I promise that one day soon I really will blog about the hidden gems and forgotten treasures in my CD collection. However, today is Sunday and if it's Sunday (come on, it's a weekly sing along now) it must be politics day!
I spent most of yesterday watching Ted Kennedy's funeral, and in the wake of his loss, not to mention our national best interest, I feel a moral obligation to rise to the occasion and not surrender the healthcare issue.
In an earlier blog I said that I had done everything I could think of as a regular citizen, but I have thought of some more. After watching Bill Moyers on Real Time with Bill Maher, I was appalled at the notion that our President could possibly forgo genuine healthcare reform that would benefit millions of Americans for the sake of re-election money that would come from the health insurance and drug companies. Bill Moyers suggested that Rahm Emanuel might be telling congressional Democrats to do just that.
Hearing that makes me feel like I've just been betrayed by my best friend. It's the Godfather equivalent of Fredo taking sides against the family. And you can argue that Rahm has taken it on himself to do that, but in the immortal words of our late President Harry S. Truman, "The buck stops here." So as far as I'm concerned, President Obama is responsible.
I don't know what could possibly be going through this administration's mind, and maybe I'm just politically naive, but even with all the money in the world to campaign, don't you need the citizens to actually vote for you? I have never been so thoroughly disheartened or disappointed in the Democratic party in my life, nor have I ever thought about looking elsewhere to vote when the incumbent was a Democrat, but now I am.
So today I'm going to do something I've never done before - write a letter to the President of the United States and to his Chief of Staff. It will not be filled with vitriol, but rather with open-hearted honesty and the sincere hope that they will have the backbone to risk being in office one term if they can accomplish something that will benefit the nation for generations to come.
It is not easy being a leader, but the time for poetic rhetoric must give way to straight talk. It is time for our President to be a President and not a bystander. It's time for him to show some backbone, and if necessary, some teeth. It's time for this administration to remember that we entrusted them with more than ambiguous issues, we entrusted them with our hopes, and dreams, and our very lives. They volunteered. They asked us to.
So let's hold them accountable for the job they signed up for. Let's remind them that we put them there and we can just as easily put someone else there the next times around. The insurance companies and the drug companies can raise our rates, and they can buy politicians air time, but the one thing they cannot do is walk into the voting booth for us on election day.
I urge you all to write and call the White House and remind them whose interests they are there to look out for. Because I like to make activism a little easier for my readers, here's the contact info:
email: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Phone: 202-456-1111
Mailing address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20500
Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day!
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