Today’s challenge is as apt as you want it to be — the theme of your as-yet-unwritten story must be, we need hope in the face of of hopelessness. It’s a bit dramatic-sounding, but themes are rarely served by a soft touch. So, that’s your task. Tackle a short piece of flash fiction that deals with that as its central theme: why we need hope in the face of its opposite.

You’ve got, mmm, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due by Friday, January 27th, noon EST.

Post online, give us a link below, etc.

I set that as my 7AM reminder this morning.

I set it because, I dunno, maybe up until this point I’ve been hanging onto a loose and fraying thread that clearly, surely, some savior force would come in and reverse what was coming. The vote would prove to be rigged. The “OMG RUSSIA DID IT” investigation would advance to the point of no return. Obama would rip off Comey’s mask and reveal Old Man Giuliani underneath, who would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you crazy Millennials. Joe Biden would challenge malarky-havin’ Comrade Dumpkov to a ski contest on the K2 and he would win the day against the rich punks for all us underdogs and underachievers. I dunno what the fuck I thought was going to happen. Probably nothing, but maybe something.

Maybe?

Please?

Yeah, no.

No one is coming. Our plane crashed, and we’re alive, and no help is on its way.

That sounds dramatic, I know, especially to people who think this isn’t a big deal — but we’re staring down the barrel of a president whose stated intent is to sand down nearly every foothold we’ve gained in the last several decades. Worse, he’s got the run of the table with a Congress who has already begun their monstrous rending and flaying. Everything’s on the chopping block: women’s rights, health care, the free market, arts, humanities, science, education, national parks, bald eagles, anyone who has ever been marginalized, you, me, all of humanity, the whole fucking planet. Pounds of flesh cut from those who cannot afford to lose them, and given over to the vampire kings above us who want to bleed us all dry. It’s not dramatic to think that, at the very best, we’re going to experience an existential tumult over the next four years. At the worst, I dunno. At the worst we get hill cannibals, probably. Nuclear hill cannibals.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together.

That means something. I don’t mean that in a glib, WE ARE THE WORLD way, I don’t mean it to be some kind of shallow sing-a-long. I mean that our president — the one who comes with the biggest winking-butthole-asterisk of all time by being a president who won by losing, who won with the help of shady Kremlin no-good-niks, who won by surfing to the White House on a churning tide of sexual assault and racism and inane non-policies, who still hasn’t filled most positions, who wants to fill his cabinet with the swamp monsters he exposed by draining the swamp — our president is way the fuck outnumbered. This is our asterisk president. This is a president who we didn’t earn, who didn’t win, who has a historically low approval rating and a historically high disapproval rating. He works for us, and we outnumber him by heroic numbers.

That’s a real thing. That’s truth. It’s not arguable that he’s surrounded by a miasma of illegitimacy. He can earn his way out of that — he can clear the fog by doing right for all Americans, not just the richest among us — but let’s be clear, the likelihood of that happening creates betting odds no gambler would take.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together, and we can save each other.

You’ll say to me now, what does that mean? What does that mean, we can save each other?

My honest answer is, I don’t yet know. Not really. Because I don’t know what’s coming down the pike. I know the next four years will be contentious, but I don’t know if they’ll be ruinous or simply bizarre. But here’s what I think it means.

I think it means we can be there for each other. And we can be kind. We can help each other up.

It means we can use what power we have to help those who have less power.

It means making each other laugh, because oh Sweet Saint Fuck, we’re gonna need to laugh.

It means staying involved, and keeping up the pressure, and using our voice and our vote not just for our behalf but for the behalf of our neighbors.

It means sharing the things we love: art and books and movies, quotes and images and ideas.

It means knowing who our enemies are, and pointing our metaphorical weapons to those outside the trench, not to those hunkering down in the mud alongside us.

It means kitten pictures and dog videos and other forms of random comfort, and of course what I mean is otters, because fuck yeah, otters, you can’t deny the healing power of otters.

It means turning an ear to listen and offering a shoulder to cry on and letting people just wordlessly shriek at or near you for as long as they need it.

