BlogHers Act

BlogHer is taking suggestions for a year-long initiative called BlogHers Act, which will utilize the power of the 11,000 member strong organization.

Such smart women! Such worthy causes!

BlogsHers Act will
1) adopt a single cause for global change to rally behind and

2) create a “Voter Manifesto” of crucial issues to pose to our 2008 presidential candidates.

My vote for the global issue is the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Urgent. Specific. Imperative.

My choices for the four political issues:

-The environment
-Health insurance for all Americans
-Iraq
-Affordable antiretroviral drugs for the poorest AIDS patients, here and abroad.

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If we agree with this powerful statement, adopted by the UN in 1948, then our activism will come not from a superior place of charity and sentiment, but from a stance of equality and solidarity.


The environment from a mom perspective:
Do we love our children? Of course! Do we love our grandchildren? Some of us are of the fortunate age and circumstances to be able to soften into smiles. “Yes,” you say. “Very much.” For others of us, we smile too, imagining the future years when our little ones, grown tall, will be going thru their very own thrills of potty training, the humbling hours of mindless play, the calling us for advice, the loving a child as much as we love them.

But do we love our great-grandchildren? We are not allowed to sluice off this question with “well, I don’t know if they’ll decide to have kids. . . . ” You can’t get past the fact that once you make a kid, you make a legacy.

How we live, where we live, how we move from place to place, what we eat, what we buy, what and how we discard what we no longer want, how we stay warm and clean and comfortable –all of our choices today will act on the children who are not here yet.

We need to get in nesting mode for the world.


Universal healthcare

I Tivoed Oprah last week to hear Cormac McCarthy, (my husband does the best imitation of Oprah announcing her strangest book club choice ever - he bellows joyously, "THE ROOOOOAAAAAD!!!") but Micheal Moore was on first, promoting Sicko, his new movie about America’s profit-based healthcare system.

You may find this man difficult, but he made an interesting point -- The term “socialist medicine” brings up scary images of cold and impersonal institutions, cold war-era wards, perhaps, with rows of cots. But we fail to recognize that so many American social services, which are part of our daily lives, could also be considered socialist: the police, the fire department, the libraries. Profit drives none of these, unlike the American health care industry. And the search for profit is what creates denied coverage for millions of Americans.


AIDS drugs

The Lazarus Effect from this month's Vanity Fair Africa issue. (The Red campaign is troublesome to me - "Be materialist for the poor others!" - but there's other good stuff in this article.)