I must first say that by now you guys have heard so many of
my speeches. I love you guys. That is so wonderful. Though she doesn’t actually
live here in Kingman, Felecia Rotellini over there has heard me speak in public more
often than my wife this past year and by this point could probably serve as my
personal biographer if impressed into service. Just sayin’
Now you know that as I travel, I see so many desert places. I
just love it. Do you know what I mean? Like in that HBO series, “Deadwood,”
when Swearingen was talking the Indians he called them dirt worshippers. After
having driven around Arizona for the past two years, something like 72,000 miles,
I am beginning to get an idea of what he was talking about. (Yeah, 70,000 plus.
It’s like I retired from teaching to become a truck driver!) But seriously, if
loving the land, the rocks and hills, the horizons, the shadows and trees, the
splashes of water, if loving the sublime beauty of the land we live in is the
equivalent of worshipping dirt, then my mom was right about our Indians heritage
(Cherokee & Choctaw as I recall).
But when I talk about our land as a desert, I see it,
western Arizona, as a desert in many ways. I also see so many people struggling
in these hard times. We already came out to the desert ready to take on the challenges
of nature and then found our biggest battles are with a government that doesn’t
seem to care about the people and an economy that wants to eat us alive. I also
see you guys out here busting your hump for the good of the party everywhere I
go. Now, I have gotten to watch the growth and change in Mohave County’s party
personally, but everywhere I go I am watching the same thing—citizens, standing
up, stretching their comfort zones to try to lend a hand at fixing the many messes
we find ourselves in. I have got to tell you that is what inspires me.
Everywhere I go I meet dreamers and real DREAMERS devoting their time and their
lives to trying the make the change we know America needs.
I want to tell you America has been driven the wrong way for
a long time. From the shining beacon of “can-do” we’ve been derailed. We don’t
have time for me to go into the details. There are 5 fresh outrages anytime you
look at the news. But I am not here to drag you down with that. I tell ya, when
you’re preaching to the choir there’s no need for fire & brimstone. Instead
I want tell you a story.
As some of you know I am getting ready to begin phase in my
campaign that I have long dreamed you. I am planning a trek through the smaller
communities of the seven counties in the district bringing music, mirth, a bit
of sideshow oddity and Democratic values and ideas to places where many folks
are afraid to admit they back the donkeys. You know what that’s like. You have
heard of DINOs & RINOs, I’m going to tell you there’s a larger group out
there, the DBNPs: “Democrat, But Not in Public.” I feel for you guys. I grew up
that way. But I know that we can make the change we want in society if we are
really willing to work on it and the time we devote to working for change
changes us forever and for the better.
I grew up in a tiny town in Texas, Raymondville, Texas and
as many of you have heard I was a teen runaway who wound up back in my hometown
& when I was 19 there was a farm workers strike in my town. I joined it and
when I tell that story it sounds like that was the beginning of my effort to
devote my life to working for the good and we all grew to a glorious future.
But that’s not the case. The farmers brought in scabs, the crop got picked. The
next year they stopped planting labor intensive truck crops like onions and
carrots and tilled the land into cotton & sorghum. The people had to move.
There were no jobs.
My late wife & I moved during that time to Illinois,
Springfield, Illinois, Land of Lincoln and that’s where I first saw a liberal
community. Not to say that Springfield is the Berkley of the Prairie or
anything like that, but the city was large enough to where there was an active
counter-culture and liberal yuppie intelligentsia who were new-agey, granola
crunchy,& quite a bit spendy (just to say) and to this small town podunker,
that sort of thing was VERY alluring. It was a society built of all the things
our little community back in Texas had held suspect: people who dressed to
their own different drummer, questioned the status quo and actually went out
into the public arena to speak truth to stupid. People who grew up to go to
college and got all these wonderful jobs and had all these wonderful
experiences due to the breadth of their knowledge and their global sense of
connectedness. I had never seen anything like it. I had to have more.
So, before they’d moved to Texas my wife’s family had been
part of the Springfield food co-op culture, a grassroots (in more ways than
one) movement committed to whole foods, health foods, activist politics and new
age fashion. This was back in the 80s. Before long, I became the co-op manager—
(& I know that sounds like an oxymoron—that you’d need
to manage something like a co-operative venture, but I promise ya, even among
those w the most noble of intentions, lots of folks remember to sing Kumbaya,
but not everyone remembers to make sure someone keeps the floor swept and the
shelves stocked just sayin’).
--And to me it was a great adventure and I met so many
wonderful people. And then one day this woman came in carrying an oversize
bundle and crying, “I feel SO guilty, I just can’t take it anymore!” she cried
and slopped her bundle on the counter. It was newspapers. “I hate that I have
to be so wasteful with these. Why do we throw stuff like this away? Why can’t
we recycle?” It was a good question. Bigger cities were already setting up
programs and there were a couple of smaller scrap yards in town that would buy
a few things; but she was right. There in that city of 100,000, the model
seemed to be about waste, not reuse, about negligent consumption, not the
greater good for the public in that spring field or for the actual prairie
ground beneath it.
But it was a co-op and soon the topic of recycling was abuzz
in the co-op community. Why couldn’t we recycle? What could our group do to
make the culture embrace recycling to the point the public would clamber for it?
It took us about two years. We first educated our own members about the
importance of recycling and then set up a recycling center there in the
basement of the co-op. I tell ya it wasn’t easy hauling those bails of paper
and buckets of glass out of the basement like that, but the co-op members began
to feel better about themselves as consumers and citizens and soon we began to
promote the idea on the larger scale. It was a time of a national movement
towards recycling. Our little co-op wasn’t inventing the wheel or driving
western civilization as we know it, but we were doing our part and, empowered,
we began to affect the culture of Springfield.
In addition to our own tonnage of recycling, we wrote
letters to the editors, held classes for the public, spoke to our elected
officials, we even sent me to the St Patrick’s Day parade one year dragging,
like, a zillion milk jugs on ropes down the street as our parade entry to
dramatize the way our consumption creates a burden if we are responsible with
the waste it creates. Or something like that.
And bit by bit as society in general changed its attitudes
on recycling we helped our community move forward. In time, the city created an
office for solid waste management and one of our board members was the first hire.
Eventually the city instituted a widely used curbside recycling program,
reducing the environmental impact the city’s waste produces and offsetting the
operating costs for the waste haulers now that they had enough resources to
enter the recycling markets. And by the way, we all got a little bit cleaner
dirt to worship.
But that’s my personal story of how my life changed of how
my community changed because someone cared, because someone had an idea and
acted on it. That one idea infected a community and that changed a society and
maked things better. And along the way I went to college myself just like all
those people I had admired and here we are today. There are tons of stories
like that of social change and the wondrous personal growth it can bring. I
love those stories. I hope we will all continue to make those kinds of stories
happen in our own lives. I hope this tale reminds you you want to work on that
today.
Thank you.
