It was very pleasant to see Ann and Medea again, and it was a special treat for my beloved partner Kayleen on her birthday. They look very much as they did back in the early oh-oh's. Peace & justice activism has maintained their youthful appearance.
Last night's talk at the Dominican Sisters' Spirituality Center was booked before Election Day, when a Hillary Clinton presidency was a virtual certainty. Both Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin had to change their presentation topics a bit in light of current surreality. It happened again last night, and this time I didn't expect it. At a gathering hosted by uncloseted Socialists, I heard the (D) word way too much.
Houston's branch of Socialist Alternative convened a gathering of progressives of various stripes at the Montrose Center last night. The theme was building popular resistance to Donald Trump and his minions in the White House and Congress. SA needs to book a bigger room next time: About 80 people showed up, twice what Room 112 can comfortably accommodate. Before last night's general meeting of the Harris County Green Party, I honestly thought that I would be able to tell you today of a new direction for HCGP and a plan to get back on the ballot in 2018. That little dream of mine was deferred until next month, in favor of the important but tedious and contentious recrafting of the HCGP by-laws.
Before the November general election, before we knew for certain that Texas Greens would lose ballot access, I put together a proposal to present at that month's general meeting. The proposal, outlining a strategy for the 2017-18 election cycle, is complex and has long-term implications. Thus, I had no expectation that it would be adopted in November. Since we usually do not meet in December, I agreed that we could put off further debate until January. By-Laws Prioritized At the January meeting of the Steering Committee, the focus was on the by-laws. I had to remind those present that I had a proposal on the table, which specified dates by which we would take some actions toward building party infrastructure, so the proposal would actually be on the agenda. Rather than try to shoe-horn this information into this morning's post as an update or add it in the Comments, I figured that it would work best as a separate entry. It was originally going to be confined to just two paragraphs, but I decided to give this entry the breathing room it deserves.
DBC and the Four Chairs First, while casually glancing at the list of Democratic precinct chairs for Harris County, I noticed some familiar names: four in particular, two of whom I have known for a long time but didn't know that they were currently serving in that capacity.
A Meetup group called Houstonians for Bernie Sanders currently claims 889 members, including Yours Truly DBC. It's sobriquet for members is "Progressives," which certainly applies to some of them. The group is associated with Houston Area Progressives, who last night held a meeting at Midtown Bar & Grill on West Gray Avenue. Midtown B&G has become the meeting place of choice for multiple left-of-center groups, but that's another story entirely.
I don't remember exactly when or how or why I decided to join this Meetup, even though I joined just within the past few weeks. Mostly I was attracted by the fact that some influential Progressives among them were organizing the protest march on the evening of Inauguration Day (i.e., tomorrow night) from City Hall to the Mickey Leland Federal Building. It has taken me this long to post my first blog entry for 2017. It was not my intent to take such a long break from this blog. With the election and the post-election fallout and the recount, I had plenty of material. Now I have met with the stark realization that the world has changed in so many ways, I can't keep up.
This not being able to keep up is nothing new. For quite a few years, especially since I have been working in Information Technology, I have felt like the world is zooming past me. New gadgets with innovative features hit the shelves one after another. Since the 1990s, I have been able to resist the mass-market programming that conditions people to want all the new toys. When a product proves itself over time to be stable and useful, I'll consider blowing my allowance on it. The one particular gadget that I credit for that epiphany was the Tamagotchi. The political world now has me feeling like a Frogger frog content just to coast downstream on the back of a turtle until forced to leap onto something else. I can't bring myself to write anything coherent about all the 31 flavors of shit that daily grows wings and starts buzzing around the landscape. How many different ways can one say, "Donald Trump is still an asshole" or "Democrats are still in the pockets of their corporate donors" or "Corporate media still sucks"? Why bother scrupulously documenting ever more evidence thereof? |
Blogging Sporadically since 2014Here you will find political campaign-related entries, as well as some about my literature, Houston underground arts, peace & justice, urban cycling, soccer, alt-religion, and other topics. Categories
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