Contact the White House to show your support for health care reform and the public option

Here is the letter I sent through the White House's online comment form, earlier today. It's a bit sappy, (well very), and it's certainly no masterpiece of rhetorical writing. But I think volume is what matters most. Send a quick note to show your support! Feel free to borrow/adapt bits of this when writing your own letter of support.

Contact the White House to show your support for health care reform
and the public option: http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

Folks on Twitter are also pushing a call-in for Monday 8/17, 9 AM.
White House comments line: 202-456-1111

Please read President Obama's 8/15 op-ed piece in the New York Times:
"Why We Need Health Care Reform"

And if you don't understand why this is so urgent, please read this 8/16 AP article at NPR: "White House Appears Ready to Drop 'Public Option'"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear President Obama----

Hi, my name is Wahida. I'm 26, and I'm about to start grad school---an MFA in Creative Writing. I'm proud to call you my President.

I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing, trying to revamp our broken health care system in order to ensure that all Americans have access to health care. I'm writing to ask you: Please, please don't give up now!

I know there are many out there who are doing all they can to stop the public option from happening. But I think that there are more of us who believe that quality health care is a fundamental right. Maybe we haven't been yelling as loudly as the other side---maybe it's time for that to change. We can be vocal too, and that's why I'm writing to you for the first time since the election.

I voted for you because I believe in you and I believe in what you stand for. I know you want this to happen, and I know it must be frustrating to deal with the often spiteful tactics employed by those who oppose health care reform.

But during the election, you asked us not to give up, and we didn't. I made phone bank calls for your campaign, and volunteered for voter registration. I made room in my student budget to donate money to your campaign. I attended rallies and shared information. I spoke out against the lies that were being spread. Most of all, I believed in you and your campaign. I believed that you would bring change to our nation.

I know you're just a man, and I don't expect you to be able to magically fix everything that's wrong with this country. I'm impressed with how much you've done already, and I'm so grateful for the work you do. You've made some decisions I didn't agree with, but I also know you're not in a position where you can just do everything your own way.

Even when I don't agree with one of your decisions, I respect you, and I believe that you have the best interests of the United States and all her people at heart. I can't tell you how much it means to me to be able to feel that way.

But I do think you can make great strides towards fixing our broken health care system. I know you don't want to give up the public option. We don't want you to give it up, either. If you let this go, those who are afraid of change in this nation will think that yelling is all it takes to get their way.

My grandfather is a decorated veteran of World War II. About two years ago, he had a stroke, and suffered a form of linguistic aphasia. Even with veteran's benefits, the care and rehabilitation he needed wasn't completely covered. After spending their whole lives working hard and living simply in order to provide for their children and help provide for their grandchildren, my grandparents---patriotic Democrats, children of immigrants who came to this country with nothing---have gone bankrupt.

The public option is what's right, and it's what's right for this nation. I read your New York Times editorial. You said it best:

"In the end, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives and livelihoods. This is about people’s businesses. This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life. I believe we can, and I believe we will."

I believe too. Please don't give up, President Obama.

Sincerely, with all my best wishes and support---

Wahida O.

Racism is Alive & Kicking (And Apparently Shameless) in Philadelphia

I should be packing but I can't even think. WHAT. THE. F$!#.

Hearing about these kids getting kicked out of that pool makes me want to punch something. Philly needs to f-ing shut Valley Swim Club down.

I feel like my brain is broken. I want to punch something. This needs major coverage NOW.

#racistpool, #valleyswimclub

RT @harrislacewell: You can email outrage about #racistpool to info@thevalleyclub.com

RT @elonjames : #TWiB! "Philly's Vally Swim Club Doesn't Care about Black People" - http://is.gd/1rsF4

RT @cinnamn RT @AllAboutRace: 60 black child daycampers kicked out of Philly pool b/c "they might change complexion of club" http://bit.ly/13IKFx

RT @AllAboutRace: Campers have new pool & Arlen Specter investigates discrimination claim. http://bit.ly/r8mIK #racistpool #racematters

RT @elonjames RT @karsh: You see this? http://bit.ly/r8mIK I'm glad the kids have a place to swim now, but Valley Swim Club is well exposed.

