Was Cruisin My Tl & This Is So Fucking Important

was cruisin my tl & this is so fucking important

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

Okay Tumblr, it’s time to help.

See this building?

Beautiful, isn’t it?

About two thousand families attend temple in this building, including mine. My nieces go to school here. It’s a gorgeous building containing two sanctuaries, a smaller chapel, a preschool-to-grade-5 school with one of the best curricula in the country, and a museum of old Jewish religious artifacts. In fact it’s the largest Conservative Jewish temple in the United States.

It’s in Houston.

(Yes, this is going exactly where you think it’s going.)

It’s currently not inhabitable. I haven’t been able to find a photo of the inside of the building, but, uh.

That’s the cemetery right after the rain stopped, and four days after. Jewish headstones don’t go up until a year after burial, so all of the graves you’re looking at are more than a year old. None of that is raw earth. It’s all water.

If you don’t know this: the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, is on 30 September. One of the holiest, Rosh Hashanah, is on the 21st. So to translate: Christians, assume your church was royally flooded out two weeks before Easter. Muslims, imagine your mosque is destroyed by a massive natural disaster right before Ramadan. You can quickly see why this is a HUGE double blow–and to make it a threepeat offender, the two parts of Houston that flooded the worst were majority-Jewish communities. Now not only is your home destroyed, but your home away from home is, too–and you need money to fix both.

A lot of synagogues in Phoenix, where I am living, have adopted “sister” synagogues in Houston to assist with rebuilding via fundraising efforts. I’ve been following the Phoenix Jewish News closely, but as of right now, Beth Yeshurun seems to be on its own.

So I’m turning to you.

Here is an official update from the temple, as of 30 August 2017, on damage sustained and estimated time of closure.

Here is their Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, with more information on what needs replaced.

This is a screenshot from my check-in conversation with my sister earlier this week. Please note this number is ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE DAY SCHOOL, not the temple itself:

So, yep.

PLEASE REBLOG. IF YOU CAN, PLEASE DONATE. Beth Yeshurun is a scholastic and spiritual home to over five thousand people, and they need our help.

@jewish-privilege, @shiraglassman, @returnofthejudai, @copperbadge, could I trouble the four of you to help get this moving?

Hugh Hefner was a giant in publishing, journalism, free speech and civil rights. He was a true original and very progressive, and decades ahead of the rest of the U.S. He always hired African Americans at a competitive and fair wage. Hef insisted on interracial casting of his TV show, even when Southern stations threatened to boycott. Hef was the first.

Hefner long before he became sort of a doddering caricature was a STRONG voice for Civil rights and free speech issues. RIP Hugh.

An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home.

I think we should make Puritan naming customs cool again, but like, updated to reflect Millenial values. So we can have names like Resistance Jones, Self-Care Williams, and I-Am-Not-Throwing-Away-My-Shot Anderson.