Activism

I'm still on a moveon.org mailing list. I'm on a couple of others too and I mostly just ignore them. They do tend to send out too much email and they basically just ask for money. A few do campaigns to get you to call your representative to take a stand on an upcoming vote. Normally this is dull for me as my representatives mostly do what I want. Now that Scott Brown is my senator I've called his office a few times. It feels good, but I don't think it does much.

Barney Frank is my congressman and he has an office a few block from my home, I drive by it often. Moveon sent email out a day or two ago saying to meet at his office today at noon to thank him for standing strong on his support for the social programs during the deficit talks. See they're not just about complaining. I didn't think such a thing would be particularly useful and I had lunch plans.

My lunch plans fell through at the last minute so I walked down, mostly to see what such an event would look like. It turns out it looks like about 15 people, almost all with grey hair, meeting out front of a four story office building. One or two people knew each other, I assume from other moveon.org events. A few printed out 8.5 x 11 signs that said "Thanks for Standing Strong" or something like that. We stood at the steps for a few minutes. One guy said he could have worn an Obama t-shirt but it's hard to still believe in Obama. Another was saying a few things about how annoyed he was at Republicans and how they're just so wrong. That the freshman tea party congressman just don't understand that their policies are not in their own self interest. If they studied their history they'd know that Marx said...and I trailed off. One woman said rather than small groups we should have a big rally on the common to tell the country that we have an alternative view. I said I think most of the country already believes that Massachusetts has an alternative view.

So someone went up stairs to tell them that we were there. There's one young staffer that, Frank is in DC. So eight of us went up to his office and stood at the reception desk. We stood in mostly silence not being at all organized. The staffer said why I don't I take your names and addresses and any statements. So we went around saying the info as he wrote it down. A few more came into the office and a few of us made sound bite statements. "Don't cut social security or medicare" or "The debt isn't the real issue it's jobs". I said I cared mostly about the debt ceiling and would most like a clean vote or the McConnell plan. Not raising the ceiling isn't an option.

We then funneled out and went our separate ways. It all felt rather depressing. Lack of organization in any sized group is always bad. It turns out even people with similar general beliefs have differences on the details, imagine that. The woman who said jobs were the important thing mentioned the WPA and a gentleman said "or the army, that's a good job" and she said "well not the army, we want to be shrinking that and bringing people home."

I don't think showing up meant any more than calling him (my understanding is that phone calls count much more than email messages as far as influencing congressmen). I also think that showing up in some way added to the kabuki theater of the negotiations with press conferences and cable news interviews while everything real happens behind closed doors. As was said months ago, no matter what it will all come down to the 11th hour. That's a week to go.