It's Worth Noting That There Are Some Extraordinary People In The World Who Have Been Quietly Doing The

CNN

James Harrison, blood donor whose rare plasma saved millions of babies, dead at 88 | CNN

James Harrison, a prolific Australian blood donor famed for having saved the lives of more than two million babies, has died at age 88.

It's worth noting that there are some extraordinary people in the world who have been quietly doing the work for decades, and they should be celebrated with all the fervor that we denounce the villains. I first read about Harrison twenty-odd years ago, when he'd already been doing this for about fifty years, and this is one of those guys whose life can, indeed, be summed up by his headline.

James Harrison saved millions of lives. Millions. Not with anything flashy or dramatic, not with profound speeches or brilliant strategy or any of the things we insist are the ways to impact the world. He simply kept himself as healthy as possible so that every few weeks he could go and sit quietly in a room and give away a fundamental part of himself — quite literally his lifeblood — to people he'd never meet, for no pay and no expectation of acknowledgement. (He was, it should be said, acknowledged quite a lot per this article, but that's beside the point.)

When we talk about the kind of people we want to elevate and celebrate in our societies, I often think of people like James Harrison. I hope we get more of him; not just for his blood, but for his heart.

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acabwitch

1 month ago

it'd sure be a SHAME if the US populous found out all 300+ treaties with Indigenous people have been broken and that this creates a legal case to replace our current structures of power with a politic of Land Back and Indigenous Sovereignty which would actually ensure a future where everyone has water! Since we're in the mood for change (:

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shower thoughts why not human rights colonialism leftist landback

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acabwitch

2 months ago

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acabwitch

2 months ago

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acabwitch

3 months ago

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acabwitch

1 month ago

You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?

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acabwitch

4 months ago

i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.

lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.

arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.

swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.

i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.

how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger...!!

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acabwitch

3 years ago