Big Time

I would have started this earlier but I was out participating in our democracy, or as it is more commonly known: Attending my yearly precinct meeting.

The news this year, for the first time in years is that we reached quorum!! Woo! We had a total of 10 people show up! Last year we had a grand total of three and the year before we had two. You only need five and we had ten! Not counting the dead people on the rolls, we have about twelve hundred registered voters in the precinct and ten of us showed up. Y'all don’t know. It’s very exciting, and unlike last year, our precinct chair even showed up.

It’s amazing we had that many show up because we had conflicting information about where our meeting was going to be. We got a very official postcard from the county party telling us one place and time and Monday night we got a rushed call from our out-going precinct chair with a different place and time. It’s a wonder any one showed up at all. I mean, really. It doesn’t take much to give people and excuse to not show up to these things. Making them guess where they are supposed to be is a great way to make sure they go nowhere at all.

And the party doesn’t help. I got my post card because I got a postcard last year. I asked a woman at work if she got hers and she had no idea what I was talking about. We asked tonight how they go about deciding who gets a notice and who doesn't and the answer was “If you're active in the precinct, you get a notice”, which begged the question, how would I know about the meetings if I didn’t go to the meetings, which is how being "active" in the precinct is defined. The party doesn’t send them to everyone because it costs them too much. I think it costs them too much not to. The county party sends notices out to donors and others that are active in the party. But what about everyone else? Every year there are fewer and fewer, the rolls are full of dead people and everyone moans about a lack of new blood - How is the new blood supposed to find out? Lucky guess? They follow the blue star in the sky until it leads them to their meeting? They just show up at a random suburban high school one Tuesday night?

The people who know get notified, the people who don’t know will continue to not know because the party doesn’t notify them and the rolls fill up with in-the-know dead people and all the new people stay home and watch the Mississippi results come in and wonder what they can do locally and how they can get involved and the local party isn't going to tell them. Morons. The grass roots turn gray and the party tells themselves it lends gravitas.

Oh, by the way. I am my precincts brand new vice chair! Our new chair is a great guy who was the chair before our current chair got too important to be our chair. I’m very excited, I really think he’s going to do more for the precinct, and I’ll do more because I’m the vice chair of my precinct! Woo-Hoo! And I am a delegate again! Yay me! Let’s hear it for the County Convention! And the District Convention! And the State Convention! But not the big scary National Convention in Denver because that is going to be a blood bath.