By Amelia Hamilton
Welcome to Are We Doomed? The weekly column in which I take a look at recent news and try to determine if it’s all downhill from here.
Help each other
Roderick Reynolds, a Detroit father of 5, lost his home and truck to a fire. Word spread of his need and people chipped in $400,000 in one day. It’s close to half a million dollars now from more than 18,000 people.
Verdict: We’re going to be ok as long as we are willing to help each other out. Rodrick also shows us another way we’re going to be ok- by putting his family first.
Let’s talk about it
Tony Dungy is the best and, like usual, he’s right. We have to be able to have conversations if we’re going to change anything.
Verdict: We are completely doomed if we let cancel culture take over healthy conversations. I endorse the Dungy Method of making things better.
Unified
TV news anchor Harris Faulker talked to People magazine this week about being a black woman married to a white man of Jewish heritage and raising daughters together. She tells her 13 year-old that current tensions “will end when people decide that resilience and surviving this is more important than being right.”
Verdict: When we listen to and love each other, we will be ok.
But why?
Verdict: We are fully doomed when people think the way to overcome racism is attention-seeking social media posts. This is simply one of the most disgusting examples among approximately flonteen billion this week.
Practical Help
What if people offered practical help to people who are struggling rather than posting about how woke they are on social media? Bethenny Frankel of Real Housewives fame is raising money to help black-owned businesses, something that will actually help people right now, on the ground, and also works towards ongoing change.
Verdict: This is how we beat the doom. We help each other, lift each other up, and don’t make it about ourselves.
Congratulations!
2020 graduates had it rough. No ceremony, no party, none of the usual rigamarole (yes, I said rigamarole). These astronauts did a little something to recognize more than 90,000 of them.
On a smaller scale, Texas grocery store H-E-B held a “graduation” ceremony for their high school employees while family, co-workers, and shoppers cheered for them. While this isn’t an astronaut bringing your name into space, it’s just as beautiful. This is their own community supporting them.
Verdict: Double non-doom in this one. A simple act of kindness for the graduates that they will never forget is one, and being back in space is the other.
Violence doesn’t help
Protesting can help, rioting does not. Businesses are already struggling after COVID, and now riots are doing further damage. There is no rhyme or reason, businesses owned by non-white immigrants, for example, are being hurt, too.
A Catholic bookstore was looted in Chicago. The nuns are safe, but the looters ended up with a whole bunch of stuff they should probably read.
We all agree (I should hope) that racism is…bad. Shelby City Council member Nathan Martin spoke movingly on the subject in a recent meeting.
Verdict: This needs to stop. We are doomed if we try to change things by violence and destruction- and that goes for all sides involved.
Community helpers
After the bookstores above was looted, the community helped the sisters clean up and board the building against future violence.
Verdict: Seeing young people helping these nuns made me think that maybe we’re not doomed after all.
End Times?
I know there are a lot of jokes about us living through end times, but rivers are running red, ebola is back before COVID is over, a plague of close-enough-to-locusts is on the horizon, and we might be up for a supervolcano so…
Verdict: Get right with whoever you have to get right with in your belief system, because we might be doomed IDK.
What?
A Spanish porn star has been arrested for manslaughter after a man died in a toad venom ritual. That is a real sentence.
Verdict: We’re doomed in so many ways.
Safety first!
People are out there telling us to wear masks during sex, but we can protest by the thousands.
Verdict: If we don’t choose to let common sense prevail, we are completely doomed.
In the final analysis… It’s hard to say; things aren’t great right now. If we stick to the present course, we might be in trouble. Then again, in big and small ways, people are celebrating each other in their successes, and supporting them in their struggles. I think we just might be ok after all.
Want to know if your situation is doomed? Write and tell me about what’s going on and I’ll let you know what you can do to keep the doom at bay (unless it’s just totally doomed, in which case I’ll tell you that, too). You can tweet me @ameliahammy using #AskAmHam, message me through my Facebook page, or e-mail editor@velvethamster.com. Let me help!