It means working around the system to find new ways to keep each other afloat — it means giving money to the ACLU or Sierra Club or it means demanding our companies do better for us even when our government won’t, it means finding loopholes and trapdoors that help us to help each other, it means empowering others to do the work when it’s work we can’t do ourselves.

It means harnessing the one-two-punch power of Critical Thinking and Empathy, which not coincidentally are also the names of each of Uncle Joe Biden’s malarky-thumpin’ fists.

It means being good stewards of this planet because we all share it, and no matter what the administration wants you to believe, it’s our responsibility not to fuck it up.

It means creating art and telling stories because stories have power, stories help us through, stories provide a narrative for those of us now and those who come later.

It means helping ourselves and practicing self-care because sometimes before you help someone else with their oxygen mask you gotta make sure yours is on nice and tight.

It means whatever it means going forward.

I’ll be here at the blog and online if you wanna swing by and say hi. Hope you’re doing okay. Fuck the inauguration. Go to a protest. Check out a museum. Read a book. I’ll see you on the other side.

p.s. fuck international fascism

Some folks asked for my Twitter thread the other day about Betsy DeVos and the array of unqualified cabinet members to be somewhere more easily shareable, so here it is.

Share as you see fit.

(Storify link here if you’d prefer to read it that way.)

Yesterday, an author — a bestselling author — went around and did a series of tweets with fake Donald Trump tweets, and these fake tweets were Donald Trump mocking this author’s book. One of those tweets has since gone around the ol’ retweet carousel around 12,000 times. In part because it was retweeted by a number of celebrities, most of whom seemed to believe that it was real. If you look at the tweet and its responses, this is a common theme — a lot of people thought it was real. Which isn’t surprising, because that’s the angle, isn’t it? Trump on any day of the week might be using his global platform as president-elect to (sigh) rant and rail at everything from automakers to world leaders to Saturday Night Live. Listen, let’s be real: if Trump one morning decided to tweet rant about like, penguins, it would not shock any of us. (“Penguins. Totally biased!! Tiny flipers and cant fly. SAD”). It wouldn’t shock us because his Twitter feed is a lunatic’s parade of rage and hurt butts, a constant pouty stream of fragile ego shrieking and wailing from between the bars of its wrought iron cage.

So, to see Obama one day talk about how important books are to him, and what writing has meant for him (seriously, he promoted The Three-Body Problem, holy shit awesome), and then the next day to see Trump railing on some random author’s book — it’s legit believable.

It’s just not true. That’s the first part of the PSA. I’m seeing it go around, so please know:

That Trump tweet is fake.

The author likely didn’t mean any harm here (though since being called on it, it would’ve been nice to see the tweets deleted or at least a public addendum suggesting that they were, indeed, fake). I assume he meant it as something halfway between a joke and a marketing ploy. And I’m sympathetic, because hey, getting word out about your book — even as a bestselling author — is a grim, strange magic. Having something go viral around your book has value, at least in getting attention — ideally, it also gets sales. Hell, I’m helping him with the job just by talking about it. I didn’t know about his book before yesterday, and now I do.

Since that time, though, not only has the tweet gone around the world a couple times, I’ve now seen other writers trying the same thing — mostly on Facebook, actually — again in the vague hopes of I guess doing a bit and also serving the Marketing Gods. And, just as with the original tweet, I’m seeing some people take the bait and think it’s real.

Here’s why this is probably not an ideal marketing strategy.

First, we live in an age of fake news, and sure, I get that maybe you’re trying to lean into that and use that as leverage for so-called “satire” (by the way, satire and marketing ploys don’t go together, and once something is a marketing ploy, it ceases to be satire). But this isn’t The Onion. This isn’t sharp, incisive comedy that is clearly fake. This looks like fake news, and people believed it as such, and even in a world where Comrade Dumpkov is who he is, it’s dangerous to put more kooky words into his mouth and to distract from the reality of the many actually awful things he says. Don’t headfuck us further. We have enough shit to worry about.

