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.

#IranElection & The Day MJ Died & Dr. Tiller

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.

See "Michael Jackson, Pop Icon, is Dead at 50," at the New York Times.

I actually own The Wiz. Michael Jackson singing "You Can't Win":

"You Can't Win," by Charlie Smalls

You can't win, You can't break even
And you can't get out of the game.
People keep saying, Things are gonna change
But they look just like
You're staying the same

You get in way over your head
And you only got yourself to blame
[Chorus:] You can't win Chile
You can't break even
And you can't get out of the game.

You can't win, The world keeps moving
And you're standing far behind
People keep saying, Things'll get better
(Just to ease your state of mind)
(So you lean back, and you smoke that smoke)
(And you drink your glass of wine)
[Chorus]

You can't win, you can't win no way
If your story stays the same
(You ain't winning) No, no
(But it's nice to see you. I'm awfully glad you came)
(Better cool it 'cause, It ain't about losing)
And the world has got no shame
[Chorus]

You can't win, You can't break even
Ain't the way it's supposed to be
(You'll be spending), No, no, (Your little bit of money)
While someone else rides for free
(Learn your lesson), ooh,
(Refuel your mind, Before some turkey blows out your flame)
[Chorus]

I freaking love this song: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"

I remember sitting in the back of the car with my little sister & cousin, singing along to MJ on the radio. He's a tragic figure in many ways, but there's no doubt he was an incredibly talented artist, and he left a profound mark on our culture.

Questlove (of the Roots) has posted some of my favorite tweets so far, he makes really good points. Check out his Twitter page here @questlove
Excerpts below (to read them in order, start at the bottom):

aint never heard a peep about elvis as a 24 yr old dating a 14 yr old priscilla, or his drug problems or anything but him being a treasure. about 1 hour ago from web

im emotional now but i dont want the only american news source i watch talking about the controversial period. about 1 hour ago from web

elvis got revisionist media treatment. i expect the friggin same for my hero. lemme find out yall gonna paint this mofo as a freak cnn. about 1 hour ago from web

but i think its time we let him rest in peace and learn to separate the ART and the ARTIST. --that is the MJ i will forever remember. about 2 hours ago from web

that he will get due justice in all the press memorials and whatnot. i know he was mired in controversy the last decade of his life about 2 hours ago from web

not overwork myself to the point in which i can't even enjoy life anymore. im am devastated over this but we all have memories. i just hope about 3 hours ago from web

I don't think I really believe in the benefit of revisionist memory, at least not in a total historical way. *On a personal level, I think maybe sometimes we all need to do it, in large & small ways, just to get by. But I do believe in the power of empathy & forgiveness, whatever the truth is. (See "Worldview" segments at sidebar, especially Dr. King.) And I do believe that sometimes the art is not the artist. I think? I don't know. It's just sad. Maybe it's just that none of us are simple, and that includes the giants among us.

*

And another thing. I know it's inexcusable that I'm posting about MJ, but I haven't posted about what's going on in Iran yet. So I hope you'll forgive me. I've been sucked into the twittersphere, on that front. (See #IranElection.) The US media was hardly covering it at first, it seems. Twitter pushed the story. (See #CNNFail.)

Rest in peace, Neda Agha-Soltan. She was 26, just a tiny bit older than me, and she died just for standing up for her right to have her vote counted. She went to a protest, and she was shot to death. I've gone to lots of social & political gatherings, but I've always had this luxury, which Neda didn't have: I've never had to fear for my life. Whether it was a marriage equality rally, an Obama phone bank, a pro-choice meeting, or just voting, I never had to go knowing that it was not only possible, but likely that I'd be hurt. Neda Agha-Soltan knew the danger, her friends & family warned her, but she went anyway. Now her face has become the face of the struggle in Iran. Let's all remember her, and all the others around the world who have died and are dying in the name of justice.

Photo from the LA Times article "Family, friends mourn Neda, Iranian woman who died on video"

May truth & justice prevail in Iran, may peaceful protest win out. We're all connected, and I don't mean that just in some vague spiritual way. I mean that injustice anywhere echoes, and when people realize that & come together, amazing things can happen. See "Social Networks Spread Defiance Online," an article at the New York Times. (Also see "Worldview" segments at sidebar, especially ubuntu.)

*

And that reminds me: Rest in peace, Dr. George Tiller.
See "Dr. Tiller's Important Job," opinion piece at the New York Times.

Photo from http://iamdrtiller.com/

I just want to say that I did want to post about Dr. Tiller earlier. But honestly, I felt kind of scared. I guess I feel guilty for letting that stop me.

Bus Ride

Swinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswin
efluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswineflus
winefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswine
fluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswineflusw
inefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswineflu
swinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswine
fluswinefluswinefluswinefluswinefluswineflu---Oh god, is she coughing?

"You Are Being Lied to About Pirates," by Johann Hari

WTF---NUCLEAR WASTE?!

How did I not know about this? Why aren't more people talking about this?

I'm really glad to see there are people out there taking a multi-angled view of this pirate mess. There's so much human suffering involved, and there's more than one place to lay the blame.

(I know, I know---this place is completely scattered. But please just go read this article over at the Huffington Post.)

"You Are Being Lied to About Pirates," by Johann Hari

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

Johann Hari, Columnist, London Independent

Posted April 13, 2009 | 10:05 AM (EST)

[...] The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

It's just so shocking (and depressing) that an issue of this magnitude could fly under the radar for so long. I can't believe I'm just hearing about this now, especially since I'm subscribed to an email news search on keyword "Somalia."

Did I mention I'm half Somali? My father is Somali, (born and raised in Mogadishu), and my mother is Armenian American.

I mean, it's pretty devastating. I know that the mainstream US media is significantly less than dependable, especially regarding world and minority issues, but wow...

Apparently they're planning to try the surviving pirate as an adult, even though he may be as young as fifteen? See blog post by Kalash at kabobfest.com.

Sigh.

At least South Park is paying attention, see the episode "Fatbeard":

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.

A Good Month for Equality

A million cheers for Iowa and Vermont!

In other news (I'm a future Minnesotan, after all)---when will Al Franken get his Senate seat?

In other other news, President Obama (I love saying that) was in Iraq today.

Now that the mayhem of the admissions season is over, I have some brain space left to read the news again (not just scan it.) It's nice.