Posts Tagged ‘Sebastian Gray
Why persistence matters when facing down Corporate America – by Sebastian Gray, for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
In a previous letter to you I talked about the ordeal I went through getting my ex-partner David’s hospital bills paid by his company’s insurance company after he was injured on the job a few years ago. I offered this personal anecdote as an example of how to fight back at Corporate America when it’s in the wrong, but think it’s important to tell you and your readers more of the story to illustrate how important persistence is in dealing with large corporations that require time and relentless commitment before your message finally sinks in.
This is all, of course, pursuant to the ongoing boycott of David Letterman’s sponsors in relation to the jokes he made on June 8th and June 9th about the hypothetical statutory rape of 14 year-old Willow Palin by 33 year-old Alex Rodriguez during the seventh inning stretch of the Yankees game the minor child Palin daughter attended with her mother, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Today, we learned that The Olive Garden, Hellmann’s Mayo, and Embassay Suites are the first three advertisers to pull their support for David Letterman and his brutalization of young women in such sexist, misogynistic, and vulgar terms. Letterman offered up a weak “apology” riddled with excuses and justifications for his odious behavior (which in my book doesn’t amount to an apology at all — the way David’s mother, Louella, my ex-mother-in-law, used to apologize for the various terrible things she routinely did to me by saying, “Well, I’m sorry if you found that offensive, BUT…”). The moonbats, Obots, and trolls then came out in full force chanting, “it’s over! He said he’s sorry! Move on!” just when the tide’s turning and both Corporate America and Letterman’s handlers realize they’ve got a big problem on their hands.
The same thing happened to me in the three month letter-writing war I waged against what I’ll call the Mutual Benefit Insurance Company and David’s employer at the time, a retail giant I’ll call Boxco: just when we started to make some traction and get concessions out of Mutual Benefit and Boxco, Louella started telling David we should just give up, because we were never going to win, and were spending so much money on postage. ”Besides,” Louella concern-trolled to David, “Mutual Benefit offered to pay 25% of the bills, and that’s better than nothing.” I reminded Louella that paying 100% of the bills was better than settling for 25%, and Louella scoffed, “Well, if YOU can get THEM to pay 100% of David’s bills then I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
More like a cankerous and stinky baboon’s butt, in my opinion, but you see what I had to deal with for three years while living with David and being part of a relationship that including not just he and I, but also a very opinionated, perpetually wrong septugenarian long distance back in Richmond Heights, Ohio.
David’s hospital bills were $15,000, after having a seizure while at work operating some computer equipment, then cracking his head open on a work station as he fell to the floor and was knocked unconcious. His supervisor made the decision to call 911 before David regained consciousness, and he was in the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (the most expensive in downtown Chicago, while other more affordable options were available) before he ever came to. From there, he was whisked through a dozen different MRIs and CAT-scans, racking up a bill in the thousands. The doctors decided, after a few hours, that those initial scans were all inconclusive, so they scheduled him for another round of scanning over the next two days, requiring him to rack up the majority of his hospital bill in what amounts to one of the world’s most expensive hotels.
David’s work called me, as I was his emergency contact person, and mercifully Northwestern gave me no trouble for being David’s male partner: I was allowed to see him, consult with his doctors, and make decisions about his care the same way I would have if we were a heterosexual couple instead of two gay men. David’s mother meddled in all of this from afar, the same way she would have, undoubtedly, if we were a heterosexual couple as well (and instead of being the unctious cartoon Louella, she was Pearl Slaghoople, or some equally cartoonish derivation thereof). Louella was 80% of the reason David stayed in the hospital as long as he did, while both he and I decided he was fine to go home (and that the hospital was just trying to rack up a bigger bill). David listened to Louella, however, and thus began the $15,000 battle.
And let me tell you, the hospital wasted no time in billing David. His injury happened on a Monday, and he was in the hospital until 330pm on Wednesday (we later found out that if he had been released at 259pm he would have only been billed for half a day on Wednesday, instead of the whole day that he was charged…which I’m SURE was just a coincidence). By Friday, we had the first of the many bills that arrived, with each doctor and specialist billing David separately.
Being a project manager, I just handled the process the way I would a landscape or construction project I worked on: treating each doctor as a subcontractor and bundling all their invoices into a binder as I began prep to fight this case. Also in project management mode, I spent hours at the library researching governing statutes and used a friend’s LexisNexis login to bone up on governing statutes and relevent precedents covering worker’s compensation and employees being seriously injured on the job, through no fault of their own, while operating work machinary in the course of their normal job duties.
I found at least three cases where various workers had seizures while operating work machines and somehow injured themselves, resulting in trips to the hospital after employer’s called ambulances. Just like David’s case. In all these instances, including one that happened at a bakery and another in an office where the machine in question was a computer, the employee’s medical bills were 100% covered by worker’s comp — just as David’s should have been.
Because, not being able to afford insurance at the time (and not being covered by my insurance in Illinois because this state does not require employers to treat two male partners like two heterosexual spouses), if given a choice, David would have either gone to the cheapest hospital he could find or would have gone to an Urgi-care center or Minute Clinic to get another opinion before committing to spending thousands of dollars on tests that ended up all being “inconclusive” (which, to me, still suggests the hospital believed all along those tests were doing nothing more than helping to pay for the new 128-bit GE CT-scanner that cost Northwestern a bundle).
The insurance company started denying David’s claim as soon as the bills started coming, and the very day a denial of payment would come in I’d use everything I researched to hit back, refuting everything the insurance company said. I quoted directly from both case law and federal/state statutes to show Mutual Benefit and Boxco why, precisely, they were wrong in denying this claim — further pointing out that under federal law both companies could make themselves open to civil suit on our part for willfully, capriciously, and arbitrarily denying a valid worker’s compensation claim and, thus, adding more needless stress to an injured worker.
Essentially, that law’s in there to prevent behemoths like Mutual Benefit from denying, denying, denying claims until an injured worker is bankrupt, homeless, or dead and the insurance company never has to pay out on its claim. If a claim is deemed valid by the worker’s compensation board — which David’s was, in all three hearings that were held — and a company just keeps denying it without substantive reason, the penalties were something like thousands of dollars for each act of capricious denial.
And there I was, keeping track of all those instances, writing a letter a day right up the bureaucratic chains at Mutual Benefit and Boxco. First, I wrote to just David’s claim supervisor, Maryann…and after I realized the game she was playing, I figured out who her supervisor was, and who that person’s regional manager was. Every letter I wrote I copied to two people above the person i was writing to — so that not only would the recipient realize I meant business, but she or he would wonder what those in the regional office were saying about what was going on in that department.
