A week ago, a friend messaged me late on Friday. She said “we made it through to the weekend!” And I was like “I mean yeah except those pesky kids and all their bullshit.”
Well folks, here we are on a Friday: you made it. You made it through the week. That is if you aren’t a parent, or you aren’t working odd jobs, odd hours, or multiple jobs.
But nevertheless… you made it. So let’s get to this week’s newsletter.
Around the World
Fascism is on the rise, folks. So much so that I talked about it in my podcast next week (you can preview it on Youtube, or below). I’m really starting to feel like I belong to Fox News though on this topic, because the more cancel culture grows, the more I feel that Democrats have just as much a tendency to fascism as Republicans do.
Think of it: every time they try and suppress viewpoints, suppress information, cancel someone for being against the “vote blue no matter who” mantra, or claim that anything they simply don’t agree with, don’t like, or haven’t read the up-to-date information on… they call it misinformation, or a threat to democracy.
But do you know what the biggest threat is to democracy? Suppression. Censorship. Cancel culture.
What is most disturbing to me is in the case of local media, at least where I live. There is an argument afoot that “both sides-ing journalism” is harmful to democracy because it gives a mouthpiece to an objectively grotesque underbelly of society. But at the same time, if journalists do not offer the perspective of all views, what is to be gained?
One, singular, view that then becomes suppression of other whatever-it-happens-to-be out there. This is not a reflection of America, as a whole.
And I hate this with my whole being, because it offers the perspective that racists should be allowed to spew their racist hatred; transphobia permissible in the public space… and so on. Is what they say right? No. But the principles upon which this country was founded allow for those hateful things to be said, no matter how grotesque or abhorrent.
The Constitution does not save anyone from consequences from their words and actions, this is for certain. So consequence-away. Combat with love, sue people… whatever.
But outright suppression? That shit is wrong. It is anti-democratic. It is fascism, defined.
More on my perspective in next week’s pod, again you can already listen to it in its entirety here:
Around My World
School is back in full swing over here. I’m taking a course in Public Governance, and growing more skeptical of the concept of the “national deficit” by the day as a result. My kids are back at it too. I designed three, entire curriculums over the summer for my five year old, all based around projects in history, STEM, and art. My high schooler is at it, and also dual enrolled in classes at the community college. And my oldest daughter deferred a year to have surgery later this winter, but is taking classes at the community college as well, and playing tennis for their team.
As it turns out, my kids are taking two of their classes at community together, and they invited me to take their painting class with them. Of course, they were probably just being polite; but I graciously accepted, and let them turn my office into their painting space for these 15 weeks. Because wasn’t that nice of them to humor me like that?
You Can’t Unsee This
I mean… is it entirely wrong?
STFU Fridays
My big pet peeve right now are people complaining about the ongoing availability of Telehealth services. I’ve heard it from a couple doctors, some family members that are nurses, and a hell of a lot of people on social media that work in a variety of areas of healthcare.
The complaints run the gamut, but very few of them have actually boiled down to actual serious reasons related to health. Most of them are things like “the wifi never works,” or “I cannot figure out how to do audio,” or – my favorite – “patients take it as an opportunity to spend too much time discussing their issues, because they’re in the comfort of their own home.” The audacity. The audacity of patients wanting to actually be able to have conversations with their doctors without being herded out like cattle.
The. Audacity.
I can certainly see there are some issues that are harder to address over Telehealth, like a rash or something that really does require a hands-on, fingers-up approach (barf). But there are so many things that can be addressed over Telehealth, and with the rapid expansion of it due to COVID it not only makes it safer for people while the pandemic still rages, and it gives access to people to see their doctors that otherwise do not always get to go.
For myself, I am a mom with very little support system, at times (most of the time). Because of this, I am rarely able to see my doctor; once a year if I’m lucky. The pandemic opening Telehealth, though, has allowed me to have regular visits with my primary care physician and really start addressing my allergies and asthma in ways I could only dream of doing with my 5 year old in tow at the office. Both issues are now much better off in terms of their management than they have been in over a decade (think about that for a minute), and I am able to see my doctor more frequently to do this simply because all I have to do is log in to Zoom. I don’t have to fight with my kid to wear his mask or stop opening and closing drawers, I don’t need anyone to drive my older kids to their school and sports activities… I can literally do the appointment from anywhere. This has been an absolute game changer for me, and I am certain it has been for others.
So to the people complaining about Telehealth without understanding the circumstances under which it really and truly has changed lives, and possibly lengthened them? Well y’all just need to shut the fuck up. Quit being lazy, quit being stubborn, and start remembering why you got into healthcare to begin with.
(And again, I recognize the instances where a hands on approach really and truly is needed… this is why both modalities need to be available.)
…on that note of availability, I do have to say that if appointments were more readily available in person, Telehealth may not be so widely needed still. Four times in the last couple of weeks I have called and been offered in person appointments literal weeks from the time I made the call. The Telehealth visit over Zoom? The next day.
Have a good weekend, everyone! That is… if weekends are a thing for you…
I wish I could write one, fucking newsletter without starting off with something like: welp, what a mess this world is. But we’re 12 issues in, and sure as hell nothing has gotten any better.
In fact, I’d wager, it’s gotten worse.
I’m starting to find myself looking at things going on in the world – shootings, violence, crime, and the like – more as evidence that people are starting to snap, than anything else. Sure, gun safety reform and legislation is absolutely necessary; so is more adequate access to mental health services. As are a host of other things that create an insurmountable amount of pressure that, for some, just ends up being too much.
I do not condone anything that is happening in that space, but I have to say that I understand. I really do.
People can just only take so much. So much pain, death, disease, hardship, and lack of care.
In any event, let’s get to it.
Around the World
Dr. Oz won his primary this week, in the same general vein and district patterns that Trump did.
In other words: we’re fucked.
Not that authoritarianism isn’t already kind-of sort-of going on already. To be more clear: it is. The Biden Administration has taken the road of doing what they think is best, even though it is antithetical to even some of the fundamental principals and mandates upon which they were voted in. And I’m not even just talking about areas in which they are strapped, and their hands are supposedly tied (which they are not, and we’ll get to in a minute). But when an Administration makes as many blunders as this one has, and keeps cow-towing to the Republican and corporate demands that are not in the best interest of the people, while having essentially a blank check for a foreign war that the majority of people did not co-sign…
Well Houston… we have a problem. This is how you invite hyper-nationalistic fascism to the dinner table.
It is my belief that the Democrats have rendered themselves impotent in the name of old-timey bipartisanship and, well, capitalism. Not only has Joe Biden failed to hold true to many of his campaign promises in 2020, his Administration has largely failed to meet the moment on a number of crises that have occurred around the country, and world, since. Have they been an abject failure? Well no, but on the areas in which they have had a mandate, they continue to fall short.
What does not make sense is being elected to do those very specific things and then just … not…
Democrats, and the Admin, are great at pointing the finger, except for when it comes to pointing it at themselves. As I see it, a number of factors are getting in the way of them achieving any of their promises, and securing enough wins in the fall to hold the majority. Oftentimes, they remind me of one of my old boyfriends who would defeat himself with inaction and procrastination; it was easier to point blame and feel sorry for himself than to actually try and be successful. Because once you’ve been successful, well how will you win the next round (in the case of the Dems, what will you campaign on?).
But, if we’re being frank here: I don’t see the Democrats doing anything with the majority anyway (they always, invariably, find an excuse not to). Now they’re on some grand campaign to gaslight America, to try and make people believe that their material conditions aren’t actually worse, that things aren’t really hard right now, that inflation and housing and jobs and everything in between isn’t really affecting them… that we all just don’t understand, which – in my own personal experience – is the D’s traditional line when they’re pinned up against the wall. And this is, sadly, exactly why the vast majority of people in America see them as elitist assholes who, frankly, do not serve anyone but themselves.
The bottom line that hardline Democrats are failing to understand is that average Americans – the people that vote only when they care about something – are not party line voters. They will not Vote Blue No Matter who if Blue doesn’t do anything for them before the next election. Republicans get it, they give their voters the things that they explicitly are elected to do (often times, judges and an elimination of government control). Numbers of non partisan or so-called Independent voters have grown in exponential numbers, around the country, for decades, and it’s why so many of our elections are unpredictable, and communities are largely a purple swath of people that sway with their conditions at the time the ballots are cast.
Blaming people is an ineffective tool if but only because of all those factors I mentioned getting in the way. Among them are: a refusal to reform the filibuster, a refusal to utilize the bully-pulpit of the Presidency, an Administration that is both ignorant and incompetent on important issues until it is too late (see: Omicron, baby formula), a President that is living in the past (the days of bipartisan deals and being good friends with Mitch), and, well, capitalism.
Even on issues like the economy, Joe Biden has a fiscal policy that is politically to the right of Nixon. Just think about that for a minute. President Nixon – a traitor to democracy – did more for economic stabilization to stave off inflation and recession than Joe Biden will. His plan for the economy is laughable, at best. Beyond the fact that average Americans are largely unaffected by the deficit (an arbitrary and made up concept to begin with), the bulk of his plan to deal with inflation and the economy is all the talking points of that failed piece of legislation – Build Back Beyond, or whatever it was called – that Manchin vetoed, they promised to break up, and haven’t talked about since. They’re empty promises, just like COVID funding and calling on Congress to do something about guns. Rather than flex the powers of the executive branch that Biden actually does have, he’s making remarks, letting his Administration correct them, saying he didn’t see pretty much everything coming (including the formula shortage, which is unforgivable as I see it), then heading home for a three day weekend in Delaware, seemingly just as much as Trump used to golf. It’s insanity!
(And I say this all as a Democrat, with absolutely no skin in the game. Think about that one too…)
Around My World
Welp, the lesson I’m learning now is that when you go through hard shit, you learn who your real friends and family are.
We’ve been looking for a rental since January, and shit just gets uglier and uglier by the day.
We’ve now spent $3,960 on non-refundable application fees, and the rejections are getting stupider by the day. Today, after being effectively approved on a home, we were then told “sorry, a military family contacted us we’re going with them.” This is the second time this happened in the last two weeks.
My daughter who is 14 went with my husband to one viewing, and the realtor showing the home thought she was his girlfriend. I guess not getting selected for that home was a blessing in disguise.
We are now at three homes that we are waiting to hear back on. This is how it goes. It’s 3 then 5 then down to 2; it got so confusing at a point that I had to make a spreadsheet for us to keep track, which is a depressing sheet of just strikes through addresses and notes like “probably not going to work for us too small,” and “has 117 other applicants.”
So as of now we’re at three, one is ideal for our family, another sort of ideal but outdated, and the third was a scene of a crime today when, three doors down, a man was arrested after the chopped up remains of his mother were found in the community dumpster.
Meanwhile, we’re still in our temporary rental. It has dampness and mold, no ventilation, an outdated circuit breaker that could catch fire at any moment with all the lights around the house flickering, and no emergency exit that will open. The dampness has caused me to have a sinus infection for 4 weeks now, and I am covered in hives; but God forbid I mention that in casual conversation, then – it’s becoming more and more common – I never hear from whomever I’m talking to again.
