Good on you Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this is how it should be done. Lately, I've been tooling around on Twitter trying to get Ability Fierce's numbers up (HINT if you aren't following @AbilityFierce on Twitter, please do so now) and it is a vast universe out there. It might actually be the only place we can make a difference these days, so I've been learning the ropes and getting out and tweeting. I still have a long way to go to get to the level Alexandria has obtained but I find what happened yesterday to be very instructive.
On Wednesday night, responding to Betsy DeVos' evil* plan to cut the Special Olympics program, Alexandria asked the Twitterverse to list the handles of their favorite disability advocates so she could follow them. This is a big thing. She's saying, I want to hear from you guys, what are your issues and what can we do about them? But she didn't stop there.
She went on to follow a lot of them and then started going through their feeds and re-tweeting the best tweets she could find, thus learning about the disability community and giving them a voice at the same time. Then she followed up by tweeting about an elevator in her building that didn't work and wondered what happened to all the people who can't manage the stairs. Color me impressed.
I very much admire Alexandria because she does what we seek to do at Ability Fierce. She cuts through the bullshit and says what needs to be said. Some people seem to feel there are other leaders that use Twitter to do that, too, but often those leaders are just calling BS to replace it with more of their own BS. Alexandria's not doing that, she's reaching out and willing to learn. We need more politicians like her and we need to focus less on stupid irrelevant issues like how much she makes and what kind of clothes she wears and whatever is going on with Jussie Smollett _ who doesn't really matter in the scheme of things.
*Note to journalists: When something is evil you can and should call it that. There is no sense behind this plan other than to hurt people. Newsmedia has pointed out that the amount of money saved would be roughly equivalent to the cost of the president visiting his New Jersey resort six times. What makes it worse is it's probably a ploy to distract from the fact that no one, besides a few of the president's flunkies, has seen the Mueller report. Note to anyone who says this is playing politics: The president has openly mocked a disabled reporter and backs DeVos' evil plan. This is BS. He has disrespected the disabled and his own office and thus no longer merits our respect. That's not politics, that's common sense.
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