BEING RELATABLE

Too many years ago I was transitioning-from a 9th-grader in middle school, to a Sophomore in high school. It is a cruel turn-about, from the status of the oldest class in middle school to the youngest of the high school rankings, all while acne and hormones are raging.

Across Highway 214 from high school, however  Was Burkes Big Wheel, for soft  ice cream, a block from there was Smith's Corner Grocery. The convenience store of today, 7-Eleven and Plaid Pantry, did not arrive until the late 1970s. To call it a corner grocery was an exaggeration. It did sell cigarettes and candy. The Smiths had a son in his mid-20's. He was male because that was the only option he had. Some of us called him a 'morphadite', a mis-application of hermahrodite, which people 1000's of years before our time, new more about than Republicans today. As time progressed gays and lesbians were finally allowed legal humanity. Transgenders have not yet achieved that status.

In June of 2024, I became a volunteer at Marion County Democrats. On one Friday that June, I went home with the image of President Biden appearing weak and mentally unstable at a debate with Trump. The following Monday, the president had dropped out of the re-election campaign and turned it over to his Vice-president Kamela Harris. The joy in the Democrats that walked through our door was palpable. One of the first people I bonded with was Sarah. With an 'H'. She was about my age, a veteran of the submarine service in Vietnam, and an Agent Orange survivor. She was not a regular member of our county chapter because she preferred to be registered as an independent. What attracted me to her was her knowledge of leftist politics in Salem, going back to Occupy Wall Street. Sarah was not Sarah as a submarine sailor in the Vietnam era, "it's  submariner, not sub-mariner", she liked to remind me. At some time between her re-entry to civilian life and our meeting, she transitioned. Her wife, whom I met later was of a similar age. 

Sarah's early advice to me was that "MCDems needed to be relatable". But I needed to be relatable as well. I agreed with her about the Democratic party. It stung a little to know that I was not excused from being measured as relatable. I have long held that inkling of disappointment in the Democratic party. It has not resulted in my registering as Independent because the Republican party has been much worse and independent is not a strong political movement. The degree of worse has not been known until it recently dawned on the slowest of us, when the Supreme Court was revealed, by Pro Publica, to be taking rich offerings from billionaire Republicans. Yet for much of the last 40 years, high-level races by Democrats have been lost by a tiny cadre of followers of third-party candidates; many of whom were encouraged to run by the same Republican deep state that has been bribing Supreme Court Justices. That turned out to be the difference between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in 2000. In subsequent years we argued about the difference between bad and less bad. And the party squandered its time on the Electoral stage by electing moderate Democrats. A couple times, we squeaked out a win in the popular vote, only to lose by the Electoral College. 

So relatability has been the Democratic party's Achilles heel in the same way that honesty is the Republikans Achilles heal. Those who followed the other party, in that same time-frame, did not care to be relatable, because they had layed the foundation for what Karl Rove, and others called, "a hundred years of Republican rule". A couple of times we managed to disappoint Republicans, but not for long. And here we are again, knocking on democracies door as Republicans aspire to ever more powerful and harsher methods of governing.

Sarah and I bonded for some reason, in spite of my, and my party's lack of relatability. It has been a successful comradeship. Through her I met some of the political drivers of local protest movements, was able to arrange volunteers to attend rally's, and have been a part of their successes. We joke, Sarah and I, on my relatability. He even joked with me once on his path to relatability as a female. 

During the ensuing one and a half years, I have needed to defend Sarah from some of my volunteer staff. Slowly, they are coming around. We like to call ourselves, we Democrats,  a big-tent party. As difficult as it is to maintain, we must not entertain notions of purchasing a smaller tent. Look how that has affected the "party of Lincoln" whom Lincoln would not wish to party with. Some Democratic analysts have suggested that we were too strident in defending LBGTQ+. But for the entire span of my lifetime, the Democratic party has been representing those Americans who have been oppressed for things they did not choose. There is no honorable way to back away from that goal. We have also supported working people and unions. We did back away from them. It was not honorable. It is the main reason that the Maga movement has been so potent; why we lost our relatability. The history of my parents generation could have provided a potent warning, but we Democrats, at least those in leadership posts, did not heed that warning, so we once more must deal with fascism in our laps. 

The frustrating thing that confronts us is that Republicans do not need to be relatable to  the bigger tent. They are relatable to fascists, racists, and Christian nationalists, about 35% of the voting public. They don't even try to be relatable to the rest of us. In fact, every thing they push out there as governance is intended to, "own the libs", which pleases the cruelest among them. 35% is not a governing number, unless about 30% of voters stay home on election day. And that is where we stand on the precipice of a bi-election year. Perhaps the most important bi-election in our lifetime, because we cannot say for sure if we will ever have a free and fair election again.