Those Poor Children

Just wrote to my representatives about the children on the border, the ones the US government says it doesn't have to provide food and water and soap for (all while Trump charges the Secret Service, whose job it is to protect him and his family, rent at his properties). Disgusting.

Anyway, here's what I wrote:

I am writing to you today as one decent human being, one decent American, to another.

The migrant children, some as young as 5 months, having not only been ripped away from their families, but now being held without access to proper food, water, medical care, need to be taken care of.

Period.

Full-stop.

Do not use them as a bargaining chip to get funding for any other thing, including immigration enforcement.

Do not use them to complain, as I have keep hearing politicians do, that it’s “the other side’s” fault or that the children’s parents broke the law. I don’t care if their father is Jeffrey Dahmer and their mother is Ted Bundy. Which, incidentally, these people are not. They are refugees. Maybe ones that fit our asylum requirements, maybe not. Maybe they are “only” economic refugees. Maybe they are fleeing climate change or violence. But they are people and they, particularly their children, now artificially orphaned by the Trump Administration’s cruel policies, are in distress.

We are Americans. We take care of children. We take care of people in distress. It is the decent thing to do and Americans are decent people. Those there, on the ground, including government workers, are trying, even coming in on their off hours to help. Other Americans are coming with donations of diapers and soap and toothbrushes and paste – only to be turned away.

Other countries take care of such influxes with refugee camps and invite in organizations like the Red Cross. Why aren’t we doing something like that?

We used to be a country that could handle things like this, would even help other countries.

Please do whatever you can to take care of these children. And do it without delay.

Thank you.

That’s Not How Any of This Works

At least, it’s not supposed to. 

How can Russian intelligence use social media to interfere with American elections?

Because, apparently, a significant percentage of people lose sight of reality when they get online. They get ugly, nasty and scary.

It’s like there’s lead in our water supply.

Like the guy who threatened to use his Second Amendment right on me because I said I thought gun owners should have to carry liability insurance.

Hey, in case you are wondering why many of us are frightened of gun owners, there’s your Exhibit A.

Or the little old lady mentioned in this Washington Post article. At first, I felt bad for her. A smarty-pants blogger is making his living fooling simpletons on Facebook. The blogger, Christopher Blair, a liberal, makes up the most ridiculous “news items” he can and sees if he can fool (and humiliate) right-wing conservatives.

And he can: millions of them.

Like Shirley Chapian, a lonely 76-year-old living in a trailer in Pahrump, Nevada.

But look at what Shirley, looking like someone’s grandma, likes on Facebook:

“A Muslim woman with her burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked antifa protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants: like.”

What the hell?

According to this superb and frightening 2017 Rolling Stone article, rather ordinary people are used by everyone from Russian intelligence to Trump campaign officials to Alex Jones to teenagers in Macedonia looking to make a buck, to spread bizarre and hate-filled conspiracy theories.

And this has already had, predictably, real and awful consequences.  After all, the New Zealand massacre, which killed 50 people, was planned by its perpetrator specifically to go viral.

What is wrong with us?

Getting Political Again

So, I continue to contact my representatives. Most recently, about healthcare. One of my senators is Ted Cruz, who would like to slash Medicaid and allow insurance companies to sell products that don't actually cover anything.

What I found to say:

Dear Senator,

According to the most recent survey, 61% of Americans oppose the most recent Republican proposed healthcare plan, 65% oppose your proposed cuts to Medicaid, even after they’ve heard your arguments for them, 71% do not want a total repeal of the ACA, or Obamacare, but would rather you work with Democrats to make improvements to the nation’s healthcare. I am joining all these other citizens, as well as consumer groups, patient advocates, doctors, hospitals, addiction-treatment centers, insurance companies, religious leaders, governors, both Republican and Democratic, and your fellow colleagues in the Senate, to urge you not to vote for your healthcare plan to become law.

It is a hot mess.

It is not OK to throw more than 20 million Americans off their insurance plans, some of whom are in the midst of battling deadly medical problems.

It is not OK to slash Medicaid so deeply. Medicaid goes to poor children, poor pregnant women, the disabled, including about 160,000 profoundly disabled children here in Texas, and most of the elderly residing in nursing homes across the country. (42% of Medicaid’s costs come from the elderly living in nursing homes.) Those are the people you are going to take from? No.

It is not OK to allow insurance companies to offer products that don’t actually offer coverage, that don’t cover things like emergency room visits and prescriptions. Such a product isn’t insurance; it’s a scam. Shame on you for attempting to allow it.

