Community Organizing To Defeat Those In The Thrall Of The Alphabet's Seventeenth Letter.

When I was a kid growing up in southern Oak Bay I could pretty much see Sequim from my house*. 

Recently, the little town across the water from Victoria on Washington State's Olympic Penninsula was taken over by a small band of crazies and a Q Anon-addled mayor that were making all kinds of things worse, including skyrocketing COVID hospitalizations after the public health officer was professionally and personally attacked, not to mention an opioid epidemic that was running rampant while concerted efforts to improve treatment and harm reduction were stymied. 

However, as Sasha Abramsky reports in the Nation, the majority has prevailed and both the mayor and many of the crazies are gone. Things started get better almost immediately, including for public health officer Allison Berry:

...For Dr. Berry, as the tide turned against the vocal right-wingers who had held Sequim hostage through 2020 and 2021, her correspondence from residents shifted from a daily barrage of threats to something rather different. At some point last fall, a contingent of elderly people began writing letters to her and her public health colleagues expressing how much they appreciated the public health staff. Anonymous residents would swing by the office and leave bouquets of flowers. “A good thing happened: There was a counterresponse in the community,” Berry recalls with a smile. “It was incredibly heartening.”...

It's a good news for democracy story that required progressives and centrists, even those that leaned right, to get together and do a whole lot of grass roots organizing that resulted in multiple overwhelming election victories at the civic level.

Imagine that!

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*Actually, to see Sequim, or at least it's outer edges, I would actually have to stroll on down to Blueberry Hill on a clear day and gaze out across the East-West Strait of the Salish Sea.

Unlike Sequim, it looks like reversing a take over by extremists in Shasta County in Northern California may be much more difficult to reverse given that both the grass and the roots are being steam-rolled by outside big money influencers/influenzaers... 

When C and I first moved to Northern California in our filled-to-bursting Mazda GLC, we spent some time exploring Shasta County and the town of Redding...It's really a beautiful area, filled with friendly people, including the guy who fixed our flickering alternator...One of the things that struck us most, and this is pretty politically ironic now, was how red the actual dirt is.


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