Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit and Transcendentalism
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/01/2012 - 06:27Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. October roles around, the first full month of Autumn. It is dark when I get up, except for the lingering light of the setting harvest moon. I've often wondered if I have Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is harder for me to get going during these shorter days. At work, I have a light that Kim got me last year to get more simulated daylight.
Work continues along an even course, but all my free time is getting sucked up with the election. There are roughly fifteen thousand voters in my district. Slowly, surely, I've been contacting as many as possible. Perhaps not as many as I would like, or as others would like, but I'm making progress, and the words of one friend stay with me. Elections are not sprints, they are marathons. I've built a solid foundation for my campaign. I've hit my stride. Now, just to keep the pace for the final month.
Besides voter contact, I've been working on refining my policy positions. One thing comes back to me from my years of writing, show, don't tell. At back to school night for Fiona, the teacher spoke about trying to get the kids to incorporate this concept into their writing. I've been thinking about it in policies as well.
How do I help connect people back to their community and to their government? By connecting more with voters, the community and the government. I try to keep this in mind as I attend events and meet voters personally. How do I address education reform? Perhaps an important part of this is to nurture my own love of learning.
Last night, I spoke with Fiona on her radio show about reading books on smartphones. She enjoys reading various books on her phone and I suggested tweaking it so she can get books out of the library or from project Gutenberg. I spent a little time getting some books onto my phone as well. Reading Margaret Fuller's Memoir may be more helpful in forming policy positions than reading many papers from various organizations.
Fuller is an interesting character and I'm enjoying reading her writing. She was part of the circle of Transcendentalists in Massachusetts during the mid nineteenth century. Here story and writing ads an interesting layer to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. I would love to see explorations into politics, religion, literature, the arts and civic life that we saw from the Transcendentalists, perhaps with a touch of the Great Awakenings of the preceding years. Somehow, the political landscape today seems so far from this.
But the early morning hours are slipping away. It is time to get ready for another day and another month. Although it is not part of the great intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century, the old childhood invocation, Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, harkens back to a time that perhaps, wasn't really all that much simpler, but still holds great appeal. May the month be lucky for all of us.
The Amity Teen Center Adds to the Hynes 2012 Soundtrack
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/30/2012 - 01:20For a while now, I've been wanting to write about the soundtrack for my campaign for State Representative. At different times, there have been different songs that have been going through my mind as I campaign, and today, the Twenty Fifth Anniversary Celebration of the Amity Teen Center added to that celebration. Really I should write two separate blog posts, but I've been finding less time to write during my campaign, so I'll combine the two.
One song that I often get stuck in my head as I campaign is The Indigo Girls, "Closer to Fine"
I'm trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
The best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all
Yeah, I go door to door. I make phone calls. I greet people at fairs. I'm constantly trying to tell people something about my life. I'm constantly listening to people talk about the issues, and trying to find the nuance, the insight between the black and white that dominates so much of political discourse these days, and one of the best things I've found is to not take life, or the political campaign too seriously; it's only life after all.
Sometimes, I end up sending notes to people; email, postcards, something scrawled on a flyer, anything that I can use to reach another voter.
Sometimes, on these notes, I leave my phone number. "If you want to find out more about my campaign, please call me at (203) 298 0814." When I write something like this, the words of this year's earworm, "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, comes to mind:
Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here's my number,
So call me, maybe?
So call me, maybe? Or even better, Vote for me, Maybe?
Today, I stopped at the Amity Teen Center for its Twenty Fifth Anniversary Celebration. I saw a lot of friends there, mostly parents, but some kids I knew as well. I must admit, I hadn't been to the Amity Teen Center before. Perhaps some of it is because of my experiences as a kid when I got dropped off at places like that after my parents separated and my mother had to find some place for me as she went back to work.
Yet the Amity Teen Center had a very different feel, something that appealed to my inner teenager, as well as to my thoughts about education. I've often talked about how teaching to the test is serving our students, as well as teachers, parents and towns poorly. When our students go out into the workforce, their ability to fill in the correct ovals on standardized test forms isn't going to be what leads to their success. No, there ability to speak publicly, relate well with their co-workers and be creative is going to be much more important.