I just kept writing and writing and writing, with another letter of denial coming every day.
And every time I wrote, I included copies of all the letters I wrote beforehand as well.
Our living room became an assembly line for these letters. I had stacks and stacks of paper, all piled neatly, always ready to go. When I’d finish a new letter, I’d print out 30 copies, then work the assembly line to include copies of all the paperwork before it, with CC: to the entire C-suite at both Mutual Benefit and Boxco.
Then, I moved onto the Boards of Directors of both companies…and then I started CC-ing the local media in all the cities where these companies had offices. Of course, I was also copying the state and federal worker’s comp and labor department officials on all of this too.
Towards the end of the three months it took to get all of David’s medical bills paid, I had two pages of CC-ed people on each letter. I think the last batch of letters we sent out had 50 people copied on it.
Now, not everyone got every letter even if they were copied on it — that’s a little trick I pulled on Mutual Benefit. I would ALWAYS copy certain important people, like David’s claims supervisor and the CEOs of the companies, but then I’d pick 5 out of all the people I CC-ed to send actual packets to. Since I was mailing packets every day, I’d typically hit everyone on the list with at least one packet, so if they were in communication with one another, someone was always receiving SOMETHING. I just made it look like they were all getting every packet.
Just to make these people realize that the letter writing was never going to stop unless they did what they were supposed to do and paid David’s medical bills in full.
I also kept track of what I spent on the printing and postage of all the correspondence to convince them to do what they were supposed to do anyway, because as I understood the law if these people willfully, capriciously, and arbitrarily denied David’s claims and forced us to spend so much out of our own pocket to get them to do what they were supposed to do anyway, they should reimburse us.
Despite Louella every day saying I needed to just give up and accept the 25%, then 50%, then 75% that Mutual Benefit offered to pay of the medical bills, I held out for 100% payment (and ultimately received that, with a $1,000 settlement to cover our costs incurred in the investigation and resolution of this claim).
Louella wanted us to give up at 25% and kept telling David it was hopeless.
I knew we weren’t done yet, and that we had to be persistent.
Louella wanted us to give up at 50% and kept telling David I just needed to shut up.
I knew we weren’t done yet, and that it takes weeks before Corporate America takes anyone seriously.
Louella wanted us to give up at 75% and kept telling David that “Mutual Benefit is sorry, just tell him to move on to something else, that obsessive little French f***” (which is what she often called me).
I knew if we just kept up the assembly line that Mutual Benefit and Boxco would soon do whatever it took to stop the letters from coming.
And I was right.
So, I tell you this to remind everyone that David Letterman’s advertisers will indeed desert him, but the pressure must be kept on them to do so. It’s been about 9 days since Letterman made his vulgar “joke” about the statutory rape of Willow Palin by Alex Rodriguez. In just 9 days three major sponsors have abandoned Letterman.
Just imagine what his sponsorship deals will look like after 18 days…27 days…a full 30 days.
Maybe you can convince Mars Candy, Kelloggs, and Johnson + Johnson to drop him like Olive Garden, Hellmann’s, and Embassy Suites did.
I bet at least one of those will dump Letterman before 30 days is out.
But, the real victory will never fully be known because no matter how many sponsors actually drop Letterman publicly, the ad execs will surely use 30 days’s worth of boycott letters to negotiate much-reduced ad rates from CBS in the future. So you could be hurting Letterman in ways you will never understand, just by standing up against this leftist political activist and showing Madison Avenue and the CBS execs that he can’t get away with this misogyny anymore.
So, I remind you that nothing good has ever come from listening to trolls and Louellas. They either don’t know what they are talking about, or they want you to fail, for whatever reason. They also smell bad, have horrific teeth, and are twice-divorced publicly shamed adulteresses who live in glass houses and throw a lot of stones (at least in the case of my Slaghoople former mother-in-law, anyway).
Keep the pressure up, and see for yourself that determination and perseverence pay off big time in the end.
Sebastian Gray,
Chicago Illinois
The REAL difference between Democrats and Republicans: Dems know how to work the system – by Sebastian Gray for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
The other night I had dinner with my friend Jessie, where we talked about her applying to law school and how best to structure her application essay to maximize its appeal to the “We Are the World”-styled admissions committee (which, at every university or college, has to be “as diverse as possible”, with a Hispanic, a black, an Asian, a Native American, someone in a turban, a Romulan, a Muppet, conjoined twins, either a flaming gay man or a very angry lesbian (but not both), you name it, on the panel, with as few old straight white men as logistically possible). Jessie’s a Republican, and when I read her first essay draft, it was a standard well-written paragraphed resume of her professional accomplishments — which is what I’d expect a Republican to submit. But, the United Nations of Political Correctness empowered to decide who gets in and who doesn’t at these schools doesn’t care so much about accomplishments as it’s completely obsessed with NARRATIVE.
Liberal (and let’s be honest, almost 100% Democrat) admissions committees don’t want to hear about your running your own fashion design company, surviving as best you can in an adverse marketplace and tough economy. They want to hear about your growing up poor, being abused as a child, overcoming some personal hardship related to your race, gender, sexual preferance, or religion, and essentially seeing how well you manipulate society’s violin on your shoulder, beggar’s cup in hand system.
Jessie, in the middle of dinner, took a call from her mother and told her she was at dinner with me, and then both she and her mother laughed about something that Jessie explained to me once she told her mom she’d call her back.
“I told her I was out tonight with my friend Sebastian, who she doesn’t believe is real because she always hears about but has never met on any of her visits up from Texas. And she said, “Oh, you need to listen to him about law school. I remember what you said he told you, ‘Listen, I’m a lifelong Democrat, and as a lifelong Democrat I know how to work the system while Republicans don’t have the first clue in Hell.’ That is so true.” Remember that?”
Of course I remember that because it’s true.
As a lifelong Democrat, I’m frequently perplexed by some of the behavior of all the Republican friends I made during the McCain/Palin campaign when those of us here at HillBuzz led Democrats for McCain efforts with our whole heart and soul.
Republicans give up so damn easy at just about everything.
That’s surprising to me, because on the whole, Republicans I know tend to have a lot more money than my Democrat friends, so maybe they have more fortitude when it comes to spreadsheets than they do with front line action in the real world.