Second, there’s the creepy shine of exploitative opportunism here, because just days before, Trump attacked Civil Rights icon, John Lewis, and as a result, that icon’s sales jumped per book by a figure in the hundreds of thousands of percent. Trump is a guy who says, fuck bees, and tomorrow, everybody’s a beekeeper. Trump tells you to eat Trump Steaks and it’s like, okay, those are poison, don’t touch those, you’d be better off eating one of those Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. But the timing here is bad. You don’t really want to come across as an author who thinks, Hey, I can be just like John Lewis, and I’ll fake Trump trash-talking me, right? Even if that’s not what the author thought, it vibes that way. John Lewis is an American icon, and what he had to go through to get here, where he gets yelled at by a bloated ego-buffoon is not currency for you, for me, for any of us. Look at it a different way: would you somehow tweak and twist Black Lives Matter into a way to sell your book? Would you say BOOK LIVES MATTER to sell your book? Do you see where that starts to feel sorta gross, how it feels itchy and uncomfortable using real life and real suffering as rungs on a ladder?

Third, Trump is bad people. He’s advocated sexual assault, he’s advocated banning people based on their religion, he yells at Civil Rights icons and makes racist assumptions about their districts — I’m sure in his quieter hours, he kills and eats bald eagles while wiping his ass with the Constitution. So, looking at him, I have a hard time seeing opportunity. I have a hard time seeing him as a good marketing platform, especially because that platform would springboard from his horribleness. His awfulness isn’t a tool. If you could imagine yourself going back in time and using Actual Hitler as a way to sell your book or your widget or your whatever, then don’t do it with Actual Trump, either. We’re having a hard enough time with this guy, with fake news, with toxicity across social media to try to trade-off on that as some kind of marketing tactic. Again, that’s probably not what that author was doing here. Maybe it was, in all honesty, just a joke. Certainly I’ve made jokes about Comrade Dumpkov, and will continue to, because if we can’t laugh then we’ll chew through the rebar we have to bite on to repress the existential scream that continues to try to escape our faces. But this tweet has gotten bigger than just a joke, and maybe there are better ways. If you’re an author considering aping this tactic, nnnnyeah don’t? And if you’re the author who used the tactic in the first place, maybe now’s a good time to deal with those tweets?

For the rest of us, it is once again a good time to remember that there’s a lot of fakey-fakey stuff out there, and some of it doesn’t mean to be harmful, some of it definitely does, and it’s on us to stay vigilant and keep an eye on verifying what we read and what we spread around.

I have little reason to post that feather, I suppose, except to remind you still that Blackbirds remains $1.99 for your electronic reading doojiggers:

At B&N, Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Google Play.

And as a shiny special bonus, there’s a very nice review at Publishers Weekly for Thunderbird: “This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It’s easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut.” It also gets a shout-out at B&N’s 25 SFF books to read in 2017, so yay.

And that’s it for now.

Go forth and good luck.

Pre-order Thunderbird now: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Fellow awesome writer person Sarah Gailey had some stuff to say about the class eugenics that lurk unspoken in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and if you know Sarah, you know that what she writes is worth reading. Just check out her work at Tor.com, or her upcoming novella (omg hippos), River of Teeth. 

Healthcare is essential to human life.

Without it, people die. Babies die. Mothers die. Kids with allergies die. Grandfathers with pancreatic cancer die. People with disabilities die. A steelworker who gets his hand crushed, a farmer who gets bitten by a snake, a teacher who has a heart attack. Without doctors and medicine and treatment, people who get sick or injured die.

This is the endgame of the ACA repeal: death for those who can’t afford insurance and who can’t privately pay for healthcare. Death for the poor, death for the unemployed, death for the newly self-employed entrepreneur, death for the laborer with three part-time jobs and no benefits. Death for the widow who relied on her late husband’s insurance; death for the orphan who was a dependent. Death for the infant whose mother couldn’t afford birth control or prenatal care. Wealth or death: those are the choices.

While this may sound harsh, it shouldn’t be surprising. The social Darwinism that drives so much of America’s rhetoric — the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that undergirds the American Dream — makes a snug fit with the consequences of the ACA repeal. This is the comfort of the wealthy: those who can’t afford healthcare can’t afford it because they’re lazy. They didn’t try hard enough, so when they die, they have only themselves to blame.

