Adventures in Trumplandia

We had our county Democratic meeting last night. I’ve written before about how I attempted to act as a bridge between the two “opposition” groups that have formed here locally and the Dems – an effort that seemed to fall flat. However, there’s good news on that front – we had the (women) leaders of both groups in attendance last night.

We started with a discussion of how our Hands Off protest went. Everyone was excited about the turnout. I’ve been politically active here locally for 25 years and I have never seen 150 liberals and/or Democrats assemble for anything in this Trump 75% county like they did for that protest. Heartening.

Funny story. There were Trump counter protestors at the Hands Off rally. One man stuck out because he was off by himself with some kind of recording rig – probably doing live commentary for his You Tube channel or something. I love to argue so I generally steer clear of the nuttier Trumpists. No joke – they’re all armed and angry. You’ll get shot. Anyway, my friend Heather is much nicer than I so she engaged our Right wing You Tuber in conversation and she said he was quite pleasant.

The following week Heather picks up the local weekly “shopper” and lo and behold they covered the protest! Trumpy You Tuber was interviewed in the article she reads. In the comments beneath the article Trumpy You Tuber leaves a comment where he claims he told the reporter he “saw a bus” bringing in protestors and the reporter “did not include the bus in the article”. Heather immediately registers and comments (you know, like we do) – she can’t believe this shit- she writes “John, I SPOKE to you at the protest and YOU KNOW there was no bus, WE TALKED about people we both knew AT THE PROTEST, why are you LYING?!” No response from John.

The second part of the meeting was…less fun. The head of our local health department is a Democrat (which I did not know until last night) and he’s really worried about the GOP cuts to public health. We’ve already lost close to a million dollars in grants and that’s just EMT/fire and public health – we’re also bracing for cuts to Head Start and huge cuts to local public schools. The speaker assured us “oh, people will FEEL this”. I hope so. I didn’t want the cuts, I worked to elect Democrats up and down the ballot to avoid the cuts, but if they’re coming…yeah. I want people to feel them. They need to. There need to be local consequences for poor decisions on national leadership.