mom, it keeps me up at night sometimes worrying that this little girl was orphaned.
When I was 21 years old, I started working at a daycare and exactly a week later, Uvalde happened and I found myself crying because my students are the same age those kids were. When they came in after school the next day, one of them had asked me if I had heard about Uvalde and I told her I had, I asked her if she was scared of going to school because of it. Her reply broke my heart. “We practice for it every week so that when it happens to us, we know what to do. I’m just worried that the shooter is going to start in my baby sister’s classroom and not mine.” I listened as other students with younger siblings agreed with her, one of them saying “I would take fifty bullets, if I had to to keep my little brother safe.”
Early this year, I watched Russia launched bombs into Ukraine, blowing up churches and schools and hospitals and apartment buildings. I watched as the estimated death count rose from the hundreds to the thousands to the tens of thousands. I watched men send their wives and children to bordering countries for refuge while they stayed behind to fight, knowing they would probably never see each other again.
Just four months ago, I watched as my right to medical privacy got taken away. I watched my old roommate fall apart because she was denied the right to have her dead fetus removed from her body for almost two days, I worried every time I looked away from her that the next time I saw her would be in a casket. I watched as the women around me realized the military-grade weapons that had torn children in classrooms apart were protected by the government but our bodies weren’t.
There is nothing “wrong” with my generation, we’ve experienced all these things as children and were expected to respond with patriotism for a country that continuously sacrificed their children for the “right” to military-grade weapons, that took away my freedom of choice. We are tired, we were told the world was a wonderful place then shown, at every step, how the world was a place of destruction and pain. And we are angry. We are angry because no one but us seems to be trying to fix anything. And we are scared. We are scared because our children, our nieces and nephews, our cousins and our friends children are growing up in a world that won’t protect them.
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mysharona1987 · 4 months
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You just know the NYT has a “style guide” for this sort of thing.
Maybe someone there should get fed up and leak it.
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drsonnet · 2 months
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The last words of Aaron Bushnell before he set fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington - Free Palestine.
The original scene is true: capture photo from video shows #AaronBushnell sets fire while a policeman is pointing a gun at his burning body!! Cop went for gun instead of an extinguisher.
DrSonnet — #CNN #BBC #SKY #NYT,.... SPEAK UP. It's 2024, not... (tumblr.com)
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all…Free Palestine.” -Aaron Bushnell
"This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal"
-Aaron Bushnell
Shortly before his final act in this world, Bushnell posted the following message on #Facebook: "Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' "The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."
RIP Aaron Bushnell.. He decided to be a free man and not to be complicit in #GazaGenocide.. His last words were (Free #Palestine).
Photo credit: SOURCE: Krime Krime (@krime_1) / X (twitter.com)
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#RIPAaronBushnell #AaronBushnell
#Gaza #freePalestine #PalestineLivesMatter
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eelo · 10 months
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wintersmitth · 1 year
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[Screenshot from Queering the Map, the mark in Zhytomyr region I Ukraine, saying "If I knew bombs would have rained down on us the following morning, I would have never stopped kissing your fragile skin the night before".]
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kashiomi-art · 11 days
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Not gonna lie, my morale is at the lowest point it's been since the beginning of the invasion. Russians are successfully occupying more and more territories and shell frontline regions every day. People are dying, our culture and herritage is destroyed. International aid dwindled significantly because of american bullshit. Mobilization law has been signed and there is a chance that my family members get conscripted soon. Don't even get me started on internal political problems. A bunch of articles in foreign media talking about our defeat and "peace talks" (what a joke).
It feels like there were no at least moderately good news in a while. On top of that, the feeling that we are screaming into the void is stronger than ever. I'm happy when I see a foreigner online supporting us and spreading the word, because it gets rarer. Ukrainians feel like none of what's happening gets outside our info bubble. Most likely no one but Ukrainians will see this post either. Honestly don't know what to make of all of this.
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myrddin-wylt · 11 months
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I’m very tired. you probably heard that Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam to slow Ukraine’s counter offensive. here’s something I didn’t quite realize: since this February, the Russians operated the dam in juuuuust the right way so that as much water would build up as possible when the snow melted and spring showers started. and then they blew the whole thing up.
40,000 people may need to be evacuated. I don’t really have the energy to say anything else right now.
Hospitallers Medical Battalion: actual angels can confirm. they’re combat-zone medical services - you know how humanitarian groups like MFS and Red Cross have to pause operations due to the Russians fucking shooting at humanitarian zones? yeah, these guys don’t pause for bullets, they fucking walk into them and they bring out anyone they can.
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation: you can choose from a number of various fundraiser projects here, if you’re feeling particularly picky. for those of you who balk at the idea of supporting anything military just please remember that things like vehicles and drones aren’t just for military use, they’re also for evacuation and finding the wounded and they’re fucking vital.
KSE Foundation: similar to the above, KSE has multiple projects you can choose from to donate to. looking at it right now, one of the projects with the lowest amounts of money raised thus far - despite being started in April - is Seeds for Ukraine, which will help Ukraine recover from the ecological devastation Russia has been wreaking (and with Ukraine, the countries that rely on Ukraine’s grain exports that Russia keeps trying to steal).
Come Back Alive: do these guys even need the introduction? they’re Come Back Alive. I’m kissing all of them.
United24: Zelenskyy’s brain child, and the official fundraising platform of Ukraine. Mark Hamill recommends the fundraisers for drones in particular.
UAnimals: Nova Kakhovka’s zoo got... pretty much completely swept away. all zoo residents except the birds have drowned. UAnimals has tried throughout the occupation to keep the animals safe, and they’ve been reporting on the status of the zoo. I don’t really know what to say except that I hope they’re able to save the pets and strays in the towns along the river.
You can find NGOs specific to evacuation efforts in this post; please signal boost it as well. I’ve listed them but am leaving the links for the op post.
Ukrainian FireFighters Foundation
Helping To Leave
VOSTOK SOS
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folklorespring · 25 days
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Students of Mykhailo Boychuk Art Academy drawing their school that was hit by russian missile
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sidebee-hive · 6 months
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I recommend reading the entire letter, but here are a couple excerpts:
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chaoticace22 · 10 months
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this summer is definitely something...
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swamp-cats-den · 2 months
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Will never forget how long the 2-metre walk from my bed to the window in the morning of 24.02.2022 felt as I was desperately trying to persuade myself that the booming, earth-shaking sound was just an unusually vicious thunder, and simultaneously thinking 'what if I pull the curtains open and there is no rain?' I pulled the curtains open, and there was no rain. No thunder clouds. Just the faces of neighbours also woken up by the missile explosions looking out of the window. That's when I understood that the war began.
Here's a reminder that Ukraine still needs donations badly to fight off the invasion.
United 24 and Come Back Alive are both verified charities that support the Ukrainian military. They offer various options, for example, collecting money for medical equipment, humanitarian demining and rebuilding Ukraine if someone doesn't feel comfortable donating towards weapons.
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guhfis · 2 months
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today, February 24, second year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The tenth year of the war. A centurys of struggle. Thousands and thousands of killed and maimed people. Endless grief and pain. Fear and rage. If you have Ukrainian friends, support them today, this is a difficult day for all of us 🫂
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swemtpotamtam · 2 months
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Tomorrow is gonna be the second anniversary of the invasion ruzzia launched against Ukraine, and the tenth anniversary of ruzzian aggression since 2014
Please, support us, keep talking about us, we are still being attacked and killed everyday
Make sure to donate to Come Back Alive, to Serhii Prytula, to any Ukrainian creative to keep us all afloat
War and genocide isn't a trend for social media, those are not some silly things for people to talk about and then forget once it's not "popular" anymore, those are actual atrocities that shouldn't even be a thing in the 21st century
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nicostiel · 1 year
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“The Warrior of Light costume symbolizes Ukraine nation’s fight against darkness. Like Archangel Michael, who defends Ukraine with a sword, it protects us.“
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nesyanast · 3 months
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The State Department just published a 51 page report detailing over a century's worth of Russia's exploitation of antisemitism as a tactic to spread disinformation and propaganda
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artharakka · 6 months
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Nightingale (2022)
Palestine sunbird over the Dead Sea (2023)
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