“If you can’t afford treatment, you don’t get treatment.” This is the basic concept that drives opposition to universal healthcare — and yet, even that blunt statement flinches away from the true conclusion of its execution. The true conclusion is this: “if you can’t afford treatment, you deserve to die.” Those who can’t afford antibiotics will die of fevers. Those who can’t afford dental care will die of rotten teeth. Those who can’t afford chemotherapy will die of cancer.

In this scenario, the poverty that American morality has always scorned becomes a capital offense; the pursuit of wealth, a necessary route to survival. Never mind that wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in populations of privileged white people with family legacies that are rooted in the exploitation of those who benefit from the programs like the ACA — never mind that. [8 people hold as much wealth as 3.6 billion — cdw] The bottom line is this: those who are not wealthy enough to afford the cost of healthcare will be eliminated.

How could this be allowed to happen? How, in our nation, which we call the wealthiest, the greatest, the strongest nation on earth? How could we propose to allow millions of citizens to go without the medical care they need? How?

Well. Let’s talk about eugenics.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, eugenics is a horrific application of selective breeding. To understand selective breeding, imagine a gardener who wants all of his pea plants to have purple flowers on them. He would have to weed out the pea plants with white flowers on them, and plant only seeds from the plants with purple flowers.

In 1937, a guy named Frederick Osborn proposed that the principles of selective breeding should be applied to the social order: encourage people with desirable traits to reproduce, and sterilize “undesirables” to remove their genes from the pool. Osborn’s ideas were heavily tied into the rhetoric of social Darwinism, which suggests that the law of natural selection applies to modern society: only the strong deserve to survive.

Many will rightly associate this concept with fascism and particularly with Nazi Germany — but it cannot be forgotten that eugenics was popular throughout the Western world, and particularly in the United States, during the early 20th century. Our country participated in the “removal” of traits which the government deemed undesirable — traits which included mental illness, physical disability, nonwhite heritage, and any sexual identity other than heterosexual. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court passed Buck v. Bell, which effectively legalized compulsory sterilization. Individuals were sterilized against their will, incapacitated, or killed under the euphemism of ‘euthanasia’.

Today, this practice is widely considered to be unethical, dehumanizing, and morally repugnant. The repeal of the ACA brings it to the forefront of American society, hidden behind a thin veil of capitalist ideology.

Does this embody the national character Americans claim to have? We call ourselves “the greatest nation in the world,” and “the land of opportunity.” We pride ourselves on our immense national wealth. We claim to have a social, political, and economic system upon which all others should be modeled — and yet we are debating a proposition that would leave millions of Americans at risk of death due to a lack of coverage. And so it is that we must ask ourselves: does an American morality that leaves the uninsured to die embody the universal right to life that is promised in the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence?

No. Instead, it embodies the darkest facet of the American perspective on capitalism: that citizens are justified only by their earnings, and that without justification through labor and wealth, the life of a citizen is not the concern of the American government. This is the America that we so consistently look away from: the America whose constitution was written solely for the benefit of landed white men. The America that pioneered early eugenics; the America that, years before Hitler’s rise to power, began attempting to rid itself of “undesirables.”

Today, those citizens who are not wealthy are being declared undesirable by the ACA repeal.

And we know what happens to undesirables.

* * *

ADDENDUM, 1.17.17, by Sarah Gailey

When I wrote the above piece, I failed to recognize a long-running conversation in the disabled community about the eugenicist roots of healthcare reform, and about the destructive legacy of American eugenics. I am so thankful to the people who took the time and energy to help me recognize the frustration that’s caused by my participation in this conversation. Several disability activists and disabled people brought this to my attention after the piece went live: disabled voices have been talking about this issue, but their voices are too often ignored. The ACA repeal and American eugenics have a massive effect on the disabled community, and in a conversation about either, that harm should not be elided. I’m not qualified to write about the specific ways in which the disabled community is impacted, nor would it be appropriate for me to do so. With that in mind, I had a conversation with disability activists Heather Ratcliff and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. They suggested we add that conversation to this piece, adding their perspectives on the way these issues intersect with disability.

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a .5 deaf, .5 blind, .5 Scandinavian SFF writer. She is the founder of feminist sonar (feministsonar.com) and has written about disability for Writing the Other, Terrible Minds, Dragon+ and many other websites. She’s a disability rights activist and general loudmouth. She tweets @snarkbat and is the assistant editor of Fireside Fiction.

