So if we had enough people we were going to march into the highway and block off traffic, but since 6 people were there in total that didn't happen. So we went downtown to City Hall, and we passed out these flyers.
One says "Freeze Rates not Health care
No More Death- No Mas Muertes"
Affordable Power-Health
The other says; No Cuts on our County
People have a right to health care!
It lists why we need to stop the budget cuts. Basically there are two important people that we concentrated on today, Todd Stroger and Emil Jones.
Stroger took this position because of his dad, who the hospital is originally named after. All the other smaller clinics are going to be shut down and they are trying to vilify the hospital in order to justify the budget cuts. But this hospital is amazing, its the only one in Illinois and there are very few in the United States where this service is provided free of charge. I got my tooth pulled here for free. Some people have other ailments and need their medication that they otherwise could not afford and now instead of getting a 3 month supply of medication for your diabetes you will only get a one month and the hospital will get busier and busier and people will die because they can't get their medication. The wait is long enough as it is, sometimes it takes a few days of 10+ hours of waiting to get it now, can you imagine what would happen if the wait was increased to a week or worse?
That is why we went to City Hall and Dave and I went into the board room and listened to what they had to say, we really wanted to disrupt the meeting and let them know that this budget plan needs to change. Stroger just wants to cut health care but leave all his political buddies untouched, whereas fellow senators don't agree with his budget plan and have proposed an alternative budget plan which would fire all his buddies and save health care.
So Stroger has hired Dr.Simon to basically be the Butcher and sell the cuts. With the previous advisers that was not able to happen.
When we were passing out flyer's outside, a man in a nice suit asked to see what I was passing out and he said, "This is great, I just return to the address listed below and I said yes, he says, "keep up the good work." That made me feel really good and some people actually returned the petitions to me signed.
This board meeting was the beginning of a few to finalize these cuts. It was great, since I now have teal and purple hair, I'm sure there was some attention on me. I bet they were expecting some sort of disturbance and I can't wait to honestly. But next week is the bigger meeting that is more concentrated on this issue and that one will be disrupted, I promise.
After that we walked to The Thompson Center while Emil Jones office is. His office is on the 16th floor in the high rises, up we rode to the elevator. Again with the security but we had no problems before and we didn't then. So we didn't get to see Emil personally but we at least were able to speak to his secretary. We all went back and Curly gave his speech and she gave him the card with the information he needed to make an appointment.
Emil Jones in the only person in Cook County who can Freeze the rates of the electricity company Comm Ed. There is only one electric company because they thought competition would raise the rates but obviously that was wrong to assume. There was a bill in place so that the rates could not be increased but the bill ended and January 1st the rates tripled.
Curly works for these organizations Affordable Health/Affordable Power to the People. Affordable Power deals with helping people sign up for the LIHEAP/CEDA Energy Assistance Program to pay their gas and light bills in the winter because they are ridiculously expensive. In my apartment it was 900 for this winter. I can't imagine what anyone's heat bill was. In Boston I remember they shut the heat off because the bill was like 3000 or something. But you cannot shut any one's heat during the winter.
Part Deux of Wednesday
We went to Hollywood Grill, we really like it we've been there 6 times now. We both got Veggies Burgers but what was weird is they put Spinach on it.
Then we went to Revolution Books! If you can't tell by the name or the Huge Red Flag outside they are communists. That being said they are still nice, intelligent people.
We were there for at least 3 hours and its a tiny store, and I did buy 2 books they were calling me. The first title is Victorian Murderesses, seriously was this book made for me. That's exactly what Dave said when he saw it. It's a goldenrod yellow hardback and it was 4 bucks. I love anything Victorian related, seeing as Oscar Wilde was an author I've read a lot of. I was in Paris and I didn't get to see his grave and I was pissed and I dislike Paris because it was in the summer of the heatwave when I went.
The second book was Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Lou (The Owner) reduced the price a little since it was a new title. I started reading it immediately and got through the first chapter because Dave had become engrossed in a conversation with Lou. We all did in fact we talked about education, religion and of course politics. I personally am not that political or religious but I enjoy talking about them occasionally. The context of it was great, and I was discussing why I really didn't agree with the social hierarchy of religions and school. But I admit that college is vital to an individuals post adolescence growth. But I felt that I was living in high school and that frustrated me. But I would never say that college is a complete waste of time.
Dave says he wants to be a communist just so when he is drunk he can show that he is a card carrying member. But as it turns out neither one of us knew that there isn't just one communist party there is two. The Communist Party USA and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Which Lou is a member of is the latter. I kept trying to get Dave out of the conversation, I wasn't trying to be rude its just how long can you stay talking. Lou is an interesting character and it was good conversation but he had no stopping point he would just keep going.
So we finally got out of there and went home. Then since our roommate has the boot on his car and this morning it was towed, we took Dave's car to get a microwave out of storage. The microwave we have in our kitchen stopped working. So we got Jeff's microwave out of storage and some other items that are needed in the house. Something I felt that was necessary for me to obtain was Casper Activity Center on CDROM, its a computer game and he had it so I'm going to be playing that in my spare time.
We drove back home, and then almost immediately we needed to go out again. We then walked down to Nuevo Lion because maybe there were margaritas but it turns out there isn't and we order our dinner and Dave finds a piece of plastic in his, (gross) but he doesn't care and just lets them know instead of asking for it to be taken off the bill. We are both full and feel sick and we both say we are going to lie in bed and moan about our full stomachs. Anyway since my Netflixs are around and he has requested to watch one, The Godfather is what we watch. I fall asleep though cause I'm tired. I'm going to watch the rest of it later when I'm done with work etc.
We started watching Six Feet Under which is a show so many people have said I would like, mainly because the producer is Alan Ball (the director of American Beauty). It is very dark humor and kinda addictive we watched the first disc and since the whole thing is on DVD guess what's next on the Netflix Queue.
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