This literally took me 2 minutes to do. And whether it made a huge difference or not it was important for me. I don’t have time to elaborate in my own words so I’ll just cut and paste this letter from Sojo.net that I received:

Dear Ariah,

We have one last chance to reject this immoral budget. Call Representative Cooper now at 1-800-426-8073!
As the world waits for Christmas, poor families are still waiting for a compassionate Congress.

First, the bad news: This morning, the Senate passed a budget hurting low-income families just four days before Christmas. Now the good news: Because of your prophetic voices, the vote was so narrow that Vice President Cheney was forced to cut short a diplomatic trip to the Middle East to break a 50-50 tie. (Civics class flashback: He’s the president of the Senate.) More importantly, your voices helped remove some harmful provisions of the bill, changes that will force the members of the House to fly back to Washington to vote on the amended bill.

Bottom line: Because of our hard work, we have one last chance to reject these harmful cuts to children and families struggling to work themselves out of poverty.

Call Representative Cooper now at 1-800-426-8073!

After you connect to Representative Cooper’s office, tell the staffer you reach:

As a person of faith from Tennessee, I ask you to please vote “no” on the new budget bill that the Senate passed. Before you go home for the holidays, don’t take away health care for low-income children and crucial work support for families trying to work themselves out of poverty.

Background

This morning, the Senate approved the budget reconciliation conference report. Vice President Cheney, president of the Senate, cut short a diplomatic trip to the Middle East to break the 50-50 tie. All Democrats and Independent Jim Jeffords (Vt.) opposed the bill, as well as five Republicans: Chafee (R.I.), Smith (Ore.), Collins (Maine), Snowe (Maine), and DeWine (Ohio).

But, just prior to the vote, the Senate removed several provisions from the conference report that the House had passed at 6 a.m. Monday (212-206). Therefore, the House must now approve the Senate’s version and could vote as early as Thursday or Friday, or as late as January or February.

What does this mean? We get another chance in the House. We must appeal TODAY to congressional hearts and minds, asking legislators to oppose a budget that hurts the poor. Call Representative Cooper now at 1-800-426-8073.

Many in the religious community cannot believe that leaders could pass a federal budget cutting health care, child support, and educational assistance to low-income families while further lowering taxes for the wealthiest Americans and increasing the deficit for our grandchildren. Making this decision just before Christmas does not proclaim goodwill toward all. Although the faith community played a strong role in preventing food stamps from being cut in this budget, we cannot ignore the many other cuts that could become a reality for many of the 36 million people living in poverty in the U.S. Despite clear messages from people of faith that the poor families and children with whom we work need better policies and support, our political leadership is missing the meaning of Christmas. Instead of filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty, this budget process will only fill the rich with good things and send the hungry away empty.

Bipartisan efforts to prevent severe budget cuts continue to provide hope. Congressional leadership may cast today’s slight change to the budget bill as a way to delay the inevitable. That is not the case, and your voice can continue to have an impact. Please keep doing the great work you have been doing all year!

Make sure your member of Congress knows you are still watching and praying. Call Representative Cooper now at 1-800-426-8073 and ask the Representative to oppose the budget reconciliation bill.

Peace,
The political and organizing staff at Sojourners and Call to Renewal

Warning: The link below will suck your time away, proceed at your own risk.

CAUTION: Do not click on this link unless you are on a break from school, home from work for the weekend, or away from your spouse and up late unable to sleep.

DISCLAIMER: Should you choose to proceed while any of those things our true, limit yourself to three tries MAX. Should you feel the need to proceed beyond that count, please seek help immediately.

URGENT NOTE: Given that I don’t normally put things like this on my blog, or encourage others to play them, I would like to usher a word of caution when proceeding to the link below. This game could possibly be extremely addicting.

I sort of feel like I’m runing through a big group of people, I love doing that; at a sports game, in a parade/march, in a store, etc.

I recent wrote an article for Relevant Magazine concerning Fair Trade. It’s evoked a bit of discussion and a little debate. I also posted on my other blog, about the article and about looking for fair trade garments. Something happened that immediately struck me (and I’ve done this before too): People commented using the word “Free” instead of “Fair” when talking about trade. There is a big difference and though some of us are aware of it, we tended to confuse the two. So allow me to indulge in an explanation and attempt to address some of the comments made on my article.

