Best Laid Plans

 

Some autumn colours because why not...(several scarves, fresh off the loom, not wet finished yet)

I had headed home determined to plunge into my stash and really tackle weaving it down, but apparently life had other ideas.

While I made a good start, after shoving things aside for weeks, I was faced with now having to actually come to grips with at least some of the more critical things.

One of those things is the impending municipal elections.

Thankfully some local folk had taken the time and made the effort to gather as much information about the various candidates and try to make sense of the sundry statements and get them into order so that it was possible to sit down and review the information in a more organized fashion.

Right now attending a forum was simply not in the cards (way too few people masking, folk crowded into small spaces, who knows the quality of the air/filtration) so being able to access this information online was a huge benefit.

I admit I tend to hang out with other left leaning (political) people but I didn't want to just ask them for their opinion, I wanted to make up my own mind and for that I needed to be a good citizen and try to winkle out the folk I did not want on council or school board because generally I vote to try and keep people out of power who I feel would not use it in a benign way, elect people to provide help for all, not just their buddies.

So I vote to keep more centrist or left leaning in the halls of power, even if those halls are just my own city hall and school board.

It took far longer than I'd hoped and before I knew it the afternoon was used up - and so were all my spoons.

I also spent some time doing guild 'business' (I am, after all, President or Chair or whatever you want to call it, again) and things needed to be dealt with.  Fortunately there is core of really solid members I rely on (too much at times) so it was more a matter of fine tuning, a bit of course correction, and my right hand person making sure we were on the same wave length.

What it meant, however, was I only got to the loom once instead of three times.  But I kept reminding myself that, like Stonekettle (Jim Wright) says, if you want a better world you have to be a better citizen.  So I made sure I carefully considered all the candidates and weeded out the ones I felt had too narrow a vision of who was 'worthy' or who were obviously clueless as to how city council or the school board actually worked.  

There is one more early polling opportunity today and since those are generally less well attended than on official voting day, we will don our masks and head over to the polling station and cast our votes.  And get our official 'right to bitch' cards.  (I jest.  Sort of.)

I don't expect all of the people I am voting for to do everything I want them to do.  For one thing, these boards/councils need to work on building consensus.  What I hope is that they will be made up of people willing to work on consensus, not ride roughshod over the rest in their hobnail boots.  And work for the good of ALL, not just a few.

Like I said to Doug, I can weave later.  Elections are this week and I cannot let them go by without doing my best to insure good people sit at the table to work in good faith to support everyone in this community.

If I am a citizen of this country, this town, then I need to be a good citizen.  I need to inform myself.  And I need to make the effort to vote.  As the meme says, if it didn't matter so much, they wouldn't try to prevent you from doing it.