
Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass real gun control legislation; tell Florida and Kansas state legislators to oppose anti-transgender bills; tell big corporations to stop donating to insurrectionist Republican Congressfolk; tell a European hotel-owner to treat its housekeepers right; and tell our FDA to ban flavored tobacco products. The paragraphs below provide all the email/petition links you'll need.
With all the police shootings and mass shootings we've heard about the last few weeks (see, things are really going back to normal!), and with most politicians either shrugging and saying nothing can be done or trying to do things that won't solve the problem, I refer you, again, to Thom Hartmann's proposals for real gun control, which you can share with your Congressfolk. Mr. Hartmann would make it as hard to get semiautomatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and would regulate guns the way we already regulate cars. I no longer oppose banning assault weapons, but I remain wary of the kind of broad background checks politicians like to propose, and in any case I don't think these policy prescriptions would do as much good as Mr. Hartmann's would. And I prefer solving the problem to worrying about whose feelings we'll hurt if we solve the problem.
The Florida House has passed HB 1475, a bill that would, get this, allow schools to examine the genitalia of young girls in an apparent effort to keep transgender children out of girls' sports, and Change.org helps you tell the Florida Senate to reject this bill. How many ways is HB 1475 an abomination? Let's start with nobody should be looking at children's genitals except a physician trying to diagnose an illness directly relating to those genitals. And then let's go on with how public schools already know which of their students are transgender! I know, I know, some folks think transgender children, or our "tolerance" thereof, are abominations. If that's you, kindly navigate away from this page -- you can learn nothing from me, and yes, that's your fault.
Change.org also helps you tell Kansas state legislators to reject HB 2210, which would make it a felony for doctors to perform gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement therapy on children, which should make even the folks who think it should be the parents' decision wince. I'm not impressed that Section 1(c) exempts doctors from this crime if "if a child was born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development" -- that raises the possibility that the bill only exists to create drama, and that's the kind of thing we should smack down whenever we see it. And frankly, I trust any kid who says they're in the wrong body -- how likely is it that they're "just acting out" when there are a) so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" and b) there are so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" that don't result in them getting the crap kicked out of them by their peers? So much right-wing rage doesn't stand up to the gentlest application of logic.
Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Toyota and JetBlue to stop giving campaign funds to the same insurrectionist members of Congress to whom they said they'd stop giving campaign funds! I won't say it's useless for big corporations to give lip service to the causes we care about, but what Toyota and JetBlue (among others!) are doing is less than useless -- they want the good PR for "doing the right thing" without the bad PR they deserve for going back on their word. But we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we don't have to put up with any of that. Remember, these Congressfolk smiled upon the events of January 6, even if they didn't actually aid and abet them; depriving them of campaign contributions is more toward the "least we can do" end of the spectrum.
Sum of Us helps you tell Ibis hotel owner AccorInvest to stop paying its housekeepers in dung pellets and treat them like human beings, which includes not running them through "scientific" task-timing, as they're currently doing. They give their housekeepers 17 minutes to change over hotel rooms, and as someone who works for a living, this is personal to me: I'm sick and tired of bosses looking at a spreadsheet and thinking they can learn more from it than they can from, you know, doing the job. Any idiot knows that if you've really got lollygaggers working for you, you confront them head-on, and you don't hide behind stupid assumptions about "how long a task should take" when you won't actually dirty your hands by doing it. Maybe that sounds old-fashioned, but I'm an old-fashioned dude, and this kind of task-timing doesn't sound like "making workers work more efficiently," but delivering wealth upward to executives more efficiently.
Finally, Progress America helps you tell our FDA to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products. They might taste like bubble gum or cotton candy or "tropical twist," but they all contain nicotine, and we really don't need to be starting children on a lifelong addictive habit. Whomever came up with this probably thinks they're a super-genius -- get 'em started young, and we'll be able to keep selling to them until they're old and grey! High-five! -- but they're not; they're just evil. I mean, I insist cleverness should result in good works, not (once again) in redistributing working folks' income to the undeserving rich.