Earlier this week we saw what can happen when a bunch of pissed-off voters call their elected representatives to explain what’s pissing them off: Congressional Republicans dropped a ridiculous plan to gut the congressional ethics office.
Trouble is, making these kinds of calls can be very difficult for those dealing with social anxiety. Writing your representatives a personalized email (not a form letter) can also be quite effective.
But if you want to get past the fear and actually make the calls, cartoonist Cordelia McGee-Tubb (who suffers from social anxiety herself) has some good advice, in the form of a comic.
You can find it, along with some other useful links, on her blog Echo Through the Fog.
See more Resist Trump Today posts here.
I need to remember to call my Congresscritters. We made the House back off its Ethics Committee blitz, we can make them back off Obamacare.
@ Falconer
My bosses both voted for trump, then, at the new year, we all had to change health insurance ($), NOW THEY HAVE OBAMACARE (as do I), and Medicaid for her… and they are very concerned. I’d really love to be able to say “… you knew he was a snake when you invited him in….”
@Weird Eddie, I’ve been using the frog and the scorpion as a referenced myself, where the scorpion talks the frog into swimming it across a stream and stings it to death halfway over.
The Don doesn’t know what’s best for him.
@Weird Eddie
That’s unfair to snakes. I heard that Trump was bitten by a rattler at an Arizona campaign stop; poor critter swelled up and died in convulsions.
Yeah, all my colleagues not only voted for Trump, but voted for local officials who may make their job (public college employees) obsolete by removing funding.
They have no idea…they continually say they are tired of paying taxes when government doesn’t give them anything. Well, I guess, technically the government doesn’t give it to us, we work for it, but still, the irony…my irony meter broke three days after I moved here (I had just had it repaired from all the overwork in the red state I moved from).
I’m not an American.and I like your blog that I read it regularly because you write interestingly and can see that you put much effort into the graphics.
I may not agree with you on how the economy should be managed and how people should be helped, but I support you for fighting racism.
Thank you.
@iknklast
What are the chances of them getting fired because of decreased funding?
In places where the House has been gerrymandered out of competition, the senate may still need to respond to voter pressure.
And if anybody wants a good reason to practice, here’s one:
Instead of gutting the Ethics Office, Trump’s gutting the CIA as punishment for investigating him and his bestest buddy Putin. THE CIA.
(Apologies for the editorial link, BTW, but the only news site actually reporting on this is the WSJ and that’s locked behind a paywall. Dunno if it’s too early for the rest of the media to catch up or if they’re just burying
their noses in Trump’s assholethe story again.)@SFHC
Are you kidding me fucking hell.
You know, part of me is hoping we’re all overreacting, worried that Dump is going to be a dictator but all this news…it’s…disheartening. Honestly I’ve been so on edge since November, this is just tiring now.
@SFHC
You know when people say things like “this is just like my novella” it usually isn’t said with dismay, disdain and disgust. Those three words don’t even begin to suffice what is happening. This, combined with Trump bragging about being a vassal to Putin, with 50 goddamn electors being literally ineligible to vote, with the fact he won with the worst rating and doesn’t have the vote of the people, with the media being complete sellouts and hacks to the highest bidder ensuring that any form of actual critique and discussion goes down the shitter, other relevant parties doing jack and shit in their bubble of ignorance, just creates a cocktail of what may very well be the biggest collection of disgrace the nation and its people have ever been subjected to
To the American posters here:
Is Trump like a religion to his supporters now? I’m not a native speaker and don’t live in the US, but there’re Trump supporters on the (alt-) right here, and I debate them.
It’s like my head just exploded! The denial, the lack of reasoning, the… ”we don’t know what he’s going to do yet”, as though his 70 years on this earth say nothing and mean nothing, and his actual actions and words don’t say anything about him at all. Might’ve gone for Clinton just as well, then, eh? With such reasoning you could just as well hand a dowser a phone book and let them pick a random name/person as apparently, the intelligence, personality, history, actions, choices, virtues, faults, controversies etc etc of said person don’t matter in the slightest because ”we don’t know what they’re going to do when they’re in office!”
WHAAAAH!
They also act like they’re so enlightened and so *critical*, when in fact, they just built their own bubble of right-wing/conspiracy websites that confirm their beliefs. And then they call me influenced etc, but offer ZERO proof to support any of their claims. I mean, if I’m blind to some hidden truth, or some great gnosis, tell me, by all means! I’m asking constantly…. but I get nothing more than some vague nonsense and deflections.
