Tag: get involved

10MAY2023 – OCF Update – Just a Note After a Long Day

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Long, long day.  Much too tired to write anything coherent.  And an early morning on top of that.  But I always like to have something up on the site.  I was surrounded by the folks of Dunwich in all their various manifestations.  It was literally the good, the bad and the ugly.  But it was fun and energizing.  Mothers with young children, families, very old folks and everything in between.  And lots of working men too.  All of it full of local color and mostly good humor.  There were a few discordant notes.  Some confused or angry faces.  Folks lashing out or clueless about what is going on around them.  But they’re part of the mosaic.  They’re an aspect of the story.  They represent what the fragmentation of our local society leads to.

I also saw something that explains why the Democrats control New England.  It’s because the Republicans are leaderless.  They don’t organize or even communicate effectively what’s going on or what their goals are.  They’re too busy with their own lives to build anything.  They don’t have the bandwidth to compete with an entrenched Democrat organization.  So, they lose ground steadily.  Leaving is the smart thing to do for the young.  There are more opportunities to improve your own life and the community in a red state.

But all in all, it was an interesting day.  Later on, today I’ll catch up on the news and try to write something substantial.  But as discouraging and frustrating as most of the events going on around me are, I still see that getting involved is the correct strategy.

Well, gotta get some rest.

Lifeboat

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Today I had to head out for a work training that I wasn’t looking forward to.  I mean, Saturday?  What is this the 1930s?  And then I thought, yeah, it kinda is.

And in addition, yesterday the ZMan’s “power hour” podcast failed to materialize for almost the first time I can remember.  And it didn’t show up today either, something about his work schedule.  So, I was even more out of my routine for this point of the week.

But every day we have on this Earth is a good day in some sense so I figured I’d see what would develop.  Well, the training was not what I’d call interesting but studying the people turned out to be amusing.  It’s funny how small towns seem to perpetuate “types.”  There’s the politician who’s always doing his schtick and the police officer who immediately sizes up the people in the room.  And you can recognize school teachers and small businessmen and doctors and tradesmen.

And each of these different types approach their time in the group differently and somewhat as adversaries.  Their differences of opinion are extremely predictable and almost stereotypical.  And I’m sure that goes for me too.  Anyone who has been trained as an engineer will fall back on a predictable way of approaching a problem or a project.  I’m sure that the selectman looks at me as a sort of obstacle when any kind of technical issue interferes with something he’s working on.

And so even though the subject matter wasn’t something I wanted to spend my Saturday on I kind of enjoyed interacting with a room of my fellow humans.  It reminded me of that famous Alfred Hitchcock WWII movie “Lifeboat.”  You have a bunch of people who have escaped from an American passenger ship that was sunk by a German U-boat.  They include a cross section of American society from the millionaire industrialist, to the working-class sailors of the sunken ship, with a female newspaper columnist, and a love interest for one of the sailors thrown in to make the movie interesting for the women viewers.  And, of course, they include a German sailor that escaped from the U-boat that also sank.  Watching the “allied” passengers aggravate each other over social differences is even more interesting than the conflict with the Nazi “prisoner” who eventually becomes the leader of the castaways.

I guess if my politics had been known to the other participants some of them at least would probably have likened me to the German U-boat commander.  But regardless, involving yourself with the people around you is a good and necessary thing.  I think a big part of the problem with the blue states is that the Right has refused to get involved in local politics and so by default, it has been taken over by the Left.  How could that not turn into a disaster?  And even in the Red States, allowing other people to make decisions that you’re too busy to worry about is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, for someone in New England it’s all academic.  All the big battles have already been fought and lost.  Our scope only remains in the local town decisions.  And even these are sometimes almost completely circumscribed by state and federal mandates.  But fighting the good fight is still the better way.  Just ceding everything to the Left is lazy and crazy.

