Red Cross Road Block

My mother is a long-time volunteer for the American Red Cross. She is a retired teacher (special ed., eighth grade, which alone I think earns her a big shiny gold medal) and registered nurse, and now that she is retired she flies all over the place for the Red Cross, helping them set up shelters and large-scale disaster relief logistics. When she's home, she teaches CPR and First Aid and disaster preparedness classes and then she shows up in the middle of the night if your house burns down.

She's pretty amazing, quite honestly.

The American Red Cross does amazing work. We all know this. They have continued to do amazing work, despite some serious organizational and financial hurdles over the last few years.

The American Red Cross has also been simply blowing me away these last few months with their social media efforts and outreach. I knew they had a Flickr page. I knew they had a YouTube Channel. During the recent spate of hurricane action (during which my superhero mom was deployed to Houston), I noticed they had a Twitter account. A damn good one, too.

But did you know just to what extent they have their social media groove on? Check it out, and tell me you're not impressed.

Today, they are asking us all to pay a little more attention than usual to the folks who desperately need our help.

I know we all care, and we all help as much as we can, and holy cats is money tight these days, what with Wall Street exploding, and we're all a little more careful with our money than maybe we were a few weeks ago.

But really. Do you have a home right now? A safe, dry place to sleep? Your pet by your side?

Me too. And holy cats am I grateful.

That's why I just donated a little lunch money to the Disaster Relief Fund of the American Red Cross.

If you feel so moved, you can too, right here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2xkA1Ok7Eo]