It’s not that I mean to just complain all the time. It’s just that this is a pretty big thing going on in our lives right now, and when people ask how things are going, I take that to mean they actually want to know…
Because that’s the real lesson in all of this. Not that California’s housing crisis is greater than anyone not experiencing it could ever imagine. Not that 45% of the state is a renter and virtually no one in public office on any level is doing anything to represent them with the urgency of this unprecedented crisis. Not that landlords are literal scum, and your house can literally harm you physically.
No, it’s that when these types of things happen, a lot of people in your life just… disappear. Because it makes them feel bad to talk about their vacations when they know you have to spend your spare cash on application fees, and an $800 a month gas bill so your kids can still go to their activities after you had to move out of town.
To them I just have to say: I am very sorry that my personal predicament makes you uncomfortable in your privilege.
There are also those that themselves contribute to the problem by hoarding empty homes, or subjugating the middle and working class into uninhabitable conditions as landlords. I’m not saying that all landlords are bad, just that if you are a landlord or employed somehow in this line of work, and find yourself justifying (or attempting to justify) ostensibly horrible conditions and situations… I don’t know, maybe you’re just a horrible person. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with a friend about mold in the kitchen cabinets; a friend who herself works as a property manager for a relatively large company in Los Angeles County. She said to me “well you know you can’t expect to have a home AND have it be livable all the time,” and that – ladies and gentlemen – was the end of our friendship.
Ah well…
You Can’t Unsee This
Sorry to burst your bubble. This is the current rate of COVID transmission in the US. You are being lied to if someone is telling you it’s over. It’s not. COVID is still very real. Living with it does not mean just infecting people all willy-nilly (more on that in a post next week…).
Get your masks back on, at least in situations where vulnerable people may be present. Consider scaling back on gatherings.
And if this monkeypox thing blows up…
STFU Fridays
I live in Southern California, but the truth to the matter is that all over the world people are experiencing the changing climate. A part of that is that droughts like we have never experienced are cropping up all over.
The effects this will have on crops, life in general, is a more serious conversation for another day. For now, I’d like to talk about people with grass lawns, and golf courses.
In So Cal, we have been restricted to only water once per day, and who-boy have the crazies come out.
One group is asking why we are building more apartments and houses if we don’t have enough water infrastructure to water our palatial lawns and take 2 hour showers every day. Well, first and foremost, all those people that are living in RVs, in homeless encampments, in tents in people’s backyards, in their cars, in local motels… they have a right to live in a home too. They exist. They are more important than your fucking grass yard and 1970s ol’ reliable washing machine, Janice. Unless they all just up and die (which, to be frank, I’m sure many of these NIMBY fucks would be fine with), they need a place to live. This doesn’t have a single thing to do with watering restrictions. So shut the fuck up to them.
But also, and this is going to blow all of your minds, the people defending the watering restriction and conservation guidelines need to shut the fuck up too. I know! Crazy, right?
Wrong.
In California, as an example, only 10% of water usage is attributed to people’s homes. Brushing your teeth a little less, taking shorter showers, washing your clothes less frequently, and only watering your lawns once or less a week, is not going to do a damn thing to really make the sizable dent in the water reserves that will be needed for the long term. So the people going after those complaining about grass lawns and their plants dying for real need to shut the fuck up. Because who you need to really go after are the golf courses, high schools, businesses, and agricultural sectors not doing their part.
There is absolutely no reason why golf courses and high school football fields should be exempt from water restrictions, and yet they are. More to the point: Big Ag could make substantial changes to their watering processes to irrigate more efficiently and with less run off, but they won’t because – duh – Big Money.
Rather than go after someone reasonably pissed that all the investment they’ve made in their yard – whether you agree with that investment or not – is about to die (because watering once per day is honestly not going to keep a damn thing alive), why not focus your anger at the politicians and the golf course and agriculture lobbyists that are passing the ultimate burden onto the rest of us? Because they are the enemy, and until you recognize that I think it’s time to just…
Unless you live under a rock, you know that Roe and Casey are about to be overturned.
If you do live under a rock, my apologies. Last night, a leak from within the walls of the Supreme Court was published in a Politico article, which included the opinion of the Supreme Court, which has effectively taken an internal vote to overturn both Roe and Casey. This will throw abortion and other healthcare rights back to the states, which will have an avalanche of consequences, including the return of back-alley abortions, and an elimination of privacy for everyone. It also, effectively, makes travel even through a state with outlawed abortion a non-option for millions of young women, as even travel through will be subject to criminal proceedings should a woman later terminate a pregnancy that was merely conceived in the state, in passing. Here is a link to that article; if you need to go read it, we’ll be here waiting when you’re done: LINK.
There is little less in this world quite as grotesque as the actions and words of many within hours of the publication of that article. I am sure more will come.
If I were to include an incomplete list, it would include:
1. Men, like Congressional Representative Eric Swalwell, making this into being about him:
2. Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and the DNC/Joe Biden fundraising off the issue:
3. People who have been promising to protect women for decades, only to repeatedly fall short of doing so
And the big one:
4. Men who believe they have a right to pontificate on how women are allowed to respond, react, feel, and vote/not vote on this issue
And that is, fundamentally, what I am seeing of the most. Men, and a few women as well, taking to Twitter and Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram – everywhere really – to pontificate and bluster about how this is the fault of young people who didn’t vote in 2016, or this is the fault of people, especially women, that are critical of Biden and the Democrats now.
The problem with that is that it fails to acknowledge history, and the gift that Democrats have been given over and over again over the last 50 years, only to take that gift for granted, much in the way women are often used and abused and then thrown to the side when no longer needed in every day life.
Even if we just consider the last couple of administrations, since the Supreme Court evidenced itself to be a political body in Bush v Gore, you have to accept that:
-In 2009, Obama had a super majority in the Senate for 5 months. Prior to this, he had campaigned on codifying Roe into law, and yet as soon as elected, his agenda shifted and this no longer became a priority. With that super majority, nothing was done.
-In 2014, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to retire, and she was either too selfish or senile to oblige. People claim that she wanted to wait until a woman was president, but this foolish viewpoint is a grim statement more (in my view) of why the Supreme Court should not be a lifetime appointment; that an age limit should be enforced.
-In 2019, as highlighted above, Biden campaigned on codifying Roe, much like Obama did. And while he has not been gifted a super majority, his weak leadership has only made the problem worse. When asked to expand the court, he created a commission to study it. After spending our tax dollars to research the issue, the group created a 300+ page document that simply provided a history of the Supreme Court, and issued no recommendation. Since then, the issue has been dropped, mentioned now only in passing when things get bad. Moreover, in fall of 2021, the House passed a bill that would codify Roe into law, and the Senate has remained in gridlock on the issue. Most notable though is that a handful of senators did not even show up to vote on the issue, Biden made no public moves to lead with an iron fist on the issue, and to this day he continues to take zero position in favor of nuking the filibuster – even for a carve out on this singular issue, which they have done before, on military spending.
And these last 24 hours, the people in power have again shown us who they are. Pelosi and Schumer issued perhaps the weakest joint statement they have ever issued; Biden did much of the same today. It was more “let’s wait and see what happens,” as if time is not of the essence in this issue, as if the clock is not about to strike midnight. Fundraising, because women’s rights are a big money maker; and moving on to their agenda for the day of passing more money for Ukraine.
In the end, the military and the economy is really what this is all about anyway. If women continue to stop having babies, the economy cannot grow. Right?
But all of that is neither here nor there, in the final analysis. The damage to this point is done, and now it is only a matter of time before women in this country are subjugated in ways we never even believed could happen. Interestingly, over the decades, abortion statistics have remained static, through illegal and legal times. The only difference, fundamentally, has been whether or not they are safe.
Then again, were we the ones foolish and senile on this issue? The people in power in this country – the elite oligarchy of Democrats and Republicans, and a handful of progressives who still have more cash on hand than the rest of us – have systematically shown women what they think of us for a long time. There is no universal childcare. No equal pay, truly so. No paid family leave. Women’s healthcare has been on the downslide for decades, with abortion being the final nail in the coffin.
And it’s more than that. It’s the rise in toxic masculinity that is pervasive to daily life. It’s people saying they don’t want to wear a mask to protect others because it makes them feel “weak,” and “feminine” to care about others, have compassion and express feelings like kindness. It’s feeling threatened when a strong or intelligent woman enters the chat. It’s being a woman and calling the cable company, only to have them ask if they can speak to your husband. It is exhausting to be a woman in America today, this decision by the Supreme Court is more of the same.
It’s a country of men mansplaining to women how they are allowed to feel and react, and – again – how to vote or not vote in reaction to their fundamental right to choose being taken away.
Please stop making Roe about you. Please stop posting your hot takes, turning it into your own issues, using it as a fundraising tool, and telling women their frustration with their supposed-allies is invalid. Even if you are an older women, consider that this only symbolically affects you. For young women – women under 50 all over this country – the stakes are much more dire; for you it’s posters and cries to resist, for them it’s life, death, and back alley abortions.
Consider this: when you tell a young woman who is now faced with the consequences of the world created for them, a woman who has to plan travel around not even going through states that outlaw abortion (unless they want to later on face possible criminal proceedings)… when you tell them that they cannot vote how they want, feel how they want, or react how they deem appropriate, because the Democrats said so and the two party system is just what we have:
You are doing the same thing that the Supreme Court did by voting to overturn Roe and Casey.
You are taking away a young woman’s autonomy. You are deciding for her what she is allowed to think, feel, and do.
I can say in all honesty that I never in a million years expected to live this long. I’m not sure why. I feel 100, and also 12. Who knows what’s next? It’s just a number, and to be honest this doesn’t really change anything at all or mean anything.
Still…
Around the World
Not all of you live in California, or the United States, so I imagine this needs a bit of primer.
In America, we like our United States Senators to be old. And I don’t just mean old… I mean these fucks could drop dead any day. It’s sad, because they should be enjoying their Golden Years watching TV and doing crafts, but these folks have a tendency to get into office and then hang onto it with the life force of Skeletor’s death grip.
This week, the San Francisco Chronicle published a piece in which several colleagues (as in Democratic Senators) and former aides to United States Senator Diane Feinstein attested to her cognitive decline over the last several months. Those of us in California for whom she is one of our two senators know that her husband recently died, so she may arguably be a bit distracted. Nonetheless the woman is in her 80s (88 to be exact), and as with many of them… aging fast.
This calls into question not only her ability to serve in her office now – making major decisions on behalf of the American people, but until her term is over, still years from now. She has since issued a statement that she plans to – and claims she is capable of – continuing her tenancy in office; but the rest of us are left wondering… why? Why does a United States Senator choose to spend every last breath of their lives in office for a little over $100K a year and a good parking spot at the airport?
Especially one like Feinstein, whose net worth now stands above $87 million.
I – for one – am all in favor of term limits for holding public office. Nancy Pelosi is another, who is 82 years old and running for another two years. These people play games with the lives of over 340 million Americans – from choices about war, to how social spending is (or is not) to be had. And when it comes of an appropriate time to retire, to head to Florida to live out the lives of the Golden Girls (or some similar retired folks anecdote), they instead choose to hang on to office for as long as they can.
