We had some unusually cold days this January. A local church decided to open up a space in the basement to make a warming station for the homeless. There are no homeless in our town but the neighboring town does have several, so church members would drive them over to the church, feed them, and give them a warm place to sleep. Every church has a specific branch of charity that it favors, and this one concentrates on the homeless. It’s been doing this for years, if not decades, and nobody ever had a problem.
However, our very red town now has a woke mayor and a woke group of new aldermen. They completely spoiled our traditional summer park festival by filling it with booths of such inappropriateness that I had to shepherd Klara out before she saw things I wouldn’t be able to explain. The festival is now called “Unity Fest” but it’s more about advertising every variety of sexual deviancy than promoting unity. The church I’m telling you about sent some people with goats and Jesus flyers to the newly woke festival, and I guess this upset the organizers.
As a result, this year the municipal authorities forbade the church from offering a warming station. They came up with a series of bureaucratic objections. “You didn’t file for permit. Yes, you did but you filed too late. You didn’t file too late but it’s the wrong form. It’s not the wrong form but the signature is in the wrong place. It’s not in the wrong place but…” And so on.
In the meantime, it’s getting extremely cold, and nobody is doing anything. The church, of course, said screw it (or whatever the religious euphemism is), and opened the warming station. The city authorities fined them heavily for every day they were helping the homeless.
We are a small town, and all of this is widely known and passionately discussed. Everybody except a couple of known curmudgeons is siding with the church. But what gets to me is the extreme pettiness of the woke leadership. They don’t like the church and decided to let a dozen homeless freeze just to annoy the pastor and the parishioners.
People will want to know how we ended up with this woke mayor. We had a really wonderful right-wing mayor who saved us from COVID lockdowns and did a lot to make us the best town in the region. But he retired and the only people who ran for mayor were a fun guitar-playing dude who masked his wokeness behind a clown persona and a trad right-winger lady who thought we should go back to being a hamlet where she grew up 50 years ago and where you had to drive 40 miles to buy groceries. There is a constituency of people in town who do have that sort of nostalgia but they are a tiny minority. Everybody else loves stores and restaurants and understands that the people who moved into town since year 1970 aren’t about to move out, so fantasizing about empty fields springing up where there’s now housing.
This is such a typical right-wing fail. Antagonizing the masses and losing elections to a fun wokester who skillfully concealed his extremism.
Clarissa's Blog 
Petty power-tripping bureaucrats will be always with us.
Good on the church for setting them to ignore. It’s good to see there are still people who stand on principle.
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“Such a typical right-wing fail. Antagonizing the masses and losing elections to a fun wokester who skillfully concealed his extremism.”
There is a missing step: “Not showing up to do the work” after “Antagonizing the masses” and “complaining about the unapologetic reactionaries or monomaniac types who do turn out” after.
Admittedly the participation needed to step up at the political level is the endlessly tedious (and in many cases, utterly pointless) bureaucratic committee work. And the electable people who *do* turn up and work their way through the bureaucracy are often the boring diligent types like De Santis who are slow to learn how to wear a clown suit.
Those who wear it easily are not trusted, precisely because they lack the track record of a DeSantis. It’s an interesting trap.
In fairness to those who are not stepping up at the local level (and so complain about the lack of a talent pool) the National Party itself appears to exist to thwart the handful of De Santises, Jindal, and Walkers who make it out to the electorate. People get demoralized and give up. And they should not.
Local is where we have the best opportunities.And there are no shortcuts: Our countries did not get into this mess overnight
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“a trad right-winger lady who thought we should go back to being a hamlet”
So she doesn’t want these people living in ‘her’ town and then expects them to vote for her?
Oh republicans…. never change…. as long as you don’t mind losing every step of the way…..
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Right? Come vote for me but remember that I hope you didn’t exist.
Some people think that appealing to voters is beneath them.
We have several proposals for limiting growth that have wide acceptance. Nature preservation, reasonable doable stuff. But who needs modest but real change results when you can go for unrealistic, bizarre fantasies?
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The “woke” want to wake up and it’ll be nothing but flowers …
“… a constituency of people in town who do have that sort of nostalgia …”
How do you think that’s going to work out, “Main Street” quite probably complete with its own Carol Kennicott versus a ragtag bunch of political inv-
Oh, yeah, don’t say the I-word. :-)
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