08 | December | 2024 | MY ENDURING BONES

Back when I lived in Snohomish County, I used to belong to the 1st LD Democrats- so I went to the meetings.

The meetings were hyper focused on the environment. I mean, that’s not a big thing. All LD’s have their ‘thing’ and the first was all about the environment- and electric bikes.

One guy suggested that my 80 year old Mom should use an electric bike. No kidding. She has arthritis and I don’t think she had ridden a bike in over 60 years but if she cared about the fate of the planet, she should use one he implied. I’m not kidding. I wish I were.

Anyway, they felt that the environment was something that they could work on that would bring the community together and that ‘we’ could all agree on. Oh and Reproductive Health Care and “Women’s Rights. ” That was it.

Electric bikes, saving the shoreline for Salmon in Bothell , Washington and Global Warming. No matter what religion you practiced, your ethnic background or if you were a ‘moderate republican ‘ or an Independent, those were things that affected all of us.

If it sounds narrow, it was.

At one meeting a family showed up- a Mom and her now voting age sons and her husband. They were a family of six. They sat next to me an we chatted because our sons had gone to the same high school.

We sat in the back of the room and listened to the business on the agenda and when we were done The Mom and one of her sons met at the cookie table and asked me and one of the Chairs of the LD if there were any committees her sons could work on that was focused on Civil Rights.

She and her kids were POC- and that was the issue they wanted to work on- Civil Rights. They cared about protecting and furthering Civil Rights.

The Chair told her that he was glad they were there and went on about how ‘we’ were focused on issues that affected ‘all of us ”

She was there to teach her sons about the Demoratic party and working on important issues and all she heard about were Electric Bikes and fish. In fact she was told that was what was important ‘to us’.

She looked at me and shook her head and then as we walked away, she asked me: ” What are you doing here?”

It was a good question. It was blunt I admired her asking me because in all of the time I belonged to that group nobody ever asked me what I was doing at the meetings.

They were good at telling me what ” we ” were doing there.

After Trump oozed his way back to the White House, David Axelrod said on CNN that the Democrats had become an increasingly “smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party”, suggesting that they failed to appeal to people from lower-class and non-college educated backgrounds.

He was right- he was absolutely right.

I learned that for myself at the Cookie Table.