I have my own thoughts, and a lot of others have theirs. On one hand, I do believe you have some politicians who have been doing it for so long that they just don’t know what they’d do in retirement. Or, they had an agenda when they first got elected, and because government moves so slow have yet to finish it.
But I think the real crux of it, especially in cases like Feinstein and Pelosi, can be found in what they block while in office.
Nancy Pelosi, as one example, has been opposed to bills that would limit what types of, if any, investments elected officials can make while in office. Unlike our Governor – Gavin Newsom, who placed all of his investments and businesses into a blind trust when he entered public office – many other elected officials go on to hold robust stock portfolios. And whether anyone will admit it or not, they cash in when they are privy to information that will affect the stock market before it happens.
For people like Martha Stewart, or average schmucks like us, this is called insider trading, and comes with hefty prison sentences. But for people like Feinstein and Pelosi, or the same on the other side like those two Republicans from Georgia that lost in the January ’21 special election, it’s a blip in the news, and no one is ever held accountable.
Election reform, again, would go a long way to correct this. But then that would require the elected officials to vote for the types of reforms that would stop them from doing all of this, so… I guess we shouldn’t hold our breath on that one.
Around My World
Things are getting pretty grim around my neighborhood. The new one, that is.
We are at war with our duplex neighbor, who is psychotic and has come banging on our door in the middle of the night more than once. She complained to our landlord about alleged noise, and rather than come to our defense and talk to her about her crazy behavior, the landlord decided instead to take her side, warn us about noise (our 5 year old giggling…), and say they were going to do nothing about it.
So we’ve also had several maintenance issues come up with, what appears to be, just years of neglect of the home. The circuit breaker is outdated, and so our lights all over the house intermittently flicker if more than one light or appliance is on at a time. When we told the landlord, they sent out an electrician and then tried to blame it on us. So we just deal with that and hope no one has a non-epileptic seizure. The duplex neighbor has also made damn sure that our kids don’t play out back by encouraging her elderly mother to chain smoke in the backyard. After one asthma attack by my little guy, that sealed off use of the backyard for us.
The real kicker is in the pedophile down the street. I thought this guy was a little off, if you know what I mean. His wife pumps iron in the garage like a body builder, and he shuffles around smoking a pipe all day and all night. One night, my 14 year old daughter was just walking the dogs up and down the street, and he started following her. So this guy is a … creep…
Last week, my husband was heading out on a run one day when all of a sudden he came running in screaming my name. Our house was completely lined with sheriffs and unmarked cars full of guys in suits. My driveway was blocked, and the neighbors all around pretty much acted like it was your average day around here. We saw a K9 unit go in and then come out with a black bag.
No one left. No one was taken away. Just… the black bag…
So we’re looking for a way out. Frankly, I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be able to do it. At least it’s good for some stories?
You Can’t Unsee This
I’ve been thinking there’s some haunted presence in this entire neighborhood since we moved here two months ago. I even wondered if the flickering lights through out our duplex unit are actually just a ghost.
Two nights ago, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room and around 4:45 in the morning woke up to what sounded like someone knocking on the back patio sliding glass door (which runs parallel to the couch I was sleeping on). I dismissed it and went to sleep again, too tired to go to bed; only to wake up in the morning to see that shortly after I had woken up, our front door camera (titled “Christine Watch” for our psycho neighbor) had pinged my phone with a “Human Detection.”
Except, as you can see, there was no one there.
STFU Fridays
I think I’ve said this before, but for real this time: shut the fuck about “COVID is over.” It isn’t. Every time you dumbasses rejoice and rip off your masks and start having parties, and shit, COVID comes raging back.
If you are paying attention, the cases in the United States – as in other places around the world – are beginning again to increase. As are hospitalizations, and the deaths will follow (in fact, in some places deaths are increasing more quickly than cases, indicating woefully inadequate and faulty testing). This is all happening probably because of a relaxing of protection; or more of that seasonal bullshit (although I don’t know any other specific virus that circulates seasonally as in all the time, unpredictably, in every season…). There was also recently a huge outbreak at a political event in DC, in which more than 11% of attendees contracted the virus. That is an alarmingly high number of people to be infected as a part of an outbreak, and to make matters worse the management of the venue refused to disclose how many employees got it to.
There’s also a new variant, which has mainly gastrointestinal symptoms, so I’ve really enjoyed the dozens of posts in the Facebook moms groups about this “crazy stomach bug going around that also has a cough.” I mean come on, get tested and stay the fuck home.
And while we’re at it, maybe stop with this “we have the tools” horse shit. Yes, vaccines and antivirals are available, but available is not equal to effective tools that everyone can avail themselves of. Vaccines have limits, too; we know this now. The efficacy of them wanes, even the second booster and even with protection from hospitalization. And antivirals… maybe if you’re a wealthy elite, you have access to them readily. But a lot of people have no access, or limited access; and hardly any insurance companies are planning to cover them (this includes ours, which has it marked as Non Formulary).
The problem is that the more y’all don’t shut the fuck up with these trite and dismissive comments is you give our leaders no reason whatsoever to continue doing anything, ie funding, the effort. So stop. Even if things are looking better.
To me it’s like: why tempt fate? Why call it over, say we’re good now, when you just do not know? No one knows, this is a pandemic! A once in a lifetime event! Maybe have some humility and accept you don’t know everything, err on the side of caution, and realize that people exist on this planet other than you.
Welcome to the 5th part of my 5 Part Series: The Infection Was Initially Mild: My Small Town City Council Run, the Toxic American Pandemic Response, and What Both Mean For the Future Of the Country.
You can also read the entire series now, download it in entirety in PDF format, catch the disclaimers in the Introduction, listen to it on Text to Speech (I have to warn you it’s a little awkward), or watch the Text to Speech on YouTube.
Also, more resources, videos, updates, and Pay What It’s Worth links can be found there too!
So this is the thing about politics: the wound started out incredibly small. The infection was initially mild.
The coronavirus pandemic, and everything that came with it, quickly put on display everything that is wrong with this country. Our politics are too local. Our response is too rooted in money. Personality has become too much a part of policy making. Messaging – not policy, or simply right or wrong – is a make or break tool, which is absurd when you really get down to it. What begins as something minor can explode into a big problem, a crisis, in a matter of just days. This is exactly what has happened.
Politicians on every level showed themselves to be incapable of handling the crisis before them. On my city council, we had so many people that couldn’t see past years of just saying what sounded best; and they failed to anticipate that this would result in a rapid erosion of trust in the community.
When COVID first hit the United States, two of the residents of our city were on that first cruise that returned with the illness. The patients – Patients 0 and 1 for our community – were ill for a week or more before they were even tested. When we all finally found out that they had, in fact, come back with SARS-COV2, naturally the public had questions. I asked several of our city council members if we knew the locations the people had been: when I come home from a vacation, I’ll do things like take an Uber, go grocery shopping, if we came down with a cold or flu we’d go to the pharmacy. One city councilmember replied to me “well we should hope that the community helped them get what they needed so they could isolate.” Except they didn’t even know they had COVID yet, and so the trust began to erode in those earliest days for many of us. Unfortunately, and on every level, it didn’t take long before it was all lost.
My city council race was nothing particularly unique; in fact, it was exactly what every other race in America is like. It is exactly what the future of America may end up being. People that run for water boards and school boards today get into the same type of toxic political wielding that the president does. We would be foolish to believe this is not intentional.
In fact, I know it is; as do many within the upper echelons of the two, major political parties. When I was interning at the end of my undergraduate degree, I went to the California Democratic Party’s annual convention in Sacramento as the denouement of my internship. I still vividly remember meeting with my academic advisor afterwards where I described to him the talk I attended by some group presenting what they called The Red Takeover. This was the Republican Party’s plan to takeover American politics by filling in every non partisan seat they could with party line favorites. It didn’t even matter if the people were qualified or had experience in government or public policy; all that mattered was that they were allegiant to the party and its ideologies, at all costs. My advisor’s face filled with horror as we talked about this, and – as idealistic as every other college student – I giggled and said “but that’ll never happen.”
At the retirement community’s candidate’s event – the one where the moderator was an ardent supporter of my opponent – one question came up about what our political affiliations were. A non partisan seat in name only, it was still well known that he and I had both taken Party endorsements, and yet he had claimed on his campaign signs to be Independent, so someone was trying to draw out of him the truth. In his answer, he admitted his allegiance to the right-wing faction of the GOP, and then went on in a whisper of a voice, leaning in to the microphone, about how the thing to remember about me – me, remember he was campaigning on not being me, rather than his own merits – was that the Democrats had an insidious plot to install puppets in non partisan seats all over the country. Projecting as many good Republicans do, he slithered this accusation into the microphone, while I realized that he was also probably right. Not that I was some Blue puppet going to takeover the council with the Democrats’ agenda. But the plot he described was quite clearly real overall. It was over 15 years ago that I saw that presentation at the California Democratic Party’s convention, and the truth was that I had left halfway through it. I didn’t even stay to hear the part I should have stayed to hear: that the Democrats were planning to align their strategy with the Republican’s, to fight fire with fire. They both planned to do it, and today it appears that they’ve been successful.
This, surely, is how in my own city we could have a nurse sitting on the city council, in the middle of a pandemic, doing absolutely nothing for public health and nurses. When the nurse’s union approached me about an endorsement, it was mainly to air grievances about how they did not feel protected while working in our community when a secondcity council member (my opponent) sits or sat on the board of the local healthcare district. After the election, this clear preference to party politics and staying in office superseded what was right – with the pandemic, as well as a host of other measures that came before the city council that would impact the quality of life, health, and safety of our residents. With all of them, and not just in this city council. Once it became so evident to me that all of our non-partisan seats were simply puppets installed with wads of cash and a familiar name, it was easy to identify just who landed on which side, and why so much had gone wrong.
This isn’t to say that there’s anything particularly wrong with people choosing a side – so to speak – and then running for office. It’s what I did. But they have to be allowed to deviate from the Party on certain issues, and there still has to be some core aspect of them that is fundamentally qualified to lead independently. This, I feel, is like antibiotics to an infection that left otherwise alone would become deadly.
Instead of this though, what has happened, is that Party leaders have taken up the practice of handpicking who will run; they groom their candidates. This happens in big Party leadership – where the Party decides and elevates high profile figures to run for big ticket offices. And it happens, probably more prevalently and dangerously, in local political party-affiliated groups. People in my community have handpicked and installed – either by genuine and well funded elections, or by appointment after someone retires mid-term or dies – a handful of puppets to take seats they are otherwise not qualified for.
This has only been made worse with the rise of influence of social media, and culture wars stoked by both Parties meant to politicize otherwise non-politically divisive issues. Examples of this would be masks in schools and what textbooks are used to teach middle schoolers sex education or history. Critical Race Theory, Black lives matter, and the concept of systemic racism. False flag and rallying around a cause have always been used as political rhetorical devices, but thanks to class Party politics and growing divisions, stoking the flames of these cultural divisions only stands to make it all the more easy for political parties to hijack these hot button issues to win non partisan elections. Even though none of them truly believe in any of it.