But it does jive with what Michael Steele said to me a few months back when I met him here in Chicago, and he talked about how Republicans don’t bother thinking about an election until they are almost right upon it, and then the day after the victory party, no matter what the result, they completely forget about politics, organizing, lobbying, you name it until two or four years later when they hobble together an effort again.
Democrats never stop campaigning.
The day after an election, we gear up for the next contest.
If you tell a Democrat “no” to something, we immediately think of (1) how to appeal, (2) who we know that can turn that no into an insta-yes, and (3) what government agencies we can involve to make you do what we want.
Have a problem? The government will fix it. But you just need patience to work the system, and have to invest yourself in writing letters every day until you get what you want, appearing in public with a bunch of signs and recruiting people to stand outside nondescript buildings or busy street corners in the middle of the day screaming and yelling about whatever it is you are mad about.
I can’t even tell you the number of times one of my Democrat friends have called me up and asked, “Hey, can you come down at 11am tomorrow and dress up in a clown suit and dance around in front of the county building because I want to protest the clowns inside who wouldn’t renew my driver’s license.”
Sure!
Because this is what Democrats do. This is what Al Sharpton, the biggest clown in all of clown town, is a childish prodigy at.
And Republicans haven’t a clue.
The reason Al Sharpton can get Don Imus fired in a few days is because Democrats, especially black Democrats, increase the pressure on corporations, in particular, every day that they do not get what they want. Whenever the Al Sharpton call for race-baiting goes out, and the black community joyfully screams RAAAAAAAAAAAAACIST! over a cartoon that wasn’t even about the current president (but was about the idiots in Congress), or Sharpton alleges someone didn’t get a job because that person is BLAAAAAAAAACK!, or threatens anarchy because policemen shot a black youth with a gun who would have killed the cops, every day more and more people in the black community come on board and create a festival atmosphere to the protest.
Democrats see this as fun, while Republicans see protests as an alien annoyance: something that must be done because the situation at hand is so bad, but not something they would want to be seen reveling in.
Democrats have no problem whatsoever with such revelry, and they know the more noise they make, the faster they will get what they want.
Take David Letterman for example, and the vile joke he made about statutory rape this week. Letterman said, on 6/8/09, that the Palin daughter attending the Yankees game was “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez. The only Palin daughter at that game was 14 year-old Willow Palin. The joke could not have been about the oldest Palin daughter, as Letterman weakly claimed yesterday, two days after the perverse “joke” aired, because Bristol Palin was thousands and thousands of miles away from the baseball game Letterman was talking about. The joke about the baseball game and the forcible impregnation Letterman claims happened there makes no sense if it’s not indeed about the Palin daughter who was actually in the proximity of Yankees player A-Rod.
Now, the MSM is trying to spin this for Letterman, and all the usual suspects are out there defending him, including Joy Behar on The View and the White House propaganda team that is MSNBC, CNN, etc.
Republicans will let them get away with this spin, I’m sure; Al Sharpton would only scream louder and drown this spin out.
To be honest, there probably wouldn’t even be any spin at all if this was an instance of the black community calling someone a RAAAAAAACIST! Because they are so vocal, so well-organized, and so persistent, “explanations” like the one Letterman delivered on his show last night are never even allowed.
If this whole episode involved the current President’s daughters, Malia and Sasha (just three years younger than Willow, FYI), Letterman would not be able to claim he was talking about “some other daughter” or “someone else”. If Letterman made any sort of joke that Sharpton et al could construe as RAAAAAAACIST, he would indeed most likely be forced into early retirement because CBS and its advertisers know the black community, and Democrats who support and enable them, never, ever gives up.
Republicans, I’ve noticed, might get riled up about something for a day or so, and then they say, “there are more important things to talk about” or “I have other things I have to do now”.
Democrats never have other things to do, and seldom think anything’s more important than whatever’s right in front of them.
And I AM A LIFELONG DEMOCRAT TELLING YOU THIS.
Boycotts, letter writing campaigns, protests, this is totally what I am all about, because this is what I was always taught as a child to do whenever I felt someone wronged me or someone I care about.
And. I. Love. The. Palins.
Sarah, Todd, Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and most of all, Lil’ Trig. You mess with any of these people and I respond emotionally, channeling that anger into action by way of mental and muscle memory recalling all of the protests and various campaigns I’ve been involved in since childhood.
In grade school, at a Democrat Catholic School in Cleveland, we used to write letters every week in class to various companies complaining about their use of styrofoam or whatever that was bad for the environment. In high school, my Democrat teachers had me write similar letters to various companies arguing against their support for various political candidates we didn’t believe in or other causes my teachers didn’t like. College, grad school, DITTO.
Southwest Airlines left my friend Mary’s suitcase on the tarmac on a 95-degree day, so all of her cosmetics melted and ruined absolutely everything in the bag. Being a good, make no trouble Republican with better things to do, Mary called Southwest, got frustrated when they wouldn’t pay for her bag (since their excuse was, “we didn’t lose it, Ma’am, because you admit you have it. It’s not our fault your luggage melted. That’s never happened before”), and just decided to give up, “because I have better things to do. Here if you think you can make them budge, then you have a go at it”.
It took me two weeks, but I got everything in that bag covered by Southwest, including the bag itself, and a free flight for her trouble.
And all I did was write three letters to everyone on Southwest’s Board of Directors and the entire C-suite. I stayed professional and polite, but kept hitting Southwest with the facts, including the inconvenient truth that Mary looked out the plane’s window and saw her bag just sitting there on the tarmac — where it was removed from the loading trolley by a Southwest employee so he could sit on it like a chair while he waiting for some problem to be fixed so he could load the plane’s cargo on board. Mary knew the truth: that Southwest’s employee did something he was not supposed to do, forgot about her bag, and nothing inside would have melted if not for that.
What Mary didn’t do was press her case enough. She just gave up at the first puff of resistance. She kept complaining, of course, but didn’t want to really do anything about it.
And that’s what I see in Republicans in general. Sure, they’ll go to Redstate.com, Ace of Spade, or Michelle Malkin and complain about Democrat activists like Lettterman getting away with brutal attacks on women, but do they do anything about it? Maybe they make a few calls one day…maybe they write a letter…but they don’t understand that working the system requires persistence…and that every day that goes by with thousands and thousands and thousands of letters flooding into Mars Candy, The Olive Garden, Kelloggs, Hellman’s Mayo, and Letterman’s other advertisers dramatically increases the pressure for the executives at those companies to cut their losses and dump their Letterman ad buys.
