Tuesday the 9th marks my first legitimate campaign appearance of 2014, appearing in the candidates' forum at Lone Star College's Kingwood campus. I appeared there whilst running for US Senate two years ago. It is a two-year college, but that doesn't mean nobody there will remember me.
The forum that night is specifically for judge candidates on the ballot in Harris, Montgomery, and Liberty Counties. By "judge" they mean not just County Judge, but various county and state judicial positions as well. Even more specifically, it is for Green Party candidates for judgeships. The Green Party of Texas has four such candidates apart from Yours Truly, and all are running at the state level: Supreme Court Justice Place 7 - Charles E. Waterbury Supreme Court Justice Place 8 - Jim Chisolm Court of Criminal Appeals Place 4 - Judtih Sanders-Castro Court of Criminal Appeals Place 9 - George Joseph Altgelt I don't honestly know how many of these folks are going to show up Tuesday night. These are busy attorneys. Jim Chisolm, at least, lives in the Houston area. As for me, I am not a busy attorney, but the office of Harris County Judge does not have a "ten years practicing law" requirement. I have a friend who works for the LSC system, at the main campus in Aldine. He has taken a position of leadership in the struggle that academics face here in the US: keeping academia a good place to make a living. The tenure system exists for a reason: to provide faculty members with at least a semi-secure place to conduct research and pass their knowledge on to the rising generation (and some older students looking for better careers). Community college instructors don't expect to make the same salaries as professors in more prestigious institutions, but those who have earned their PhD's should not have to teach four courses a week at four different colleges for subsistence wages and no benefits. The "adjunctification" of academia must stop. It is all about keeping tuitions competitively low, which seems admirable enough when fancy schools charge $50,000 or more per year. The Green Party has taken the position that public post-secondary education should be free to students, as it is in a number of nations, even some nations that aren't Norway. This would mean changing the tax structure fairly radically so that colleges can be fully funded without relying on tuitions. Read about the Green New Deal that Jill Stein put together as the foundation of her 2012 Presidential campaign, particularly the portion dealing with education. This is my official coming out to the electorate of Harris County as a Burner. I have never been to Burning Man, a week-long party in the Nevada desert that requires a huge amount of fossil fuels to get everyone there and back. However, I am a veteran of two Burning Flipsides, the Central Texas regional Burn.
Over Labor Day weekend, I helped stage a Houston-area event called the Playa Pity Party, an intimate gathering of folks who would like to have gone to Black Rock City, Nevada, but lacked the time or money. (The Playa, Spanish for "beach," refers to the sand flats of the high desert. Read more at burningman.com.) We spent the weekend outdoors, at an unofficial campground in muggy southeast Houston. In a small gathering of Playa Pity Party guests, I sat under a pop-up tent and mentioned to people I had just met that I was a candidate for Harris County Judge. These folks who barely knew me were delighted to learn that there was an alternative to Ed Emmett on the ballot. Once they got to know me better, they were even happier. Some will register and vote just so they can vote for me. One of the reasons I am attracted to the Burner crowd is that they strive to relate to each other on a deeply personal level. It's much more than mind-blowing art, mutant vehicles, and costumes laced with flashing LEDs. For someone like me, introverted and somewhat repressed, such relating can be challenging, sometimes irritating, but eventually profoundly liberating. Conservative icon Grover Norquist went to Burning Man this year. He wrote an op-ed afterward that seems to indicate that he gets it. He's even OK with the indisputable fact that Radical Self-Expression includes violating the laws of the local, state, and federal governments—in particular, ingesting illegal substances, mostly cannabis and hallucinogens. My own progressive ideology holds that society progresses primarily, if not exclusively, when people challenge laws that are unjust or make no practical sense. Sometimes challenging these laws means having the courage to violate them, to risk arrest for smoking a joint in public, for demonstrating against the predations of Big Capital, for standing up to institutional racism, for daring to vote while female or dark-skinned. Our mini-Burn had guests who identify with various political parties, some who are non-partisan, and some politically apathetic. That embodies the spirit of Radical Inclusion, another principle of the Burner movement that Norquist seems to respect. We had people like me, happy with a few beers, jammin' tunes, and scintillating conversation. We had others who took the opportunity to ingest some hallucinogens. We had no serious injuries, and as far as I know no conflicts resulting from guests getting too wasted. This event was not perfect, but it was a living illustration of peace. Two other Burner principles are Radical Self-Reliance and Communal Effort; these are not contradictory or mutually incompatible! We exhibited both! I heard more than one attendee say, "I wish we could all just live here." It wouldn't be easy, but we could, especially if we could turn part of the campground into a garden. Living in community is challenging—and so very worth it. This is the transformation of society that Greens advocate:
And that's just the beginning. |
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
All
Archives
April 2023
|