How this relates to a real crisis – be it the pandemic, or something more long term like homelessness – is that then you have these bodies in place of leaders that are simply ill-equipped to handle what’s been put before them.
These people, these political drones that run on slogans and pep rallies, are so tuned in to suiting only the interests of their donors and their ideologies, that this is how they approach a crisis that affects everyone. With the pandemic, we saw it on the local county and city level with small businesses. Small businesses make up such a large percentage of campaign contributors in my community that this became the default beneficiary of CAREs funding when it was time to doll that out. In a public health crisis, public health was a mere afterthought; county supervisors were mostly concerned with when weddings would again be allowed, and how soon the malls could be back to full capacity. FEMA-funded programs, like meals for seniors and free hotels for COVID positive isolations, quickly were shut down the first chance they could as well, because while seniors were still hungry and people in multigenerational households still had a hard time isolating from vulnerable family members, the interests of restaurant and hotel owners came first. As things began to open up, community leaders branded those that still stayed home as selfish and hurting small business. This is how far afield we’ve gone in our thinking: that as community members, if we don’t support their donors, as we support them, we are in the wrong.
Moreover, it’s become even more evident over the years that on some level, many of the people both in elected and appointed office don’t even believe in the principles on which America was founded.
The GOP so clearly does not believe in representative democracy; while the Democrats have stopped pandering to the idea that there is such a thing as a social contract. Now in office for over a year, some interviews of White House staff and advisors include comments from these people outright saying as such. And in local Democratic groups and more Conservative organizations just the same? Talk to any of them and they don’t even know what a social contract is. If the two political parties do not even believe on some level in the government they are elected to run, what – really – is left? When we entrust them with our lives, as the social contract dictates, and they in turn do not even attempt to keep up their end of the bargain, we know that America’s disease has raged so far beyond a point, it may not be possible to bring it back from the brink.
Perhaps the evidence of just how deadly our infection in American politics truly is can be found in the politicization of the pandemic response. When I say this though I don’t mean things like “masks are for Democrats,” or “Republicans are antivaxxers.” Beyond the fact that statistically speaking, neither of those is an entirely true statement, rather the issue of each is nuanced and rooted in a variety of issues (some political, while others socio-economic and racial), those are not the real sentiments that have politicized the pandemic.
It’s been in how decisions at all levels of government have been made.
At some point, it became evident that pandemic policy was going to be dictated not by what was right or wrong, but how people would react. This alone is the very definition of politicization. Mask policies were not a blue state or red state thing, rather an issue of whether or not polls came back stating people would wear them or thought they were useful. Critical voter blocks were polled, rather than scientists and doctors. Mandates for vaccines or vaccine verification were made, or not made, on Party line philosophies, as well – not on the truly empirical evidence that showed the efficacy of vaccines (the shots, not the mandates).
My problem as a candidate, and an organizer and advocate since, is that I have failed to jump in on that Party line. In return, I’m accused of being everything: a socialist, a communist, a radical, an idiot, an anti-vaxxer, a conspirator, a Trump apologist, a CCP agent, a demon sent from hell to inject people with COVID vaccine. Everything. My status as just as much not a puppet for the Democratic Party as not a puppet for the GOP became clear to many of them when, quite some time after the election, I criticized a decision of Joe Biden’s on Twitter. Suddenly I was seen as a liability to the Democrats, too “progressive” in my thinking. Some thought it was a sign I was a Republican plant (I can assure you all, I am not that interesting). It really doesn’t matter in the end who I was with, though; the point was that I was not blindly allegiant to any of them, which we see now – on both sides – gets you kicked out. And this is the real crux of the argument: the Democrats and the Republicans are just one club of infected political ideologues. Blue MAGA, Red MAGA – both are fundamentally MAGA.
And as Carlin says: “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
The truth is, I advocate for what I think is right. I really, and truly, believe simply in improving our material conditions and quality of life. I really, and truly, believe this can be done from the standpoint of public health. At the end of the day, almost all things can lead you down that road. Typically, I can argue for this from the perspective of facts and reason; unfortunately, though, those are two things that come as a threat to those unable to easily use them when those very things confront the sycophantic drones of either Party.
When I was running for city council, early on, another candidate who was deep into the local Democratic Party contacted me to lecture me about FEC laws and my campaign materials. In it she offered to bring another Dem Party “insider” to help me out. Having worked on so many campaigns in my life, as well as for the labor unions, I knew how it all worked already. Should I have been insulted that she didn’t know this? Maybe, but then I didn’t have time to be offended. The truth is, I barely had the time to run the campaign, let alone do that and play extraneous personality politics. I thanked her and politely mentioned that I was aware so wouldn’t need the help. Perhaps that was my mistake; but with the little time I had to run my city council campaign, I didn’t prioritize humoring local political party “insiders” (if you can call them that) on my schedule.
I rarely heard from any of the local Democrats again after that. So I stopped worrying much about what they thought, stayed true to myself, and in turn got into a lot of trouble with the locals.
When a local mom blogger, who is in local politics insofar as she’s on committees but is too narcissistic and unhinged for me to pay much attention to, was drunk-posting on Facebook about another mom not tipping enough to her Instacart driver, I commented “maybe she simply didn’t have the money but still needed the service? Could she be COVID positive?” This became her rallying cry to consider me the loose cannon that other Democrats had “warned” her about. She’s had a target on my back since.
But those were more personality politics than they were policy politics. Of course on those I got into trouble too.
When locals that had called on the community to stay home, social distance, and do the right thing all along, were suddenly having parties, going to work sick, and bragging about going into stores mask-less because they had been vaccinated, while children out in the community still were not, I called them out and asked them to please hold the line to protect kids.
Another rallying cry.
I wrote our city council, asking them why they broke from the state’s mask guidance, making masks optional even as children in our community were being hospitalized from COVID. Later, I wrote them again, begging them to have mobile vaccination clinics at community events. When they didn’t respond to either, I called them out in the local paper.
Another rallying cry.
When Democrats and Republicans alike started to back further into their corners, openly suggesting retaliation towards their political opponents on school boards and neighborhood councils (one even suggesting that a school board member be evicted from her home so she could no longer represent the district, something that has since initially writing this happened to me and my family), I spoke up.
Another rallying cry.
Ultimately, I’m just a mom. I write. I post on my blog. I take graduate courses. I advocate for others. I spend a lot of time talking to people that are in the community that want better material conditions. And I spend the bulk of my days just being with my kids.
On the campaign, and every day since, I have come into contact with so many people just like me. Many volunteered for my campaign, many have continued to contact me to this day. Just average people sick of the disease that is running our community; sick of the infection that runs unabated in city hall and beyond.
The infection was initially mild. It was a wild plot to takeover America, but that nobody ever thought would happen. It was some infighting in just one, toxic Congressional district. It was one, unqualified Party favorite council member, on a board of otherwise entirely qualified and impartial individuals.
Today it is all of them. It is all of them, and they are in control of everything.
As time goes on since my failed bid for city council, I’ve become more worried about both my community, and America on the whole. It would be one thing if this was just isolated. But quite clearly, it is not. Politics has always been cutthroat and nasty, always in the state of nature; but never has it been so toxic that the host body joins the mild infection in destroying everything in its path – friend or foe.
The solution, of course, is that we inject the body politic with massive amounts of medication – antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories; the works.
We reform elections so that money becomes less of a driving factor, so that lobbyists cannot control so much of our public policy. Who reforms elections is as important as the reforms themselves, though; reform must be done by the voters. Not the mom bloggers, committee members, and each board or council doing it their own way, but the voters. All of them. Universally.
We take limits a step further than number of terms, and apply them to election spending. We publish campaign contributions for each candidate in the election pamphlets that come with the ballots. Because who you elect is never just the personality you click at the polls, it’s everyone that donated to their campaign too.
We hold leaders accountable for their failings. We have more oversight. In a municipal government, we allow voters to take part in appointments and have hiring hearings that the public can view. In higher levels of government, like Congress and the Presidency, we do the same, only more so.
Perhaps the boldest move would be that we institute ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting, combined with very systemic election reform created by voters (not politicians) would go far to break up the two party system, and level the playing field so that more qualified candidates may come to the surface.
Because let’s be honest: both the Democrats and Republicans are equally, in their own ways, the source of the infection to begin with. And representative government does not work if the representatives see who they represent by how much money they’ve donated, or don’t believe in the government they’ve taken an oath to uphold.
Doing this, and more, would go far in changing America. In curing the infection, and in restoring us to a place that can do the work of representing people on every level, these reforms must be had to restore integrity. As high as the Presidency, and as low as a sanitation board, if we do not stop this infestation from plaguing us, it’s hard to see how we will come out the other side of it.
Remember that we can always go back from whence we came. The infection was initially mild. It may never be completely gone, but it can be controlled to be mild again.
Thank you for tuning in to my 5 part series on running for city council in my small town So Cal community. If you feel so inclined, please click the link to PAY WHAT IT’S WORTH. This is so much better of a way to sell my books than to go through the process of publishing them; and it allows me to offer my writing for free to those that haven’t the means.
Welcome to the 4th part of my 5 Part Series: The Infection Was Initially Mild: My Small Town City Council Run, the Toxic American Pandemic Response, and What Both Mean For the Future Of the Country.
You can also read the entire series now, download it in entirety in PDF format, catch the disclaimers in the Introduction, listen to it on Text to Speech (I have to warn you it’s a little awkward), or watch the Text to Speech on YouTube.
Also, more resources, videos, updates, and Pay What It’s Worth links can be found there too!
That sounds like I gave up, but what really happened was that I realized I could effect much more change simply by speaking up, rather than by being elected. Too many people get elected and it changes them. The reality of their re-election hits them smack in the face at the moment they take their oath of office, and it fundamentally changes who they are. I didn’t want to be changed. I didn’t want to be politicized as an individual in my principles and beliefs – and I saw it becoming more clear that I would have to do that, to compromise my standards in order to win. I chose not to, and suffered the consequence.
That consequence? I got outspent.
Of course I pushed on and campaigned to the bitter end. On the weekend before the election, as voting began all over the district, I did another email campaign, text, and phone bank push to every home in the district. With over 70% of ballots that would ultimately be cast already in at that point, this seems like it was all for naught, but – again – in doing this, I was able to still get my message across. While I had the opportunity to lift people’s ear, I did.
That message? To be safe. To wear a mask. Vaccines were coming, when they did arrive, get one as soon as they became eligible. Call me if they needed resources. Call me if they needed an advocate. The election was just weeks before the pandemic was about to get significantly worse, and with clear indication that I was not going to win, I felt an obligation to reach as many people as I could. My opponent, and the entire city and city council for that matter, could not care less if people got sick and died, if the hospitals were overrun, if people lost their homes and starved. Even the nurse. Running for city council, if anything, reminded me that I did not need to be elected to work, organize, and have an impact on my community.
In the end, though, the will, the way, and the money made sure that do it as a private citizen was the only way I would.
