Dear everybody,

Hey! How's it been! Your friend Austin here. Why, it seems like it's been months since we last talked! We got together, did some crazy campaigning, and we got Barack elected. That was pretty cool! After election day, we sorta dusted our hands off, smiled a little bit, and everybody went back to doing whatever we used to do.

I know you're pretty busy, so I'm going to give you a brief rundown about myself. A few years ago, I was a total staunch Republican. I mean, I'm white, relatively middle-class... I'm totally the right demographic. Then my dad died, and my mom became a single parent, and then stuff started to get a little crazy. My sister has a disability, and we're legal guardians to my adopted little brother... you know, stuff that makes life complicated! Needless to say, down to a single parent, our lives got harder. About the same time, I went off to college, a Sean Hannity book in my bag. I then spent a few months studying, volunteering at an elementary school, and doing some work with the International Rescue Committee.

Talk about game-changers. Working with the IRC, and directly with refugees who are about as 'off the boat' as they come, really opened my eyes. Things started to get tougher at home (try getting reasonable insurance for a teenager with a disability), and I started to realize, maybe the current system isn't working so well. I'm not talking about handouts, or wanting one; I'm talking about wanting an opportunity to be like everybody else again. I had that once, and then my family changed socioeconomic statuses. I just want to be able to be like I used to be, and I realized, I want everyone else to be able to have what I used to have. I want everyone else to be able to go to a doctor without fear that the treatment, or the visit itself, might be too expensive. I want everybody to be able to go to a school where the teacher cares, and works with the students. I want everybody to have enough to eat, and somewhere nice to stay.

It was then that I realized the Republican party wasn't really in line with my agenda. I mean, sure, you'd be hard pressed to find someone in favor of being uneducated, hungry and homeless. What I, and the people around me, really needed was a group and a party that really believed we could make everybody comfortable, if not happy. So I looked into the Democratic party, and as it turns out, our goals were in line with each other. I became a socially progressive Democrat.

That said, John Kerry was a good candidate in 2004, but he didn't win. We lost the discourse, we let everyone else define Senator Kerry, and we spent another four years under President Bush. It wasn't great.

Then, in 2008, there was a revelation -- Barack Obama. Smart, educated and well-spoken, President Obama had a perfect message, and seemed completely dedicated to progressing the social values that were important to myself and those around me. But then, as I said, we won the election. You would have thought this was the best thing that could have happened, but really, it doesn't seem like anything changed. We're still getting pushed around in the senate and congress, despite that we've got our man in the White House and we had previously held a super majority in the senate.

My message today, friends, is this:

Sack up.

No, seriously.

If there's one thing we've been lacking recently, it's guts. We have a super majority, and the will of the majority of the American people, and instead we produce a watered-down, ineffective health care bill that got diddled away to almost nothing. Why is this? I mean, sure, we don't want to do the same thing that President Bush did, where we just do whatever we want and then tell everyone else to deal with it. But we need to stick to our guns.

Stop letting the other party, and radical fringe groups, set the agenda. I hesitate to use the term 'mandate', but come on, the American people chose President Obama for a reason -- because we wanted change. We're not getting change. We're getting a whole lot of dithering, and conceding, and 'bipartisanship'. Stop with the bipartisanship! One thing we've seen, OVER AND OVER, is that nobody else is interested in bipartisanship! They say they want input, but the other side's input basically amounts to 'No, I don't think we'll be doing that'. And we say OK! This is stupid!

It's not OK to drop an idea, or an agenda, because the other political party says they don't want it. Of course they don't want it, they're the other side! But guess what? THE PEOPLE VOTED FOR US! Yes, it's good to try and represent everybody, but in a representative democracy, we make decisions based on what the majority of people want, NOT the minority. So quit pandering! If the other side's solution is 'Let's just water it down, and then veto it', then screw 'em! America got to be an awesome country because we were progressive when other countries were regressive. Let's get back to that!

If we keep kicking, and pouting, and conceding to everybody's whim, we're not going to get anywhere.

The majority of Americans voted for change. We want change. Give us change.

Consider this a stern talking to, folks. If you keep wasting the faith and capital we gave you, we're going to stop giving it to you. We'll go elsewhere. We'll vote for other candidates.

You have our trust. Quit blowing it.

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