Free trade quite simply is an attempt to take away any barriers to a free flowing economic system. If you’ve taken Micro-Economics (and if you haven’t you should, it’s absolutely fascinating), you’ve learned a bit about supply and demand, opportunity cost, and more. More specifically in Economics you learn about all these things in an ideal and mathematical world. What struck me, besides brief mentions of externalities, is that Economics doesn’t really take into consideration human rights or needs. If the way the economics play out dictates that a child will work for 20 cents an hour sewing the elastic band onto your underwear, then that’s the way it should be. The idea is that in the long run, everything will pan out better for everyone. Let me be the first to say, that I don’t necessarily think that they are wrong or that those ideas won’t work. What you’ll find is I just have some difficulty with what it means for me specifically.

Quite briefly, and I’m sure we’ll get into this more later, I find the idea of trade being “fair” especially settling to my conscience. I work with youth and the question I constantly ask is, “is that fair?” There are plenty of times I agree with them that society, school, the “system” or some authority isn’t “fair.” And it gives me the opportunity to engage in dialog about class or punishments, etc by asking them if what I decide or ask of them is “fair.” So when it comes to the food I eat, the clothes I wear, and the coffee my wife drinks, I’d like it to be fair. Fair to myself, and fair to others. So what does fair mean?

(unfortunately this is where I have to go to work, so you’ll have tune in later).

A conversation with a friend of mine this past week got me thinking about what it would be like to not have heating where you live. Many places this is just a reality, and then for many in the States, their inability to pay their bill results in it being turned off.
My wife flew out on Thursday night and I began a little experiment by turning the heat off. The first evening was not too bad and I didn’t notice much difference at all. By Friday evening, not even 24 hours past I noticed that it was certainly getting colder in my home and I had to bundle up a little with warmer socks, slippers and a long sleeve shirt.
We live in an apartment complex of six units. It’s a nice building, brick on the outside, and decently put together but probably not the best job in the world. I wondered about how much the quality of your apartments building layout affects your expenses to keep it warm. Can you imagine living in a low income housing situation where not only was your rent high for extremely low quality, but you had to leave the heat running constantly to keep it at all warm.
Friday night I went to sleep with a sheet, a comforter, a blanket and then a sleeping bag (rated to 20 degrees) on top of me. I was warm, but it felt like being outside. Saturday at about noon I stepped outside and realized it was considerable warmer out there then it was in my own apartment and it was only 46 degrees out there. I tried to open the window shades to let the sun in, but the angle our house is at didn’t allow for much direct sunlight coming through.
After it got cold enough that I had to put on a shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweatshirt and sometimes a vest I was starting to get miserable. I don’t have a hat or gloves and so I had my hood on and I tried to keep my hands in my sleeves a bit. My hands where getting quite cold which didn’t feel good. I tried to think of it like camping outdoors or something, but I couldn’t break out of the fact that this was my home! I feel like I should be comfortable in my home. I thought in my mind that maybe I should try and make it through Saturday evening, making it a full 48 hours. I sort of made that up on the spot cause I think I wanted to feel like I had achieved some sort of goal, or survived through something. Truth is I just wanted to turn the heat back on.
At the advice of my mother, and for my own self interest, I turned the heat up just enough for it to maintain the temperature without dropping anymore. My thermostat says it’s about 60 or less, but I’m not sure how accurate that is. My desk is cold. I’m still dressed pretty warm.

I wasn’t doing this to try and do anything nobel or sacrificial. Mainly I just thought I could save some energy and money and experience life with the heat off for a little bit. It brought some thoughts to my mind.

It’s these little things that we do take for granted. Now in other places not having heat is just the norm and you push through and make it. Here we expect to have heat. I’m living in Nashville, grew up in Wisconsin, and I’m cold right now. Imagine having your heat off in a more northern city. I would guess I would be a miserable person to live with if our apartment was this cold all the time. My nose started running Friday evening. I can’t imagine how much more often someone would get sick, especially a child, if you didn’t have heat in your apartment. I think I might become quite lazy under these conditions, not wanting to do much more then sit in a chair and watch a movie or sleep.

I’ve never thought about the affect this sort of thing might have on someone, I only hope I can be more sensitive to it in the future.