You Can Save Lives — But You Must Act NOW!

Regular, ordinary people like you and I can literally save lives today by making a couple of phone calls. Seriously. Don’t wait. A vote on Trumpcare to repeal our national health care policy is happening this afternoon in the House of Representatives. It will threaten those of us who are currently insured under an Obamacare plan, causing 24 million people to lose insurance, and it will especially disadvantage women, seniors, and lower income people.

Here’s how to help:

Call your member of Congress at 855-981-7297 and enter your zip code. If someone answers, tell them who you are and why you oppose the bill. If they are already opposing the bill, say thank you. They need to hear that you support them, especially if they are a Republican.

Next, and most importantly, contact these Republican members who are undecided:

Charlie Dent PA; Peter King NY; Mark Amodei NV; Trent Franks AZ; Steve Pearce NM; Alex Mooney WV; Darell Isa CA; Joe Barton TX.
Here’s a link to an article that explains the concerns each of them has with the bill.

You can reach them by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Press zero and hold for an operator. Ask for the member’s office by name. If someone answers, tell them your personal concerns with the bill and request that they ask their boss to oppose Trumpcare.

If their mailbox is full, google their contact info and call one of their district offices instead, preferably the one in the state capitol. Or you may find their D.C. fax number and write a note that you can re-fax to each member’s office.

Please do not think that someone else will make these calls. And do not think you can only call your own representative. Each member’s vote will personally affect YOU today. Every single American has a right and responsibility to call and voice their opinion. Many seniors and low-income people don’t have much of a voice in this. Speak up!

You will want to express your own opinions, but here’s what I’m saying:
“My name is Melanie Griffin and I’m calling to ask Cong. XXX to oppose the healthcare bill this afternoon. I am a woman in my sixties and I will be hit very hard by this bill. I will lose the insurance I have now, along with 24 million others. I am also a Christian and am very concerned about how the poor and seniors are being treated in this bill.”

 

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Writers Resisting Trump

I can’t let this weekend go by without writing. First of all, today marks one week until the unthinkable happens and an arrogant, greedy, pu**y-grabbing, power-obsessed man-child marches up Pennsylvania Avenue and then gets his DNA all over The People’s House.

Which means of course that we are also saying goodbye to Barack and Michele and Joe and Jill and oh, I can’t bear the thought.

From class to crass.

Also next week the Congress continues its three-ring circus to decide how and when to gut my health insurance (along with twenty million other people’s) and replace it with . . . what? Nobody seems to have a clue. A bunch of tweets telling me what a loser I am? A premiere Russian healthcare plan? Something Ben Carson dreams up — oh wait, he’s a housing expert now, I forgot.

The Resistance

In addition to all the fun in D.C., this Sunday is Writers Resist day. While I sometimes have trouble thinking of myself as a real writer, I have no trouble at all calling myself a member of “the Resistance.”

To resist means to withstand the action or effect of something, in this case a Putin-approved, race-baiting, Muslim-hating, fear-mongering, planet-threatening, money-worshipping . . .

I guess if I’m playing a writer today I should limit my adjectives, or so the experts tell me.

But you get the idea. You know who the guy is. Bottom of the barrel. Even his supporters know who he is. They just don’t seem to care. I can’t imagine that the Russian black-mailers have anything on the man-child that could possibly surprise any of us. Kellyanne Conway says that if we want to know the real Trump, we should look into his heart and not at his words or actions.

No thank you, Kellyanne. What a horrifying prospect!

“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Luke 6:45

#WriteOurDemocracy

Writers Resist is a national network of writers concerned about the “growing public cynicism and an alarming disdain for truthfulness” that is eroding our democracy. The group understands that writers “have tremendous power to bypass empty political discourse and focus public attention on the ideals of a free, just, and compassionate society.” 

This Sunday, writers all around the nation are gathering on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday to share their words of resistance. If you’re a writer, visit this website and join others at an event on Sunday. Or invite your friends for coffee or wine and host your own event!

Word By Word

Throughout our history, writers have used their craft to resist illegal, immoral, unethical, unthinkable situations. The British taxation of tea, women’s suffrage, slavery, child labor, civil rights, poison-peddling tobacco lobbyists, fake reasons for going to war, black lives not mattering, climate denial.

Letter from a Birmingham jail.

Word by word, we write our democracy.

And we resist.

I can imagine some small hairy Neolithic guy carving himself a sharp chisel and then finding the perfect smooth rock and gouging out, “Hell, no!” before throwing it an alpha male’s head.

Just Write No

No, we’re not registering people by their religion or ethnic background. And no, we’re not paying millions of tax dollars to build a wall around our country, pretending that Mexico is going to pay us back. And no, we’re not going to reject science and common sense and abandon the progress we’ve made slowing climate change. And no, we’re not going to “punish” women who make the heart wrenching decision to end their pregnancy.

No, no, no, and no.

Hell, no.

{Author’s note: I recognize that I am not yet in a place to expound on the ideals of freedom, justice, compassion and the like. I am still astounded and angry and terrified. But I’ll come around and share something edifying at some point. I trust that God will not let me live in anger and fear for four years.}

What’s the Deadline for Finding Peace and Happiness?

I’m struggling under too many deadlines lately, which I know won’t illicit sympathy from those of you in the work-a-day world. But as an accidental early retiree, I’m not used to deadlines anymore so they are even more stressful and intrusive than when they were organizationally imposed.

That penultimate, omnipotent organizational deadline imposer, the Internal Revenue Service, dictated a February 28th deadline for me this year, under the threat of losing my beloved, best-thing-in-the-world, don’t-mess-with-it-Supreme-Court Obamacare subsidy. I impressed myself by meeting that deadline, but as executor of two estates, there are plenty more IRS forms in my near future.

Health care ensured for the year, I’ve moved on to the next impending deadline and am ostensibly working on a sermon to be delivered next week. The topic I’ve been assigned boils down to “how to be happy and at peace.” Cinch, right? Being new to sermon preparation, I find it tortuous, and now even more so because I was recently commissioned to our church’s Pastoral Team and feel as if I’m suddenly supposed to know how to preach.

Preaching guidance did not come in my how-to-be-a-pastor packet. What came instead was about a bijillion email documents covering ten years of strategic planning, which I’m supposed to read and digest in three days.

I’m also up against a March 9th deadline to apply for a summer writing workshop. Last night I spent hours mucking around with the simple question, “Tell us something about yourself.” This does not bode well for the associated 1,000-word essay.

Last night I got a pleading call from the people who are buying my family house — the one I grew up in and where my brother fell into mental illness and died (no emotional complications there). The couple’s house has rented early and they have no place to go; can we possibly move up the settlement date by a week?

Sigh.

I now have just a few weeks to haul piles of boxes and bunches of furniture out of the house and find someplace to put it all, hire someone to clean the house, transplant Mom’s roses and azaleas, and sell a dead car for which I have no title. 

For now, I have to get back to this sermon. Hmmm – how to find peace.