CALLAHANTICS

Right before disconnecting from work for the holidays, a very dear friend of mine mentioned in passing that a cable network was playing every episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing from Christmas to New Year’s Day. So I began watching it. Then I binge watched it for most of the week. While watching, I began to remember my life when the show first aired. I was an hourly temp employee. I had just undergone cranial surgery and seizures were different than prior, but still significant and I had just become engaged to my fiancé, who is still my husband. We were in New York City and both of us were intrigued by the dramedy Sorkin was creating for us. Little did either of us know at the time, that both of our lives would take several random turns leading us to working for the federal government and while we watched it again this year, it was daunting how different a perspective I have on the show in 2023.   The show held up amazingly well overall considering almost a quarter century had ...

OK. Having watched the last two years and working hard not to hyperventilate and or go completely insane, I have a simple question for the Democratic Party; “What would it take to get legal identification for every registered voter in the US who currently needs one in time for the midterms?     Do we put together a GoFundMe® campaign to get the resources to transport voters who are being disenfranchised to the nearest place they can go to get a legally accepted ID? Do we go out into the communities and work with Americans to help them get their required documents (birth certificate, proof of citizenship, proof of address, driver’s license etc.) or whatever other information is required for an official ID? Whatever their state, city, county, district, territory, parish, or other area name requires?     Do we go to mayors and councils and whoever else we can assist in setting up venues/appointments and a workforce who can go out to their jurisdictions and set up events...

It is official. Thank you for your time with us Trumplandia. You are free to go become your own nation and make Trump your Plutarch. I (like many Americans) have finally reached the grief stage of acceptance. Those of you on the fence deciding whether you are Trumplandians or Americans, you are officially offered the freedom to choose this one last time. So go for it. Secede and go form a country. Create your own union of states. Heck, just for the hell of it, you could even name yourselves the Confederate States again and head off to live your lives; (provided your Plutarch does not insist his name be used). Those of us who chose to stay in America wish you well and hope you go on to live happy and healthy lives. Please join together and adapt the F.U.S. Constitution to serve your needs and wants and have at it. I think Americans are finally willing to set all of you free. We can send some diplomats over if you want to negotiate with the different demographics and decide who gets to s...

While many of us are becoming increasingly desensitized to the daily chaos we are currently experiencing, perhaps we need to discuss some issues more than others now as a nation. Specifically, we need to begin to deal with the financial and employment impact that Covid-19 is causing. Why? Because whether we see it or not, each of us is experiencing almost constant trauma. Every moment for the past 150 days, Americans are constantly coping with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors who are dying, or becoming permanently disabled due to Covid-19. We are also making daily decisions to weigh acceptable risks to both our own wellbeing and the health of those we love. Like it or not, none of us can truly escape the impact Covid-19 is having on each of us both personally and tangentially. While that is more than enough to keep us all quite busy, that is not all. We also recently experienced many external events that are continuing to impact us. From the passing of Congressman John Lewis, ...

Teachers are vital. No matter what age, no matter what subject and whether they are public, private, magnet, charter, kindergarten, grade, middle, high, special needs, advanced, college prep, and multiple other categories we can put them in; they are vital. Just go ask the parents who simultaneously are in the role of parent, teacher, counselor, IT tech, spouse, and employee/job seeker. So it has been remarkably strange listening to the different perspectives on reopening schools, virtually, in person, forcing teachers back to work; throwing out the hundreds of thousands of international students (who pay full freight to universities across the country BTW). Teachers who are generally overworked, undercompensated, underappreciated and undervalued are now being told to go back to work or else    the ones who are higher risk ( nearly a third ) are being basically coerced into going back to teach in person in a few weeks. Threatening their keeping their jobs in a market where sch...

On March 11, 2020, the world looked remarkably normal for one experiencing a pandemic. in DC when a variety of event and Governor Cuomo had begun the process of discussing the “cluster of Corona Virus (soon changed to Covid-19) cases” in NYC, Biden winning Missouri and NCAA Basketball redefining March Madness for the rest of 2020. My federal office closed down and furloughed me with nearly 40 contractor/colleagues the night before, beginning the self-quarantine process and Red Cross (who I had been on-call with for nearly 2 weeks asked me to go to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in DC. So, while my husband continued working virtually for his organization and managing his project team, off to the EOC I went.  Blood Donor Ambassador:  The person at a blood drive or donation center who checks in people and helps them fill out the form to donate)   Casework Volunteer:  The person who provides one-on-one direct support to clients. Some support disaster response...