It will take a month to really hurt David Letterman — a month of sustained letter writing and calling to every one of his advertisers letting them know that their decision to stand with Letterman means they support the notion that statutory rape of a 14 year-old girl is “funny”, and that later calling this same 14 year-old girl “one of Eliot Spitzer’s prostitutes” is also funny.
Liberals count on elephants never changing their spots.
Maybe Republicans, like their mascot, can’t actually do such a thing.
But, it’s hilarious for me to coach my new Republican friends like Jessie on things like the law school admissions process because they hang on my every word as if I’m speaking in tongues, amazed at the actual strategy that goes with consistently getting what you want from the system. “Gosh,” Jessie admitted, “here I would have just taken no as a no, and not appealed, or I would have talked about what I actually did instead of WHO I AM, which is the narrative those people really do want to hear.”
And if you don’t believe that’s the case, you didn’t pay any attention to whom these liberals voted for in 2008 and whom they want on the Supreme Court in 2009: it is about the narrative people, and persistence, persistence, persistence.
Yes, it is an absolute pain in the neck to sit at a computer and write letters to corporate America every day. It must also be a giant pain in the neck to be Al Sharpton, and have to wake up every day screaming and yelling, crying and wailing, about something.
But, look how successful Al Sharpton is. And I got into every law school I applied to a few years ago. Unlike my Republican friends, I didn’t have the money to actually go, but I got in to really great schools, because I knew how the system worked and instead of living in the dream world of “that’s not how it should be” I played the hand these schools deal.
So, I’m interested to see how long Republicans can keep the pressure up on The Olive Garden, Mars Candy, and Kelloggs in particular. Losing those three big accounts will make CBS apoplectic. I think it’s a valuable lesson to both CBS and Letterman personally to see how many advertisers drop him if we keep this pressure up for 30 days. To my knowledge, Republicans have never stayed focused on anything that long, losing interest in protesting after a day or two, and then probably going off to play golf.
Meanwhile, on the blue side of the aisle, we continue to be busy, busy, little letter-writing bees…with the busiest and buzziest being Sharpton, a man we personally find as repugnant as Letterman (but for different reasons), but a man no one here could ever claim was not effective.
The advertisers will all buckle in the end…but it will take a few weeks for them to stop listening to CBS’s line that “this will all blow over, just watch”.
If you take this opportunity to use Democrats’ favorite tricks against them and you don’t let this blow over, Republicans could very well be surprised to learn a whole new set of tools to get what they want from the MSM and liberal elite. Jessie sure was surprised to have a glimpse of how things are done on my side of the aisle — you can be pleasantly surprised like that too.
But first you have to work hard to get there.
And say what you want about Sharpton, and he probably deserves most if not all of it, but the man sure does work HARD at whatever he’s up to that day.
Sebastian Gray
Chicago, IL
How to write to corporate America – by Sebastian Gray, for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
Like the rest of you here, I’m disgusted by the “jokes” David Letterman has made this week about the New York Yankees raping Willow Palin and impregnating her on the recent trip her mother gave her to see a ballgame in the new Yankee Stadium.
In New York state, sex with a 14 year-old is statutory rape: by “joking” that certain Yankees players “knocked Willow Palin up”, Letterman is, by definition of young Willow’s age, “joking” about her being raped.
And that’s in addition to Letterman “joking” about Willow being used by former Governor Eliot Spitzer as one of his prostitutes.
The only way to put a stop to these sort of “jokes” by Letterman is to channel Al Sharpton and mimic his best tactics and techniques. If you notice, whenever Sharpton believes the black community is being attacked in any way (whether he is right, or whether he is just race-baiting), he INSTANTLY calls for an economic boycott of everyone involved — and exerts immense pressure on corporate America to force whatever he wants.
I’ll be helping to write letters to David Letterman’s top three advertisers, once we know for sure who those are, by ad volume and gross revenue each year. We should know that shortly, so I can give your readers specific examples of what I write when I need to hit corporate America where it hurts most.
A few years ago, my ex, David, was injured at work, knocked unconscious, and taken to the most expensive hospital in Chicago, Northwestern Memorial, by an ambulance his company called for him. It was a CLEAR worker’s comp claim, as he was knocked unconscious on a work machine, at his work station. While he was incapacitated, his company made the decision to seek medical treatment for him — David was uninsured, could not afford healthcare, and the company’s decisions resulted in him receiving over $15,000 worth of treatment. He was held for three days in the hospital, after receiving numerous CAT-scans, MRIs, you name it, all to determine whether or not he had a concussion.
Now, David had barely $700 in the bank. There’s no way he could have paid a $15,000 hospital bill. The insurance company representing his company denied his claim, and tried to fight the worker’s compensation case. It’s a personal story, so I’ll omit the details, but I can say that I spent many, many hours in law libraries and going to every federal and state agency I could think of here in Chicago to gather the information I needed to wage a three month letter writing war with the insurance company. They denied the claim again and again, but each time I got a letter back from them with another denial, I sent a new letter back refuting their latest excuse, with copies of all my previous letters in the increasingly large envelopes as well.
Not only that, but each letter received at least two more people CC-ed on the full packet. So, letters that first started going only to the claim administrator assigned to David now went to that person’s supervisor, and the supervisor above that person, and so on, all the way to the CEO. After that, I filled out the whole C-suite, copying the CFO, COO, CIO, etc. Then came the board of directors and all the major media outlets both in Chicago and also in the cities where the insurance company had offices. Finally, in the last few weeks of letter writing, I also started copying low-level company employees on the letters to the point where I was sending out packets to basically everyone I could think of who worked for the insurance giant — so embarrassing them that after 3 months not only did they pay David’s claim in full, but we also got an extra $1,000 “Settlement” to cover what we spent on postage and mailings to get these people’s attention.
If you want to get through to corporate America, this is the mindset your readers need to have: they will resist you, and try to ignore you, and most definitely laugh at you in their boardrooms…but if you are persistent and you keep writing them, and writing them, and writing them, then you will ultimately scare the living daylights out of them.
Because most Americans are lazy.
Some will complain or fight a denial received in the mail, but 90% won’t. MAYBE they’ll write one letter. But, few will write two. And absolutely NO ONE writes what amounts to a letter a day, mailed to everyone of any importance at a corporation, with the correspondence building and building and building.
To be honest, I didn’t even send out packets to EVERYONE on the CC list. When the list got to over 50 names, I was probably sending packets to maybe 5 of the 50 cc-ed with each letter. I’d always send one to the claims administrator, the CEO, and the execs overseeing the particular Illinois branch office that denied the claim. But, then I’d just keep them guessing as to WHICH of the 50 people all around the country received a CC of that particular packet.
