Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.
Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.
Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.
Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.
Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.
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