The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Small Town

I feel I should add a little more info to help with perspective on the fact that only 40 or so people came to the funeral for the Bill of Rights. Of course there's the weather issue, which I mentioned. There's also the fact that just a week before the event took place, it was just an idea in my mind. All the preparations took place in that span of time. A little note from the activist handbook-- if you're planning a major community-wide event, give yourself more than a week to prepare. I knew this, but these were extenuating circumstances. The main factor was that I hadn't thought I would even be living here anymore by this time. I've been going through an eviction saga for the past many months, and have been conducting my local affairs with a short-term mindset. All this Bill of Rights defense stuff came about because this guy got in touch with me and asked to meet and talk about it. Then he told me about how all these communities around the country have been passing resolutions supporting civil liberties and opposing the USA-PATRIOT Act, and it got me fired up. That was about a month and a half ago now, and a lot has transpired from it, not the least of which was this funeral.

Anyway, the main factor I wanted to make clear is how small the population is out here, which is the biggest reason why the relatively low numbers at the funeral were actually a pretty good turnout. My whole county has under 100,000 people in it. The town where the funeral was held is population 3,001. The bulk of the county's population lives either in Truckee, which is a city on the east end of the county, pretty far (and disconnected) from here, or in various ultra-rural unincorporated areas. I'm part of the latter group...my address is technically Nevada City, but I'm way outside the city limits.

So my point is that it's hard to get a large number of people to any event here, unless it's some sort of artistic perormance. Most people do their politics in meetings and the letters to the editor page, not in the streets. That's probably true in most places, but here the law of numbers has a big impact. There haven't been too many demonstrations here with more than 50 people that i can remember. The last big one I remember was when a bunch of high schoolers walked out of school to protest something (I can't recall what just now -- it was a few years ago, shortly after I moved here. I think maybe it was drug testing). I haven't seen a lot of the peace vigils they've been having here lately, but I saw one and it was about 20 people. So that's kind of how it is around here.

The deal with media is basically the same, unfortunately. That news show I was on a while back is the only local TV news. The other "local" news stations are in Sacramento, an hour and a half away. I probably could have gotten one or two of them up here, but the time factor hurt me there, big time. That's definitely my biggest disappointment from the funeral for the Bill of Rights. No major media. We did have a broadcaster from KVMR show up, and she taped some of the ceremony, and played it over the air this morning at the beginning of my my interview with her.

I didn't want to get too into talking about all the details of this past week tonight. I'm still behind on sleep, and today was a rough day -- another weather-related power outage day. Extra pains in the butt related to that ate up a lot of my day.

I'll be talking a lot more about the funeral...I want to compile a lot of notes, to help inspire others to hold them in their communitites. I think it's a really compelling and effective activist event. I'm going to put a couple more thoughts about that in a separate post in a minute actually.