I might have a fun idea!

I'm watching the Senate on C-Span right now. They are discussion medical insurance companies, drug makers, and how their relationships and competition makes drug prices cheaper for the American people. The arguement is whether or not to allow medicare to negotiate prices directly with drug companies or whether it's best to let private insurance companies negotiate their prices. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says that "competition works" so if we let medicare negotiate prices we will undermine the market by interfering with the natural competition of the medical market. John Kerry (D-Mass) says that by not allowing medicare to negotiate their own prices the tax payers are paying higher prices for drugs through a federal program. I have an opinion on the matter but it doesn't matter.

What I see in this, is a deeper arguement of whether or not America should create a universal medical insurance system or the private companies should continue to have the upper hand. Congress seems to be passing all sorts of legislation regarding healthcare that is beating around the bush on the issue of universal healthcare. So, what do the American peole think? I don't know what polls say. But I do know that behind any issue like this there is a massive amount of money going into lobbying our Congressfolks. Does a poll on this matter even have any leverage here? Probably not...I can't make a poll and get an accurate count of what people think, but someone with money can. And there lies the issue that brings me to my point. Our relationship with Congress is based on money. Whoever has the most money has the biggest voice (in most cases).

All of this leads me to this thought - How would it work if there were national issues attached to the presidential elections every four years that gave the people a voice. If a national election could be held, not to pass legislation, but to let Congress and the President know how we stand on issues. For example, the congress passed a non-binding resolution that told the President their stance on the war in Iraq. There would obviously have to be limits on something like this. Maybe that would look like a certain amount of issues (i.e. gay marriage, universal health care, limits on abortion). They would be the most pressing issue surrounding the presidential election. The problem would be figuring out who got to choose what went on this list. Would it be Congress? Would it be a committee set up? Would it be the cabinet with approval from the current President?

Sure, this comes out of my distrust of Congress. I think that too many representatives don't actually pay attention to what their constituency wants and only play attention to who donates the most money to them. I don't have any answers, but if anyone out there wants to put in their own two cents on the idea i've proposed, it would be appreciated.

I Finally Won Something!

I had one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had tonight. About two months ago a professor of mine brought in some flyers for an essay contest to win a scholarship of $1000, toward a trip costing $1500, in which a group of people from across the nation bring medical, educational, and other types of humanitarian aide to the people of Cuba. The point of the trip is to protest the blockade that the U.S. has imposed against the Cuban people since the early 60’s. It’s required by federal law that anyone bringing aide to Cuba must acquire the proper permits to do so, which limit the amount of aide being taken to Cuba. We don’t apply for the permit and refuse to pay any fines that are then given to us.

So, tonight we had a dinner to celebrate community heroes who are active in Latin American affairs both abroad and domestically. I showed up to help set up and was eventually told that I was the winner of the essay contest. After a number of speeches I was introduced by Congressman Sam Farr. He read a little bit of my essay to the crowd then invited me up to accept the check and make a short speech…I wasn’t expecting to have to do this so I had to come up with something as I began to talk. I simply said that with all of the inspiring speeches made tonight I wasn’t going be able to say anything insightful, so thanked the 150+ people there for their support in the community and for helping people like me and the others like me to have the chance to stand up against the government and say in a voice of solidarity that their embargo is immoral a just plain wrong.

The Congressman praised my writing ability (something I generally don’t feel is too incredible). He was briefly heckled by the crowd to hire me on his staff… that was fun.

I was then invited to a little after party by the organization that put the contest on. These are all people in their 60’s to 80’s. We sat around until midnight discussing the various policies of our government and the different ways that they have worked to change things and how we could change things in the future. These people are very well connected people. People who know House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a first name basis. It was a new thing to sit around in a group of like-minded people discussing things that we all have a good amount of knowledge about. This one guy who has been involved with Cuba and Nicaragua and other Latin American countries was talking about his experiences in the 80’s in working with the Sandinistas and contra groups in Nicaragua trying to fight the coups the Reagan administration was supporting. Crazy stuff.

Listening to some of the stories these people told I became aware of how very few people can make a huge difference. Though I often have conversations with one of my roommates about direct action like protesting and marching do make a difference, I don’t always believe it. Tonight gave me a new way to look at this stuff. The fact that I was presented an award from a U.S. House representative (one of the richest I might add) made me realize that I was closer to the action, to making a difference, than I feel most of the time.