Sometimes, towards the end, I’d send out two mailings a day.
Until I won, and David’s bills were paid.
You do not mess with my man and get away with it.
Not. On. My. Watch.
And you don’t get away with joking about rape, either. I have several friends who endured this — and I’ll tell all of you now, though it’s hard for me to talk about, that I was date-raped once just a few years ago myself by someone much bigger than me who just wouldn’t take no for an answer (and then passed out drunk afterwards and pretended the next morning that he had no idea what he did). So, rape’s not funny.
EVER.
But ESPECIALLY when it’s statutory rape being joked about involving a 14 year-old and a professional baseball player.
We all make decisions where we spend our money, especially in these brutal economic times. That applies to corporations as well. If I ever walked into a restaurant, no matter how much I love the place, and heard the proprietor joking about raping a 14 year-old, I would let my feet express my opinion on that business and the person in charge of it. NEVER AGAIN would that vile pig receive a cent from me — even if it had previously been my favorite place in the world. Even if everyone I do business with eats there and boycotting that place would cost me business. I would rather be homeless and eating out of the garbage than doing business in a place that’s run by HUMAN GARBAGE.
So, my advice to you and your readers is:
(1) to find the three biggest advertisers Letterman has
(2) focus on advertisers having anything to do with children
(3) identify the entire C-suite of both the advertiser and that particular agency making the commercials
(4) write to every single person on the list you make above at least once a day, and do your level best to fill up their voice mails with POLITE and PROFESSIONAL (no expletives) chastisement on a personal level for giving any pennies to keep that vile pig Letterman on the air
(5) use the Internet to post on every site imaginable the fact that M&M Mars, for instance, sells candy that promotes rape. Talk about how buying peanut M&Ms helps encourage the statutory rape of 14 year-olds in New York. Make a list of all the products made by M&M Mars and send that to every church group, daycare center, high school, etc. that you can find (with copies to the entire C-suite and exec board in (3) above) telling parents that purchasing any of these products puts money into the pocket of a pervert who promotes the rape of young girls like their daughters
(6) Once your boycotts are organized on the local levels, have teams in all cities contact their local news and tell them about what you are doing…invite the news to come out and watch you picket in front of grocery stores (once you obtain the public gathering permits, if needed, of course) to encourage fellow shoppers to boycott all M&M Mars products until they yank their ads from Letterman…in smaller cities, this would be a big news item, as there is often nothing to report in Mineral City, Ohio on days that cats have not gotten stuck in trees
M&M Mars will buckle and pull its support — in about a month, I would guess. Just like Kellogg’s yanked its sponsorship of Michael Phelps once he made headlines not for strokes in the pool, but tokes on his marijuana bong. M&M Mars cannot afford to sell the candies parents could quickly associate with rape.
And there is absolutely no defense of Letterman possible in this instance. Ultimately, Letterman will come out and claim that he MEANT to make fun of Bristol Palin, not Willow, and that some low-level writer made a mistake and ASSUMED it was Bristol, not Willow, on the New York trip. Most likely, that’s what CBS will hide behind…that the made fun of the wrong daughter, and were most likely intending to make fun of the oldest Palin daughter being forcibly impregnated, not the Palin’s middle daughter, young Willow.
But, CBS is in a bigger mess than they realize right now.
It was indeed 14 year-old Willow, not 18 year-old Bristol, that David Letterman stood in front of the camera and talked about a New York Yankee, grown man, baseball player impregnating — in what is statutory rape in every state of the union, from what i understand.
There’s no way out of this.
Don Imus was fired for much, much less. David Letterman should be fired, too.
Will that happen? I don’t believe so…as Letterman is more of an institution than Imus ever was.
But, CBS is in real trouble right now. Katie Couric just clocked the lowest ratings for a news broadcast on American television in HISTORY. Ad revenues are down everywhere, and once a month when Dr. Utopia gets on the TV and commandeers primetime for one of his ego trip national addresses, the networks lose tens of millions of dollars.
CBS cannot afford to lose M&M Mars or any two other large advertisers. If you direct all of your firepower at three big players like this, all selling products to families, and you heed my advice above, SOMETHING will happen before a month is out. You just have to put a little Al Sharpton in your life, be persistent, and write, write, write.
I’m enlisting everyone I know here in Chicago to help with this, on both sides of the aisle. Robby’s asking his mom and her Coffee Club friends down in Mineral City to do the same (and those ladies love nothing more than to write letters to strangers all day mad about something). I’d also suggest finding senior citizens who are retired and cranky in general to help write letters too, as it would give them something important and fun to do.
Anyone who thinks it’s wrong to EVER joke about rape, consider yourself drafted.
Anyone who is sickened by the thought of a 62 year old pervert getting off chuckling over statutory rape, consider this your chance to get off your butt and do something about it.
Corporations that advertise on CBS’ nightly pigfest, The Late Show With David Letterman, consider yourself on notice, and pray you have enough interns in the mail room, becuase if I have anything to say about it, THERE IS A MIGHTY HEAP OF MAIL COMING YOUR WAY.
Sebastian Gray
Chicago, Illinois
May You Live Always In Interesting Times – By Sebastian Gray, for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
Yesterday, my good friend Jessie took the LSAT, after cramming and kvetching and absolutely driving herself crazy studying day and night for the last several months (“The outside world doesn’t even exist right now, and won’t exist again until after June 8th and this test is over”). For the last ten years or so, Jessie’s had her own design label, making couture dresses here in Chicago, running her shop out of her apartment not far from us in Boystown (a beaded, bedazzled, and fabric-strewn Project Runway in exile if ever we’ve laid eyes upon one…Tim Gunn eat his heart out). But, like many small businesses in the last few years, Jessie saw the embroidery on the taffeta after two disappointing years of lackluster profits and knows her business will go under soon (“Honey, when I can’t even sell at huge discounts to drag queens delivering Pie Hole on Tuesday nights, at a time when the First Lady of the United States is in bad Jason Wu drag most of the time, I know I’m one commercial break from an economic Auf Wiedersehn”). Several months ago, Jessie had to lay off her assistant and intern…and soon she’ll have to vote herself off fashion’s sinking island as well.
Hope! Change! How’s that unicorn working out for you, too?