So, I returned home feeling somewhat energized instead of drained as I thought I would be.  It’s funny.  People taken one at a time are mostly not so awful.  Obviously, there are the horrible exceptions but I think a lot of those are found in the upper strata of society.  Regular people tend to be regular.  They’re all full of tics and habits and mannerisms and sure they’re all a little crazy at least.  But most of them are kind of hard to truly hate.  I guess the real problem is we’ve never figured out a way to keep the mob from running our lives.  I guess the trick is to be in charge of the mob.

Well anyway I managed to escape from the Lifeboat back to my cozy island here in Dunwich.  And hopefully tomorrow I’ll have some subject more profound than this to expound upon.  Watch out for those U-boats.

Conservative PACs Dominate Texas School Board Elections

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“Candidates backed by conservative political action committees (PACs) swept Texas school board elections held on Saturday, as last year’s nationwide pushback against critical race theory materializes into on-the-ground victories.

Among the big winners was the 1776 Project PAC, a group that defines itself as forwarding those who “want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history.”

Another group that found success over the weekend was Grapevine-based Patriot Mobile, a cellphone company that poured half a million into a PAC to support candidates in Tarrant County school districts, according to The Texas Tribune.

All 15 candidates endorsed by 1776 Project PAC won their races across six school districts representing suburban Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, the group announced through Twitter.  Out of 11 endorsed candidates by Patriot Mobile Action, 10 won their races.

1776 Project founder Ryan Girdusky highlighted during an interview with Breitbart that his organization has a perfect record so far this year, and he hopes to continue the success with the upcoming school board elections in Georgia and Maryland.”

Now if we could multiply this success by about a thousand that would be a good beginning.  But it’s still encouraging that it’s at least starting to happen.  These are the victories that have a real world impact.  Kids are protected and Leftists who are damaging children can be stopped.  Kudos to the groups organizing this effort.

Not All Politics is Local but Local Politics Has Become Crucial

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Thomas P. “TIP” O’Neill was the Democrat Speaker of the House during Ronald Reagan’s administration and he was an old time Boston Irish machine politician.  He made the famous but not very meaningful statement that, “All politics is local.”  What I think he meant was, “To a politician who wants to be re-elected all political issues better be considered from the local point of view.”

Well, I’m not going to give a lecture on elective politics.  What I wanted to write about is the way I’ve been thinking about local issues.  I think too many people despair of the local political scene without even doing the minimum of due diligence about the actual nature of the political setup.  And when I say local, I’m talking about your town or county.  I live in New England, the land of the woke.  But my town votes Republican.  That alone should tell me that there is some hope of getting involved in something meaningful.  The town government is heavily involved in education, taxes, services and many other things that have a direct effect on people’s lives.  But let’s say your town is hopelessly left leaning.  It’s still in your interest to find out who runs what and how they effect your life.  For instance, suppose you find out that there’s a seat open on the school board.  If you or one of your friends managed to get on the board just that change might be enough to minimize the damage that comes from all of the CRT nonsense that’s going on.  The information you learn might be enough to rally like-minded parents, even socially liberal parents who still would resent their children being propagandized.  Something like that is already occurring in blue-state Virginia.  Often people are a lot less likely to experiment with their kids lives than they are with other people’s lives.

And getting involved with town politics and policies may impact other things going on around you.  Many small towns are voluntarily building and zoning low-income housing.  Knowing that this is going on isn’t something automatic.  And likewise letting your neighbors know about something like that can have a huge impact on stopping it.  After all, the effect something like that has on housing value is very real.  After it’s too late isn’t the time to find out that you’ve lost half the value in your home.

Other important town business is also worth knowing about.  Things like who is being considered as police chief or whether the town is thinking of spending a lot of money on a library or an art center.  These things have a big impact on taxes and town budget constraints.

So, there are several reasons why getting involved in local politics is smart and also effective in making your local community better.  But even if you find out that you are completely outnumbered by raging woke leftists, at least the effort will provide you with that fact and the assurance that here is no hope for a normal life should spur you to get the hell out of the hellhole you inhabit and move to a place where you won’t be surrounded by pod people.  After all contact with pod people for extended periods will turn you into a zombie too.  At least that’s what I learned from watching several versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”