~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I’m starting either a long haul or a rapid burn-out – contacting my federal representatives every day…. and if I do it three times a week I’ll feel okay about it.
Writing to or calling my two Senators and my one House member about something I want them to do is all of our jobs right now. Many of us are depressed, confused and anxious about oligarchy undermining or vanishing our constitution and thus our way of life.
What to do? It seems too complicated; it’s already been so compromised I feel we’ll never be able to get our hire-ees, from the president to the senators and members of Congress, to do their job or leave.
What’s creeping into, if they haven’t leaped in already, our government is a heap of billionaires chosen by the president elect (PE) to run things in nearly every agency. The fact of it is easily accepted by too many, figuring why fight city hall – you never win.
The majority of us who are not MAGA becomes meaner and stingier by watching our betters, also known as the top one percent. They hold more wealth than the middle and upper-middle classes together and pay no attention to our pitiful woes; they don’t know much about us and don’t care to. If they came from the lower classes, they pride themselves on pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps routine. If the rest of us are so feckless as to be unable to do so, well, too bad for us.
Our only touchstone with them is our representatives in Congress, the obvious place for us to go for help. After all, we elected them and we pay for their salaries, their stamps and lots of their travel. Their job is to help us, their bosses.
So, every day or so, I’m asking these men and women who directly affect me to shape up, to work on the ills of America and quit making things worse. The big predicament dividing us right now is uneven taxes between the rich and all those below them.
Some of my questions to my reps:
1. When will you move to stop the inflation of grocery prices by taking on the corporate food industry and their price gouging?
2. Can you appoint people to the PE’s cabinet who are vetted thoroughly, the object to get the best person possible to run an agency for the people, not for another person?
3. Why is the PE visiting foreign leaders before his presidency commences?
4. How can he command Congress to go on recess for a while so they won’t be around to question and interview cabinet candidates?
5. When are we going to get a bipartisan border solution so the PE can quit lying about the number of immigrants and their work (thieves, druggers, human traffickers)?
6. Why aren’t you, Representative, proposing legislation that furthers the freedoms of Americans rather than taking freedoms already set in place and junking them? Your job is to enhance our lives, not deplete them.
7. Will you dare to vote for another of the PE’s tax breaks for the wealthy similar to the one passed in 2017 (the only significant legislation of this PE’s first administration)?
8. When are you going to quit dissing the very government you spent money on getting into and do a full-on public information plan on returning to the populace our trust and pride in our government?
9. Will you please not censor and white-wash history regarding our centuries of enslavement of others, insulting every person of color whose forbearers were shackled?
10. When will you return the public school system to its original equality of teaching? A democracy cannot survive without a fully educated population, which includes how to be a good citizen, how to vote, how to elect worthy candidates. We have seen what happens without this in the last decade.
11. When are you going to get rid of gerrymandering and slicing up voting rights?
12. If the PE really did say he would eliminate funding for the majority of Black schools, what are you going to do about it? All of you have constituents of color.
13. Do something about free speech when it comes to lying. European countries have figured out that lying about historical facts is not a part of free speech; we must absorb that into our First Amendment, or we’ll have elections like this last one forever. When are you going to work on that?
Use these questions and ideas and add your own. Keep them flowing via email, phone calls or texts and letters. (Google will give you numbers and addresses of your Reps, and of course, your president.) Doing something rather than nothing usually eases my anxiety.
