GOOD MORNING chiclets. As you may have heard, today Congressional Republicans will try to ram through their irresponsible slapdash garbage âhealthcareâ bill, which will make it even more difficult for poor people to afford getting sick, but on the bright side*, will BIGLY cut taxes for people making over $200k!!! (*Iâm being sarcastic. This is not a bright side.)
So guess what! This is a good morning to take two minutes to call your representative to register your opposition to this toxic nonsense bill and affirm your support for your friends, neighbors and countrypeople on Obamacare. The Indivisible Guide has some great scripts with sample dialogue depending on your repâs stated position. You could also just take the paragraph approach:
Hi, my name is [your name] and Iâm a constituent from [your town]. Iâm calling to register my opposition to repealing the ACA and replacing it with this slapdash Republican health care bill, which will strip millions of people of lifesaving coverage. The ACA is important to me personally because [I am on Obamacare, I have family/friends/neighbors/students/patients/coworkers on Obamacare; a short personal anecdote is always effective].Â
If Congress[wo]man [Repâs name] votes in favor of this bill, it will be a disaster for American healthcare and her/his constituents will remember that in the next election. Could you pass that on to the Congress[wo]man? [wait for them to say yes.] Thanks for your time.Â
Hereâs me and my roommate calling our congressman.
see? its so easy even this idiot can do it. great job everybody. way to save america.
1. YOU DID IT, 2. Is there any sweeter phrase in the English language than âhumiliating defeat for President Trump?â I canât think of one.Â
sometimes you fight, not because you think you can win, but because you need to be able to look back later and say, âi fought.â
âIn King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor
character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely
âFirst Servant.â All the characters around him â Regan, Cornwall, and
Edmund â have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story
is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such
delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he
understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of
old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it.
His sword is out and pointed at his masterâs breast in a
moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part:
eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is
the part it would be best to have acted.â
â C.S. Lewis, âThe Worldâs Last Nightâ
So Stanford professor Ken Taylor has a whole lecture on this in Hamlet, and the role of defiant resignation (citing Kierkegaardâs concept of resignation) where you are urged to act despite understanding that it wonât change anything, simply to demonstrate your dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, and your belief in what it should be. But Steve demonstrates a lot of this.
As thousands blockade airports and fill up city streets, a new generation of amateur Kremlinologists is coming forward with its hastily assembled theories, assembled from bureaucratic signifiers, to say that by trying to stop the harm heâs actually doing, all weâve done is play into his tiny, tiny hands. [âŚ] What looks like the beginnings of a breakdown in effective government, or an opportunity, is nothing of the sort. They planned everything, and everything fell into place.
The left is no stranger to this kind of defeatism, and itâs not hard to see why. Capitalism is omnivorous and polymorphously perverse; todayâs revolutionary slogans are found on tomorrowâs Coke cans. [âŚ] If you look backward from the state of the world today at all the heroic resistance movements that have failed throughout history, itâs easy to think that this was all part of the plan.
Much of this is true, but its effects can be paralyzing. Weâve fucked up so much that itâs made us afraid of victory; faced with an enormous and implacable enemy, there are people who are now convinced that its power is infinite. Whenever it looks like the reactionaries have massively over-reached themselves itâs just part of a larger plan, one that we canât see. If Steve Bannonâs pants fell down tomorrow and he tottered crying into a muddy pond, there would be someone ready to announce that actually, this made him even more omnipotent than he was before.
[âŚ] Itâs almost comforting, in a way, to imagine yourself as a pawn. Thereâs no moral duty involved: The evil plan is grand and inscrutable; it gives a sense of order in what looks like disintegration, and tells you what your place is in it. But there is a moral duty, and we need to face up to it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the people in charge are just as blinkered as we are.
posting to emphasize the point that although whatâs happening is really, really bad, it is harmful to let ourselves believe that the administration is all-knowing and all-powerful, ingenious masters of strategy. they are not. they have weaknesses and they can be fought. do not give up.
â[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, [and] the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their âtoughnessâ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
That the ideal of âtoughnessââŚwas nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they âhad always been against itââor claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been âabusedâ by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused âthose in powerâ of having abused his âobedience.â) âŚThe atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.â
Hannah Arendt, âEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.â
I want everyone to go read that link about Danish resistance, please, because itâs a very good example of what to emphasize:
326 Miles 