Saturday, April 19, 2008

An Afternoon With True Believers

I didn’t write a post about how there was going to be an Obama Rally in Sugar Land this afternoon because, frankly, I couldn’t find out what time it would be and didn’t want to steer anyone wrong.

Well, with 20-20 backward vision, the Obama Rally will have taken place starting at 12:15 PM, that is 4 hours ago at this writing, today at the Sugar Land Memorial Park in Sugar Land, Texas.

It’s a brand new park on the floodplain above the east bank of the Brazos River as it flows past First Colony. I had never met any of its organizers and was frankly wondering where they came from. My visit with them this afternoon answered that question. These people are all brand new friends who were all a part of the Obama for President effort of Fort Bend County.

In other words, these people are True Believers in Barack Obama.

True Believers in a presidential candidate that they all admire. True Believers in the man and his message. People that I like to call the new activists who have come out in 2008 in droves to put an end to the Republican hegemony in our nation’s capitol.

To put a Democrat in the White House.

First to speak, after the rally organizers, was a Democrat who likes to call himself a country lawyer. An activist Democrat at birth who made hand-painted JFK campaign signs when he was 13 years old. Don Bankston stood to give an empowering speech to this small crowd of Obama supporters. A speech filled with facts and figures of the county’s recent primary and its three senate district conventions, each of which brought the crowd to standing applause. As he wound it up, Bankston said something that needs to be said from now and on to the November election. He extolled the importance of the grassroots, that it was the grassroots that was going to deliver our country back into the hands of the people.

I know what he was talking about, and hope that there were those in the crowd that took what he said to heart. While it is fantastic that so many have decided to take it upon themselves to volunteer and help organize for the presidential campaign, what matters in the long run is what takes place after Obama wins in the general election. What is important is that these new activists not put their signs, buttons and banners away in their scrapbooks along with their memories of a stupendous political victory. What is important is that our new activists see their job as incomplete. Incomplete until Democrats have taken each and every county office in Fort Bend County. Incomplete until Democrats put our county, state and country back on the path of peace, fellowship and equality.

Don’t worry, there will always be those like Don Bankston around. Lifelong activists who will work tirelessly to see that our Republican friends will always have a minority voice in our government. But what this country needs right now is for some of these new activists, and these True Believers, to sign up now for another tour that goes beyond November 2008.

Our Republican friends and the corporations that support them won’t go away after November. They will be itching for a fight to take back what they have lost. We need our new activists to hang around and show our opponents that not only can they not have anything back that we’ve taken from them, but that also, we aren’t done yet.

Not completely.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've always wondered what a "true" believer is. Probably something like a "legitimate businessman". Or a "real" Democrat.

Anonymous said...

...Or an "anonymous sage."