I used to believe I was the only liberal in my county. Hell, I used to believe I was the only liberal in my whole state, and after two elections where George Bush is alowed the keys to the white house, I believed that the entire country felt that way. I thought I had found what I needed on blog sites. But that wasn't the truth. After writting faithfully on this site and others for a about a month and a half, I found myself just as alone with my feelings. I'm not sure how long websites like this have been around, but it seems to me all of you have been around at least since the last presidential election, even if the site hasn't. And it seems to me that despite the screw ups, you just weren't there. Where were you?
Then I discovered for myself a grass roots organization in the county where I live. Waiting for the first meeting, I wondered how many people were actually there. I wondered if it would be more then two people. I live in a very conservative county and I figured that the two people there were struggling to keep the group alive. Still, I went; and to my utter supprise more then fifteen people were there. Not only that, but at the meeting they had a huge pile of newspapers they had created, all of which were to be sent out to a large pile of people who's addresses had to be typed into a computer, and then pasted on to each paper. I was stuned! Here was a group, in my county, that was actually working for a large lump of time.
Now granted, the reason I did not know about this group was because I had not been living in this county for a while. Still, I had lived there for 19 years before going to college, and the amount of hardship I endured for being a liberal was unreal, and there was litterally no where to go to find people just like me.
Today at only my second meeting, close to ten people were new. A lot of the old people weren't there, they were working on a bennefit concert down the street that the proceeds would help the organizaion. Still, thinking about the amount of people who did not go to tonights meeting b/c they were helping with the bennefit, plus the probably 30 people (members, newbees, and some people who probably hadn't heard of the group before had come to the bennefit, I was so amazed at how awsome grass roots organization can be.
I'm not going to put in here the whole "maybe you are blogging and being out in the grass roots organizations" that's crap. I believe that if you had been, there'd be at the meetings, and George Bush wouldn't be president right now. I don't know maybe he would be.
But then again, before I found these organizations, it was like I was screaming it was like the tree falling in the woods: Nothing was around to hear it, so it didn't make a sound.
-earthy