- Sarah and another supporter whose name I don’t know.
- I still refer to Sue (pictured) and Greg and their two kids as “the amazing Skogs.”
- Lou and Donna. Those light blue signs that you can’t read from a car still make me laugh. Only Faith Kidder knows why.
- Dan and Jed. Dan’s sign is so Dan. “Courage Minnesota!”
It was December 2003. It was freezing cold. My toes hurt. And yes, the Deaniacs – mean spirited though they might have been – had speculated correctly. We were the type that would spend a Saturday afternoon on a tie dye fundraiser that would net a couple hundred tops. We said yes to just about anything as long as you were willing to “make it happen.” This is how you get stuff like “Coatless for Kucinich.” It’s not for us to say where to direct one’s passions.
On this day, we said yes to freezing our asses off because Ted Koppel/ABC had made the decision to exclude the non-viable Dennis Kucinich from a nationally televised debate. We protested KSTP or “big media” as we liked to call it. Nobody cared. Nothing went viral.
I had somehow dragged my friend Lou along. It wasn’t the first nor would be the last time he would move from my sphere of theater friends to the political group. The last time we saw one another was at a precinct caucus in my new neighborhood several years ago. Our state representative rallied the troops.
“Give yourselves a big hand! We all know you could be doing something else!”
The akward self-congratulatory smattering of applause would make way for political maneuvering, with those who understood Robert’s Rules of Order having an edge over the newcomers. With a packed governor’s race at stake, campaigners vied to dominate the district convention rules committees. Not unlike the first precinct caucus I had attended as a Kucinich supporter, it made my stomach hurt.
I haven’t been to a precinct caucus since.
I watch plenty of garbage television shows but the local news hasn’t been one of them since I was in high school. So boycotting something Ralph Nader aptly refered to as “Murder, Sports & Weather” or whatever it is that I’m supposed to do given the most recent offense shouldn’t be too hard.
Faith Kidder, the lead coordinator of MN4K back when we were freezing our asses off, used to insist that we put things in terms of what we wanted and not in terms of what we didn’t want. It could be annoying. She once interrupted me to suggest that I say “situation” instead of “problem.”
“So a person doesn’t have a drinking ‘problem?'” I challenged. “They have a drinking ‘situation?'”
We could butt heads. But we laughed a lot. This was no exception.
With Faith’s predominate attitude in mind, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we completely pulled our energy out of the crap that doesn’t work and put it elsewhere. Find an independent news source that you like and support it. Then forget about the rest of it. Besides, KSTP was never a serious news source anyway, was it?