This is not a game, Senator. This is millions of people’s health. Quit rushing. Quit trying to simply win political points by insisting on repealing everything we have now just because it has President Obama’s name on it. Look at what we have and fix it. Do it for the good of your fellow Americans, your constituents, and not just yourself.

By the way, I will know that you have come up with such a plan when I see that you don’t exempt yourself and your family from it.

Thank you.

Getting Political

So, I haven't been here for a while.

Part of what I've been doing is calling, emailing and commenting on the Facebook pages of my senators and congressman as regularly as I can.

Though I've always voted, I've become, for the first time in my life, politically active. (Thanks, Trump.)

The issue that most concerns me: climate change and how we are ignoring it.

According to The Indivisible Guide, which I highly recommend reading, contacting your representatives is one of the most effective things an ordinary person can do to get their voices heard. The 65 is also good.

Oh, and you'll get busy signals a lot with the phone calls. I've learned that you should call the representative's Washington, DC office but if you can't get through (or, maybe even if you can), call one of their in-state offices as well. And if your congressmen are like mine, Congressman Poe, to email them, you will need those last extra four digits of your zip code before their website will even let it through.

Making these contacts is not hard -- all the contact info is easily available and, on the very rare occasions when you will be able to get through to a live person at one of their phone numbers, their staffers are always unfailingly polite. Their job is to take down your thoughts and pass them on. It literally just takes minutes.

I honestly don't know if commenting on their official Facebook pages is helpful. But one of the things I like about that is, rather than sending your thoughts into the void, where, at best, a beleaguered intern will check off that yet another person is concerned about the climate (though those calls and emails are important too), on Facebook, other people can see the comments. My representatives routinely have thousands of comments on their posts, most telling them to start doing what's right for our country.

I do recommend ratcheting up the privacy settings of your Facebook account; I've been reading the replies to people's comments from pro-Trump people and they can be pretty unhinged and scary. Interestingly, the far-right Cruz has far more venomous supporters than the more moderate Cornyn.

And there is nuttiness. I had an Facebook exchange on another site, actually civil, with a woman who likes Trump because she thinks he is a sign of the end times. "Fasten your seatbelts," she said.

Back in the real world, I like that on my representatives' Facebook pages (Senators Cruz and Cornyn, Congressman Poe), when the representative's staff put up an innocuous post about, say, Texas history, the comments appear immediately and will be, over and over again,  "That's nice, Senator, but when are you going to have a town-hall meeting?"

I don't think what you write, how detailed of an argument you make, how good your writing is matters. What really matters is to make that contact -- repeatedly -- and make your opinions known.

Here is one of the longer emails I have sent to my representatives, just to give you a sense of what someone else is doing:

I am one of your constituents and I am writing to register my horror – there really is no other word for it – and absolute disagreement with your positions regarding climate change.

I’ve read Republican statements about climate change, from Trump’s claim that it’s a “Chinese hoax” to Republican legislators saying they are “open to debate” on climate change, but you all are ignoring the overwhelming facts of the matter.

For instance, Republicans claim they don’t want to control greenhouse gas emissions because you think it would place the US at a “global economic disadvantage.” However, 350 American major companies pleaded with Trump to not abandon the goals of the Paris agreement because it would harm American prosperity.

As one expert said, “President Trump seems intent on reviving a 19^th century energy source rather than pursuing the promise of the 21^st century.”

And experts, including the heads of coal companies, say that he won’t be able to bring coal-mining jobs back – not because of government regulation but because of market forces (natural gas is already and  renewable energy is quickly becoming more cost-efficient) and because of the increasing use of mechanization in coal mines.

Furthermore, recent headlines proclaimed “US Cedes Lead on Climate to China.” The Chinese know not only that protecting against climate change is the moral thing to do, but that it is also the economically smart thing to do.

43 bipartisan senior military leaders and national security, homeland security and intelligence experts pleaded with Trump to take climate change seriously because it is “a significant and direct risk,” not only to our military forces, but to our nation as a whole.

The science is, of course, overwhelming. Why else would the Trump Administration be so intent on destroying government research data that scientists had to scramble to save what they could? As one Arctic researcher wrote, “Each defunct page is an effort by the Trump administration to deliberately undermine our ability to make good policy decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence.”

And poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans believe climate change is real and want our government to do more, not less, to protect us from it.

Meanwhile, despite all this, you side with climate-change deniers, many of whom have blatantly obvious financial interests for their denial, such as the Koch brothers, whose companies are some of the largest producers of pollution, including greenhouse gases, in our country. And you have slimy financial interests too, when you accept their campaign donations.

How you look your children in the eye is beyond me.

Please reconsider your stance and protect our country from climate change. You are on the wrong side of history on this one.

Thank you.