The blood supply is collapsing. Show up.

Canadian Blood Services issued an urgent call this week: the national blood supply has fallen nearly 20 per cent since June 1.

Hospital demand is outpacing donations by thousands of appointments every week.

Several blood types are dangerously low. Heading into the August long weekend, when trauma and surgical demand tends to spike, the shortfall becomes an emergency.

This is a call to action. It is also an invitation.

There is almost nothing left in modern life that reminds us we belong to one another.

The economy tells us we are consumers. The algorithm tells us we are audiences. The self-help industry tells us we are projects.

Every institution that once existed to serve us has been reshaped, over decades, to sell us back to ourselves as isolated units of purchase and attention.

Beneath all of that noise, our bodies keep telling a different story.

Our lives are held up, at every moment, by the labour and blood of strangers. We eat food picked by hands we will never shake. We travel on roads laid down by people we will never meet. We recover in hospital beds because someone we do not know sat in a chair, extended an arm, and gave what they had.

There is nothing more materially honest than a bag of blood. It is a stranger's body, running through yours, keeping you alive. That is the truth of who we are to each other. It is the truth consumerism has spent a century teaching us to forget.

Indigenous thinkers, from the Red Paper to the Red Deal, have never let this truth slip.

Their frameworks of relationality insist that we are woven into the land, the water, and each other, and that our obligations flow from that weaving.

The settler project of possessive individualism, the notion that a person is a self-contained bundle of rights and preferences, was always a fiction. It was a fiction imposed to break older, deeper understandings of kinship and mutual care.

More recent writing on solidarity argues something similar: solidarity is not a feeling. It is a practice, something we do, repeatedly, until it reshapes us and the world around us.

Donating blood is that practice made small, tangible, and repeatable. It is solidarity you can schedule.

A debt that cannot be repaid, only passed on

I donate plasma. I started because someone I love dearly ended up in hospital with unexpected complications and needed multiple transfusions to survive.

Strangers kept that person alive. They gave what they had without knowing who would receive it, without applause, without an audience, without any return on their attention.

Every time I sit in the chair now, I think about that.

I think about how completely I owe that debt, and how impossible it is to repay to the people who paid it.

The only thing to do is pass it forward, to some other stranger, so some other family gets to keep the person they love. That is the whole point.

If you have never donated before, it is worth saying plainly: it is a warm experience.

At the Abbotsford plasma centre in particular, the staff and volunteers are some of the kindest people you will encounter in any public-facing setting in this region. You are treated with genuine care, concern, and warmth from the moment you walk in until the moment you leave.

You are checked on, chatted with, and looked after.

For a short time, no one is trying to sell you anything. No one is optimizing your engagement. You are simply a body, generously offered, in a room full of people doing something meaningful together.

Where to donate

The closest options for Langley and Fraser Valley residents:

• Abbotsford Plasma Donor Centre, 32700 South Fraser Way, at West Oaks Mall (exterior entrance beside Michaels and Party City). Open six days a week. Plasma only.
• Surrey Donor Centre, across from Guildford Town Centre. Whole blood donation.
• Vancouver donor centres at 4750 Oak Street and 888 Dunsmuir Street. Whole blood donation.
• Mobile clinics run periodically in Langley. Check blood.ca for the next date near you.

Book an appointment at blood.ca, through the GiveBlood app, or by calling 1-888-2-DONATE. If you already have an appointment, keep it.

If you cannot make it, cancel in advance so someone else can take the slot.

Plasma, worth noting, is chronically undersupplied in Canada, well beyond this current shortfall.

The country produces only a small fraction of the plasma its patients need, and imports most of the rest. Every plasma donor closes that gap.

The point

We are running short of blood. We are also running short of the sense that we owe anything to anyone beyond ourselves. Both shortages are dangerous. Both have the same cure.

Show up. Sit down. Give what you have. Someone you will never meet is counting on it, and they always were.