On Election Night last year, I’ll never forget sitting next to Jessie at the Chicago Young Republicans’ event at the Hilton Towers, watching the Kool-Aid Gang carrying on across the street in Grant Park for Dr. Utopia’s victory celebration (all huddled together bleary-eyed, staring blankly into the bright lights, like they were waiting for Gozer the Gozerian to appear on stage as the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man to devour all their souls and open the ancient Sumerian portal to Hell, instead awaiting Dr. Utopia’s victory speech in his most resplendent Quinn the Eskimo mode). Jessie, in a moment of pained clarity, just said, “Well, that’s it for my business. Because if the economy didn’t kill it already, this man and his Alinsky recipe for socialism damn will.” We had all the windows open and could hear the crowd below roaring and screaming, with the network reporters on all the channels positively giddy about the ushering in of The Golden Age of Hope and Change. Jessie stared straight ahead and shed a few tears knowing full well what was ahead for all of us.
There I was, a Democrat, with a few of us from HillBuzz and Team Hillary joining our new Republican friends, knowing full well we did everything we could to stop the disaster we knew was coming under Dr. Utopia — but realizing we weren’t strong enough to effectively counter all the Kool-Aid drunk, screaming fools below.
Jessie decided that, since she’s not going to make it running her small business anymore, she should go to law school — as people for years have said to her, quite correctly, “And you didn’t go to law school, WHY?“. I talk about the women who I admire most in this world, and Hillary Clinton always comes out at the very top, for waking up each morning and putting her whole heart and soul into everything she does, win, lose, or draw. If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the fire and determination Clinton showed on the campaign trail, particularly that night outside Pittsburgh when she belted out her very best campaign speech in the driving rain, defiant and empowered and full of fight. Well, that pretty much sums up Jessie any day of the week — whether she’s fighting to keep her business afloat, fighting to rally her friends in the CYRs to volunteer for the USO or the Special Olympics, trying her damndest to squeeze a Gold Coast debutante into hand-stitched couture evening wear, or whether she’s working hard to retrain herself to survive in the depression that’s coming (if it’s not already here already).
And I’m not talking about the kind that can be treated with paxil, zoloft, or endlessly repeating viewings of Josie and the Pussycats…I’m talking a second Great Depression that’s on its way to wipe out the last remnants of the gilded age we all took for granted the last few years.
I knew Jessie would be wiped out from taking the LSAT, so I wanted to surprise her with a small get-together of some of her friends from both sides of the aisle: CYRs, HillBuzzers, and friendly faces in general. Because I, too, am struggling to stay afloat in this economy, I’m spread really thin these days, taking a half dozen low-paying small projects all around town to make up for the two or three large gigs I’d typically have as a freelance project manager over the course of a year. Normally, I’d have the flexibility to manage my projects and still have time to squeeze in planning a fabulous fete for someone as special as Jessie, but this time I needed help, and I’m proud to say McCain/Palin once again taught me something about myself and what we all need to do to get along and stay afloat together.
A month or so ago, I had a serious falling out with a few people who backstabbed me pretty shamelessly, without so much as an apology (that I am still waiting for). My typical response to something like this is to just never speak to those people again, and to carry around that grudge forever (just like they’re a Kennedy, or an Edwards, or a Richardson, or a McCaskill). That’s more of the old me, the guy who also would never have been friends with a Republican, let alone planned a surprise party for one. But, the universe brought me the wrong French toast in 2008: in the general election, I worked hard alongside Republicans for the first time in my life and now count many Chicago Young Republicans, in particular, as good friends. I saw that when we’re all in a boat that’s sinking, it’s no time to hang onto grudges of the past, but instead it’s time to band together and set things right (and then, in 2012, hopefully elect a president who knows her way around an iceberg and how to get us out of this mess, you betcha).
So, I reached out to one of the people who backstabbed me, a guy named Warren who happens to be a very good friend of Jessie’s. I still don’t like Warren, and in fact, to be perfectly honest, I never much liked Warren and his too-old-to-be-kegging-frat-boy ilk to begin with. But, I knew Warren also wanted to see Jessie have a big celebration after all the hard work she put in — so I decided to put aside the issue I had with him (he stole a job that was promised to me, one that I had been laying the groundwork for, and then had the audacity to actually ask me how to do the job, since he didn’t have the slightest clue where to start) in the interest of the bigger picture.
I just didn’t have time to pull off the surprise without his help, and I knew damn well Jessie would NEVER in a million years think I was conspiring with Warren to plan anything, let alone a big surprise for her.
I can continue to dislike Warren, and his tendency to, when he’s not stealing jobs that should have been mine, get so drunk at parties and other events that he’s lucky someone doesn’t strip him down, stuff him into an always-at-the-ready bunny costume, and leave him passed out somewhere in Boystown, gift-wrapped for whatever Elmer Fudd should find him. Not that I have ever planned what I would do should that sort of opportunity ever arise, or anything.
But, celebrating Jessie was more important than whatever I had against Warren (and if you need help planning a party, a big drunk is a great place to start).
Just as America remains more important than most of what we as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents may have against one another politically…we need to put aside those old grudges for now, and continue to work together.
At Jessie’s party, there was a good mix of us from HillBuzz and Jessie’s fellow Republicans, all enjoying a giant table in Ping Pong eating General’s Chicken, Kung Pao Beef, and other delicious family-style Chinese dishes in the heart of Boystown, one big happy cohesive group feting one of our own for working so hard to set a new course for herself in life. Outside the windows, most of Boystown passed by in its usual whirl, oblivious to the presence of Republicans amongst them, or economic reality all around us all. No matter what else we can say about Election 2008 and its results, I still maintain the REAL Change! that happened last year was this bond that exists now between people who would have never, ever been friends or shared anything in common if not for our opposition to Dr. Utopia and his socialist agenda.
Those connections, unfortunately, continue to deepen as almost all of us now find ourselves in the same boat of either underemployment or unemployment itself. A year ago, this party for Jessie would have been held at a big steakhouse, with wine flowing freely and no expenses spared, but times are tough so it was a more restrained evening in a BYOB Chinese restaurant: we still had all the fun we would have had at three times the price, but what a difference a year does make. People with Master’s Degrees from top-ten schools have not been abe to find work in half a year. One friend got fired yesterday, in fact, and was told by her employer that she “might have Swine Flu, because she’s coughing and sniffling too much”; the employer, a wealthy woman in Wicker Park, apparently decided she could do without a decorator by instead finishing her re-do by herself, with Swine Flu a convenient MSM-supplied budget cutting and face-saving excuse (and you KNOW the economy’s in the tank when people use Swine Flu as your reason for termination).
