To Obama
Page 14
Thank you for your time,
A message from: John Mier
Submitted: 10/16/2013 11:34 AM
Address: Leetsdale, Pennsylvania
Dear President Obama,
My wife and I are signed up for medical insurance due to begin on January 1, 2014 which we bought off of the Healthcare.gov marketplace.
Yes, the website really stank for the first week but it just stank for the next week. Now, it still smells BUT: instead of paying $1600 per month for a group insurance plan of just me and my wife (we are both self-employed and it was the only way we could get coverage) we will have a plan that will only cost us $692 a month—a savings of $900 per month. Once this program gets underway, I would expect the cost to go even lower. And by next year, the website will work like a champ.
You and your team envisioned, put together, and got through a balky Congress this plan. Despite all the histrionics and lies from the Cruz Control, it will be good for America.
Thanks for doing it and thanks for not caving into the idiots.
Best regards to your wonderful wife, Michelle, and to your fine young daughters Talia and Sasha. They have a father to be proud of.
Very Sincerely,
John M. Mier
p.s. In one of the greater acts of hypocritical gall, there are GOP congressmen who want to investigate why the ACA website didn’t work very well in those states where Republican governors would cooperate with the program. But they are losers and in ’14, not all of them will be coming back for their government job.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
John—
Thanks for the letter. The website really was a screw up, but I’m glad to hear the actual program is saving you money!
Best wishes,
Barack Obama
Jordan Garey
Independence, KY
Dear Mr. President,
I am 7 years old. My name is Jordan. I want to tell you that I am getting adopted on Oct 8, 2014. I have been a foster kid for 6 years, and I have finally found my forever family. I have two dads named Jeremy and Matt that are keeping me forever. I know you can’t come to my adoption, but I wanted to tell you thank you for everything that you are doing to keep me safe.
Thank you, Jordan Garey
P.S. I wish I could spend the night sometime in your big house.
New York, NY
March 6, 2013
President Barrack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500.
Dear President Obama,
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” That statement kept going through my mind as I listened to your inauguration speech. It was a moment that was so surreal…I never thought I would hear these words in my life from a president:
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, an Selma, and Stonewall.”
My Facebook page got hit like crazy. Family and friends keep calling me on the phone to ask if I heard it. I did, and at first I didn’t believe my ears. I thought you must been talking about slavery in Stonewall, Mississippi. I mean after all it was also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Then it dawned on me. You were talking about the Stonewall Inn. My Stonewall Inn. My eyes fill up when I thought back to the first night at the Stonewall Riots when I was a 20 year old gay kid at the bar the night of the raid.
You see Mr. President; I was there for the first 2 nights of the riots. It was like a war zone. I saw garbage cans burning in the streets; bricks being thrown in the air and young silly little gay kids like myself being beaten by police officers and the tactical police force till they bleed. All this violence because we wanted to dance alone and be unseen from a society that did not want us. I was so unaware at the time that I was being denied my right as an American, but I that I was also being denied my basic human right. It is kind of funny when you think about it; my grandfather came to America as an Irish immigrant. He got a job as a laborer assembling the new Stature of Liberty in the New York Harbor. The same one with the mounted plaque that reads “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I yearn to breathe free Mr. President.
As gay man back then in 1969 I could not serve openly in the military. I could not get a license to practice law or be a hairstylist; if I was trapped doing something “Lewd”. I was dammed by almost all religions. The American Psychiatric Association told me that I was mentally ill. I was not allowed to get married, and had to keep my love of another man hidden. I could not adopt children. I was not allowed to receive a legal drink in any bar in New York City with out them loosing their license for serving a “sexual deviant.” It was a life that was bleak and filled with one word “NO” and to top it off that night in June 1969, they were now going to tell me I couldn’t dance…not even hidden in back of a dark bar.
You made me proud sir when you mentioned that significant part of my life, but it is a battle that is not over yet, and we still have a big fight on our hands. I still have not gotten to dance that dance I started 44 years ago. The big joyous “I Am A Completely Free Gay American Dance” yet, and I so badly want to dance that dance before I meet my maker…not just have spent my life listening to the music.
Thank you for making that dance floor a little bit more accessible and starting to play the music.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel (Danny) Garvin
Stonewall Inn Veteran
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
November 29, 2013
Mr. Daniel Garvin
New York, New York
Dear Daniel:
Thank you for the powerful letter you sent this spring—I read it with interest.
