The easiest thing we can do is to give up. I know for many of you, what we face now seems insurmountable. So I want to share with you something GOOD that happened this week, before I get to the Bad and the Ugly.

In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black Woman elected to the United States Congress, representing Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, New York. I’m sure she felt like giving up many times, too. But in 1972, she did just the opposite — she ran for President of the United States of America, the first Black Woman Presidential candidate for a major political party in this nation’s deeply racist and sexist history. 

I turned 18 in 1972. This was the first year 18-year-olds were allowed to vote. About a month after my 18th birthday, I voted in the Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary, and I cast my first-ever vote for Shirley Chisholm. She collected 3% of the vote in that primary — and I was one of them. Meanwhile, the winner was the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. He was a hard-core racist and segregationist. He personally stood and blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama, prohibiting its first Black students from entering. The President, John F. Kennedy, had to call in the Alabama National Guard to Tuscaloosa. This is the same George Wallace who received 51% of the vote in the 1972 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary. George McGovern got 27% of the vote and Hubert Humphrey got 16%. I voted for Shirley Chisholm not as a protest vote against these white men, but because in my opinion, she was the best candidate for the job.

George Wallace won, in part, because the day before the voting, a man with a gun shot him in an assassination attempt. Wallace was left paralyzed. Shirley Chisholm, his opponent, went to visit him in the hospital. When one of her young campaign aides objected — “Why would you go visit a Racist and a Segregationist?” — Chisholm’s answer was simple: You never know what effect you might have…

Chisholm’s bedside visit to George Wallace helped to change Wallace’s point of view. He would eventually spend the rest of his days disavowing his past views — admitting that he was wrong and that it was time for change. As I remember this, it was Shirley Chisholm who created this transformation in his soul. 

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This past Saturday, November 30th, would have been Shirley Chisholm’s 100th Birthday. New York City has made this “Shirley Chisholm Day.” And of course the next day, December 1st, is Rosa Parks Day — the day Rosa Parks decided to not do the “easiest thing” and instead, refused to move out of a seat at the front of the bus. 

On Wednesday, December 4th, the United States Congress voted unanimously to honor Shirley Chisholm with the Congressional Gold Medal — the oldest and highest award in America, right there with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And one of the Congresspeople who spoke on the floor of the House Wednesday, honoring Shirley Chisholm’s decades of service, was that very same Chisholm campaign aide who questioned her visit to Wallace in 1972 — Representative Barbara Lee. 

Like Ms. Chisholm, Congresswoman Barbara Lee is also one of my personal heroes, and I am lucky to call her a friend. Just three days after 9/11, Barbara Lee was THE ONLY PERSON IN CONGRESS to vote against the blank check authorization of war that the Bush administration used to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Standing alone, she warned the country that we should be “careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Now, some 23 years later, the Global War on Terror has become one of our “endless wars,” the beast that keeps feeding the machine of the military-industrial complex. To date, this “war” has cost you and I, the American taxpayers, $8 TRILLION. She was right. Of course. 

Representative Lee is retiring from Congress on January 3rd, 2025 after 26 years. She has been our defender, our champion, a true American Patriot. She never did the “easy thing” — she never, ever gave up. She will be missed in Congress, but I have a feeling we have not heard the last from her.

Unfortunately, all is not well in our Constitutional republic. 

In just the last 72 hours, our nation’s “Well Regulated Militia” has violently murdered 63 Americans. Another 114 people were injured by gunfire. 

The victims of this senseless — yet Constitutionally-protected! — violence include two kindergarteners at a Seventh Day Adventist school in California and the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare, the nation’s largest health insurance corporation. He was gunned down on the streets of midtown Manhattan.

Each year nearly 50,000 Americans are killed by gun violence. And each year over 100,000 Americans die from infections they pick up when they visit or check into our nation’s health care facilities. How is this possible in the 21st century in the wealthiest nation on Earth? A nation where the wealthy owners of the for-profit hospitals and nursing homes despise regulations and inspections — making going to get medical help in America one of the most dangerous things you could do.

And finally there’s this: According to the medical journal Lancet, 13% of Americans have a family member or friend who have died in the last 5 years because they simply couldn’t afford medical treatment.

None of this should be happening in a place called the United States of America. And while the gun deaths will make headlines if it’s a mass shooting at a school or a church, or if it’s the assassination of a multi-millionaire CEO in New York, the 186 who will die today due to a broken healthcare system, one that is run primarily by insurance men, we will not hear one word about that tonight, their names shall never be mentioned.  

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The motives for the school shooting Wednesday and the killing of the CEO, are currently under investigation and are not yet known. All we know now is that on the bullet casings used in the killing of the CEO included the inscriptions, “Deny” or “Defend” or “Depose” — which could mean everything, or nothing. They could have just as easily said, “From my cold dead hands” or “Make America Great Again” or “Half-Off Tuesdays at Applebees!”

After all, this is America. And weirdly enough, the death of the healthcare CEO has got people talking about America’s health insurance industry and how it makes money off of denying people health care and letting them die. It’s one of our most awful and ugly truths — truths that we don’t really want the rest of the world to see. Because no other industrialized country on Earth so willingly and heartlessly lets a few large corporations literally decide who shall live and who shall die — a decision that is based solely on profit motive. To help prove my point, please take a moment to let me share with you all this extended clip from my Oscar-nominated documentary, SICKO, about the origin and history of our health insurance industry and how it makes money off of us. 

Here’s the current denial rates of the top healthcare companies — from the best, Kaiser, to the worst, United Healthcare:

As the clip above showed, Kaiser was the worst health insurance company in the 1970s, the evil geniuses that gave us the sick system we suffer under today. And yet they, Kaiser Permanente, are now the best — they say “Yes!” to submitted claims and provide coverage more often than their competitors. And who denies care to the most Americans? United Healthcare! They turn down over 5 times as many patients in need of care than do the folks at Kaiser. And THAT speaks volumes about just how horrible our healthcare situation is here in this country when I find myself giving props to Kaiser. 

Wait, wasn’t that The Ugly? Nope, it sure wasn’t.

While Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and others were honoring Shirley Chisholm in Congress on Wednesday, Republican Congressmen were busy introducing a bill in support of teaching Civics in our high schools. Well, not actual Civics. Just a government mandated curriculum that would require all schools to teach the evils of Communism: H.R.5349 — the “Crucial Communism Teaching Act.” But when Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern rose to ask why the bill makes no mention of teaching the dangers of Fascism, the Republicans across the aisle all-but-accused Rep. McGovern of being a communist and refused to answer the simple question: Why are we teaching kids Communism is bad but aren’t teaching them about the historic failures and mass, mass death caused by Fascism? Why is one bad but the other… not really an issue? 

And as Rep. McGovern pointed out on the House floor, when he offered an amendment to the Bill to add the word “Fascism” — in other words, to include Fascism in the forms of government we were going to teach American schoolchildren are “bad” — every single one of the Republicans voted AGAINST INCLUDING FASCISM AS “BAD.”

If you tuned into C-SPAN to witness this on Wednesday, you may have thought you had turned on Comedy Central, only to realize that not only wasn’t this funny, it was a terrifying display of the soon-to-be inaugurated administration that is poised to walk us back out through our front door and into a sea of stupidity. Right now, it’s nowhere near January 20th. Biden is still president. Leonard Peltier would like you to know that. 

Giving up is easy folks. Resistance will be hard. Let’s be like Rosa and Shirley and Barbara.

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