I’ve had some rain in the last few days and there will be more according to the forecasts. That was part of my excuse for slowing down putting up signage for Grandma’s Marathon. Everything else is in place. I have my lit. I have a crew of lit passer outers. I’ve warned them to bring jackets to keep them dry. They have cool tshirts with gorillas that I hope will peek out of their jackets if they are bundled up. I’ve got doggy poop bags to keep my lit dry.
I have three days to put up more signage. Today I’m meeting with a member of the legal establishment to talk about how the Federalist Society seems to be a state’s right stalking horse for a Republican takeover. On Friday I’ll cut out of the campaign to serve lunch at the Soup Kitchen. Between now and Friday night I want to write about ten columns worth of material for my weltyforcongress.com site and or for my blog, here. I also want to set up a site to sell merch on the internet.
It would take me about three weeks to do all this or a week if I had five full time volunteers. In short I’m seeing time close in on me with 55 days ahead and the chance to go viral before the primary which seems just out of reach. And, I have news that my son’s family will be making a week-long stop with our new granddaughter on the 4th of July. I’m taking deep breaths to stay focused.
I will be content if until the primary I remain dogged and alert to possibilities to catch lightening in a bottle. If I lose I will return to life sans politics which according to a remarkable paragraph I read in a NY Times article about American hating each other will not be easy:
” ‘Nearly 5 billion people are on social media,’ Van Bavel wrote:
The average user is online for 3 hours a day and scrolls through roughly 300 feet of news content — the height of the Statue of Liberty.
We are just starting to understand how this impacts our relationships and sense of identity, let alone society and democracy. Although the effects might be small on a daily or weekly basis, there is reason to think it might matter a great deal on the scale of years or decades due to the large user base.”
There were fewer than 3 billion people when I was born. Now the poor of the third world have cell phones and people like Fox News make money telling them things that make them hate each other. Its a far cry from Voice of America or the three networks that told everyone the news when I was 12 to 40 years old. ABC, CBS and NBC were all rigorously anti-inflammatory. So were newspapers even with Vietnam and Civil Rights roiling the waters. Today a man can escape paying legal judgements after screaming online for years that the parents of the slain children of Sandyhook were all actors and that it never happened.
I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Where this internet image is found
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