Civic Engagement

I have the day off today; this is the first day I've had off all semester (not counting Spring Break, which didn't really count, due to all the childcare). Well, I did miss one day of class for the rally several weeks back, but I digress. Today is a much-needed day for sleeping in, catching-up, writing papers, grading neglected papers, and restoring balance in my life.



I spent the whole day Saturday at the Travis County Democratic Convention. Remember when I was feeling all political and involved a few weeks back? Yeah, so that had pretty much worn off by the time I remembered I'd signed up to be a delegate for my precinct... the fact that we met at 6:00am on Saturday to carpool to the day-long convention (I got home shortly before 5:00pm) didn't help much, either. The entire week leading up (and much of the time I was there), I thought of these couple-friends of mine, we'll call them Rose & Charlie. Whenever Rose gets upset with Charlie (which is somewhat frequently, in my experience), he'll remind her, "You could've said, 'no,' Rose. You could've said, 'no.'"



Regardless, I didn't say 'no,' even though several opportunities presented themselves to do so, and I wound up in the poorly-lit expo center all day long along with 7,000+ of my neighbors. I will say that my fellow delgates of precinct 437 made the day much more bearable... in fact, getting to know my neighbors was the only thing that kept the entire thing from being a huge slaughter of a good weekend (the fact that I have today off is also helpful). Our group is really representative of the transitions my neighborhood has experienced over the past years... there were some old-school-78704-ers who bought their houses for $7500 30 years ago when the neighborhood was a red-light district, and then there were the new-money urban hipsters who have gentrified and changed the face of the neighborhood. There were also some poor-but-fabulous student types (such as myself) who brought spiciness and sass to the whole affair.

Don't get me wrong, being involved is cool--I like the fact that I'm participating in new and different ways in an historical election, I just also think that having a community meeting to vote for the delegates would have been a much more efficient way to accomplish that which we accomplished in roughly 11 hours at the Expo Center. Civic engagement is a somewhat new and enriching experience for one who grew up without being really community-involved. At the end of the day, I was even more amazed at the inefficiency of the governmental process, inspired by people who stand up for what they believe, annoyed by those who continually blame one source for all of society's problems, and pretty sure that I don't fall neatly on either side of the ideological line. If you're really keen to get an idea of what the whole experience was like, there are about a ton of blogs I've found with pics, etc. One such is here. Oh, and the greatest T-shirt of the day (although I really do love those 1930's-propoganda-esque Obama shirts) was probably this one: