oldturkey03

oldturkey3@gmail.com

on Twitter as @oldturkey03

So, who am I and why am I here? I consider myself just a regular Joe. I am old enough to know better but still believe in trying to save the world and humanity. One device at a time. I love to mentor and to help others, I am into re-purposing and trying to repair anything.

I come from a time and a place where there was never enough money to just replace things or to just go and buy new stuff. Fixing things was not a passion but a necessity. 50 years of fixing, building, and yes, breaking things as well, has taught me a lot. During my lifetime I've learned that the only thing that truly matters is how we get along with others; to never prematurely judge people. I do judge people by their actions and not by some preconceived notion. If you are being kind and compassionate toward our environment (people, planet, animal, etc.) you are okay in my book.

I have learned a lot and continue to study and learn new things daily. This enables me to provide some answers on this forum. It enables me to help someone that needs it and it helps to keep things going. All too often we discard stuff just because it is broken and we do not know how to fix it. This puts an incredible strain on our environment and it makes others rich. We all should support organizations like https://repair.org/stand-up/ to fight for our right to repair. It’ll keep our hard-earned money in our pockets instead of further feeding the Profit-before-People (Planet) machinery.

“We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. “ (Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator”) Totally awesome expression thereof shown here

As of February 24th 2022, we all realize that the world has once more gone absolutely crazy. War in Europe was the last thing we expected. Just as we counted ourselves lucky for potentially having left our Covid Pandemic behind and live returning to a more "normal". I guess we were all wrong. We now have the largest humanitarian crisis since the 2nd World War to deal with.

I hear a lot of people in my own social circles saying that it really does not affect us since it is "over there" and it always turns into very divisive political discussions. Ultimately, it affects all of us. We cannot turn away from a situation like the current one since it will have a worldwide impact for decades to come. Some of us on here are old enough to remember the cold war and how it impacted society. My own training was based on the thread from the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact states.  We must not return to geopolitical situations that we once had. The world will suffer even more than it currently is. We have so many issues that we must focus on. Global warming, world hunger (now even more exacerbated) and the destruction of valuable resources by the Profit-before-People (Planet) machinery, just to name a few.  It would be nice to say that Ifixit this situation as well, but it looks like we would have to change the "I" to "We" however, there are a few things that the "I" can do. I am obviously too old for the Ukraine’s legion of foreign soldiers. Even so the equipment that the Ukrainians need from Germany is the stuff that I was trained on. Leopard 1, Marder and Bergepanzer are right up my MOS.

Reality is that "I'm so mad I'm getting old It makes me reckless" so the only fight I have left is the one to try to make this a better world. Once more, my team and I felt that we needed to do something other than talk and getting mad.  We are health care providers and wanted to help our colleagues in the Ukraine directly. Supply chains have been severely disrupted. Stockpiles are inaccessible due to military operations, medicine supplies are running low, and hospitals are struggling to provide care to the sick and wounded. We cannot stop a War. We cannot stop the shelling of innocent civilians and we cannot stop innocent people from dying. What we can do, is try to ease human suffering by helping those that are providing emergent care to those affected by this war.

We connected with a Ukrainian organization in South Texas and inquired on how we could help. We found out that they use a Ukrainian-American owned truck company based in San Antonio. All the donated equipment would go straight to New Jersey, then the medical supplies are shipped to Poland, and later to Ukrainian civilians, doctors, volunteers, and people who are helping organize green corridors.

For this we collected almost 15K dollars in a mere two weeks. With that money we purchased medical supplies from a “Wish list” created by the health care providers in the Ukraine. Every dollar was used for that purchase. Not a single cent was used for any kind of administrative fee etc. We know there is so much more to do but hopefully we managed to help others to survive this insanity.

Frieden ist nicht alles aber ohne Frieden alles ist nichts