What I did to fight Trumpism this week

Source: BoingBoing

Every Friday I fight Trumpism. I start by donating to a cause that advocates for good. I then contact government representatives to urge them to either oppose or support policies I consider important.

This week I donated to the campaign of Jon Ossoff. Ossoff recently won an open primary in a Georgia district and poised to flip it blue in an upcoming election runoff for the first time in decades.

I also contacted the office of Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and urged him to reject Trump’s budget proposals to cut foreign aid spending. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear Senator Corker,

I’m writing to urge you to reject the Trump Administration’s proposal to merge USAID and the State Department. I also implore you to reject budget cuts to foreign assistance. Not only does foreign assistance make up a tiny fraction of our federal budget, but it’s a vital tool for international diplomacy and avoiding military conflict. By cutting funding for disease prevention, you would be putting American lives at risk by increasing the likelihood that diseases like HIV, Malaria, and Ebola could spread to our shores.

thank you for your time,
Simon Owens

Want to help fight Trumpism too?

Here are the steps you can follow:

1. Pick a day of the week as your Fight Trumpism Day. That way, you always have a day set aside so you have no excuses to put it off. At most you’ll need to devote an hour a week to fighting Trumpism. My day is Friday.
2. Create a spreadsheet with two tabs. The first tab is for your donations. The second is for contacting your representatives. For the donations tag, track the organization, the issue it stands for, the donation amount, and the date you donated. On the contact your representatives tab, track the issue you’re contacting about, the representative you’re contacting (often it’ll be your local representative or the head of a congressional committee), and the date you contacted them.
3. For every Fight Trumpism Day, make your donation and contact your representative and then record it in the spreadsheet. I’d say you should donate the same amount every week. Even if it’s only $10, it will add up to $2,000 by the end of Trump’s four years. You will have also contacted your representatives 200 times.
4. After you’ve done these things, post about it on social media (like I’m doing here) in order to inspire others. Let’s say we got 10,000 other people to do this who weren’t doing it before; that would mean $20 million in donations and 2 million phone calls to representatives during Trump’s term. That kind of impact would be yuuggee. Get to it!