Here's the email I just sent to John Duesler at the Valley Swim Club. I wish I could have been more eloquent, but I'm still rattled. I think I made my point, at least. Please send one yourself.

to: info@thevalleyclub.com
subject: Racism is UNACCEPTABLE

To John Duesler at the Valley Swim Club---
I am shocked and appalled by your despicably racist (and utterly heartless) decision to throw those kids out of the pool and force the daycamp to take a refund. It's completely inexcusable. I hope you realize that your actions and the statement you gave were shamelessly racist. I hope to see national media coverage of this disgusting incident in the near future, and I hope to hear that you've lost your job because of it. I hope Valley Swim Club gets sued for discrimination.

Racism is UNACCEPTABLE. I'm just totally outraged. I hope you learn something from all of this.

From NBC Philadelphia:

Dymire Baylor says he overheard a woman ask, "What are all these black kids doing?" when he and his friends showed up.

Pool Boots Kids Who Might "Change the Complexion"

Campers sent packing after first visit to swim club

By KAREN ARAIZA

Updated 3:01 PM EDT, Wed, Jul 8, 2009

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

"I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor.

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

The next day the club told the camp director that the camp's membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.

"I said, 'The parents don't want the refund. They want a place for their children to swim,'" camp director Aetha Wright said.

Campers remain unsure why they're no longer welcome.

"They just kicked us out. And we were about to go. Had our swim things and everything," said camper Simer Burwell.

The explanation they got was either dishearteningly honest or poorly worded.

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

While the parents await an apology, the camp is scrambling to find a new place for the kids to beat the summer heat.

UPDATE: But the kids will get to swim, thank goodness:

Campers "Complexion" No Problem for New Pool

U.S. Senator looking into accusations of racism

By VINCE LATTANZIO

Updated 10:06 PM EDT, Wed, Jul 8, 2009. NBC Philadelphia

For kids in the summertime, there's nothing better than jumping full-speed into a pool to cool off. [...]

They just wanna swim.

So the staff at Girard College, a private Philadelphia boarding school for children who live in low-income and single parent homes, stepped in and offered their pool.

"We had to help," said Girard College director of Admissions Tamara Leclair. "Every child deserves an incredible summer camp experience."

The school already serves 500 campers of its own, but felt they could squeeze in 65 more – especially since the pool is vacant on the day the Creative Steps had originally planned to swim.

"I'm so excited," camp director Alethea Wright exclaimed. There are still a few logistical nuisances like insurance the organizations have to work out, but it seems the campers will not stay dry for long.

The banning has caused so much controversy that U.S. Senator Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) plans to launch an investigation into the discrimination claim.

"The allegations against the swim club as they are reported are extremely disturbing," Specter said in a statement. "I am reaching out to the parties involved to ascertain the facts. Racial discrimination has no place in America today."

The Cairo Speech: A New Beginning

Check out the transcript at the White House blog.



Here's my silly Twitter commentary. (Actually starts at the bottom):

• RT @hrw: Obama Mid-East Speech Supports Rights, Democracy http://tinyurl.com/qvxqaf
  
• 
  
• ashamed to say i'm going to pause for sytycdance. but did you notice that he actually SAID THE WORD COLONIALISM?! at the beginning. wowow!
  
