Help out Roderick Long

I'm Roderick Long, a professor of philosophy at Auburn University and an individualist anarchist activist.

I hate asking for financial assistance here when I know so many others are struggling even more than usual these days, but my situation is fairly desperate at this point so I don’t have much choice.

My mother’s final illness (2016-2017) was expensive (she didn’t have insurance); and even before that, our financial situation was tight; the blow to our finances two decades earlier, from the two-year period between my losing tenure at Chapel Hill and my getting hired tenure-track at Auburn, when I was paying for both her housing back in Chapel Hill and my housing here as a temporary instructor, was one we never fully recovered from. And since her death, of course her Social Security isn’t coming in any more. Plus, although I have good insurance through my job, some of the co-pays for my own medical issues have still been unexpectedly high. (I don’t live extravagantly by any means; I live in a cramped apartment, surrounded by boxes I have no room to open, and my various trips are all conference travel, paid for either by my department or by the conference venue.)

So thanks mainly to my medical expenses (primarily my mother's but also my own), I had to take out high-interest loans to make ends meet; and although my (non-summer) salary is good, the majority of it now gets eaten up automatically every month with giant interest payments and tiny principal payments. Every time I start to get caught up financially, the summer comes with its reduced salary (more reduced than it used to be; and some of my other, former sources of summer funding have dried up) and I fall further behind than before.

I’m at a real nadir now, at the point where I can’t see how I’m going to keep paying basic expenses – rent, bills, groceries, etc. (plus I can’t afford to get my car fixed). So any help would be greatly appreciated!!  Money raised, after paying for basic necessities, will go toward paying off the balances of my high-interest loans until I can finally get out from under this burden.  So please help if you can, even if it's just a tiny but - it all adds up.  And if you can't help with money, please help by sharing this post.  Thank you!