At Stonewall, people joined together and declared they had seen enough injustice. While being beaten down, they stood up and challenged not only how the world saw them, but also how they saw themselves. History shows that once that spirit takes hold, little can stand in its way—so the riots gave way to protests, the protests gave way to a movement, and the movement gave way to a transformation that continues today.
You are right that the dance is unfinished. But as long as I hold this Office, I will keep fighting to open the floor for everyone.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
Contact Us—Economy
Submitted: August 28, 2013 01:40
From: Tom Hoefner
Dear Mr. President,
My wife and I live in Brooklyn. I have a Master’s Degree from an Ivy League school. She has one from a CUNY. I haven’t been able to find full-time work since 2008. I have six figures of student loans I can’t pay, most of which I’ve defaulted on and are now with private collections agencies. We worry about paying bills from week to week. Yesterday I went over the limit on my Target credit card and had to wait with my 6 year old at customer service figuring out how I could pay for our very modest selection of carefully chosen groceries. I have looked for steady work for five years in my field, education, presumably a stable field that is proving not to be. I send resumes out into the void, never to hear from them again.
I am 34. I will likely never own a home. I will likely never have a retirement pension. My generation was always told that if we worked hard and did well in school and stayed out of trouble we’d have secure futures. We were lied to, or at the very least misled.
We do not have pay-cable channels. We have cell phones, but no landline. We have never taken a vacation.
We get by, day to day. Barely. We will never achieve the American Dream,
if it ever existed. We will be silent victims, never suffering enough to be pitied but never succeeding enough to pay off our debts, to be able to live as we were promised.
The system is broken. The middle class is dead. We are its silent victims.
Sincerely,
Tom Hoefner
P.S.—I don’t expect a response to this. I’m used to getting form letters as a response, or no response at all. This is just one more thing I needed to shout into the empty void.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Tom—
I got your letter. I know things are tough out there right now, and I won’t try to pretend that I’ve got a guaranteed solution to your immediate situation. But the economy is slowly getting better, and we are working every day to push through Congress measures that might help—like student loan forgiveness or mitigation.
I guess what I’m saying is that your President is thinking about you. And your six year old is undoubtedly lucky to have a dad that cares.
Barack Obama
From: Mr. Bob Melton
Submitted: 12/18/2014 11:27 PM EST
Address: Morganton, North Carolina
Dear Mr. President,
I thought you would like to know that because of the ACA I went to see a Doctor for the first time in 12 years. I am having pain and the ACA enabled me to at least get examined and now treated. I’m 61 years old and in pretty good shape (At least I think so) but without your help would have had NO insurance. At all. Thank You again Mr. President. You remind me of President Roosevelt. A man was weeping on the street when FDR died. A reporter asked, “Did you know him, you are so upset?” The man replied, “No, I didn’t know him. He knew me”. I feel that same connection to you Mr. President.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
December 13, 2016
Mr. Bob Melton
Morganton, North Carolina
Dear Bob:
I wanted to take a moment to extend my appreciation for the note you sent a few years ago about the difference the Affordable Care Act has made in your life—as you know from my staff’s outreach to you, your message moved me and my team deeply.
Over the course of my Presidency, I’ve seen in letters like yours the courage, determination, and open-heartedness of our people. “The faith of America” of which President Roosevelt spoke still echoes in every corner of our land—shaped and carried forward by generations. I am confident that it will continue to guide us as long as engaged citizens like you keep speaking out for the ideals that bind us as a Nation and as a people.
Again, thank you. You have my very best wishes and my gratitude for your steadfast support.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Gavin Nore. I am a 15 year old young man from Fort Dodge, Iowa. I first met you when I was eight years old. Back in 2007, you gave a speech about your campaign. Once you were done, people were allowed to ask you questions. I got the chance to meet you and I asked, “Would you continue stem cell research?” You told me you would continue the research. When I turned 14, I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma on February 14, 2013. I beat the battle. During the summer of 2013, I was cancer free. Then, in August of last year, I was re-diagnosed. I had to have a stem cell transplant. I beat the battle once again. I would like to thank you very much for continuing the research. If the research haden’t continued, I wouldn’t be here today. Once again, thank you very much Mr. President!
Sincerely,
Gavin Nore
CHAPTER 9
Barack Obama
THE WHITE HOUSE
I asked Obama if he read the letters in the sequence in which Fiona so carefully arranged them.
“I actually do!” he said. “I’ll go through them one at a time. Yeah, I know. You’ve been rifling through my mail—”
It was a cool autumn afternoon, the trees outside appropriately dropping their leaves, marking the end of a season and, soon, the end of an era. The first African American president. Two terms. Closing.