Before the chocolate-dipped fortune cookies arrived at the end of the meal (served up on green and red ping-pong paddles in homage to the Boystown eatery’s name), I learned that all but four people at the table had canceled their cable, negotiated their cell phone bills down to almost nothing, and cut just about every extra special treat out of their lives. The women were almost all dying their own hair instead of dropping that money in salons; the men weren’t going out anymore, and were instead doing a lot of fishing for free on Lake Michigan and playing plenty of volleyball in the park instead of going to movies or taking any trips. Everyone’s rediscovering the bounty available in the public library, neglecting Borders or Amazon in favor of entertainment of the free variety. Those who own fabulous apartments with killer views have acquired, or are actively seeking, roommates to rent out what used to be an office or a workout room or a den; those of us who rent are counting the days until leases are up so they can downsize into something much, much more affordable with tomorrow so uncertain.
I shudder to imagine how bad things are in other circles if some of the best and the brightest in Chicago, some of the most successful and accomplished people I know, are all economizing this much, and are all having so much trouble finding jobs. My good friend Janelle just took a job paying about $25,000 less than she’s made in the last 15 years — and it’s an entry-level position about 3 levels below where she “should” be working at, because 300-400 people, at least, seem to be applying for every position out there. People overqualified for the job by miles applied to all the jobs Janelle would have normally taken, pushing her down the ladder to take an entry level slot people right out of college would have taken just two years ago (which means, recent college grads, welcome to McDonalds). ”It’s like I’m starting all over again at the bottom,” Janelle said, before reading the tiny strip of paper stuffed into her fortune cookie. ”May you live always in interesting times…”
“IN BED!” , everyone shouted.
I kept it to myself that this particular fortune is actually a head game played by the companies in New York City that produce most of the fortune cookies in America, because in China this doesn’t mean what Americans think it means at all: ”interesting times” is a relative term, not necessarily meaning “good times”, and having nothing whatsoever to do with any setup for fellow dinners to double-entendre by exclamation.
The Golden Age of Hope and Change certainly has been interesting these last six months.
But can any of us say it’s been good?
I would never wish interesting times like this on anyone, in or out of the bedroom. Not even on Warren, and I seriously want to stuff him into that bunny suit and leave his sorry ass on Halsted at last call.
But then I cracked open my own fortune and Fate smiled, because apparently I “will always be surrounded by true friends, even when (I) think (I) am not…”
“IN BED!”, came the shout again.
And that’s certainly something powerful to hang onto as each day all of us face one surprise after another as Dr. Utopia lurches this country closer towards socialism, and continues to destroy so much of what all of us have worked so hard for all of our lives. Unfortunately, the daily surprises are not the good kind, like walking into a room full of friends and plates of sweet and sour deliciousness after taking a grueling exam all day…but ultimately I hope we all collectively draw my favorite fortune from last night, or any night at all:
“This too shall pass…”
IN BED!
And hopefully everywhere else, in times far, far less interesting.
Sebastian Gray,
Chicago IL
Cinnamon Rolls Stapled to My Head — by Sebastian Gray, for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
A few years ago I went to a comic book convention with my friend Panda, who was there primarily to stalk the guy who played Xander on the defunct WB TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but was prepared to settle for chasing around any random guy dressed up as a red-caped, leather-diapered Spartan from the movie 300 (because Panda remains ever the pragmatist, in his celebrity stalking, if not his actual life). This was in Chicago, at one of the fancier hotels in the Loop, where I just happened to have event-managed several weddings, mitzvahs (both bar and bat), and, most proudly, a lesbian commitment ceremony with an Annie Oakley/Wild West Rodeo theme (where I scattered enough bales of hay on the parquet floors to make a crystal-chandelier-ed big city ballroom smell like the inside of an Oklahoma barn, complete with goats, chickens, piglets, and a giant cake shaped like a saddle that made it almost all the way through the evening before a goat ate one of its marzipan and fondant buckles, to, thankfully, the knee-slapping amusement of everyone). Backstage, the hotel’s service areas were a warren of twisting hallways, stairwells that went apparently nowhere, and random elevators joining a floor here and there haphazardly, the building remodeled and repurposed erratically over the last hundred or so years. “I think I brought pigs through here once,” I told Panda, in a long corridor stretching towards an apparent dead-end. “This stairwell knifing to the left goes all the way down to the ballroom level and a back bathroom where I washed farm animals off my hands for an hour while I waited for the hoot-a-nanny to start, so I think we can sneak in this way.”
Panda was beside himself with excitement, because my old catering experience found a way to slip passed the long lines queued up to meet people who played Romulans, Klingons, or Care Bears in various things through the years so he could get close enough to the Buffy actor to potentially trigger any court-ordered restraining orders that may well have been in effect (“That wasn’t Nicholas Brendan, I keep telling you, it was Joey from New Kids, but it wasn’t a restraining order, it was just that they won’t let me back on another New Kids cruise, and that’s really my friend Ashley’s fault anyway. I wouldn’t get back on a Carnival ship if you paid me, so that means I actually have a restraining order against THEM, not the other way around. I never really liked Joey McIntyre anyway either, so he can just STUFF IT”).
“I just want a picture to put up on Facebook of me and Nicholas so I can tell Ashley to STUFF IT,” Panda assured me. ”I won’t do anything you can complain about later or write about on the Internet, I promise”.
Panda promises a lot of things, to be honest, but there’s only so much of these celebrity-stalking adventures I can take before I need to wander off and leave Panda to whatever recycled I Love Lucy episode he’s destined to restage, without my being sucked into the role of Ethel. So, I left Panda in the first row of seats in the ballroom, waiting for a panel discussion on The Best Buffy Episode EVER, where Nicholas would appear, to explore the strange world of SciFi and comics fans gathered around little booths and folding tables pouring over memorabilia from hundreds of TV shows and movies, including a hefty amount of Star Wars paraphrenalia.
At one of these booths, a documentary played about the making of the original film, A New Hope, where Carrie Fisher talked about landing the role of Princess Leia, a job she really needed, then having to endure the bizarre cinnamon-roll hairstyle George Lucas personally designed for her. ”Oh, no George, I love it. It’s the most beautiful hairstyle I’ve ever seen,” Fisher said, remembering how at 19 she was so desperate to stay in the picture she pretended to love the ridiculous way she was dressed and styled for her adventure through space. But, really she hated those damn cinnamon-rolls — she just needed the job so much that she knew her pride didn’t matter.
