Young Democrats

I've just come back from the Second Annual Young Democrats breakfast. Chris Carney, our congressman, was there, as was Trey Casimir, who's running for state senate in the 23rd District. Leon Allen and MaryAnn Warren both spoke.

It sounds like it should have been boring, right? A "rubber chicken" dinner, only at 9:00 a.m. on a snowy Sunday morning.

Well, it wasn't. It was friendly, and fun, and lively, and most important of all -- it was energizing! I say that because it energized me.

But first, a backstory. I'm pretty allergic to politics. Like working in a sausage factory: you just don't want to know how it's really done. When George Bush defeated John Kerry, though, I tried to get involved in Philadelphia, where I lived during the week. I joined the local alternative movement, and went to a few meetings. But I got just a wee bit exasperated when the group -- quite united in their disgust of then-current political regime and its war -- started to fight each other over what was the right way to implement change. One faction thought we should run for local political office (committee person positions and the like), another thought we needed to work on national issues, still another thought something else. Me? I thought we needed to work on getting the media more comfortable representing progressive positions as viable. But I saw all the other suggestions as good ones too. They just weren't the suggestions that energized me.

One day, I said as much. "Why are we arguing?" I asked. "Why doesn't everyone pick the thing or approach that excites them and go do something toward that goal? Then we can maximize the effort and see what works." Another woman, a sociologist (she said), retorted angrily, "We're NOT fighting!!" and then went back to fighting.

I never went back.

Fast foward to my move fulltime to Susquehanna County in 2006. I signed up to be a Democrat -- definitely the minority party up here -- and settled back into my usual complacency. Politics, like sausage-making, is a job I expected someone else to do for me. But when I had signed up as a Democrat, I must have said something about having done election-rights work for the Kerry campaign. (I'm an attorney, although not one with any special election rights experience, but an attorney is an attorney, so I helped out in Throop on election day 2004.) Karen & John Hoffman, our party chairs here in Susquehanna County, latched onto me and got me involved in the election for 2006. Happy to help out.

Since then, I've been modestly and tangentially involved in a couple things here. Sitting at the breakfast this morning, I got excited again about the possibilities here. Democrats make up a greater percentage of the electorate than in the past few decades, we have two Democrat county commissioners -- and thus a majority -- in Montrose, and Chris Carney has been working hard even in the 13 months he's been in office to get "green collar" jobs in NE Pennsylvania. I think it's a great time to be a Democrat, but it's also just a great time to be politically active.

So I'm finally going to do what I had wanted to do three years ago: Contribute to the media. No offense to the two newspapers in Susquehanna County (the Susquehanna County Transcript and the Independent), but they're not the best source of information about what's really happening. Maybe it's the quality of the reporting, maybe it's their political bias, or maybe -- and I think this is the most likely explanation -- it's the pressure of too much work done by too few people. I just know that Susquehanna County can and should get more information than it does.

This, then, is my first entry to my political blog. I want to post about jobs, finances, energy policy, the awesome work done at the township level, how I don't think the political parties are the problem locally and a lot of other topics. Let's look at how we do things here in Susquehanna County. Let's celebrate the good stuff and work to improve the other stuff. And I want to know what you think. Leave a comment -- it's all good.