Bear with me. I'll get to the point eventually!

I've mentioned here before that a friend of ours held high office here in Oregon and ran for both United States Senator and Governor. When he ran for the Senate, as a Democrat of course, it took forever for Democratic Senator Ron Wyden to endorse our friend because Wyden is a j@$#%^^ss. I'll get back to our pal Billy's campaign in a second but I want to quote Wyden from this past week. Somewhere around here I posted that the two main Mayoral candidates gave limp explanations of their neutrality between Bernie and Hillary. Here's Wyden's

“A number of new forces have emerged in American politics, forces that deny science, forces that believe constitutional protections are only for their own beliefs, forces that reject bipartisanship,” Wyden told The Oregonian in January. “Clinton, as president, has the passion and the energy and the skills to push back on those developments and offer an alternative.”

Bipartisanship! what a goofball!

Ok, so Billy ran for the Senate against Gordon Smith in 2002 and I wrote a pretty blistery paper on how to fight the Republicans which I gave to the Assistant Chairperson of the Oregon Democratic Party. I guess it was too blistery because he seemed shocked. It contained a bunch of truth and involved calling the Republicans on everything. Most of all the plan was to push hard for everything that we wanted, to be the Party of something, not just the Party Against Republicans (oh dear me! I'm a-scared! Look out for those Republicans!)

Too bad that paper is long gone, on a hard drive of a long dead computer. It was 14 years ago, after all. I've got tons of stuff from 2007 on, thanks to these little whatch-a-ma-call-it drives that fit in the USB ports. Back in 2002 I think the big deal storage unit was the Zip drive that held a whopping 700 megs of info on disks that cost $10 each. So maybe it's on one of those disks...in a dump somewhere.

But consider this: For a few months I had a direct line to the Party hierarchy. My ideas weren't adopted but they were listened to and I think if I'd been patient I could have worked my way into a position where ....well, where they would have booted me out or something. Maybe I could have snuck some stuff into the state Party agenda. Once Billy lost and then, later, when I lost interest in the slow-moving bureaucracy, I gave up the opportunity. I think if I wanted to I could still get in there again but....hmmm...no.

Maybe I should, though. Can you tell I'm of two minds on this? It's a terrible waste of time and yet it seems like it's right there to grasp. I guess it won't be me but it should be somebody. But then, why not me? Maybe I should re-register as a Democrat anyway, just to vote against Hillary as many times as I can, but also I could get back to being a Precinct Person. That's something like a Ward worker where you get the names of the Democrats in a certain area and you push them to vote. As a Precinct Person I could go to meetings again and state my case for People's action. Who has the time, though, right? It would mean giving up valuable blogging time! So I guess I could do it...and I guess I should do it. Here's why...

You know that a spinning record (a spinning anything!) moves fastest along the outside rim and slowest in the middle. If you're in a park that has a kiddie carousel and it's spinning fast it's hard to jump onto it unless you run alongside it as quickly as you can. Back in my rock n roll days I pictured the record industry as something like that and I thought "Boy, it'll be tough to start from the outside. Why don't I figure out a way to get to the inside and just drop down there?" So rather than play in dive bars for a bunch of years I made phone calls to big shots and pushed demo tapes. Which kind of worked. Not well enough, obviously! (or I'd be having my flunky write this as I'd be too busy sleeping) But it got me to a point where if I'd been good enough and crazy enough I could have been successful at that.

And I think that's how we have to handle this political thing. We can't influence the people in power. We have to BE the people in power, at least on a local level. Those blank-blanks are not going to do what we want them to do. We've got to take it from them. If we're too busy, if we're too tired, too lazy, then the power goes to those who aren't as busy, aren't as tired, aren't as lazy. Dang. I don't like where this is going. It means real action.

Which reminds me of Network. That Paddy Chayefsky sure could write. That's sort of joke because in Marty, which Chayefsky wrote, he has a character say that of Mickey Spillane. Anyway, Network...that Peter Finch character summoned up a lot of the Trump fans anger.

But that's easily ignored. Nope. We've got to do it. It's icky. Local parties are slog work. I know because I've been involved before. But it needs a commitment. In the meantime we can continue to be loudmouths here and other places. But someone has to fix the world, right? And who's gonna do it? Them? Not likely. It's got to be us. I'm afraid it's the only way.