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Make Something Happen

In a few short days comes the fund drive. This is the place where we all live but I’m not afraid. I love our listeners. You know why? Because they are, above all, just plain smart and they are also scared. We have a President of the United States who has surrounded himself with numerous felons. One after another, they are dropping like flies, confessing their sins, on their way to jail. These people are his closest associates. As I write this, there is a major debate over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the country’s highest court. While I suspect that the feckless Republican senators don’t care a whit about Trump, they do care about the crucial Supreme Court appointment that will put their political philosophy firmly in the driver’s seat, perhaps for generations to come. That’s why their PACS and money go to their candidates. Yet, something remarkable is happening. Little bits of money from hundreds of thousands of people are going to candidates and that is making a real difference. Just look at Ted Cruz in deep Red state Texas.

When Donald Trump was elected president, people didn’t know what to expect. The pundits were cautious. There were great debates about whether to use the word “liar.” Not on WAMC -- the word was used by members of the morning Roundtable Panel. The program proved so incredibly popular that it was increased to an hour and a half. Now I am hearing from one person after another about the time from 9-10:30 being “must” listening. Not only that, you have no idea how many people who can’t listen in the morning but enjoy the podcast and write me, sometimes in the middle of the night, about what they just heard. Like everything else on WAMC, these calls and notes are interactive. In fact, we are all in this together and we count on you to tell us what’s on your mind.

Your contributions are similarly interactive. We all know that in this time of great danger for our country, our tax dollars will be used the way that politicians want to use them, too often for their own self-serving reasons. Nevertheless, every once in a while we get a chance to put our individual dollars where we think they will do the most good. We all know that if we left it to the politicians to determine where the money goes, we would hardly have a WAMC. Obviously we just have to keep it going. It takes a certain amount of courage to spend your hard earned dollars on WAMC but you do it proudly because you know that we are talking about the quality of your life and the lives of your kids and grandkids who will come after you.

We know that in a time of catastrophic weather events, we have a president who is a climate denier. This puts all of us at tremendous risk so it is imperative that you keep hearing the truth about climate change and the environment. We’ll do our part if you do yours.

The thing I love the most about WAMC and all of us in this community is the can-do attitude. More than a few important people thought that we couldn’t buy our tower at a cost of a million dollars. They wanted us to borrow the money and to pay it off drip by drip. But if we did that we would have had to cut back on what we do so well. We raised that million dollars practically overnight because I think everyone understood that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. When a community, a real community, gets together and makes something happen, it not only protects our mutual values but it makes us feel good. In a world of frustrations it proves that our effort truly means something. Every once in a while the good guys win and that’s all of us together. We’re counting on you.

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