When you struggle with your mental health on a daily basis, it can be hard to take action on the things that matter most to you. The mental barriers anxiety creates often appear insurmountable. But sometimes, when you really need to, you can break those barriers down. This week, with encouragement from some great people on the internet, I pushed against my anxiety and made some calls to members of our government. Here’s a comic about how you can do that, too. (Resources and transcript below.)
Motivational resources: There are a lot! Here are a few I really like:
Sharon Wong posted a great series of tweets that helped me manage my phone anxiety and make some calls.
Kelsey is tweeting pretty much daily with advice and reminders about calling representatives. I found this tweet an especially great reminder that calls aren’t nearly as big a deal as anxiety makes them out to be.
Informational resources: There are a lot of these, as well! These three are good places to start:
Among all the horrible things we already know about this guy and our upcoming administration, Bannon is involved in multiple sex discrimination lawsuits and completely fine with taking voting rights away from African Americans. The article provides more 3 more facts as well as details, sources links, etc
This is a website that gives you a weekly call you can make to fight Donald Trump and the terrible developments in the USA. It helps you find your representatives and then gives you a script:
For those of you who haven’t seen it, the Washington Post was tipped off by a high ranking official (a term not used lightly – more on that in a second) that a secret CIA assessment was conducted and found that Russia did indeed interfere with our US election – not for the purpose of just casting doubt on our system – but for the sole purpose of electing Donald Trump. Some have tried to allege that this is fabricated news, but here’s now we know it is not: back in late September, President Obama received this intelligence but thought if he were to give it to the American people, it would look partisan. He instead decided to have the intelligence agencies brief the “Gang of 12” or, a group of the twelve senior ranking congress men and women, so they could put out the information to the American people in a bipartisan fashion. The hope was that they would expose Russia’s interference and denounce any further attempt to sabotage our election system.
While Democrats said yes and some Republicans said yes, most notably Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said no. He refused.
Let’s say for a second he didn’t trust the intelligence. Let’s say he didn’t trust all seventeen security agencies about this information. Let’s say that.
But we also need to take into consideration that after the election, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Cho, was given a cabinet position.
This doesn’t even touch on the fact that America’s security agencies are almost certain (see: they won’t confirm it outright) that WikiLeaks was acting as a proxy for Russia and the FSB (their CIA) for a long time now, which explains why WikiLeaks has not gone after Russia with the same tenacity they’ve gone after the rest of the world with for years. They’re certain that Russia also hacked the RNC but sat on the information (and remember: WikiLeaks said the information on Donald Trump wasn’t “interesting” enough to leak).
And now Donald Trump has filled his cabinet with people who are not just alt-right they are billionaires with ties to the Kremlin and friends of Putin. I know this website doesn’t really give a shit about Eastern Europe, but realize that for people living beyond Germany and living in the Balkans, this is terrifying stuff. This is a return to the Cold War, and while I am no fan of America throwing itself into everyone’s backyard nor do I glorify Reagan (i fucking do not like Reagan), consider a return to the Cold War where Russia is left to invade countries at their leisure. We saw it with Georgia in 2008. We saw it with Crimea.
This is happening right now and if you don’t think Donald Trump isn’t Putin’s handpicked puppet, boy have I got news for you.
I misspoke when I said we have gone 24 hours without a Trump twitter controversy. This one’s less likely to start a war, though in some ways it’s more disturbing.
So, at around 8:00am this morning, Trump fired off a tweet which suggested he was going to take the contract for Air Force One away from Boeing. When I say ‘suggested,’ what I mean is that the tweet ended with the words, “Cancel order!” Boeing’s stock began dropping.
Evidently, Trump read this article, got pissed off, and decided to punish Boeing because its CEO dared to oppose him. I’ve figured out, incidentally, why Trump is so addicted to Twitter. It provides him with an instant gratification that he cannot obtain in any other way. He thinks it, he tweets it, he basks in the attention. The attention is what’s important to him, not the consequences. No wonder “Trump’s Unpredictable Style Unnerves Corporate America.”
All right. Let me see how succinctly I can explain why, in a capitalist economy, when you are the incoming or actual President of the United States, Words Have Consequences, and why even those of us who kind of hate corporate America share some of their unnerved-ness.
Steel Phoenix Studios 