Heather Ace Ratcliff is a former mortician and current disability rights activist. She has been featured talking about her invisible disability, Ehlers-Danlos Disease – III, at the Guardian and the Economist, as well as on the podcast “Off the Record.” Poems about her disability have been featured in Breath & Shadow. She tweets @mortuaryreport, blogs at mortuaryreport.com, and is the proud creator of Stay Weird, Be Kind (#swbk, stayweirdbekind.com).

SG: Thank you both so much for taking the time and energy this morning to help illuminate some of the frustration I caused by writing this piece without bringing in the voices of the disabled community.

ESH: (THIS ONE IS HARD) Disability isn’t a monoculture. That’s the first thing we need to be really aware of – I don’t speak for everyone, and I can’t, and I shouldn’t. But what I can do is shed a little light – I know many disabled people who struggle when able bodied writers get attention and praise and are just damn well heard about things we’ve been saying forever. It happens more frequently than we’d like. Many of us have been shouting on Twitter about this for months – and haven’t felt heard by the able bodied community. In addition to when Sarah spoke with both Heather and I independently, Heather and I checked in so we could support one another. These discussions are hard, and having them with your friends is harder.

HR: Elsa’s exactly right: because disability runs the gamut of politics and opinions and life experiences, it’s difficult to pin down any one thing we all agree on. However, I think many of us can agree that the disability community finds extreme frustration when our voices are ignored on issues that affect us and non-disabled voices are uplifted while spreading the same message. It’s a little bit like screaming incoherently into the able-bodied void. You can’t be for us without us, as they say.

SG: I had originally written the piece with a focus on poverty — and something that I’ve come to appreciate after speaking with both of you is how deeply intertwined the issues of poverty, disability, and healthcare are.

HR: Teasing apart where one intersection ends and the other begins is nearly impossible. When Sarah notes in her essay that “those who are not able to afford the cost of healthcare will be eliminated,” a large group of people who will be directly impacted are disabled people, who are more likely to have poor overall health and therefore require access to medical services more often. Those medical services become extraordinarily cost-prohibitive when paying out-of-pocket instead of with insurance garnered through the ACA. When it comes to income, the poverty rate for working-age people with disability is nearly two and a half times higher than that for people without disabilities; people with disabilities are two times as likely to be poor as non-disabled people.

ESH: Many non-negotiable adaptive devices are also brutally expensive. Literally this past week, as the ACA repeal began picking up steam, I was having a prosthetic eye made, which is vital to my quality of life. Pre-ACA insurance wouldn’t have covered it (and didn’t) and the last one cost an arm and a leg. It’s not a choice to have a wheelchair or a prosthetic – and when you don’t have a choice those medical devices can throw you deeply into debt.

People with disabilities are placed in a very weird position by society – we’re supposed to be inspirational public commodities of hope, and yet simultaneously not make any noise or fuss about how hard it is to access the medical devices we need to live and survive and interact with society. Basically – be adorable and childlike, but don’t you ever tell us how much your wheelchair cost.

SG: You’ve both spoken extensively about the ways in which our healthcare system keeps people with disabilities in a state of economic struggle. What are some of the systemic issues that undergird the intersections between disability and poverty?

HR: Part of the issue with poverty and disability is job security and economics. Under the U.S. Department of Labor, it’s currently legal to pay disabled workers less than the legal minimum wage. Even securing those jobs is challenging when you’re disabled: in 2015, only 17.5% of people with disabilities were employed, compared to 65% of non-disabled people. Fewer than 1 in 5 PWD is employed, and disabled persons earn significantly less than non-disabled workers when they are working. The conversation on accessibility of jobs, workplaces, and employment discrimination is another one entirely, but you can see where the cycle feeds itself.

