Flashback: Old letters to leaders
Pleas and thanks
Sent on May 16, 2015
The Hon. John Anthony Barrasso III
307 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Barrasso:
Based on what I know of your background and values, I am emboldened to write you this letter urging your leadership and immediate action on behalf of 6,000 to 20,000 scared and starving people (including children and babies) floating in the hot sun on rickety wooden boats in the Andaman Sea today.
As a physician, you have probably been as alarmed and saddened as are many of us regular American voters by this emergency. Would you consider using your position as a senator and a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and its Subcommittee on Multilateral International Development to take some legislative action this week to save these people’s lives? A letter from your committee, or even just from you, to the State Department or to President Obama, or a speech by you on the Senate Floor, urging executive action, would go far.
I suspect that you could save lives while also helping to launch an inspirational and impressive new American refugee policy that would help restore our country’s reputation and adherence to our supposed founding principals. Please call for the immediate deployment of our navy to save as many of these stranded refugees as possible.
If my entreaty to you seems naïve or unrealistic, please ask yourself why. Should it be unrealistic to see a boat full of our brothers and sisters, their skinny arms reaching out for water and help, and to expect to be able to answer their plea immediately? Are we not a wealthy nation? Is this not an emergency? Yes, millions around the world are now struggling against danger and hunger and the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard are not equipped the save them all (wait, are they?), but let us save as many as possible. Let us seize this moment and offer immediate and magnanimous assistance in this high-profile disaster, thus increasing by at least several thousand the number of people who think of mercy, life, liberty, and freedom when they think of our country, or see our Statue of Liberty, which features, as you’ll remember, this little poem: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Thank you for your kind consideration and for all that you have done and will continue to do as a leader.
Respectfully yours,
Sent on July 28, 2017
Dear Senator McCain,
Thank you for your vote against that dumb "Skinny" bill! It sure sounded awful and not at all in people's interests, and so we are grateful that you proved yourself yet again to be a maverick.
Please keep up the fight. Please fight for real conversation in the Senate, real bipartisan compromise, real solutions.
I know that you and your colleagues are so used to saying "the American people" that the phrase might have lost meaning, the way phrases tend to do when you say them over and over. To my ears, the phrase has taken on pathetic shadings--pictures of downtrodden, skinny men in undershirts, working on old Datsuns in falling down barns, or people scratching their heads and thinking "Gosh golly, I sure hope those nice senators think of something to help us!"
But I think that YOU realize that "the American people" means them and also EVERYBODY else. The poor people. The rich people. The brilliant people. The funny people. The struggling people. The dancers and the mechanics and the engineers, the little girls, the boys, the people temporarily employed as "public servants," you know, you yourself. Isn't that the best way to think of us, as various but equal incarnations of you yourself?
And what you and I really want is a healthcare system that is paid for fairly, by we the people (through a system of collective payment that we like to call "taxes"). And we would like it not to be skimmed off of by meddling middle-men called the insurance industry, which enriches itself by denying brain scans and brain surgeries, by the way. We would like a more straightforward system, where all are covered and all pay, but not according to how sick they are, but instead according to how much money they have (within reason). Can you help make this sensible plan a reality, as it is already in most wealthy civilized countries?
Anyway, thank you for helping us avoid that disaster last night.
Best regards,
Emily
Dear Senator Murkowski,
Thank you for your vote last night! Thank you for standing strong against whatever pressure you might have felt to conform, to play nice, to sit down and be quiet, to go along with something so patently dumb and against regular people's interests. (By regular people, I mean people not serving in Congress.) My family and friends and I are grateful to you for your common sense and courage.
What we really want and need, we regular people (non-billionaires, people not currently serving in Congress, just regular Americans working and making art and music and raising families and kicking ass and making big corporations and small businesses alike able to even function) is a single-payer healthcare system, as currently seen serving people quite well elsewhere in the world, in countries with legislatures more interested in serving their electorate's interests.
It's not FREE, it's just sensible and logical and more efficient. Get the gluttonous insurance industry, an obvious enemy to health, out of our healthcare system. Can you help make that happen? It would mean that we, the American people, would have a system by us, with us, and for us. Period. What an amazing legacy that will be, for whichever Congress finally grows up and has the courage to build that, through legislation.
I look forward to supporting you in the future and seeing you do more great things for the people you serve.
Best wishes,
Emily
Dear Senator Collins:
Thank you for your vote last night against the irresponsible healthcare bill. My family and friends and I are deeply grateful to you and appreciative of your unfortunately rare sense of responsibility. You know that life is not a dream and that laws have real consequences in our lives.
I am also, personally, proud of you as a woman. I know that it is sometimes more difficult to vote against the current when you are in the minority, as a woman.
Thank you, too, for your vote earlier to prevent this bill even coming up for a vote. It wasn't ready to be voted on because it wasn't an acceptable bill.
I look forward to supporting you in the future as you continue to serve people's best interests, even in the face of pressure from the worried, the bought-and-paid-for, the corrupt, and the careless.
Best regards,
Emily