My will to win faded towards the end of the campaign. Even though, as I said, I fought until the polls closed, I increasingly became concerned about what would happen if I actually did win.
For months, my family endured the type of harassment that I had never witnessed in all of the elections I had worked on before. After college, I worked on a lot of campaigns. Big campaigns, small campaigns; campaigns as a volunteer, as an intern. I worked on campaigns as a full time employee with a big title. Never did I see the type of vitriol and hatred spewed at the direction of a candidate as was spewed in mine. Over a city council seat in a small, suburban community of around 70,000 people. But then social media was not as pervasive to daily life back then.
The type of comments that were made to me on social media were the stuff of nightmares. People called me innocent things that were easy to ignore, like “Democratic Socialist,” and at the same time things so horrific and personal, it made my skin crawl.
But the name calling wasn’t the extent of it. I got text messages on my campaign phone telling me I was a “dirty whore,” and that people were coming to get me; my entire family was doxed online in the comments sections of our local newspapers. Strangers knew oddly specific details about our daily lives. On an average day, my kids and I would be heading out the front door in the morning to get to whatever we had going on for the day, to find trash had been thrown at our house. On more than one occasion, we had to call the police because my kids were being followed.
Of course after the election, I thought all this would abate. It did not. My kids being followed only intensified; trash thrown at my front door became a nightly thing for a while. People texted my old campaign line telling me to “kill” myself. Supporters of my opponent hacked my business social media pages, stole my credit card numbers – you name it, they got ahold of it.
A few months after the election, I got a text from the organizer of the Democratic mom’s group, calling me a racist because I didn’t support one of the city council members taking a turn as mayor. That council member was white (all of them are); nevertheless, I apologized for any misunderstanding. I was still removed unilaterally by this woman from the group, and she and a couple other Democratic moms began smearing my name in every organization I had been a part of. Even sports groups my kids were in that had nothing to do with politics. Later, I found out that this woman was good friends with my opponent; so much so that they had dinner together on Sundays. Her insistence on not being able to display one of my campaign signs on her lawn – which had no less than ten others on it – suddenly made sense.
Campaign signs, or rather the replacement of them, ended up being my biggest expense. This was because they were regularly destroyed. Ripped out of the ground, vandalized, and disappearing in the night, this ended up becoming a full time endeavor: replacing the signs, repeatedly. Closer to the election, I just gave up replacing them – having run out of money and the will to keep returning to the same spots day after day to find mine, the only one in the group of all the candidate’s signs, gone.
When I started out, I had 256 signs around town (on top of the yard sings people had on their own private property) that I had gotten permission to display, along with all the other candidate signs out on these corners. The night of the election, when I went to collect what remained, there were only 12 left.
In my opponent’s first election to the city council, he spent somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000 – most of his own money – to be elected. This was an unfeasible sum to me for a city council district seat that pays around $1500 a month. I could understand wanting to do it for your community, but that sum of money seemed not just ridiculous, but wasteful and suspect.
Nevertheless, I figured this was what I was going to be up against: somewhere around $40,000, which all of my advisors and campaign volunteers agreed would probably be the sum to beat.
I didn’t have any intention of fundraising to such a degree, nor did I plan to spend that much of my own money in such large sum. But I knew I could get close to 25% of that in contribution and in my own donations, and make a considerable showing in the race.
What I didn’t anticipate was that my opponent would go above and beyond to the tune of $75,000. Between his own personal loan to his campaign of $15,000, contributions from local business owners, law firms, and land developers, and tens of thousands of dollars from the police (who never even returned my call) and fire fighter’s unions, my opponent simply raised, and subsequently spent, well more than I could have even anticipated someone would spend for a city council seat.
But it was more complicated than simply dollar-by-dollar campaign spending. At least in my view.
While my volunteers were largely staying home and keeping safe due to the pandemic, the bulk of his supporters didn’t even believe in COVID and were paid to go out and walk precincts.
While my fundraisers were held virtually and in an effort to social distance, his were in person, in people’s homes, which you knew had happened because the following day the entire street would be lined with his campaign signs.
And as it turned out, cronyism had truly taken hold of the community in insidious ways. What I left of politics over a decade prior to the campaign was gone, I returned to a wasteland of toxic identity politics and capitalistic city control. I knew that politics locally were something of a black hole before, but at least then I knew who stood by what principals. Quickly, what remained of my political capitol and these notions as to how things stood was clearly very little. People on all sides politically in our city, and in the county at large, were now on the same side: the financial and political exploitation side. Using power and public office or appointment as a position from which they could fund their own personal, financial endeavors, people had either lined up for their cut, or left politics behind.
Moreover, I was stunned to see how my own emergence in the political sphere clearly threatened so many people. To this day, I still don’t fully understand why. Fundamentally, I’m a nobody in the grand scheme of things. With a limited budget, and even less of a stakeholder position in the financial underpinnings of the community, I was no more a threat to many of these people than perhaps a gnat. And yet somehow, many people and groups made sure that I was outspent in every way I could be.
When it came time to seek endorsements, as I said, I made sure to align my goal to the organizations that were in line with my agenda. I didn’t want to waste time seeking the endorsement of any old group that came along. Endorsements take time, lobbying, and a lot of effort to secure. It’s paperwork, meetings, interviews – as a candidate, you have to devote some time to them, but you can’t devote all of your time to them.
The reason why you “have” to? Money. Endorsements traditionally come with a check, both from individuals and groups; more so with the groups. The local Planned Parenthood was quick to cut a check after their endorsement of my campaign, and it was equal to all of the other city council candidates that group endorsed. A few days before the election, the local carpenter’s union came through in the same way. However, every other group that I garnered an endorsement from fell short on the funding of my campaign as compared to other candidates. Maybe they didn’t think my district was winnable, and wanted to spare precious funds for future political activity. But if that were the case, why would my opponent not spare in the same way? Why would he and the police and fire fighters spend tens of thousands of dollars?
Stunning, as time went on, were the comparisons on campaign disclosure forms. The local Democrats would throw me a bone, while other candidates less qualified with less likelihood of winning were given maximum dollar amounts. The women’s group that endorsed my campaign, also funding me far less than other candidates, also forgot to mail my check for a whopping month and a half after it was written. It was almost as if these groups were setting me up to fail, and in such a way that seemed innocent or simply due to incompetence, but when it happened over and over again, the reality that it was probably for intentional reasons became clear.
There came a point that I simply gave up on personal endorsements, which concluded with my endorsement from our Congressional representative. While nice to know that my political capitol with her had not soured over the years, I knew that was about as good as it would get. A lot of others I had worked with, or done organizing in the community alongside over the years, ended up going silent when I asked for them to endorse my campaign.
Or some, like the fire fighters, simply smiled, said they supported me in idea, but wouldn’t give any official endorsements in any city council race; only to turn around the next day and endorse my opponent, along with writing a check to add to his $75,000 pot.
Still others were brutally honest and in my face about it. A former county supervisor I had encountered over the years I was working as a community organizer for the labor unions bluntly told me that she would not endorse me because my opponent was also a member of her rotary club. Another, a school board member, said she didn’t want to be embarrassed when she ran into my opponent’s wife at book club. Soon, these same types of excuses came in. “Oh our kids did boy scouts together,” or “you know we go to the same church.” The church was my real downfall, just up the hill from my own home and a centerpiece in our community, he was a staple figure from the years; and I was… well who was I? Not knowing me, many of them deferred to the familiar name, whose wife and adult children were always in tow, while my untraditional Catholic family could never seem to be found, all of them being at work, sports, or still staying home because of the pandemic.
This not knowing me seemed to do me in far more than I realized at the time. Often I would call a voter for them to say at the end of the thirty minute conversation “you know I wish I could vote for you now, but I already sent my ballot in.” Or, “oh well [opponent] was here last Saturday and he helped me fill out my ballot, sorry.”
In the retirement community that constituted roughly one-third of the district, I realized early on that if I could win them over, I could win the election. Keeping in mind turnout, presidential year, and what was needed to win, I could secure them plus a few hundred outside of their community, and my win would flow like gravy. Probably the most foolish thought of my entire campaign, I thus focused on that community more than any of the other neighborhoods in the area; hitting them with mail pieces, phone banking, and getting as many signs on lawns inside the gated community was my primary goal. I thought that, from a strategic standpoint, if I hammered on the pandemic and the danger to their aging population, I could secure their votes.
What I underestimated was the protection they already felt from behind the gates of their community; and the privilege with which they had already shrouded themselves in that made them largely untouched by the pandemic (at the time of the election). When the election took place, they had yet to see a single case of COVID 19 in their greater than 4,000 person community. They continued to enjoy golf, swimming – all of it; because, as we learned in the months that followed – the wealthiest people, in reality, were the ones that came off the easiest.
Interestingly, I did garner some support from inside the gilded gates of retirement living. Just not enough, and not the right support. And, I found out only too late, that my opponent, using his connections for having already been on the city council, had arranged to have a regular meet up with the community at large. During his time on the dais, he had advocated for them on some hemp smells that were coming from a neighboring farm. For this, many of these seniors, aging in their retirement village that largely stands apart from the rest of the community, felt indebted.
If we’re being honest, he also is, when you get down to it, an old man himself. In his 60s and covered in liver spots and aged lines, my toad man of an opponent fit in well with the senior crowd, whose regular complaints about aching joints and hemorrhoid problems were likely met with similar anecdotes on his part. He identified with this crowd much more than a young mom in her 30s ever could. For this reason, it was probably more than foolish to think I could win them over in more of a way than he could.
But still, I tried. When the organizer of their regular candidate’s night event contacted me, I was thrilled at the opportunity to address the otherwise-closed-off community. The event was simple: my opponent and I would come, they’d record and air it on their closed circuit channel, for all residents to watch on their televisions either live or on a replay, during the event we’d field questions from the community so they could make their choices based on our answers to the issues important to them.
A few things, now, stick out in my mind as suspicious about the entire event. For one, the organizer said to me repeatedly things like “I’m trying to be as fair as possible here.” Innocent enough. But then he would call me about some planning thing – offering a tour of the stage in advance, asking me to come have a photo taken, and so on – and he would always preface with “well [opponent] was just here and he and I thought…” The man and the other organizers were nice enough, but what I later found out has soured the entire thing in my mind: he and his wife contributed to my opponent’s campaign, months before the candidate’s event. Does he have a right to contribute to whatever campaign he wants? Of course. But perhaps have someone not clearly biased act as the moderator of the whole show.
This, sadly, was the way the entire campaign ended up going. I would come to find that family and friends of ours for years – decades – had donated and supported my opponent’s campaign. Some even participated in the destruction of my campaign signs. Democrats, Republicans, everyone. When imposter syndrome and self-confidence rear their ugly heads, I think to myself: maybe it was just me, my policies. But then how could I have earned the support from all of those that I actually did? Were we all just wrong?
The answer, simply put, was that my message and my motive, my agenda and my plans for our community, were spread through the community at around $3 per vote. My opponents? $12. I got outspent. If you run on a quarter of the campaign funds, you can expect about a quarter of the returns.
In the end, in support, in endorsements, and in final votes, that’s exactly what I got.