Obama’s Oval Office was decorated with more restraint than many of his predecessors’. He kept a wooden bowl of fresh apples on the coffee table; George Bush usually had an abundant bouquet of roses there. Obama had added striped wallpaper in muted gold tones, and he’d replaced Bush’s formal white damask couches with quiet tan ones in soft brushed corduroy. (Clinton had bold, bright stripes. Bush, Sr., had the whole place done up in baby blue and cream.) Red curtains added a pop to Obama’s Oval Office; overall the effect was a tailored mid-century modern look.
Soon all that would change to reflect the tastes and the mood of a new leader.
I asked Obama if he typically read the letters there, in the Oval Office—or someplace else? Did he have tea? A brandy, perhaps?
“Usually my habit is to have dinner with my family,” he said, “and then I head into the Treaty Room. And I’ll have a stack of work. So I’m sitting in my chair, and I’ve got policy briefings, and I’ve got decision memos, and I’ve got, you know, some intelligence report, so it will take me a couple of hours to plow through that. And I usually save the letters for last. And they’re in a purple folder. And typically the letter is stapled to the envelope that it came in. Sometimes the packet is sort of bulky and unwieldy, because somebody sent some object along with the letter. The most common would be drawings from kids, or pictures of a family, or some document that shows their interaction with some bank or some bureaucrat that wasn’t particularly helpful to them. Every once in a while you’ll get some personal artifact that somebody sent, like copies of letters from their dad when he was fighting in World War II or some, you know, personal object that really meant something to them that they wanted me to have.”
I don’t know why I was surprised by how slowly the president talked. You hear him in public and he sounds so…pensive. One on one, he seems even more so, perhaps given your own urge to…help, maybe, speed things up? But there is no interrupting; he’s in command, plodding forward, each thought a complete sentence with, that is, commas—each word seeming to have come out only after a good amount of consideration. The image I got listening to Obama that day as he sat in the Oval Office courteously contemplating the seemingly mundane matter of his daily mail habit, was that of a conscientious old man putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Some swirly seascape where there is blue, but then there is blue, and then there is “blue” and…blue! You couldn’t argue with it; he’s getting it right, and the picture is coming together.
“There have been recurring letters,” he went on, “and in that category, I would say, are veterans looking for help, young people with heavy student loan debt trying to figure out whether they qualify for some relief, military personnel or military families who are struggling in some fashion with either a decision or a lack of help from the Department of Defense.
“If there was a letter that particularly moved me, jolted me, saddened me, I got in the habit of asking people to circulate it. So that everyone could take a look at it.”
He talked about scribbling notes on letters, asking questions of staff. “Somebody would explain, ‘This is what it’s like to deal with the federal government on this issue.’ Or ‘This is how this law has affected me,’ regardless of what the theory was.” He wanted to know why and what could be done to improve the situation. “And those staff probably didn’t always enjoy getting those notes,” he said. “But they understood that if I wrote on this letter, I wanted an answer, and I wanted an explanation—that they had to come up with one. Sometimes, you know, you’d hear back from the staff, and they’d say, ‘Well, you know, this is why we’re doing it this way.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense. And let’s try to change the policy.’
“That would be an interesting exercise, to
track the number of initiatives—most of them small, most of them not ones that would get a headline—that we ended up modifying or sparked, at least, a discussion about how we were doing business. It would not be a negligible number.
“And then there have been times where you’ve seen the reactions to a response,” he said. “Probably the most powerful example was we typically have wounded warriors and veterans come in for tours at the White House, and I’ll greet them. I remember once meeting a beautiful family, relatively young mom, dad, couple of little kids, and as I came up to shake their hands, the mom started tearing up. And she gave me a big hug, and she said, ‘You know, the reason we’re here is because of you.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And she said, ‘Well, my husband here, who had served, you know, he had pretty severe PTSD, and I was worried that he might not make it, and you had the VA call us directly, and that’s what prompted him to get treatment.’ You know, and that’s when you’re reminded that there’s something about this office that, when people get a response, they feel that their lives and concerns are important. And that can change in some small way, and maybe in occasionally big ways, how they view their lives.”
I asked him how he decides which letters to answer personally. He said that part was easy: “The ones that I usually respond to right then and there are ones that involve somebody having a very personal issue where my sense of what they need is just an affirmation of some sort.” I thought of Shelley Muniz from Columbia, California, who had written in 2009 to tell Obama about her teenage son Micah who had died of leukemia and about the enormous healthcare bills facing her grieving family. “It is for families like yours that I am fighting so hard for healthcare reform,” Obama wrote to her.