Today I witnessed something in Grand Junction, Colorado that finally got me out of my Palin funk. As some of you may know, Grand Junction, on Colorado's Western Slope, is a small-to-medium sized town in a reliably hard-core Republican part of the country. It's traditional ranching and mining economy for the past few years has been dominated by a natural gas exploration and drilling boom. Haliburton is the biggest employer and many smaller drilling and "fracking" businesses support the industry. There is a large Morman presence in G.J. too, as well as tons of little Fundy churches to take up the spiritual slack. Traditional ranching and mining folks, libertarian-type small business people, zillions of "Realtors" with rictus smiles, a big sportsman/hunter presence, hummers and gigantic SUVs dwarfed only by huge monster trucks everywhere, all these feed a hard-core Republican soup of the Western variety.
Well, this morning I left my small western hamlet to drive many miles to Grand Junction to obtain a ticket to see Barack on Monday. Yes, on Monday morning Barack Obama is venturing into Bush-McCain-Palin territory to fight the good fight in Grand Junction, Colorado. Tickets were to be distributed starting at 12 noon today at Obama headquarters and given out until none were left for the Monday event.
Due to my long journey with several errands, I arrived at about 1:00pm at the Obama headquarters which is in a grand old house on Grand Ave. Being late, I figured I'd still get a ticket, albeit maybe one of the last ones. Appoaching the headquarters I noticed a big knot of cars there, unusual for the quiet street. I had to park way down the block because of so many cars and noticed tons people were streaming down the sidewalks in a cheerful way toward the old house. When I got there, an informal greeting party on the lawn told me that no more tickets were left. In fact, I was told, well before the noon-hour arrived an extremely long line of folks had queued up and that in no time the 1500 tickets were gone! When I left, people were discussing the possibilty of finding a much larger venue for the event.
I'm back home now. I will probably not see Barack this election cycle. But that doesn't matter because I'm so happy and heartened by what I saw today. As I stayed chatting on that leafy front lawn I saw a stream of mainstream, ordinary, salt-of-the-earth Western Coloradans, torrents of them, approaching that little old house like pilgrims toward a shrine. They were hopeful, optimistic, light-hearted, thrilled as I was to see a very great many of their fellows with like-minded belief in change and the Obama message. They were all coming too late to get a ticket in to the small venue, but they, like me, saw the reality of "Yes We Can" just by showing up there.