Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #24
Vote Local, Win National
(A daily series to counter the reporting that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate. They are not.)
I’ve spent all my time here on the Tsunami of Truths focusing on us winning the House, the Senate, and some Governors’ races.
But as one who himself was elected to local office at the age of 18, I’ve neglected to point out that all change begins at home — meaning right there in your neighborhood, your ward, your borough, your school district. It is there where the crazies are trying to ban Maya Angelou. Where the Right is trying to stop affordable housing from being built. Where the Chamber of Commerce is trying to eliminate environmental regulations. Their mission is to stifle debate, to put a halt to change, to lock things down so that the big money in town calls the shots. That’s where the Ted Cruzes of this world get their start on the road to perdition. And if we don’t stop them there, they will one day become the next Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In the small town in Michigan where I live, there’s a group of wealthy white men who meet quietly once a month for breakfast. They call themselves “The Owners”, and the meeting, “The Owners Breakfast.” They don’t do this out of self-aggrandizement. They are doing this because they believe it to be the truth, and they are probably right. They own mass amounts of local real estate and investments in Northern Michigan, and they can’t afford for any of that to be disrupted or closely examined. No one has elected them or appointed them to anything. They’ve declared themselves the town’s Owners and that’s that. Few in the area know about this secret group or its members. (Someday, when we’re all not busy trying to save the country, I will tell you how I discovered them.) The Owners are smart enough to make sure their existence is kept under wraps. After all, the everyday citizens in a democracy like to believe they themselves are the ones in charge. Even if we know we’re not. Pretending and believing the myth of equality and democracy is 9/10 possession of the republic, right?
Nonetheless, we persist in the hopes we will all one day, regardless of status or bank account, be the real owners of at least the few square miles where we live and raise our families.
So while I don’t have the time or resources to cover all (random guess) 14,577 city, township, local judge and school board races across the country next month, I can humbly beseech you to do a little research to find out who these candidates are and make the right selections. It’s harder to do that these days, in large part because our local media has been decimated — radio is dead or racist, print is “what is print?“, and civic groups like the League of Women Voters are, in many places, a shell of their former selves.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whip-smart local bartender (AOC) running for town council, or a middle school principal (Jamaal Bowman) on the ballot for County Commissioner or a local activist and mother (Cori Bush) seeking to become the township clerk. There are hundreds of these good people running across the country and it will feel good to find them, meet them and vote for them. The bigger changes that we seek nationwide begin right here in Our Town.
As the t-shirt says above, the mayor in Jaws — the political hack who at the behest of the local business community demanded that the sheriff open up the beaches for that all-important tourism money-maker known as the Fourth of July weekend (even though a mad shark who had already killed a skinny-dipper was still lurking offshore) — by the time “Jaws 2” rolled around, this bastard was still the mayor! Proving unequivocally that if you don’t pay attention to your local elections, if we don’t do our duty as citizens, even in the “smallest” races on the ballot, there will be no night swimming left for any one.
18 days to Roevember!
Spirits up!
I can’t make this victory happen alone. They only let me vote once! We’re all in this together.
Fear of the Trumpsters gives that power over to them.
Believe in our collective power!
What are you doing this weekend to get out the vote?! Now is the moment!
ICYMI:
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truths:
Truth #1: The Campaign
Truth #2: Even a kid from 4th hour Trig class can beat this crowd
Truth #3: The Haters, the Bigots and the Supremacists Always Lose in the End
Truth #4: Introducing The Whackadoodle 10
Truth #5: Trump is not the Big Bad Wolf. But he is very afraid of You.
Truth #6: The Easy-to-Digest Republican Party Platform
Truth #7: Biden, Don’t F**k with Me
Truth #8: If you’re not registered, you can’t Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote!
Truth #9: Why will we win? Because the American people hate fascism.
Truth #10: Meet Blake Masters, Whackadoodle No. 9
Truth #11: 147 Reasons We Will Win on November 8th
Truth #12: Biden just gave us a boost and a toke.
Truth #13: Women. That’s it.
Truth #14: If the Mainstream Media Thinks There’s a Chance We May Be Right about Roevember, Watch Out.
Truth #15: Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, Whackadoodle No. 8
Truth #16: As Alex Jones has now been fined a billion dollars for his lies, that is nothing compared to the punishment other Republicans are going to get on November 8th.
Truth #17: Early Voting, Mail-in Voting, Dropbox Voting — These Were Made for Libs, Hard Workers, Book Readers, Artists, Busy Parents, Slackers, and Progressives like us! In other words, The Majority!
Truth #18: The Good Queen vs. The Mad King
Truth #19: A Workers' Revolt Extends to the Voting Booth
Truth #20: We Are in Charge
Truth #21: Don’t believe it.
Truth #22: If the election is about inflation and the economy, THANK GOD — We Win
Truth #23: We Believe in Science. And that’s why we will win.
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This morning I got a very disturbing email from my favorite historian Heather Cox Richardson, she was talking about the writings of The Federalist's senior editor John Daniel Davidson. The summary of it is that he is telling the Right wing that they need to be revolutionary, radical, restorationists, and that corporations need to be bent to their will when they take over, forget about supply side, Reagan like economic principles, to make abortion murder, to get rid of no fault divorce, to go after universities, starve universities because they are spreading poisonous ideologies, to go after parents that take their children to drag shows and arrest them and charge them criminally for abusing their children, teachers will be arrested and charged if they teach anything sexually explicit, in other words they cannot have sex education in schools. A lawmaker in Florida, Sabatini, was quoting General Franco, I mean, you get the jest of this, right? They want to do to the US what people like Viktor Orban has done, illiberal democracy, in other words, no democracy, an authoritarian regime. Those of us who like living in a democracy must stand up, we must vote, we must take others to the polls, we must ask our young people to get involved. Democracy is key to having a good economy, authoritarian regimes do not have good economies, they struggle. Take charge, vote!!!
Owners is apt. George Carlin said it best: it's a big club, and you ain't in it!