Neighbors Helping Neighbors

For the past two months, our isolated lives have unified us. Each night that we turn on our green lights, an entire community of socially distanced neighbors offer a civic prayer for those Kentuckians we have lost. It’s been hard. We’ve lost loved ones, we’ve watched our children observe and try to understand their new routines, and we’ve tried to be the best versions of ourselves in a world that we’ve never seen so confused.

We’re doing our best, and the grassroots, organic community service that so many have performed inspires me. Mutual Aid, support for our local restaurants and their employees, even silly TikToks to lighten our moods. We’re all just trying to offer a little bit of control, a little bit of hope to our loved ones.

I’m the same way. There’s a lot I can’t fix — but there are things I can control. I gave blood yesterday at the Kentucky Blood Center. It’s a small thing that I try to do often, but right now it’s even more important than ever.

(Donate if you can. Register now. Do it. Blood supplies are very low and our hospitals need help.)

Lexington is filled with caring people. From Sweet Evening Breeze entertaining patients at Good Samaritan Hospital with her ukulele, to our nurses traveling to New York City to care for strangers — Lexingtonians heed the call for help whenever it comes.

In the 1980s, Lexington was hit by the AIDS crisis just like the rest of the country, and a bungled national response led to more deaths of neglect than of AIDS. Just like now, community organizations sprung up to fill leadership vacuum left void by an indifferent national government. That’s how AVOL Kentucky and the PCSO got started. Organizations that are now over thirty years old and provide critical community services to this day started in a time of individual leadership in the face of a health crisis. I’m confident the actions taken by Lexington’s community leaders today will have similar long-lasting impacts on our community over the next dozens of year.

As we look at health equity issues, it’s important to consider ways that local leadership, including Council Members can make things better. A Council Member can’t change Federal blood donation rules that partially block gay men from giving while allowing other populations with same risk factors to give. And, they can’t repair in one fell-swoop the fact that historical and justified distrust the medical community has resulted in only 7% of the blood donor pool being African American.

But there are local efforts Council Members can take to make sure our local hospitals and institutions are responsive to the needs of our communities, and I look forward to sharing some thoughts in the coming days and weeks.

We’ll get through this, if we continue to take our small actions to care for each other — I’ll continue to try to support in meaningful ways our frontline heroes and broader community. I’ll continue to advocate for enlisting the help of all Lexingtonians who want to help.

I hope you make the same commitment.