Update: Ed and Sally are moving out of their house this Friday due to lack of rent money so it is back to homelessness for them. The money raised wasn't wasted, it has really helped with the medical situation but wasn't enough to secure any long-term accommodation so I thought it was worth re-posting this article from Mari. Keep in mind Ed is living with a death sentence by not having the medication he needs so donations are more important than ever.....
Whitney Doomm@niac
A bit more help for crawling back to decent conditions …
Our friend and doom guru, Ed Barnard, is experiencing a bad period of his life, you know this already. He received help from many generous people but he is still in need of some help.
I, Mari, tend to consider myself a rather lucky person because so far nothing really bad happened to me or my family. When things go, let's say, decent and rather smooth, one may feel confident as if things might go on well like this forever.
But winds can change, and often they change abruptly. And instantly our self-confidence may miserably crumble like a castle made of sand. Sometimes one meditates about this frailty when radical deeds happen, for example like when people close to us, friends of family members, are victims of tremendous diseases or car accidents. But rarely one starts thinking about frailty of life when seeing homeless people camping at train stations or poor people queueing up at charity places where free warm food is daily served. In Europe we often think that homeless people are "something else" totally detached from the life of "normal" people: people who have psychic problems, outlaws, or who were "born lazy". You can even hear crazy definitions of homeless people like those who "have all in all voluntarily chosen to live like that because they like freedom" …But in recent years more and more so-called "normal people" have been enlarging the army of poor and homeless people. And many of us probably started realizing that it may not be that difficult to fall into a critical or even desperate situation. For example, sometimes you just need a rather troubled divorce and some problems in your working place (e.g., industry slowing / closing down) for plunging into an actual nightmare. So these are not so weird situations, especially in these years of deep crisis.
If you add health issues, well, things may get worse.
Fortunately in Europe, and even in a fake-modern and troubled country like mine, Italy, health is not a tragic issue. Rich or poor, you'll be cured and you'll be given even the most advanced cures, if needed, without making you pay tens or hundreds of thousands Euros for them. Public healthcare is one of the most generous inventions of mankind. Narrow-minded or greedy people may criticize or even curse the system for its costs (from taxes that everybody pay) as far as they or their children are in good health. But sooner or later they will bless it. For us in Europe it is impossible to think about a world where hospitals and medicines are not free or low-cost. We complain or are worried if we have to spend a token of, say, 10 or 15 euros for purchasing a box of hyper-specialistic drugs for chronical diseases that would cost, say, over 200 euros. What if we had to pay the whole cost, as it happens in countries like USA? Of course, also in Europe we are told private health insurances are the alternative option, but it is well-known by now that many many people there are not safe and liable to cures even if they have insurances. Plus many people cannot have or afford private health insurance, especially when they have chronic diseases. In Europe we go at the hospital and get surgical operations, from simple to very complex ones, saving us from cancer, brain hemorrhage (a friend of mine, recently), kidney failure or heart attack, and we pay nothing extra. What if they come to you while you are still in your bed with bandages and ask to pay the whole huge thing, starting from the simple residence in hospital (cost is about 1000 euro daily just for being there lying on the bed)?
And what if you are not a millionnaire but just a normal person with a normal life and a normal bank account? Well, in USA people pay taxes as we do, but many of them suffered and suffer of such cruel system and situation, and can have their "normal" lives radically changed by loosing everything, quickly, incredibly quickly.
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Ed Barnard is finding himself in the middle of such nightmare in his life. After a troubled divorce (known to a few of his friends), the heart disease stroke his body already battered by a chronic lung disease. The latter is a burden I came to know years ago, as soon as I started interacting with Ed about one of his loves of life, music. Ed had to go to the hospital for heart attack some months ago. This experience and the debts coming as a consequence, added to the costs of divorce and the weekly costs of medical drugs for his chronic lung illness, turned him and his partner, Sally, into a homeless couple, straight away and in a cruelly and shockingly short time span. Ed is lucky, though: he still has got a job, even if a part-time one. Sally is working as well, full-time. But they don’t work at Wall Street. Homeless people with jobs? Weird, eh? Actually I discovered about the existence and the high frequency of such incredible situation recently, after reading many accounts of people having gone through such stressing experience at some stage in their life. In their accounts many of these people tell they were able to overcome the disaster also thanks to the support of other people. In this period, after paying for Ed's regular medical drugs, Ed and sally are battling for making up the money for covering the costs for rental of a room instead of the tent that has been hosting Ed so far.
What would I do if I were in that scary situation?
While sitting on a sofa it is difficult, I guess, to think about what one would do if everything is lost and the prospective life ahead is being homeless. Pride will maybe prevail at least at the beginning, but then one has to try and ask for help.
I guess it was difficult for a man like Ed to beg for help at the beginning, as it is difficult now. Ed has not been left alone, though, for sure. He has been helped a lot by the generosity of the community of doomsters, fans and bands, devoted to Doommantia. But he is not yet out of the tunnel, he still needs a bit more help. If you don't like to just give money away for nothing via a normal donation, you may help Ed's cause in a way that will be rewarding for you as well. How?
Well, you can donate by downloading the monumental Doommantia Benefit Compilation hosted on Bandcamp, 39 tracks by awesome doom bands from all over the world for a minimum charge of 7 US$. I think that this base amount is ridiculous for what you get and especially what's behind it. But the sea is made of water drops and any water drop on Earth is precious for life. So your help, even if small, even if a water drop, will be precious. Hopefully your water drops will make at least a balming, fresh water spring.
I hope in my life I will be spared of the nightmare Ed is living in this period. But if something equally bad will happen to me, I hope I'll be able to find the warmth and the help he got sofar and he will hopefully still get, for crawling back to normality.
Please don't give up supporting Ed. \m/
Words:
Marilena Moroni Download The Doommantia Compilation Right Here
