The Last Day of a Basically Rotten Year

Solicitations for money are endlessly annoying and I usually just delete them, preferring to choose my own causes. This is a big one of those and a solicitation for it, so feel free to dump the whole thing now!

Okay, you didn’t, so here goes.

Chelsea is a community in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area at the far end of the Tobin Bridge you always see as the green screen background on MSNBC when somebody in Boston, usually a Harvard law professor, is being interviewed.  What you don’t see on MSNBC is Chelsea.

The town was for two thousand years prior to the arrival of the first European settler in the early 1600’s a settlement of the Algonquian-speaking Naumkeag tribe of Indigenous People. It was called Winnisimmet. Most of the Naumkeag were decimated by disease and the cruelties of slavery, and the tiny town (2.21 sq. miles, over 16,00 people per sq. mile) on a peninsula in Boston Harbor is still a reflection of social inequities.

Once the destination of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, especially Russian Jews, who by 1930 comprised nearly half the town’s population, Chelsea is now home to Spanish-speaking immigrants from Central and South America, Mexico and Cuba. Many are undocumented, live in crowded, multi-generational arrangements and find work in service industries across the bridge in Boston. They patronize two whole botanicas on the main street where unusual religious statuary and magical oils for every conceivable purpose line the walls, depend on public transportation to get around, and during the worst of the Covid crisis were its greatest victims.

They are also the most universally warm, kind and accepting community I’ve encountered anywhere.

My mentally ill son lives in Chelsea, in an immaculately-maintained group home next door to a mountain of rock salt stored there for use by Boston street crews in their annual battle against ice. He is greeted by name everywhere, all the time, by people on the street, and is a welcome fixture in Curly’s, his favorite restaurant. No matter what.

My gratitude to the people of Chelsea for their kindness has no bounds.

And so on the last day of the year for tax-deductible donations, here’s the pitch.

In Chelsea is a grass-roots community organization founded and run by women who live there, called La Colaborativa. They’re competent and savvy and save lives. I hope you’ll join me in sending them a donation. Even the smallest is appreciated and used wisely. Here’s the website, just click on “donate.”

https://la-colaborativa.org/

Thanks!