Look.
I get a lot of mentions from starving people in Palestine begging for GoFundMe donations to be able to afford food or medical treatment. Like, somewhere in the realm of 43 activity notifications a day. (I don't know if people are @'ing me more often because I keep reblogging them, or if what I'm getting is just the normal volume for Tumblr users right now.) I try to reblog every campaign I see, but there are two million people in the Gaza Strip, and I'm just one guy who doesn't even have a job.
To be clear, I'm not trying to cast blame on any of the people doing the begging. Their situation is legitimately horrific, and if my day-to-day survival depended on getting donations from strangers on the internet, I'd probably be doing anything I could to get my campaign in front of as many people as possible. And the reason I get so many notifications is because there are that many people going through this. The only people I do blame for this are Benjamin Netanyahu and his regime for intentionally creating this situation, and all the other governments that (at best) refuse to do anything about it. Nor am I trying to act like my struggles dealing with all these notifs are somehow equal to the struggles of the people sending them. But I just straight up don't have the ability to help everyone who needs it, no matter how much of a piece of shit that makes me feel like.
I'm not saying don't @ me about your starving children or dying family members. Just try not to @ me multiple times about the same campaign. Please. I have enough of these to sort through.
And also, if you want to support these people, I'm sure you've been told to donate if you can and reblog if you can't. And yes, you can and should do that to whatever degree you're able, but it's just not going to be enough to fix the situation. Helping two million sick, starving, freezing people is going to take more than the efforts of a bunch of disorganized individuals on Tumblr who are probably all living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's going to take action on the level of countries. So yeah, keep donating, keep signal-boosting, and even keep @'ing me. But while you're at it. contact your local congressperson or whatever your equivalent to that is if you live outside the U.S. (assuming you even have one) and demand that they do something about this, too. At the very least, the people with the ability to actually do something about this should be getting as much grief about it as I am.