So, in July I’m going to Cuba! This is going to be a tiring trip but meaningful. I don’t get excited about much but I’m excited about this. The people who gave me the scholarship told me a few things they want me to look into while I’m there. They want me to break away from the group to investigate things like the hospital and prison systems so I can write about them and hopefully spread the message to the American people that our policy in Cuba is ridiculous. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to do that, but this whole thing is going to be fun!

Forty Days of Worthless!

Tomorrow (Monday) marks the beginning of my anti-lent. If you want to know more about my anti-lent, scroll down to read my post about it. I decided to create a new blog for this endeavor because I want the students I work with to read the stories if they want, whereas this blog is for regular people. Also, I wanted to make it so my regular blog could just be completely separate to make things easier, since there will be so many posts. It's called 40 Days of Worthless. I've made a link to it underneath this blog title so you can easily access it. It's probably going to be a lot of fun, you should stop by and check it out.

Nastolgia

I was driving home from the youth group that I lead tonight. I'm not sure what I was thinking about but completely zoned out. I finally came out of my daze and had no idea where I was but I knew that if I kept driving i'd end up somewhere I knew. I felt like I had been in my car for hours but it was really only about a minute or two. As I looked around it reminded me of the time when I went on tour with a band I was in. There were three of us in a van driving all over the western half of the U.S. We would drive all night so we could hang out the next day with other bands and then play our shows, get a free meal, hang out for a little more, then get on the road again.

There were a ton of times when I had been driving on some back ass country highway through New Mexico or Colorado and had no idea where I was. Sometimes we'd stop into a small town store that was open late at night and get looks from creepy locals who just happened to be hanging out in the store at 3 or 4 in the morning. This intense nastolgic feeling came over me. There's something I really enjoy about having no plan or idea of what's going on. So...

this summer I'm planning on going to Cuba on a humanitarian/protest trip. This whole zoning out nastolgia thing gave me a great idea. I come back in to Texas on July 28th. If time and money allows, I think I'm going to try to make my way back to California very slowly. It would be fun to just catch buses from city to city and stay in hostels nights that I'm not sleeping on a bus. There's something comforting about not having a plan or being bound to any time schedule. Plus, it will be a good way to take some pictures of fun things and meet interesting people. Maybe I'm looking for some sort of spiritual experience but I don't think that's it. There's those commercials from my childhood that had some messed up guy getting chased by a cop then an announcer says "Nobody says, 'I want to be a junky when I grow up'." I don't want to be a junky but I do wish I could be homeless and drunk most of the time. That would be way better than having a job and having to care about people. So minus the drunk part, i'm gonna try to live that as close as I can for about a week this summer...hopefully.

Done and done.

My Anti-Lent

I think lent ends in a week. I'm not sure if l(L)ent is supposed to be capitalised or not, so I'm gonna go lower case just for consistancy's sake.

Once again I didn't give up anything for lent this year. Well I did give something up, but not specifically for lent. Anyways, I missed the beginning of lent and I didn't want to start late for some reason. But I was thinking about how an ex-girlfriend's dad did lent. He would give up hard liquor and beer. He liked wine, but was a wine snob so drinking enough wine to get drunk would cost him a lot of money...he was also (probably) an alchoholic. So he decided that he could drink brandy since it was made from grapes, just like wine, and would be in the clear. This is really the first I had ever heard of lent.

In my thinking about lent it occurred to me that most people I know who practice lent, don't spend the time that they would have been doing the particular thing they gave up, with God... which I think (though I'm no expert) is one of the points for modern lent observers. So I decided that I'm going to practice an anti-lent of sorts. That 'anti' isn't to be interpreted that I don't like or support lent. It's just to say that instead of not doing something I'm going to do something. After all, my god is a god of action and he probably wants me to follow suit. Although I will admit that this little exercise that I will embark on doesn't really get me closer to God in any way. Unless of course one of my gifts is writing and I am honing the skill for the betterment of his kingdom, but i doubt that's the case.

So...the Monday following Easter will be the beginning of my anti-lent. I will publish on my blog one short story per day. I tried to think of something meaningful to do on those 40 days, but I really couldn't come up with anything that wasn't super cheesy, so this is what you get. When the time rolls around I'll post the web address for the new blog that is dedicated to my stories.