I pointed out that he’s not really ”draining the swamp” if you look at his cabinet picks… and they just rationalize it as some sort of ”battle of the billionaires” thing where the good, Trump-supporting billionaires fight the bad ones… again with zero reason to believe these people even remotely care about the average, ”normal” person/American.
If he’s being stupid, it’s not stupid, but strategy. He just doesn’t want to show his cards just yet! Or… he’s pretending and then he will deliver this huge punch line or something.
He’s crying like a little baby about mean media (wrt Russia) and conspiracies against his poor person and innocent, bleeding heart by intelligence services, only when it suits him. Trump supporters would NEVER accept this of Clinton. They believe all his bloviating or go out of their way making up excuses for him, while anything Clinton did during the elections (as well as Obama as president) was being assessed under a hyper-critical magnifying glass. Being critical of politicians is desperately needed, but come on! It goes right out of the window with Trump.
And there’re so many things like this. It’s so much denial and rationalization, I can’t believe what I see. It’s like Trump became their Orange Jesus and they’re now blind apostles.
Is it like that with American Trump fans?
We’re going to have to do a lot more pressuring. Even though we won on the ethics thing, they have sneaked through something insidious:
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-04/house-gop-gives-staff-broader-new-powers-to-grill-witnesses
Congress voted to give their staffers power to subpoena citizens; a power that only Congress had till now. This was through a vote on Congressional rules, not a law that was passed. D:
Stuff like this makes me feel like we’re trying to stick our fingers in leaks in a dam with more leaks than fingers.
@Margot: There are plenty like that here, justifying anything he does. Many of them are becoming disillusioned, though, and Twitter’s full of Trump voters who are crying out because he’s breaking his campaign promises.
The problem is that there is simply too much. They may have back tracked on the ethics, but they passed a rule giving the congress the right to set individual pay for federal workers. So congress can pass an amendment stating that all climate-change workers be paid $1 a year.
Oogly boggles – unfortunately, at this time, that is a known unknown. If they do away with property tax funding, they will need to increase other funding, or increase tuitions to, basically, private school levels. The odds that our school will continue to thrive in that setting are nearly nil, as we are a community college that serves a rural community.
My guess? Severe RIF at worst case scenario. Probably first effect will be reduction in benefits, reducing pensions, gutting insurance, etc. Also increasing class sizes to make do with fewer teachers (there aren’t enough already). Cancellation of capital projects, so we will continue to try to teach in buildings that are barely functional.
In short, they have taken Matthew 25:29 (Also Luke 19:26) to heart.
the trumpster-fire is now demanding WE pay for “the wall”, and, don’t worry, Mexico will reimburse us later… FUCKING WHAAAAAT???????
Also, it sounds to me like he’s framing this as “what he said all along”, like no one was listening….
@ Margot
These are Faux News-ites… they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of reality will dissuade them… though some are becoming more concerned as he deviates from the script.
Scripts are for wusses. Trump has the best words! The best!
I’ve seen a number of people on Twitter and elsewhere doing exactly what Falconer said. They had projected all their hopes and dreams onto Trump, and now they’re discovering that he’s nothing but a human being after all, and a crooked bullying one at that.
I am concerned at the thought of what the newly-emboldened alt-Right might do as they become more and more disillusioned with him.
In addition to the people upset that he’s not going to keep his promises are the people who voted for him and are upset that he might take away their Medicare and Medicaid benefits.
OT: A cool link:
The Narrative of Normalization
*waves to Mammotheers* Delurking just to say thanks for featuring this comic as today’s pièce de résist-Trump-ance. I shared the link on Facebook among several different groups, because sometimes it seems as though everyone I know (including myself) has a pernicious case of phone phobia, and often I find that having a shiny new bag of tricks can immediately reduce anxiety over a task, while increasing my motivation to follow through.
The article got a lot of appreciative responses, and spawned some good frank dialogue about social anxiety as well. I feel that the more we talk about these unpleasant experiences openly, the less weird, weak, or flawed we and others will feel for experiencing them so negatively. And in the current climate, practical self-accepting tips for improved functioning are themselves acts of resistance. We will not accept shaming, silencing, abusive behavior from der Drumpf, and we will not accept it from our own self-critical minds either.
No script! No script! You’re the script!
@Oogly
There was this 1 time when white people killed each other en masse to decide who could and couldn’t own black people. The 2016 election ranks pretty low in the grand scheme…
(Fun fact: parts of Canada and Mexico wanted to join the US, but the government refused. It would throw off the slave/’free’ state balance)
@Margot
It’s not a religion, she’s a girl. There’s no faith, except in that a man, no matter how vile, must be better than the alternative. No salvation, but to be saved from the other. Not religion. Hate