My daughter was part of the Multi Age Group, or MAG, at Beecher Road School. This program taught twenty first century skills of creativity and cooperation which are already serving her well. As I looked at the art work on the walls and listened to teens from the Amity Teen Center, it seemed like those skills are being reinforced there.
I spoke with one Amity grad who was in the MAG program at Beecher Road School, and then later spent much of her free time at the Amity Teen Center. Unlike so many recent college graduates, this young woman has found a good job in a rough economy, working in New York City for a creative agency, and I suspect much of her success is the result of programs like MAG and the Amity Teen Center.
But I was talking about the soundtrack of my campaign, so let me get back to that. As I was leaving the Amity Teen Center, the first act started on the stage. A young man, guitar in hand, approached the mic. He hit a few chords on the guitar and launched into "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", by Green Day.
It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.
Yes, life is unpredictable. If you asked me, a year ago, if I ever thought I would be running for State Representative, I'd probably have looked at you as if you were crazy, but in the end it's right. I am running for State Representative. I'm having the time of my life. I hope my campaign is having a positive effect on the people I meet; helping them become more connected to their community and their government. Hopefully, I'll end up in Hartford, where I can continue to have a positive effect on the people from Woodbridge, Orange and Derby.
Ballot Initiatives
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 09/26/2012 - 20:12Yesterday, I received an email from the Connecticut Citizens for Ballot Initiative asking me
Do you support Connecticut Citizens having the right to a statewide initiative and referendum mechanism?
My initial reaction was mixed. I'm a big supporter of getting people more involved in how their government is run, and on the surface, it seems like ballot initiatives would be a good thing. But, when I thought about how they've been used, or perhaps abused, in other states, I had second thoughts.
From Pros and Cons of ballot initiatives there are several concerns expressed.
One of the objections to ballot initiatives is
Initiative proposals can be misleading. Some initiative proposals use oversimplified language, which means voters are at risk of making uninformed decisions.
Perhaps the initial question falls into this. Yes, I support Connecticut Citizens having the right to a statewide initiative and referendum mechanism. The real question is, what would that mechanism look like?
What should be the requirement to get an initiative on the ballot? The more questions we have, the more it will cost to have ballots printed. Should initiatives be only available to people who can come up with some sort of hefty filing fee? Should an initiative require some number of signatures to be gathered? Again, there's the cost of verifying the signatures. How many signatures should be required? Should there be some sort of distribution requirement of signatures?
As an example, to get on the Working Family Party line on the ballot, I had to gather about 100 signatures. Would it make sense to require at least 100 signatures from at least 76 different Assembly Districts?
Another concern about ballot initiatives is
Initiatives can be passed without any information about how they will be funded. There is no organized procedure (like a legislative hearing) to examine costs or how the initiative, if passed, will take away from other
necessary government programs.
This is related to the previous concern about people not being properly informed about a ballot initiative. Perhaps as part of the ballot initiative process, any initiative that gets enough petition signatures to be on the ballot should have a public hearing at the Legislative Office Building, similar to bills brought by legislators. In addition to that, perhaps such initiatives should go through the Legislative Commissioners' Office "to be checked for constitutionality and consistency with other law". Then, go through the Office of Fiscal Analysis to get an estimate of costs of the bill and the Office of Legislative Research to add a plain English explanation of the bill.
Another concern about the ballot initiative process is
Unlike candidate campaigns, there are no limits on contributions to ballot measure Campaigns. As such, wealthy individual and institutional donors can exert tremendous influence over the ballot measure process.
Should some sort of public funding of ballot initiatives be added to address this issue? Should rules be put in place to prohibit the use of paid signatures gatherers? Should there be a requirement about publishing the fiscal analysis and plain English explanations of the initiative? Who would pay for such publishing?
Yes, I support Connecticut Citizens having the right to a statewide initiative and referendum mechanism. It is a very important and very powerful mechanism that needs to be set up very carefully so that it doesn't become yet another method for powerful special interests to get their way at the expense of Connecticut Citizens.