These days, I think about that snippet of the Star Wars documentary I saw at that comic convention with Panda a lot, actually, as I’ve been forced to take on freelance projects I don’t particularly want, in an economy that’s brought an end to the days of lavish Annie Oakley/Wild West Rodeo lesbian commitment ceremonies and the lucrative event planning fees that went with them. It is a real struggle these days just to pay the bills, with so many people I know laid-off and facing the reality that they may very well have to leave Chicago, since the city’s suddenly become completely unaffordable to them. Instead of working on glamorous projects like public art dedications or fashion shows, I feel lucky to have any work on my plate at all, adjusting to the reality that more mundane project management assignments in the corporate world are things I need to be very grateful for at the moment.
On one of these assignments currently, I’m working on benchmarking data for a small private company whose CEO is an absolute ogre to deal with. He’s rude, ill-tempered, and berates his employees – most especially the freelancer (yours truly) brought in for the limited-run engagement, who doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, from this CEO’s perspective. A few years ago, I would have walked off the job, figuring I could have recouped that fee on another project, saving myself the hassle of dealing with the ogre. But, I’ve learned a lot of humility in the last few months. So much, I realize, that no matter how many metaphoric cinnamon rolls the ogre staples to my head, I just keep smiling, telling him how wonderful they all are, and how happy I am to be working on this wonderful assignment benchmarking all this data in such a wonderful company to work in.
Carrie Fisher, eat your heart out, because the acting job I do on a daily basis lately puts your whole oeuvre to shame.
My friend Panda hasn’t had a steady job in a year or so now, bouncing around from one temp assignment he finds on Craigslist to another every few weeks (survey administrator, telephone psychic, guerrilla marketer handing out soy bar samples on Michigan Avenue, you name it). But, this weekend Panda was off to Brickfest, a Lego convention near Chicago where he planned to stalk a Lego master builder named Gary McIntire (“who is totally the Joey McIntyre of Lego master builders, in a good way, but spelled different”, according to Panda). I, fortunately, have never brought any pigs through that particular hotel, so I’ve skipped this current Panda adventure, but I do admire his indominable spirit. ”Look, things are bad for all of us right now, but we’re all in that together. All those idiots thought we’d be riding around on unicorns with the hope and the change right now, but those people are just stupid. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, and there’s not much we can do about it but keep our heads up, you know. And Ashley can just STUFF IT because I’m totally going to get my picture next to something big and crazy made of Legos and she can be jealous, because I might not have a job, but I’m still better than ASHLEY, who can STUFF IT”).
Sometimes the universe brings you the wrong French toast and you find yourself in situations you never thought you’d be in, struggling in ways you never thought you’d struggle. Sometimes you have metaphoric cinnamon rolls stapled to your head that you have to pretend are as glamorous and amazing as the well-paying, truly wonderful jobs you enjoyed (and maybe took for granted) in the past. Apparently, there’s an inexhaustible supply of breakfast-related, Fate-inspired idioms in my own private cosmic bakery — forever pointing to the fact that no matter how bad things get, I know I’m resourceful enough to keep going.
Remembering that no matter how lost any of us feels in twisty mazes or dark labrynths and old stairwells, that there’s always a way around the crowds and mobs if you look for it. There might be hundreds of people in Chicago applying for a job I want, but if I use all my talents and put my mind to it, I can get to where I need to be if I’m as resourceful as I’ve always been.
Sebastian Gray
Chicago, IL
Gray Matters launches
We’re delighted to announce the beginning of what we hope will be a twice-weekly or so feature here on HillBuzz: Gray Matters, a column by essayist Sebastian Gray. We’re setting up a special page for him here on HillBuzz, where Sebastian will write on politics, current events, social issues, and life in general here in Boystown, Chicago. We hope eventually Sebastian’s column will be syndicated beyond HillBuzz itself, so a moderate, Hillary Democrat, pro-woman, pro-American, bipartisan take on the LGBTQ community can bring a centrist’s viewpoint to various debates, while continuing to show conservatives and Republicans of all stripes that not all Democrats are bad, and that the negative stereotypes of the LGBTQ community held so firmly by many on the far right are outdated and ridiculous. Sebastian will give you the scoop on what people are saying and doing here in Boystown, with adventures and insights like only he can share.
If you have anything you’d like him to tackle in upcoming columns, feel free to note those ideas in comments on this thread or the Gray Matters page, or email Sebastian directly at: SebastianGrayMatters@gmail.com
As he starts this new column in earnest, we’re sure he’d love to hear from you!
NOTE: Many, many thanks to our good friend Teresa for the Gray Matters logo — and for other design-related surprises coming to HillBuzz in the days ahead!
Gray Matters: a new daily feature for HillBuzz
Please give us your thoughts on this, but we think it’s a good idea for Sebastian Gray to have his own daily column here at HillBuzz, writing from on the ground here in Boystown, covering those gray areas that moderates of all stripes have in common, but with his rainbow fabulous snarky flare. We’ve gotten such a great response to Sebastian’s essays lately that we’ve asked him to commit to a regular piece we hope you all will enjoy: we’re going to call it GRAY MATTERS, and hope it establishes itself as the new heart of HillBuzz, as we continue to evolve, grow, and take our site to the next level.
As we do this, if you enjoy Sebastian’s writing and come to love GRAY MATTERS the way we hope you do, we’d appreciate the help in getting this column out there to a wider audience and even suggesting it for syndication on other sites or in publications you have connections to. We’d love to see it carried in LGBTQ papers, especially, because the gay community needs a wakeup call and Sebastian’s just the guy to do it.
We are lousy at marketing HillBuzz and increasing readership. There is just not enough time in the day to do that and also produce quality content…so if you grow to love GRAY MATTERS, we’d love your help in making it the huge success we think it could very well become.
We were approached by a local Chicago LGBTQ publication about taking Sebastian’s column into the weekly-feature realm, and we’re hoping that happens soon, which would be the first time HillBuzz would cross the bridge into printed word, so this is an exciting development for us here at Buzzquarters that will complement what we do online and help us reach a bigger audience.
EVERYTHING we do is geared towards our goals of energizing moderates and taking back our government from wasteful loons, while bringing down ACORN and supporting great candidates, especially women, from both sides of the aisle who are part of Generation Hillary or Team Sarah.
Please share your thoughts on this new concept for us and let us know how else you think we could make GRAY MATTERS a success.
