9. Cooperation - in several campaigns I tried to get a joint Dem-Rep transport-voters-to-polls operation going, you know: nonpartisan civic activity. They always turned me down. The Rip central commandment is to never cooperate in politics & government if it is possible not to. Party advantage is God to them. And most of them refuse to talk with me about, you know, anything. I have one neighbor, since he realized I'm a Dem won't acknowledge me in the street. Very rare to find any that are willing to interact with people not of their tribe. I have found two who will interact, I am so thankful. And I've come across one with whom there appears to be a spiritual understanding. What do I mean? The spiritual pictures he paints in his head are completely different from mine but there is apparently another level of somethingness that we both inhabit and recognize that in each other.
Where was I? So, any time I am sitting with an amiable rightwinger & a policy matter comes up I like to warn that we will immediately get bogged down in definitions of words & phrases and we do because I ask what some word means & that interrupts the flow of the propagands & we end up going back to process issues (such as the degree of incompetence and criminality in both of our parties), stuff that every human has to deal with. Either we are the jerk or everybody else is a jerk, right?
I've come to the conclusion for now that there is a split in the English language going on here, multiple splits I guess. There are attempts, mostly on the Rip side, to change the way words are used. There is a lot of sloganeering on that side. They continuously launch little propaganda acts with buzzwords & buzzphrases. Press office of the Rips so much more, you know, "fun" than the Dems, who unfortunately are constrained by the need to attempt to govern in a world filled with, you know, facts.
I am really interested in talking face to face with people who think of themselves as conservative to discuss THAT issue: to attempt to figure out what the words we use actually mean.
I offered one of my conservative fbfs (i tried to friend one of his friends who commented in one of our threads but that one declined to respond) that we could start perhaps trying to talk policy by taking any phrase of the Constitution & see if we could agree what it meant, go on from there, that way we could build a mutual vocabulary with which to discuss eventually other things, perhaps the public accommodation laws, hmm? He has agreed to do it but we haven't started yet. Its been almost a week.
9. Real power
Here in Wake County NC 50% of the precincts are organized by the Dems. The precinct chairs have votes in many matters that come before the WakeDems honchos & minions in their executive meetings. I don't take part in those meetings, haven't been to one in years, boring, most of the time spent on nothing, occasional policy or procedure coups, chair shuffling, etc.
What, I dreamed, if the precinct chairs that exist were to get together in a caucus and agree on something, a platform perhaps? What if they took that platform & put it on an exec committee meeting agenda, showed up in numbers sufficient to pass it? 10 precinct chairs bring a motion & vote on it its going to pass.
But that's not the first dream I had. I was thinking about my grownup kids and their friends. A lot of them are in the kind of temporary this-is-not-what-I'm-going-to-do-with-my-life phase that is pretty normal in the 20s today, they spend what seems to me, the older worker, a lot of time chilling, well, at least they're staying out of trouble. Anyway, dreamed I, 5 of them could go ahead and organize a precinct. Kids could organize all 50% of the unorganized precincts. If they organized even 10 and voted as a bloc they could transform WakeDems into a pro-kid organization that could work toward Wake Co becoming more kid-friendly from a kid point of view.
I found a couple of kids understood what I was telling them, more that didn't. I got no takers. I ran the idea past a couple of YDA people at the county convention 2 years ago. One of them said: "Yeah, but what's in it for us?" I gotta say, the Dems just suck at youth outreach. The only thing is the Rips are worse. 2 years later the local YDA is, far as I can tell, no smarter than 2 years ago, still doing essentially nothing. Why aren't they doing poll greeting at all of the unorganized precincts? Why haven't they organized the unorganized precincts? If they did they could own the Wake party. What's in it for them? Bah. Entire youth wing of the Dem party filled with wannabe yes-people who aspire to be told what to do.
Those unorganized precincts are power lying there unused. Somebody better get them organized before the Rips send in some shill Dems to take them over from the right. Then where would we be if all of a sudden a bunch of conservatives reregistered as Dems, organized the unorganized precincts, took over the WakeDems apparatus? What's to stop it from happening? Nothing I can see. Better get cracking.