Welcome to the third part of my 5 Part Series: The Infection Was Initially Mild: My Small Town City Council Run, the Toxic American Pandemic Response, and What Both Mean For the Future Of the Country.
You can also read the entire series now, download it in entirety in PDF format, catch the disclaimers in the Introduction, listen to it on Text to Speech (I have to warn you it’s a little awkward), or watch the Text to Speech on YouTube.
Also, more resources, videos, updates, and Pay What It’s Worth links can be found there too!
Every fall or early winter, late in the year, it begins to cool in Southern California, and eventually it rains. Most years it’s been so dry that even the slightest bit of rain becomes an epic event. What I always notice about the first “big” rain (sometimes it is no more than a spit, and that’s all we get for the season) is that immediately after, the subterranean termites come out in a swarm.
Subterranean termites are these little termites that are white and translucent. They don’t do damage like the termites that rot your attic; but they are annoying nevertheless. What I always notice is that there are just so many of them. One day you’ll be enjoying the first rain of the season, and the next you can’t even look outside without seeing clouds of them in swarms, just flying around.
Flying for the sake of flying. Existing for the sake of existing.
One year, so many of them came up from underground that they also died in droves. They got stuck in window sills, smashed over the front of my black SUV so that it looked grayish white from a distance, and the ground was covered in their translucent wings so you heard a crunch and a squish, turning the wings into a translucent goo stuck on the bottom of your shoes. It was a sight of horror, one forgotten as quickly as they resurface until the next first rain of the season.
People in politics, in every fashion, are like those subterranean termites. They come out only at certain moments of the year. They fly around in swarms, and infest every open space they can. Leaving behind trails of translucent, gooey wings, and the scent of infestation, politicos (from politicians and electeds, to commentators, bloggers, and volunteers) are like annoying gnats on the ass of America. Few have any redeeming qualities, and they appear to exist for no reason but for the sake of themselves.
Flying for the sake of flying. Existing for the sake of existing. The subterranean termites come to the surface.
The city council in my city is perhaps synonymous with any other governing body in America: they are clueless, do very little, and understand even less.
Our city council is pretty typically made up of any handful of your garden variety locals. There is usually at least one self-professed businessman, whose business is a bit nebulous and sounds more like a Ponzi scheme. A lawyer is always smattered in there somewhere, since lawyers notoriously possess the cut-throated narcissism required to be a politician, and because voters tend to assume that someone who knows how to manipulate the law will also be good at running the city.
Our city has a hard on for small business, as many cities do; so there are two businessmen and one businesswoman on our council presently. The men are like pieces of Wonderbread, sort of blending into the chamber walls with their weak-willed comments, and hangers-on status. One was up for re-election the same year that I ran, only in a different district, and he acted surprised when my daughter gave him a Halloween treat bag at the Farmer’s Market. “Even for an opponent?” – he asked, to which she had to remind him that he wasn’t even in the same district as me. The other, he seems harmless (and I don’t mean that in a good way). The woman – whom my youngest called “Grandma” whenever he saw her on the screen during a meeting – has been there since the 80s. She’s taken turns being mayor just shy of 10 times (8, to be precise); and, as with the men, most of us remain unclear what business she’s actually in besides grifting the taxpayer dollar.
There are also the occasional politicos that come and go on the council. These are the people that parrot party lines, like “Black lives matter,” and “Vote Blue no matter who.” Of course neither of those phrases – in the typical election year – would even remotely be tolerated in this community; and yet somehow, some way, one of them managed to get on the council. She’s up for re-election this year, and if I’m reading the pulse of the city right now, she will be a one hit wonder in terms on the dais. The shocking part about her is that in a pandemic, as a nurse, I cannot think or find evidence of a single thing she’s actually done for the public health aspect of it. Even today, into the third year of this collective nightmare we are all living through, I watched recently a video of a council meeting in which she was wearing a loose-fitting, inappropriately layered, mask at the meeting. A nurse. A person who is supposed to know things like ‘how to wear a mask,’ and ‘what type of a mask to wear.’ Someone who was touted as exactly who we wanted to be there during the pandemic, she effectively did nothing for public health education, vaccination or testing efforts, and everything in between.
I believe – and this is just my own personal belief – that this comes more from the cronyism that is pervasive to our community, and as it turns out in the bigger political picture. Hand picked successors are everywhere. When a council member either terms out or retires, there is always someone that has a familiar name and face that’s been waiting in the wings to pick up the position. This can be done traditionally, with an actual vote of the people (that comes from hefty funding and a lot of local name recognition); or – more often – when someone leaves in the middle of the term, and the council or board or whatever convinces the public that it is more financially responsible to shun the voices of voters, and let the all-knowing remaining electeds select their new colleague.
My community has no shortage of either. Decades ago, one of the area’s Congressmen died suddenly and tragically, and in the special election his wife ran for and won the seat. The funny part of that was that when you polled most of the voters in the district, they were both unaware it was her (and not the dead husband), and didn’t even have a grip on when regular elections were supposed to be held, and just voted when told to.
On the more local level, we had a county supervisor on the board for decades, before the county finally gave in to the will of the voters and instituted term limits; and someone totally and completely ideologically opposed – though sharing the last name – got enough money from local oil and natural gas companies to plaster enough name recognition pieces around the community that she was elected in a landslide. This county representative – now on a re-election – has no more than bananas for brains, and will blow whichever way her biggest donors sway her (I can only assume the air between her ears helps with the flight). Often she harms the community with her total cluelessness, and subsequent harmful (at times dangerous) policies.
Most people in the community, though, still think they’re voting for the last lady.
On the flip side are the institutional cronies that are in just enough local groups, and have been around the political scene long enough, to simply step onto the stage the moment an opportunity presents itself for them to do so. Often times, it is so glaring when it happens you can’t help but be insulted that these people, this pack of cronies deciding everything from what roads are repaved, to which books our children in the public schools learn from, think we are both blind and dumb.
Perhaps, since we go along with it, we are.
In the last couple of years, the real offenders were the ones who knew they wouldn’t serve their term. One school board member had already contracted a move, but notified the public only after she was re-elected. This allowed the school board to handpick her successor, again after reminding the public that this was the fiscally responsible thing to do. Nothing gets your average community member like the idea that their tax dollars are being wasted, even if it comes at the expense of the authoritarianism. Make no mistake about it – handpicking successors is exactly that.
Another school board member in recent years died of a terminal cancer she knew she had and kept secret through her re-election; again she was replaced by installment. Two city council members that same year met the same exalted status locally, when seats opened only after other council members won higher office.
Of course we could have municipal laws that prohibit a candidate from running for office while holding another that would require them to resign, leaving the path open for this kind of malfeasance at schools boards and city halls all over the country. This would at least eliminate some. We could also end the ability for installment, and require special elections under all circumstances. But this brand of local authoritarianism is kind of what the whole game is about: making sure that only the people in office can decide who else is there with them.
All the Parts in the Machine
What makes all of this possible – at every level (water board, city council, county supervisor, state legislature, Congress, and so on) are the insiders. Paradoxically, this is a group of people that believe they are inside and influencing decisions, when the reality is they exert about as much weight as that of their pinkie fingers. Not much.
Sure, political influencers and some employees play a part, and can make or break a candidate or an elected official with their own actions or part in the dance. Like the city clerk who handles the elections – she could simply not return the phone call of a candidate until the time has passed for the candidate to file, and that’s about that. In the year of my own election, a man that ran for mayor in a neighboring city became victim of the malicious incompetence of the county clerk, who just happened to “accidentally” leave the man’s name and candidate information out of the election handbook mailed to all voters.
Beyond all these tertiary elected and appointed subterranean termites, there is also the mega-bureaucracy at the city and county levels, who portray and highlight those elected to office with their own particular brand of incompetence. If I am constantly having a problem dealing with the people in the property tax office at the county, it’s unlikely I will continue to vote for the incumbent on the county supervisorial board that is supposedly meant to oversee these clowns. Right? The same could go for almost any department the average citizen encounters, or so you would think.
Except when everyone is incompetent, including their replacements, what else can we come to expect over the years? Now, in 21st century suburban America, this standard of incompetence is matched only by the amount of gaslighting done in the public view. Community members accept this low standard of public service thanks to messaging and social media posts that have glossed over an otherwise abysmal electoral track record.
This was especially highlighted in the pandemic, when the inner-workings of the local government showed itself to the public to be inefficient, idiotic, and – in this case – deadly. But at the same time, they messaged the hell out of the story with social media posts and pretty pictures, and now the collective perception of how things have been handled is divided between those that watched from the protection of their homes and Internet, and those that suffered the greatest hardships.
Even our public health is made up of installed puppets, bureaucratic cronies with interests beyond their scope and practice. In the earliest days, our county took the strategy of protecting businesses at all costs. Those costs were, naturally, human lives – mostly of the elderly, low wage workers, illegal immigrants and guest workers, and members of multigenerational, low income homes. Still, the vast majority of CAREs funding the county received went to business grants, and to cities which then distributed further business grants. Very little went to public health (beyond testing, which they rapidly phased out the first chance they could). To make matters worse, the public health professionals made recommendations and guidance at the pace of snails, not wanting to hurt small business through this difficult time. As community member fatalities began to stack up, our public health director ignored the call by the public to publish what businesses had experienced employee outbreaks as well. They do it for other public health violations, but an outbreak of COVID among employees was seen to them as too politically controversial, and would harm local business. The list of these, and other, transgressions over the years of the pandemic has stacked up, rivaled only by the list of people that have died of the disease and their gross negligence. But again, the messaging is at peak gaslit, and the public has been profoundly removed from the gross negligence that has gone on.
This raises a very serious issue in American politics: what the general public doesn’t always seem to realize when they vote is that they aren’t just voting for the person or identity of the candidate, themselves, but for everyone they bring with them.
This extends beyond just who they install when a seat on their own council opens. With the president, it’s judges and administration officials. With counties, it’s everyone running the show – from your jails to your elections to your child support services. In cities, it’s the manager and the city planner. You have to ask yourself, in a city like mine, why the council hasn’t been able to find residents of our actual city to hire as city managers and planners; or why when a once in a lifetime pandemic hits, there’s no one of all the people working at city hall capable of being moved into a position to better coordinate a more well-rounded local response to save lives.
All of these people are a part of the same whole: flying for the sake of flying. Existing for the sake of existing. In essence, accomplishing and contributing very little to society as a whole.
Finally, you have all the rest of the swarm that can be seen everywhere. Like the subterranean termites, they gaggle into groups, serving only themselves.
They are the local media, who cow tow to local elected officials because it is local governments that fund their struggling newspapers.
They are the special interest groups, that average people believe only exist in the highest levels of government, when in reality they exist at all levels and are most insidious in their influence at the bottom.
They are the two bit activist groups, who have some nebulous and general cause that is used as an excuse to get together, drink wine, and gossip.
One of our city council members has a somewhat influential mother in one of these groups. A gaggle of old women and one, gay man, they get together multiple times per week to gossip about everything going on in the world that pisses them off, write checks to personalities they like, and get sauced on a local Chardonnay in the process. On one occasion they invited me and the other woman running in the city (in the other district) – a pink-haired Democratic activist that talked down to me, and routinely interrupted to ramble into oblivion on topics no one could understand. The event was 80% her talking, 19% the group complaining about Trump, and I was given about 2 minutes to state my name.
Most malignant are the local political groups, whom are usually more cliquish than they are substantive in their activism. Like a cancerous sore on the body politic locally, these groups in my community are why the leaders of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Caucus (also known as the D-Triple-C) once told me at a union junket in Sacramento that because of the toxicity that is pervasive to these local political groups in this district, the caucus typically considered it a political black hole.
Especially in my own experience, with the Democratic groups, they are the grassroots embodiment of the party at large: overpromising and underdelivering. For our own election, the local Democrats sent emails upon emails to candidates promising volunteers, phone banking, mailers, and the like. In the end, we got a couple hundred text messages sent, and a stack of door hangers with a long list of names on it (mine was towards the bottom). No manpower to distribute them except the Young Democrats who gave us a few hours one Saturday. And, of course, that couple hundred bucks from just one of their many groups.
Of course with social media, the groups expanded into things like political mom groups, and everything that comes with them. If Facebook Mom Groups are the state of nature, my own experience with them has been quite Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short. The political moms groups of course divide into the ideological camps, and I managed to piss off both of them.
For the conservative moms of the community, it was quite obvious. Most of them believed I had that conspiratorial “agenda,” of which they themselves could not even articulate. On social media they would claim they saw me being “nasty” to fellow moms, and contemptuous of our community members. None of this was true, and when asked for the proof they could not produce it. That started the next conspiracy, that I had spent years of my life gleaning my presence on the Internet, something any mom of three knows I have absolutely no time for. A lot of them were hyper-religious and took offense to my positions on public health as well (it remains to be seen how wearing a mask has anything to do with Jesus).
Naturally, the defund the police rumor, was at the front of their sentiment against me. In the end there was going to be no winning them over for this reason. True or not, they had heard too much.
The Democratic moms, though – them I did not see coming. Considering myself a very issue-based voter, organizer, and politician (if I even called myself the latter), there are a lot of things that I wasn’t particularly in agreement on with the Democrats. Perhaps that was a part of the problem, but if I understand it more clearly now, it was my own identity and demeanor that was a problem to some of them. For some in particular, that I ran in the first place.
I’m not an insider to them. For over a decade, I didn’t go to local Party events, I didn’t attend the rallies or the fundraisers or the Democratic Labor Day picnics. I stopped being on the inside of all of those things years ago, so to resurface today was jarring, I can only assume, to many of them. Especially when so many were new.
I probably didn’t help myself with occasional gaffes stating the obvious. Comments like “it’s so nice to see new faces!” are not welcome by people that consider themselves establishment figures in that particular community (whether it’s rooted in reality, or not).
I also didn’t tone down speaking up about things I saw that I believed were wrong. When the Democratic moms Facebook group decided to host an online candidate meet and greet for a man running for the community college district school board, and a mom running herself asked to be given the courtesy of the same opportunity, she was ignored. I spoke up.
When they defended people going out and breaking their COVID quarantine, including – many of them including many elected officials that should have been setting an example, I spoke up.
When they left several endorsed candidates off their list of locals that had been endorsed by the Democratic Party, I spoke up.
When my kids were followed around at the public park by supporters of my opponent, and filled cups from McDonald’s were thrown at my front door, and one of the organizers of the group said we should all forgive my opponent for staying silent on this issue “because he’s a nice man,” I spoke up.
Later, I learned, that the speaking up, and running for city council to begin with, was what I did wrong in that group. In reality, it was what I did wrong in front of all of them. It made the community (the moms, the conservatives, the cogs in the bureaucracy machine) feel threatened. It was where Blue MAGA and Red MAGA found a common enemy.
Me.
My Opponent the Toad
My opponent was as bland as water, and as in-actionable as a toad.
Remember the old story about the two toads on a log? There are two toads on a log and one decides to jump. How many toads are still on the log? Two. Toads think about doing things, but rarely have the energy, drive, or will to actually do them. This sums up my opponent, and everyone that surrounded him for that matter, in a nutshell.
To make matters worse, he looked like one too.
Being fair, I only met him in person on one occasion. It was at a carefully curated debate-style event for the senior community in our district. I call it “carefully curated” because it was crafted so as to protect him as much as possible. At the time, I had no idea I was walking into a room full of his supporters running the event; finding out later only after reading over his campaign contribution list, and recognizing all of their names. And to be clear: this was a cohort of toads, obsequious to their leader, and mostly condescending towards me.
The queen toad – his wife – accompanied him and upon walking in, she talked to me like I was one of her gal pals at Bunko. “Oh, you’ll get used to these events,” was the first thing she belched at me, while clutching her handbag and evidencing for me that she clearly had not read my bio, nor had even the slightest inkling that I – a young woman in her late 30s – could have possibly been to any of these events before in her life (I’ve been to plenty).
The moderator. The cameraman. The producer. All toads, all with that same leathery and blotchy, reptilian skin; at least a few with a bullfrog’s neck goiter.
Through out the entire campaign, this toad man – the token lawyer on the city council – painted me not just as a radical liberal, but as an idiot. In certain crowds on Zoom events and candidate forums, he would answer questions by first stating that I didn’t know what I was talking about – this was why he should be re-elected. When he wasn’t running on this, he was doing so on his totally unfounded defund the police claims. He never actually campaigned on what he would do with four more years. He simply highlighted that he wasn’t me. (And it worked.)
Of course if he had highlighted what he had done with four years in office, he would have had nothing to talk about. Besides contributing to hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer waste by getting the city sued several times, this supposed-lawyer didn’t have much else to account for. The material conditions of residents were no better (arguably worse), the city was bleeding jobs even before the pandemic as well. I can’t blame this toad of a man for making me his solo talking point. If I were as much of a lame duck, I would have done the same.
Of course I always managed to overcome his incessant and condescending bullfrog noises – his gurgles and belches, that said less in substance than I even thought was possible of someone speaking words as fully formed sentences. After all his man-spraining and treating everyone like a village of idiots, I kept my cool, stated facts, and always ended events with more supporters than I came in with. Yet either a fault of the pandemic, or more just the way things are in local politics, the general public was by and large not present for these candidate forums and face-to-face (or Zoom-to-Zoom) events. There were 10, maybe 20, at each. Add all the candidates from the combined events, and you had an online total of maybe 40. Not enough to sway the vote, because in the end what it came down to was who had the most money.
Welcome to the second part of my 5 Part Series: The Infection Was Initially Mild: My Small Town City Council Run, the Toxic American Pandemic Response, and What Both Mean For the Future Of the Country.
You can also read the entire series now, download it in entirety in PDF format, catch the disclaimers in the Introduction, listen to it on Text to Speech (I have to warn you it’s a little awkward), or watch the Text to Speech on YouTube.
Also, more resources, videos, updates, and Pay What It’s Worth links can be found there too!
To say that I didn’t have an agenda of any kind going into the city council run would be a lie. But then, everyone that runs for public office has – or, at least should have – one. What are you being voted in for if not to do things? This was the first completely nonsensical turn the campaign took: when people accused me of having an agenda, as if this was a bad thing.
“She has an agenda” became the local QAnon turn of phrase that was code for “bad lady, we shouldn’t vote for her.” I’m not sure to what extent all of the pizza-sex-dungeon-Democrats-are-spawn-of-Satan stuff has permeated the local QAnon folks, but with roughly 30% of the community involved (in some fashion and consistent with the national participation rate), I imagine at least a few of them legitimately believed my agenda was to inject the community with the blood of aborted babies. Or something like that.
My agenda was simple: I saw a city council that was doing absolutely nothing to support our community in an unprecedented time. Most notably, the pandemic had shuttered businesses, and infected and killed community members. And, front line workers like nurses and lower wage workers were approaching me and begging for help with their working conditions in our city. Our city council was largely silent on the matters – all of them. Except, of course, throwing pittance small business grants at local businesses which – in the end – took so long to get out, many businesses that originally applied had closed by the time the couple thousand bucks were distributed. This endeavor also cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in general funds just to put together (not counting the money for the grants, themselves). To say the pandemic response from the city council, and entire city, was a failure would be a gross understatement.
And the problem is that – as of writing this – we just keep failing more.
The average job in our city pays $15-$18 per hour, while the cost of living is $38 per hour for a two bedroom apartment. My agenda in reality, was in everyone’s best interest: it was rooted in fiscal responsibility coupled with a focus on public health. I wanted our community to become a Blue Zone – one where every design and planning decision was made with health in mind. Blue Zone planning is rooted in public health and policy facts, and results in an overall increased quality of life and longevity – for everyone. This meant more biking, less sprawl, more housing options, reduced cost of living, and raising the standard of living and employment in the community. On the surface, our city looks somewhat affluent: median housing price is around $750K, but more than 90% of residents have to commute 15 minutes or more out of the city to be able to afford it. What we don’t talk about is that just over 7% of people in the city live below the poverty line – some within a mile of my district and its houses that start at $3M. My support base was largely in, and just above, that 7%, not necessarily in the people I was asking for for votes.
Moreover, I wanted the city to stop bleeding money. My opponent and his colleagues’ incompetence over the years have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits, mistakes, excessive administrative fees for their friends, and bungled CYA PR campaigns.
Managing the pandemic and its recovery from a more holistic and proactive approach was what my campaign focused on; and creating a safety net for our healthcare and front line workers, even the ones that only worked here. Fundamentally, I had zero plans to stay in office for the long term. I wanted to win the election, do my part to manage COVID on the most local level, make some other health, safety, organizational, and quality of life changes along the way, and – likely – stick to one term, and done.
Because the city’s elections are in districts, I was stuck in the most affluent district, while coming from – generally speaking – just your average middle class. To win my district, I would have only need 4,800 votes plus 1 – a feat I only was able to obtain 39% of (earning only 22% of all ballots cast). In the end I failed to turn out votes that would have brought me closer to a win in the election.
When you look at the votes I did end up gathering, they were largely centered not even in my own neighborhood, but in the single, lower-income neighborhood in the district; the only one with rentals accepting Section 8 housing vouchers, where the vast majority of people I spoke to were so busy risking their lives working multiple, low-wage, public-facing jobs, that many would not have even voted had it not been for the ability to vote by mail. A renter myself, though in the single family homes more aligned with the median housing in the city at large, I still understood the struggles many in the community faced. These were the community members that needed someone who would actually take action.
Being on the city council is a part time job, for everyone that’s on it. To me, I saw mismanagement and a lack of responding to the needs of the constituents by my opponent. My own experience in politics, political science, public policy, community organizing, and in public facing jobs, especially healthcare (pharmacy) management, was (in my mind) exactly what the city needed to do better than we had since the pandemic hit.
And to my credit, it was my ideas and experience – my agenda – that earned me more endorsements than any of our city’s council candidates in recent years. Accordingly to my agenda, I sought endorsements from every organization that I believed shared my mission in improved health and quality of life. I didn’t waste my time with anyone whose mission did not align with mine; not out for just every endorsement I could grab, I went for the ones that had value to me.
