An ending & a beginning

Working the Hill was the coolest thing I’ve ever done, and will ever do. I’m seventeen and I’ve peaked. A sad reality.

Man, in the last couple of months I forgot that I liked to learn. I wasn’t interested in reading–I stopped practicing piano. But this leg of the project really reignited that fire for me. I think I’ll be able to get more out of the next three weeks because of it.

An important thing I learned about myself (that I kind of already knew but this really made it apparent): injustice motivates me like absolutely nothing else. Oh boy. And I felt like lots of it was going on, but subtly. As I’m sure you’ve gleaned from my blogging thus far, I think that lots of news outlets are not reporting the truth about what is happening at the House of Representatives. Bernie Sanders posted this last Wednesday:

But an amendment to the healthcare bill that took out special treatment of congressmen had been put in on Tuesday night, almost 24 hours before this post. I’m honestly not trying to get political here and this is not pointed specifically at Bernie Sanders–this was just the most pertinent example to what our office was working on at the time.

It’s happening from both sides of the aisle and also about non-governmental issues. A very major thing I took away from this is that people, newspapers, and bloggers all blatantly lie. It’s truly shameless. The government was never going to shut down–a budget proposal to extend the deadline had been in the works for weeks. But major outlets are not going to report that because they literally profit off of the panic of the public. The longer you scroll, the more ads you see, the more money they make. It’s a joke.

Also, a moment of truth: if you call your Congresman and rant about how awful the new healthcare bill is for fifteen minutes and rudely accuse all the interns of trying to kill your grandmother–it’s still just going to be put into a spreadsheet as “vote no for HR1628.” That’s all. So save yourself some time and breath and simply say, “Please vote no on HR1628.” There’s no need to be nasty, no matter how strongly you feel about an issue. Tone won’t change the result.

An increased disillusionment with the media is probably my biggest takeaway. Seeing the discrepancy between what is actually happening at the Capitol and what’s being reported is just staggering.

On a lighter note, I flew into New York today and I’m going to start working with a textile company tomorrow. I’m pretry excited about it, but like I said, I think I’ve peaked. There’s no way it’ll be as cool as the House was.