• 
  
• Obama "...align our policies with those who pursue peace, & we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis & Palestinians & Arabs"
• 
  
• ♥ hearing that Cairo audience applaud him. (um, but i think he just said "hajib." it's hijab, yo.)
• 
  
• & he quotes the Qur'an! i'm a secular type, but i grew up Muslim. such a big day: the POTUS quoting the Qur'an! this will make a difference.
• 
  
• ♥ that he said as-salaamu alaykum السّلام عليكم (greeting: peace be upon you)! but someone shoulda coached him on his ع'ayn sound, ha : )
• 
  
• FINALLY watching video of Obama's Cairo speech...
• 
  
• just read the cairospeech transcript on the bus. tears in my eyes. cant wait to watch it after work.
• 
  
• RT @whitehouse: The President’s Speech in Cairo: A New Beginning: Watch or read the President’s speech---http://tinyurl.com/r5xfvu
• 
  
• ahhhh YES! ♥ Obama opened his speech by saying شكراً shukran (thank you in Arabic) to the audience! i'm so proud : )

Not Too Hot to Feel Disgusted

I really really wish this NY Times article was from The Onion...I mean, look at that headline. I know it's not surprising, but it should be.

My brain is exploding, and not in a good way.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: April 21, 2009

[...] In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia. [...]

Leaked to the news media months after they were first used, the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods would darken the country’s reputation, blur the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them, bring broad condemnation from Western allies and become a ready-made defense for governments accused of torture. The blowback has only intensified since Justice Department legal memos released last week showed that two prisoners were waterboarded 266 times and that C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge. [...]

Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene. [*]

* Hmmm, these methods sure do sound familiar. Even if you have a bacterium-sized heart, and can't see why torture is wrong---does it really take a genius to figure out that people will say anything if they think it will get them out of hell?

Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is incredibly disturbing---it had me sobbing in that angry/devastated way---but I think it should be required viewing in all U.S. high schools.



PS---I was really moved by the interview at the end of the film, with Alex Gibney's father, Frank Gibney. Here's an excerpt from a Six Questions interview at Harper's:

3. Some of the most compelling footage of the film comes in the closing credits in which you include scenes from an interview you conducted with your father, who was a Navy interrogator, and who was obviously distressed about the changes in military tradition that the Bush Administration introduced. Can you tell us about your discussions with your father and how they influenced the film?

My father—Frank Gibney — was a big influence on my life. A longtime journalist and old “Asia hand,” he had learned Japanese during the war so that he could interrogate Japanese prisoners — something he did on Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific campaign in World War II.

At the time, there had been many reports of Japanese torturing Americans. Further, there was a pervasive view that the Japanese were a new kind of enemy, one that was so fanatical that some of its soldiers (kamikaze) would use airplanes to fly suicide missions. (Sound familiar?) But my father and his fellow interrogators were not taught “coercive interrogation techniques.” They didn’t waterboard anyone as a matter of policy. Just the opposite, they practiced rapport building techniques that were extremely effective in eliciting information despite the supposed “fanatical nature” of the prisoners.

Most important, my father felt that, by not engaging in retribution, he was adhering to a higher standard. “We never forgot,” he says in the film, “that behind the facade of wartime hatreds, there was a central rule of law which people abided by. It was something we believed in. It was what made America different.”

As a former Navy interrogator, he was furious about the Abu Ghraib scandal. As more details emerged about the way that torture appeared to be part of a wide-ranging policy, he was even more enraged. He encouraged me to take on this project. While I was working on “Taxi,” I visited him in Santa Barbara just before he died. One day, he said: “Go get your video camera; I have something I want to say.” We had to turn off the oxygen machine so he would be audible. A foreign policy conservative, he raged against Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush for upending the very values that he had defended as a soldier. His anger, and his belief that we could — and did — do better offered a ray of hope in a bleak film.

FRONTLINE/PBS WORLD: CHILDREN OF THE TALIBAN

It breaks my heart:



Watch the documentary and read the synopsis here.

Interview with the journalist, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy here---more about the piece at sharmeenobaidfilms.com.


Something has to change. I hope Obama will work to make sure that U.S. policy and action stop feeding into these kinds of cycles of violence. But to be honest, I'm worried. And sad.