Life, Work, and Job
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/22/2012 - 10:49It is a beautiful fall morning. I've been up, mowing the lawn, getting various tasks done. Last night, I went to the Amity football game. Kim went to Amity years ago, and Fiona will most likely be going there in a few years. We thought it would be a fun family event, as well as another good opportunity to meet voters from Woodbridge and Orange.
As I arrived, I ran into another candidate, whom I created warmly, only to be rebuffed with a comment about how they were at the game with their family, and not to campaign. It brought me back to an old union chant I learned many years ago, "Our life is more than our work, and our work is more than our job." I can understand the desire to be just a regular person, not a candidate in the spotlight. Yet, perhaps, that is part of what is wrong with politics today. We compartmentalize our lives and our interactions. Our lives are more than our work, but too often there is too little overlap between the too.
We elect representatives, less to represent us, and more to handle and compartmentalize the political parts of our lives.
We need to change this. We elected officials whose lives, life work, and jobs overlap greatly. I was glad to be at the football game, both as part of a family and community experience,as well as part of a political campaign.
The same applies to my work. I could be ready all of the policy briefs and questionnaires I get in the mail, and I do try to pay as much attention to them as possible. However, perhaps policy is better understood trying to live it.
Friday started off with Run at Work day. It was sponsored by the Road Runners Club of America and the Community Health Center, where I work, encouraged employees to get out and run as part of the employee wellness program. I went out and ran. Not very far and not very fast. I'm not in the best of shape, and wellness programs are important for employees like me. It was great to see so many co-workers join in and I'm sure there are policy lessons for everyone in the experience.
This was followed by a trip to the Connecticut State Veteran's Home. CHC sent around 50 people to help with Stand Down, an opportunity to provide important services to Connecticut Veterans. There were long lines as veterans received free dental checkups, help with housing, work, legal and other issues. On the one hand, it was great to see so many people working together to help out as many veterans as possible. Yet on the other hand, it was very sad to see so many veterans in need of help. I wish more people would take the time to speak with the veterans at events like this, for whom the safety net is so important, instead of making political speeches at conventions that many of the vets I saw yesterday could probably never make it to. I suspect many of the vets in Rocky Hill yesterday are part of the 47% that we owe a great debt to.
So now, it is time to return to mowing my lawn, and perhaps doing a few other family tasks before I return to some of the more traditional campaign activities.
I hope each of you find ways to better align your jobs with your true life work, and your true life work with the rest of your lives.
A Typical Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/16/2012 - 08:56It started off as a typical autumn Saturday morning for a middle-aged suburban white man. I was sleeping in my nice house on a quiet cul-de-sac. My wife and daughters were asleep, but the dog was awake and asking to go outside. I got up, let the dog out. The air was crisp, and the first fallen leaves had been blown into the kitchen. As Wesley romped outside, I checked the news and mail.
These days, checking the news and the mail is a little different than it was a generation ago. I fired up the laptop computer and checked the news online. Instead of opening paper envelopes, I clicked on links in the email program.
I had been out of town the weekend before and had not mown the grass or gone to the transfer station, this generation's name for the town dump. Could I get these tasks completed before I needed to head out on the special tasks of the day?
Like many people these days, my work doesn't end on Friday afternoon. My job, my work, continues through the weekend. For my job, I'm the social media manager for a Federally Qualified Community Health Center. I am always looking for ways to improve communities' health through the use of social media.
As the old labor union chant goes, "Our life is more than our work, and our work is more than on job" and my job of improving communities' health through the use of social media is also part of my work, which might simply be named improving communities. This has led me to run for State Representative which has added a lot to the tasks for each weekend.
My eldest daughter is studying at UConn and she stayed with us for the weekend. She was the second person up and we talked about her school work. She is reading about post-modernism and I thought about post-modernism and political campaigns. We talked about Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Should I add a muted trumpet to my campaign literature? Should I talk about the postal system and the efforts to eliminate W.A.S.T.E.? Could I get an endorsement from Oedipa Maas? This led to a discussion of fan fiction and the idea of trying to get fan fic writers to write endorsements of my campaign from the perspective of their favorite characters. Can a political campaign have literary value? Can we hermeneutically study the intent of the candidate and how it relates to the experience of the voter?