10. Special Requests
Dealing with people who don't want to compromise is one thing. I'm actually more interested in my compatriots who agree with my positions to go and do something about it. In NC there are 700,000 more Dems than Rips. If we vote we win, simple as that. So its to get all of those registered Dems to actually go out and vote for Dems.
So who are the registered Dems who don't vote or who vote non-Dem?
Old people: I was walking the precinct, met a 93 year old Dem: "I don't vote any more, they're all crooks." Well, pretty much sometimes. It can get to be the less worse crook (we hope). Even that's better than sometimes the choice is our crook or their crook. My position of course is: yes, its all a matter of degree, it doesn't help to not participate. But no, he wasn't going to vote.
Young people: I badger my young adult children & they vote but lots of their friends don't. 18-25 year olds tend to not vote in droves. Vote parties? Dem precinct organizations treat the HS Dem club to pizza when the HS club organizes a caravan of Dem students to vote? I watch as one by one their friends awaken to some kind of political awareness. The organizing of those people a work in progress. Youth: I'm talking to you: the structures are all hollow but the machines still work. You don't have to wait to be invited in. You can take them over. Check it out. Figure out and take over. Don't wait until you're old. Don't leave government to right wing wierdos who will hand on the reigns of power to their children, your frat boy/girl country club peers who will get your humorless square peers to run your government at you. That stuff has got to be done. Start easy: get educated and vote. Then take over.
Hedonists: they'd rather go fishing, or shop or watch TV, or imbibe something, various kinds of not "why bother" but rather can't be bothered. Sports fanatics: doers and watchers. Consumers of more exotic entertainment. Used to be a lot of religious people stayed out of politics, couldn't be bothered, thought they had better things to do. Maybe hard to believe these days, but used to be. The consumers of entertainment do not lobby, it is the businesses that service them that lobby. There has never been a beer drinkers lobby but there sure is a beer making and selling lobby. Well, hedonists, if you leave government to people who aren't like you they will do things their way. You have to fight for your right to party, whatever kind of party you like to have. If you don't have your people in the governing mix they won't pay any attention to you, then if they decide they don't like your style of fun they'll step on you. Go ahead and organize around your preferred activities then lobby and vote.
The only entertainment advocacy groups that have successfully joined the business side with the consumer side are the NRA and the churches.
Leftists: Occupy, for the moment. It is obvious that Mayday will be kind of low key for the most part. Could have been an impressive millions around the world thing, announce an international conference in the fall, etc. Instead there is nothing. Look, Dem party is there for the taking, at least here in Wake County, I think actually the Dem party is hollow all the way to the top. Think about it: Occupy Raleigh could be running someone for county commissioner, you know? Its got to be done. Left developments will not happen in USA by other than legislative means. If there's going to be trouble its going to come from the right. Go take over the state legislatures, can be done. Start with voting for the less worse.
I mean: THEY did it in 2010. Certainly the Tea Party phenomenon was funded but it is not their fault that they got organized and have done something. A lot of those TP legislators are going to wash out in the next election but some of them are going to stick around for decades frustrating left goals wherever they can. Leftists have to have an electoral strategy and a grass roots presence, and unfortunately for their sense of political cleanliness the only store in town, like a poorly stocked convenience store in the stix or the ghetto, is the Dems. Romantically demonstrating in the streets is from a certain point of view a hedonistic passtime. I'm a big fan of hedonic liberty, you want a hot dog roast you go right ahead. I'm a bigger fan of basic maintenance and administration. Keep demonstrating, that's fine. Vote too. And take over local Dem parties, which can be done. 5 people working together, 3 years, a county party can be taken over. And run for office, if you can stand being a public figure. You see the bozos who run and win, it is obvious that anyone can do it. Right?
Start by voting. For someone who can win. The jerk, the fool, the liar. The one that's less worse than the other one.
Supreme Court. Why do I need to say more?
(Someone ask me about the accident of history that put those guys on the right side of the room and the leftists on the left side of the room at the start of the French revolution. Or was it an accident? "Right" linguistically identical with "correctness," "left" associated with "outness," which is what the left is concerned with: those who are "left out," while the "right" is associated with having "rights" and the rightness of the rights possessors to those rights. But what about us ask the left outs? Not our problem says the right, besides, we're right. Difficulty of the inclusionary project increased by inadequate and oddly shaped linguistics.)
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