Red on Blue: Removing the A from Apolitical

Item: Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) will suspend its donations to lawmakers who opposed the Electoral College count after rioters stormed the Capitol building. 

     Friends and fans of Red Emma, teaching colleagues and union comrades and supportive community activists, will know that your favorite anarcho-syndicalist all-purpose resister enjoys the benefits of a brain shunt (well, not exactly enjoys) courtesy of his spouse’s union’s work to secure high-quality health insurance and benefits for SOCCCD instructors and their kin. Of course, anybody living in the reality-based public health policy world supports socialized medicine but for the moment I’ll ignore that problem and doff my implant to both the IVC/Saddleback Faculty Association and Blue Shield. Red’s brain works, memory intact, with digits and limbs doing their busy work of teaching via Zoom, typing this screed, hanging up anti-Trump posters, joining Black Lives Matter and union protests, playing the violin, and more.
     (You could wonder why it took so long for BCBSA to arrive at this incredibly easy, obvious suspension of support for members of a party which long ago abandoned even pretend commitments to reality. I stopped wondering decades ago.)
     Meanwhile, resetting the dial on my shunt helps me recall a singular and vivid moment. When the SOCCCD was run by a gang of racist reactionaries (including my current County Supervisor) and a Holocaust denier, Rebel Girl and Red Emma delivered a polite, thoughtful letter to the management of their otherwise excellent credit union asking its leadership to take a position. Against, of course.
     Thousands of K-12, community college, UC and CSU employee/members and their families looked, we argued, to the leadership of the people who held their mortgages, provided them services, blah blah blah. As in: Why not exercise some easy, obviously available political courage? Old-timers will recall that what is now Schools First then went by the clumsy if amusing acronym OCTFCU (fun to try to say), the Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union.

Frogue

     The mild-mannered mid-level manager who met with us, accepted our letter and likely wondered at the actions of a couple of precocious if terrifically attractive young IVC teachers had never, ever been asked to do a “political” thing in his administrative position and, of course, told us that he was not in a position (pun intended, or not) and that despite all its good works (charities, scholarships, etc.), the credit union would of course not – no spoiler alert necessary! – join the community campaign to remove anti-Semite, fan of the Confederacy and nut job Steven Frogue from public office, thus declining to affirm the values of democracy and community and, well, reality.
     Times change. No, strike that. People (activists, teachers, elected officials, students, college presidents) change the times – and also everyday political policies once deemed apolitical or unconnected to the everyday. Thanks, Blue Shield. Wasn’t that easy? Red is now committed to asking many more public and private institutions including financial, industrial, and commercial to take up the cross and the shield, as it were. Marriot and Shopify and others seem to be joining the campaign. I plan to write thank-you letters to both my insurer and to the famous hotel chain. Maybe some Dissent the Blog reader will tell me what Shopify is. Just writing it makes my shuntify have to pumpify that much harder. –RE

See also The Best of Red Emma on DtB (1998-2000): Giving war a bad name