The local chapter of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund were the first to announce their endorsement of my campaign, with the nurse’s union representing our city hospital coming closely after. While Planned Parenthood endorses many, if not most, women (in addition to many pro-choice men), I was the only candidate in a down ballot election in my entire county to receive the endorsement of the nurses. At our only in person debate, for a neighborhood of roughly 4,000 seniors, I asked my opponent why after 4 years of him being on the city council, and even longer on the board of the local healthcare district, the nurses – in the middle of a pandemic – chose to endorse me. He had no answer.
As it turned out, nurses and healthcare workers in general made up the bulk of my support – endorsed, financed, and otherwise. Of the 280 individuals that endorsed the campaign by its completion, 67% were nurses, doctors, pharmacists, or other healthcare workers. Another 23% came from public safety, specifically the Neighborhood Watch Group I founded in 2015.
Likely a result of my background in public health and safety, and my strong position on COVID and worker safety, the nurse’s union’s endorsement then led to the endorsement from the local Carpenter’s Council, the union that advocated for workplace safety. Shortly after them, the local chapter of Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) housing advocacy group gave me the thumbs up. The final big group that aligned my mission closely was the women’s council in my community, which resulted in a sizable influx in funds for the campaign.
Of course my last endorsement was the best: our Congresswoman endorsed my campaign in the final weeks before the election. And while people were noticeably stunned that I was able to garner the support, in my district it ended up alienating many voters who saw her as a liberal carpetbagger from Los Angeles (they weren’t, at least entirely, wrong).
In life and politics, endorsements of you as a person don’t always turn into results at the end of the game. Some of my endorsements (especially the ones closely aligned with the Democratic Party) were controversial to otherwise centrist voters. And, in the end, my own priorities were not consistent with the voters in my district, and also unable to overcome the slander and smear that my opponent waged so effectively against me.
A sleepy, suburban, affluent bedroom community, with the majority of voters working and living their social lives largely out of town, didn’t particularly want change. They wanted another candidate that would sit on the council and simply pass through what was already passed through before. Keep quiet, don’t do too much. My opponent had already exhibited for 4 years that he would do little enough to not cause a ruckus, and just enough to keep people happy.
Though what came after my loss was the eventual worsening of the pandemic and health and safety of our community, many of them continue to appear largely unaffected (to the detriment of the rest of the city).
As it turned out, since my loss, the mismanagement of health, housing, COVID, and everything in between, has been a complete disaster. Less than two years later, we have more than double the community members dead of the virus, and a paltry vaccination rate by zip code compared to other areas of California. We also have a moratorium now meant to stifle any building of newer, affordable, housing, which has resulted in both crime and homelessness rising exponentially since the election. The real kicker is that the moratorium is meant to stop the very type of housing my opponent spoke in favor of – both times he ran.
When the CDC changed their masking guidance in May 2021, and the state of California aligned alongside it in June, our city took it a step further and made masks optional for everyone. Aghast, and in horror, I contacted everyone on the city council – one of whom claims to be a nurse – asking why? How? What justification could there be when the rules clearly stated *only the vaccinated* could remove their masks? Our city claims to be family friendly, and this would only increase disease spread and hurt our lower wage and front line healthcare workers. How could a nurse, and her colleagues, sign on to this?
No one ever responded.
As the Delta variant, and later Omicron, ripped through the community, they continued to ignore my calls, emails, and requests. I drove by city-sponsored events to see that no mobile vaccine clinic had been called to come from the county. I watched in horror as city after city shut down when Omicron hit, only for our city to insist on staying open, and to outright lie when they had outbreaks. (How many times does the senior center need to change the carpeting in a year’s time?)
It’s this type of do-nothing, ignore-everyone, attitude that is pervasive to the city council, and why I say that in spite of voter registration data or general presence of support, our community is – by and large – conservative. Conservative values are more than a party or an ideology, they are a way of life. You could have voted for Joe Biden or Hilary Clinton, but still clicked the ticker on every ideologically Republican-valued candidate down the line. And we’re lying to ourselves if we don’t admit the aforementioned aren’t pretty right of center politicians anyway.
This is what voters in this district believe in, and are like. I realize that now. A progressive appearance slathered over a regressive and conservative reality; this is the community I was running for city council in, and exactly why my radical ideas of taking care of each other, and lifting the entire community into a higher quality of life, was a losing strategy. Many homes have those catchy signs on their yards that say In This House We Believe, while the people within them respond to an incident of outright racism at the high school with the old line “kids will be kids.” They vote for leaders that do anything but lead, deferring to council members that effectively show they’ll take a seat and button their mouths. That’ll do nothing and point the finger at the county or state or “personal responsibility” when it’s time to hold someone accountable for a major problem in the community, of which there are many. Those that came out to vote in my district in particular seems by and large perfectly content to bury their heads in the ground of their finely manicured lawns, ignoring the struggles of the other tens of thousands of residents that live in this city. So long as it doesn’t affect them, and they don’t have to hear about it. At the same time, you almost have to understand – at least in some sense – because with such a high cost of living, and the need to commute to afford living in the city, they’re fundamentally too busy to care. Maybe that’s the point.
As it turns out, even the most progressive public health advocates at the beginning of the pandemic were more than excited to take off their masks in stores when little kids were around. When the Delta variant began to rip through our unvaccinated populations, and everyone realized that even the vaccinated could still transmit COVID to others – well after the election was over – middle aged suburban women, and men in Oakleys with big trucks and a clear compensatory tendency, proudly talked online about being the “only ones” in the stores that had taken off their masks just yet. That number of unmasked grew, as did COVID cases, and these people whose profile pictures were still of them getting their vaccine, wearing a shirt that said something like “I believe in science,” with the Biden-Harris logo still over-laid on the photo, coined the phrase “I did my part, if you’re unvaccinated that’s on you.”
My city is like the apex where Blue MAGA and Red MAGA meet. Where every street is a mix of hard to the right voters that still have their Trump and “Let’s Go Brandon” flags up in their lawns, and soft to the right Democrats that voted for Biden but still watch Fox News and worship at the alter of First Responder culture. And yet caught in the middle of it all, holding the entire community up and making it run, are the working class, swelling our low paying jobs and privileged attitudes with a smile, while working so many jobs just to put food on the table and pay rent they don’t have the time to vote, let alone do anything else.
And this is how my opponent, a hard right Republican, masterfully manipulated the public into thinking I was some cop-hating liberal that would take their guns and bastardize the community. While I was talking about the pandemic and masks over Zoom, this guy was going door to door telling people I wanted to defund the police and soon thereafter turn our city into one where people were shackled by socialism, forced to wear burlap sacks and live in a communal shanty while paying allegiance daily to a dark Stalin-esque overlord. While I did take the endorsement from the local Democrats, this plus a check for a couple hundred bucks and my name on a list of candidates they had endorsed, was the length of support I received from them. And I always made clear that their ‘defund the police’ jargon was a losing policy – in both politics, and practice.
In truth, my own political philosophy can be best described as nuanced. I don’t believe in defunding the police, but I do believe that Black lives matter. I’m not a fan of groups or clubs. And as I said, I stand by the working class and the struggles of others more with empathy and understanding and a commitment to public health and quality of life, above anything else. In many ways, I agree with the Democratic Party’s positions, but in many ways I also do not. Certainly, what I disagree with them on is the idea that an individual within the Party cannot have varied views on things; that everyone must fall in line, as if they cannot win elections without total and utter allegiance to the official talking points.
Years ago, when I first graduated college, I worked for the Democratic Party, as well as on several campaigns (as local as water board and as national as Presidential primary). Stupidly, I forgot just how much like their nemesis they truly are. Backbiting and embroiled in identity politics, the Democrats on the largest and equally smallest scales tend to shun anyone that is not completely in line with their philosophies.
To be clear: this is just as authoritarian as the MAGA GOP. Where Blue MAGA meets Red MAGA.
They aren’t even philosophies espoused in a political party, though, so much as they are a body of non-thinking ideologues. It’s no wonder they get into office and are unable to ever actually accomplish anything; to remain in with the in crowd they have to tow the party line, or face the consequences. Festering in the back of my mind for the entire campaign was the memory of the last job I did for the local Democrats, before going back to college and then graduate school, then moving on to be a private citizen – as a stay at home mom and writer. It was a pre-candidacy hit piece on a local Democrat, pulling up personal anecdotes of sketchy behavior, old cable bills, and basically anything I could get my hands on to convince this guy not to run for office in a primary against a more well-known, well-liked, candidate. All because he was not 100% in line withe the Party’s views. After spending weeks putting this piece together, I never called the committee back when they tried to contract me for another job. I couldn’t live with the idea that I was going to be a part of this type of underhanded, backbiting operation.
So upon taking their support in my own campaign, I knew I would have to keep it at an arm’s length. More than anything, when old faces and familiar names began to crop up, I knew it was in my own best interest to remain somewhat neutral. At least with the locals. I wanted to impact change in my community, and do a service to the people. This was my agenda. Not get sucked into petty Party politics and infighting.
COVID allowed me to largely get away with doing that, at least for a time. I was able to stay above the fray until just after the election.Of course this didn’t prevent me from losing.
And once the election had passed, all the toxic, nuclear waste bubbled to the surface anyway. What came only after I lost, I never could have foreseen.
This post is short, and sweet. I’m thrilled to announce that just over a year after running for city council (and losing – dodged a bullet, I’m learning), I’ve finished my 5 part series on the experience.
Titled ‘The Infection Was Initially Mild: My Small Town City Council Run, the Toxic American Pandemic Response, and What Both Mean For the Future of the Country,’ will be available wherever you prefer on February 1st, 2022.
In this post we’ve got:
Details on how you can read, listen, or watch it
Giveaways (there’s more than one!)
The trailer!
The best part is that it’s entirely free. While there is a Pay What It’s Worth PayPal link, you can get all of the content entirely free to you. Why? Because I think it’s a critical story to tell, and also don’t want people to think that writing about it was the only reason I did it.
You’ll be able to read each part here on the website, download a PDF version, listen to it on Audiocast, or watch me read it on YouTube.
I’ll also be sending each part out weekly as a blog post. To sign up to just have them directly sent to your email box, go ahead and do so here:
Giveaways!
But wait, there’s more!
To celebrate the release of this, I’m hosting a Giveaway, and this one you won’t want to miss. One winner will be selected at random on Instagram LIVE on February 2nd. The winner will receive: a vintage political button puzzle, a box of Barnett’s chocolate covered gourmet cookies, a PURE personal air filter (I have one of these, they’re amazing), and a YEAR of Disney+ streaming services. Hit me up on Instagram and LIKE AND SHARE the heck out of this to be entered!
I’m also mailing out “THIS PANDEMIC SUCKS!” bookmarks! I have SO MANY still to give out. Just click this LINK to put in your information and get your bookmark today!
The Trailer!
Don’t leave without taking exactly 30 seconds to get in the mood for this new release!
Heather Christena Schmidt 