ESH: What Heather said. Additionally, education (which is often necessary to accessing higher paying jobs), is often inaccessible to people with disabilities. Whether it’s universities which still haven’t updated to ADA standards, professors who refuse to accommodate you, or even just the cost of education, getting your foot or wheels in the door is significantly more difficult. Many of us have fought tooth and nail to GET education, to get jobs that are considered “important,” but there’s another piece going on here:

Sometimes we literally can’t even get into the workplace. Many disabled people, myself included, have had the experience of applying to a job, being told they’d be great at it, only to find out that the company cannot accommodate your access to the office, or your needs in the workplace

Again – be a fully participating member of OUR society, but don’t tell us that you can’t get inside the building even though we don’t have a wheelchair ramp.

SG: There’s significant history underpinning these contemporary issues around the treatment of disabled people in the United States. In my piece I touched briefly on the history of American eugenics, but not at all on the ways in which that history specifically impacts the disabled community. What are some things you wish more people knew or considered about that context?

ESH: Let’s talk about perception for a second. We live in a country where disability isn’t seen as “wanted” and so when we talk about reproductive history and disability, we have to talk about how disabled babies aren’t wanted. It’s hard, because it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we have to talk about the fact that it’s morally acceptable to abort a fetus because you don’t want to have a disabled child.

When I was born with Congenital Rubella Syndrome, my parents were told that they should give me up to the orphanage, that they could always just “have another one” because nobody wants a disabled baby, right?

Fast forward to adulthood, and many disabled people who want to be parents are told they shouldn’t because they’ll “pass on” their disabilities – so if we’re talking about a world where disabled babies parents are asked if they want to get rid of their children, if disabled adults are told they shouldn’t have children – there’s a value judgement being placed on a disabled life.

I mean, let’s be real: In a country where LESS THAN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO the most well beloved Justice of the Supreme Court of our country said, “A generation of idiots is enough.” We have a problem – and that problem reaches well both into the social mindset and the legal one where disabled bodies are concerned.

HR: Coerced sterilization of many groups, including disabled people, is a really disturbing part of American history. Throughout the 20th century, federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states across the U.S. 32! In 1927, as you mentioned in your essay, the Supreme Court ruled to permit compulsory sterilization of “the unfit” as legal – a decision that’s never been expressly overturned.

I live in California, which is a state that sterilized almost 20,000 people from 1909 to 1979. Hitler espoused California’s eugenics programs in Mein Kampf, that’s how successful it was, and his T4 “euthanasia” program, first enacted in 1939, specifically targeted disabled children for murder as a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies. The T4 program deemed disabled children “life unworthy of life;” individuals who represented a genetic and financial burden on the German state by virtue of their psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities. The program started with infants and toddlers, then was expanded to include teenagers, then was expanded yet again to include disabled adults in institutions – and medical personnel were not just complicit but actively involved in determining who was sent to their death. Over 70,000 institutionalized disabled people were murdered at six gassing facilities in less than two years of the program.

As writer s.e. smith pointed out in a 2014 article for Rewire, “laws regarding sterilization for reasons of disability still remain on the books… [and]… are not simply holdovers from a previous era.” Smith points to cases in 1993, 1998, and 2007 cases where disabled children were sterilized as a “method of convenience” for their parents.

SG: This has all been incredibly illuminating. Thank you both so much for your voices and your work. In addition to your platforms, what are other disabled voices and platforms that people should be listening to and supporting in order to better understand the issues, history, and experiences of disabled people in America?

HR: Alice Wong (@AliceWong) with the @DisVisibility project is amplifying disability stories and culture! Karolyn Gehrig (@KarolynPRG) is bringing invisible disability stories to light with her #hospitalglam project. #CripTheVote is an incredibly active hashtag reflecting disabled involvement in politics. Pretty much you could follow me and Elsa’s entire Twitter feed and find important, integral disabled voices to be uplifted and included!

ESH: Lydia Brown (@autistichoya) and Vilissa Thompson (@VilissaThompson) are both doing important work with regard to the intersection of disability and race. Also, check out David Perry (@Lollardfish) and his work on people with intellectual disabilities, and the interactions of PWD and the police state.

SG: Thank you both so much. And, thank you also to the several people who expressed their dismay on social media over the past twenty-four hours. You are so important, and I can’t tell you have grateful I am for your hard work and for your voices. Keep doing what you’re doing. <3

EDIT: visit WithoutACA.com to view stories of those who will be affected by the ACA repeal.