“If you want love, you gotta give a little.

If you want faith, you gotta believe a little.

And if you want peace, just turn your cheek a little …

You gotta give to live.” — From a Sammy Hagar song

Give blood and you could save a life.

Every three seconds someone needs a blood transfusion, according to the Blood Center of Central Iowa.

Scheduled surgeries aren’t cancelled in central Iowa because of a lack of blood, but it is a problem in other parts of the United States.

From what I’ve heard, the Fall Blood Drive has been getting a pretty good turnout this week.

If you haven’t donated yet, you’ve got until 3 p.m. today.

So if you haven’t donated already, stop over at the Memorial Union and give blood today if you’re able to. Come on, it’s fun. You get free cookies and juice, and you get to relax for 45 minutes. In the socially darwinistic rat race that we call life, a break once in a while can help you stay sane.

I especially like getting to wear that arm bandage for a day.

That way when someone asks you if you gave blood, you can say something like, “No, I’m wearing this to protest the latest round of tuition increases,” or whatever your cause of choice happens to be.

I’m pretty squeamish. I mean, I used to come close to passing out when I looked at lifelike photos in high school biology. But giving blood is a piece of cake.

I hear you can make some good money donating plasma, too. If they had a plasma donating place here in Ames, I’d give it a shot.

Although from what I read in Tuesday’s Daily it sounds like the plasma-donating experience gets mixed reviews. A little blood in the urine and a light headed feeling don’t sound too cool, but hey, sometimes you need the money.

With the election coming up next Tuesday, I wanted to remind you that Ralph Nader is on the ballot for president.

If Nader gets 2 percent or more of the vote in Iowa, a Green Party will be established in this state and will be allowed to field candidates in races across the state in future elections.

Last week I mentioned that we need more “tools for democracy.” What do I mean by that?

Here’s one example. In Illinois they have the Citizens Utility Board concept. A consumer group pays for an insert that accompanies monthly utility bills.

There’s no extra postage and no tax money used to pay for this concept. The insert invites consumers to voluntarily join (for about a $5 a year fee) a consumer watchdog group.

In the early 80s in Illinois, 200,000 people signed up. They built up their own full-time advocates-lawyers, economists and organizers. Consumers saved over $4 billion in utility rates, including a $1.3 billion-dollar refund from Commonwealth Edison in September of 1993.

Periodic inserts like these should be allowed in all companies that are legal monopolies (electric, gas, telephone utilities, etc.), or are subsidized or subsidizable by taxpayers (banks and savings and loan, for example).

With consumer groups like these you’ll no longer have to take it on the chin when banks and utility companies try to charge you for everything but breathing.

Here’s another tool: How about a checkoff on your 1040 so you can voluntarily join (for a small fee) a national taxpayers group, accountable to citizens on a one-member, one-vote basis?

Had there been bank consumer associations with full-time staff in the 70s, the savings and loan scandal could have been nipped in the bud at the community level by organized consumer judgment.

Because the speculators and crooks screwed up, however, as a taxpayer you’ll be bailing them out to the tune of over a a trillion dollars.

Aren’t there better ways to spend tax dollars?

This is merely a sample of proposals put forth in Ralph Nader’s “Concord Principles, An Agenda For A New Initiatory Democracy,” which can be found on the World Wide Web, or for six cents (if you have a sixth sense) I can make you a copy of the agenda (so request one via email at [email protected]).

It matters not whether you’re a Republican, Democrat or Independent. It matters only that people desire to secure and use tools for democracy.

As President Andrew Jackson once said, “If democracy has problems, the solution is not less democracy, it’s more democracy.”

As Nader spells it out in the Concord Principles, “Without this reconstruction of our democracy through such facilities for informed civic participation, as noted above, even the most well-intentioned politicians campaigning for your vote cannot deliver, if elected.

Nor can your worries about poverty, discrimination, joblessness, the troubled conditions of education, environment, street and suite crime, budget deficits, costly and inadequate health care, and energy boondoggles, to list a few, be addressed constructively and enduringly.

“Developing these democratic tools to strengthen citizens in their distinct roles as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, shareholders and students should be very high on the list of any candidate’s commitments to you.

Unless, that is, they just want your vote but would rather not have you looking over their shoulder from a position of knowledge, strength and wisdom.”

So vote your conscience Tuesday — there are a lot of races other than president that are very important.

But when it comes to voting for president, a vote for Nader is a vote for more democracy, that problem-solving mechanism that people all over the world yearn for.

---

Andrew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.