I know many of you are feeling anxious and unsettled these days. You can’t sleep. You’re irritable, maybe a little short with your spouse or the kids.
Believe me I feel it too, that sense of dread weighing on my soul like a hippo sitting on a Chihuahua.
But people, we must stay strong. The day we’ve all been dreading is almost here, but trust me, we’re going to be OK.
We just need all of us to pull together as a nation and realize our common bond. We can survive this national nightmare and somehow, some way … endure the end of daylight saving time, which is quite possibly the dumbest idea since the Electoral College.
In the meantime, as balm for our troubled spirits, I’d like to share a little good news with you all. Actually, it’s really good news.
As faithful readers will recall, we’re doing the Give the Editor the Bird turkey drive thing again this year, where we all dig deep to help the less fortunate in our community, and not just the people who can’t figure out the whole spring forward/fall back thing.
I’m talking about the folks who have real problems, like not having enough to eat. In just the last year, the Redwood Empire Food Bank has served an average of 61,000 people a month, more than 4,000 people more a month than they did last year. One of the sadder components of that statistic is that, among those 61,000 people, there are an average of 840 new families a month.
And while people in our community have been as generous as they’ve been in previous years, charitable giving has not kept pace with inflation, even though the need has continued to rise.
Childhood hunger has long been a pet cause of mine, and last year I asked the food bank folks if I could do a little holiday turkey drive to help connect our readers with a way to help make sure more people have a way to put food on the table.
We wound up raising $50,000 in a few short weeks. This year, we’re doing it again, but we’ve increased our goal 50%, to $75,000, which at 25 bucks a turkey, comes out to 3,000 birds.
To be honest I was a little nervous about the goal. Actually, more than a little. Snitch-in-a-prison-shower nervous, if you must know.
Then on Tuesday, I got the aforementioned good news from our friends at Poppy Bank via an early morning social media post from their fearless leader, Khalid Acheckzai, who wrote that they were donating 500 turkeys!
Their $12,500 gift puts us at a little more than $30,000 raised so far.
We still have a long way to go, but I’m feeling a lot better about our goal. Speaking of which, you can help us make that goal by clicking here or going to refb.org/givethebird.
And keep in mind, that if – nay when – we reach that goal, my end of the bargain is to kick in $1,000 of my own money, which I get from panhandling in front of the old Press Democrat Building on Mendocino. And on top of that, our esteemed publisher, Eric Johnston will also pony up a grand from the money he gets providing tonsorial advice to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
As I mentioned in our kickoff column, folks who donate $100 or more will be entered into a raffle to win fabulous prizes, including a private wine tasting for you and a few friends with former Press Democrat wine writer Peg Melnik, whose name, I’m embarrassed to say, I butchered in my last column. (In my defense, that column had more than 900 words in it, and all the rest of them were spelled write.)
Anyway, I’ll save the big reveal on our second celebrity prize – beers with an awesome Bay Area sports figure – until I can make sure I know how to spell his name correctly.
So I guess that means you’ll have to endure more columns from me, at least until we reach our goal.
And if that doesn’t raise your anxiety level, nothing will.
John D’Anna is managing editor of The Press Democrat. Reach him at john.danna@pressdemocrat.com.
