Dear Senator Murkowski;
First, before I begin, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brian Walsh. I’m a forty-two-year-old disabled gay man. I’ve lived in Alaska since I was four years old, I’m a product of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and am proud to call the Golden Heart City my home. I’m an active member of the LGBTQIA community, I’ve been performing locally in drag for over twenty years by the stage name “Bianca Fusion”, I’ve been a longtime supporter and volunteer with the Imperial Court of All Alaska, The Interior Aids Association and the Fairbanks Chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays) and I’m an active member of the Tanana Valley State Fair Association. I was also diagnosed with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) when I was in my early thirties. After several years on dialysis, I was lucky enough to receive a second chance through a deceased donor organ transplant, though the underlying medical condition that destroyed my native kidneys is currently only in remission and could recur at any time. Throughout my medical trials, I have been reliant on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Disability to survive – I am not physically able to work the number of hours that I would need to afford the cost of my life-long prescriptions. Because of my ‘pre-existing conditions’, I am not able to afford private insurance on my fixed income. Without the ACA, I can be refused medical care due to my inability to pay – sentenced to a slow death by poverty.
Speaking of work, I have waited on you personally in the course of my job. It was just after you went viral for your comments about being afraid of political retribution and our interaction was only a passing moment where you expressed how much you enjoyed the property and atmosphere – but I remember desperately wanting to tell you that as a Medicaid recipient, what I want most from you is to hold the line against the Trump Regime. I wanted to tell you “Fight him, you have more friends on the left than you know.” But I let the moment pass. I didn’t want to lose my job for voicing personal politics in the workplace, I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable – I wanted to respect that this is where you came for respite away from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Now I wish I had spoken up. I wish that when I had the opportunity, I could have said to your face: “I am a constituent that relies on Medicaid, and I am more afraid of your apathy than his cruelty.” Maybe if I had spoken my truth to you gently, in a moment when you weren’t on guard against a hateful press, I could have impressed upon you the urgency with which a resistance to the Trump Regime is needed and just what a powerful position you were in to impact change. Maybe then you would have saved us. Instead, you gave hollow excuses about ‘carve outs for Alaskans’ and ‘serving your constituents’ but you were gladly willing to sell out 49 other states to serve your own microcosm. That’s not how a union of states should function, and it’s not how a national senator elected to serve in our nation’s capital should be representing our state on the world stage.
As it stands, the Trump Regime’s budget reconciliation bill has passed and will be enacted into law. I want you to know, Senator, that I and many like me recognize that we will most likely die without the programs we rely on to keep us alive. Our blood is on your hands. I hope you must live with that for a very long time. I hope that when desperate mothers leave voicemails with their starving children crying in the background, it keeps you up at night and haunts your dreams. I hope every ‘congratulations’ that you are offered by lobbyists, sellouts and yes-men for your choices hits your heart like a hot knife and you understand the true nature of the faustian bargain you have made with the devil himself. I hope that when public Alaskan lands are sold off and traditions like the Iditarod die because the lands they currently use will be transformed into strip mines, you will be there to answer to the Alaskan people. I hope the answers are difficult, catch in your throat and leave you speechless and feeling as powerless as the Alaskan citizens who are reliant on Medicare and Medicaid currently find themselves. While I find it unlikely that I will live that long myself, I pray that when that day of reckoning comes I am still alive to see it.
Praying for your remaining tenure to be uncomfortable and brief;
- Brian M. Walsh aka Bianca Fusion
Bianca Fusion 