Saturday morning, a bunch of people were going door to door urging people to support Chris Murphy for U.S. Senate. I went to join in. I offered a brief version of one of my favorite talking points about Chris Murphy's opponent to the crowd of young volunteers. Linda McMahon says we have the best health care system in the world. If you can afford to spend $50 million every other year, trying to buy the office of U.S. Senate, you can also probably afford to buy the best health care in the world. If you have a decent job, with decent employer offered health insurance, you can probably get decent health care, but not necessarily world class health care. However, if you are struggling to get by in this country. If you work for a company that doesn't provide health insurance for its employees, if you're between jobs, are poor, or have pre-existing conditions, getting good health care is also a struggle. Chris Murphy has worked hard to make quality health care accessible to more of us.
It wasn't time for speeches, so I saved the stories of patients at the Community Health Center who had benefited from Chris Murphy's work and from the Affordable Care Act.
All of this was a precursor to Saturday afternoon. A patient at CHC had lost her two year old son to brain cancer; neuroblastoma. She lived close to the Community Health Center, and would sometimes visit our community garden. Her son loved the garden, and soon after he had died, I ran into her at an event in the garden. She spoke about how much it would mean to be able to have a memorial for him in the garden and I offered to help make it happen. Saturday afternoon was the memorial.
As I drove up to Middletown, I listened to Snap Judgement on NPR. It was edgy stories about people confronting big parts of their lives; spiritual issues. How do we understand a greater being or things that are bigger than our own lives? How do take the age old craft of storytelling and make it relevant to our current age, cutting through all the noise of our daily lives?
It brought me back to the discussion with my eldest daughter about post modernism and my campaign. It took me back to the National Association of Community Health Centers conference in Florida last week, where one of the keynote speakers was Anna Deavere Smith. She did one woman documentary style performances about health care. They were powerful and moving, talking about a woman with diabetes who didn't want to go on dialysis because of her daughter's experience when she was dying of AIDS, or of a rodeo rider who ended up in the hospital after getting kicked by a bull in his kidneys.
What would I encounter at the memorial for Junaid?
The memorial got off to a slow start. Things still needed to be organized and it was a community effort. Junaid's mother still had a lot of work to do to be able to say goodbye to her son. After a couple hours of helping get various tasks completed and milling around, Junaid's mother invited all of us into a circle on the sidewalk. She spoke about having a black father and a white mother back in the seventies when it was less common. She spoke about being brought up by her mother in poverty in the slums of Patterson NJ. This was a very different Patterson than William Carlos Williams wrote about in his epic poem about the city, yet the reference brought the poem to my mind.
She spoke of becoming pregnant at aged fourteen, of giving up her daughter and disappearing into a world of drugs. She spoke about becoming clean, of a new life, and then becoming a victim of domestic violence. She spoke about the shelter for battered women that CHC runs and the friends she had met there. She spoke about caring for her son as he was dying of cancer. She thanked everyone there, often personally, talking about how they had helped her in her journey.
It was a two hour special episode Anna Deavere Smith on Snap Judgement doing a campaign to build community, end domestic violence and fight against childhood cancer.
On my drive home, I thought a little bit about the political side of this; Junaid's mother and Linda McMahon. Linda McMahon has made her fortune promoting sexually ladened violence in the guise of 'family entertainment' and is now using her millions from that to try and buy a seat in Congress to get more tax benefits for herself at the expense of people like you and I, and Junaid's mother. Chris Murphy has fought hard to craft legislation that would help Junaid's family. For me the choice is clear, and it is a moral choice.
It was probably close to eight in the evening by the time I got home, exhausted. I am a middle aged suburban white man, who went through an intense journey seeing parts of our country in our own backyard that too many of us never see.
Today, I write about it. I'll go to church and pray for Junaid and his mom. I'll go to campaign events and seek to represent American's, not just those that are most like me. Saturday; it was a typical day.