OK, I have, like most Americans been sitting in silence watching the bona fide reality show wannabe that has been a constant for 1080 days now. I have experienced multiple episodes of conscious confusion between simple overload and downright rage over the actions that our country’s leadership have chosen to take. It is critical that we as a nation try to more clearly understand the circumstances that we are currently experiencing and not simply hide behind our computers, or televisions, our substances or our social media to stay in the denial stage beyond what our lives are about to become. The decisions made by our leaders in the past 1080 days have included withdrawing from a nuclear deal isolating us from our allies and forcing them to reconsider their relationships with the United States and all others. They have also decided to enact trade restrictions on goods from China, Mexico and others that have directly affected multiple states and devalued a variety of American exports...

I n early 1990, I began attending The American University in Washington DC while a dear friend continued as an undergrad at Santa Clara University in California. Thanks to her having remarkable computer savvy, she came up with a brilliant method for us to communicate with one-another across the country without the extraordinary price of long distance telephone calls. We went into the University's mainframe systems Lab in August of 1990 and she showed me how to utilize Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), to chat with one another on two computers.  It was amazing at the time and it was a good way to stay in touch. A few weeks later, I was typing to my friend when suddenly, another conversation began….”Hi! I’m Mark. Where are you?”  I replied, “I’m Rebecca and why are you on my computer?” He worked for an Intelligence Community Agency and we went on to become very good friends. I learned relatively quickly that the Intelligence Community, US Military and Academia were all ...

Tom Steyer , Oprah Winfrey , George Soros , Warren Buffett , Jon Stewart , Stephen Colbert , John Oliver , Samantha Bee , Bill Maher , MoveOn.org ,  Bernie Sanders , Elizabeth Warren , Kirsten Gillibrand ,  Barack & Michelle Obama , and (if you are still able) Hillary, Bill, Chelsea & The Clinton Foundation  here’s a strategic suggestion to advance our country toward an outcome that I honestly believe each of you want — help disenfranchised Americans to reinstate their ability to vote. Don't just say that you want to help. Promote and fund the multiple grass roots operations out there to assist elderly, persons with disabilities, deployed military who come back and find they are erased from the voter rolls and all other currently disenfranchised voters in getting the required identification and transportation to polling sites. Don't wait for SCOTUS to come back on Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute telling you that purging doesn't violate the National V...

OK American ladies; I think we need to finally begin to strategically look at what we can do as a group to save ourselves, our children, our men and our government. Before we get distracted by the shiny marbles and trinkets that are spinning around us constantly from Al Franken and John Conyers and Bill Clinton; to Blake Farenthold (and even though Roy Moore was kept from stampeding his way into congress on that poor horse “Sassy”). We are already forgetting that harassment and borderline pedophilia has been around for centuries and certainly is not a new issue in Congress. Former Florida congressman Mark Foley and Former New York congressman Anthony Wiener, former Republican U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert and all of the ones we haven't heard about yet, who led to congress to pay out $17 million in settlements. While power does come with responsibility; integrity is far more important than either of them—and we as both a gender and a nation have fallen down on the job of requ...

Now that I am on the ground working an operation, let’s take a few minutes to do an overview of the role Red Cross fills during a response. The medical field has a good term for this role: Triage. In the beginning of any incident (from a terrorist incident to natural disaster), triage roles include search and rescue for the first responders (Firemen, Law Enforcement, National Guard, and Red Cross). This is to address immediate medical need to keep people alive; nothing more; nothing less.  Triage wards of a hospital are similar: Get the person in, keep them alive, get them to the next stage of recovery, get the next person in and start the process again until there are no more people in a life-threatening situation. This is a laborious and constant process. In a disaster response, this is where the Red Cross role is situated. Money comes from a donor and goes to finance to report, record and log the donation. Then the money goes in a fund that acquisition uses for the variou...