A renewal of action?

Last night I went back through and redid an old post, an event for which there is a backstory.

For about two or three years I employed a service called Photoshop Express as a repository for photos I used on monoblogue. But about this time last year the Photoshop Express site went away and while I still could get to the photos every single link I had to it became a dead one. If I had lots of time and patience perhaps I could go back and rework the links but in the interim I found a different service and repaired a select few of these posts (usually ones I link to semi-frequently) so I could restore them to their original glory.

The one I fixed last night was this one, which I wanted to use as an example of where a group of motivated people descended on Washington because I was part of the group. It’s a definite blast from the past since we did this back in 2009, but it was a useful comparison to a manufacturer summit I wrote on for American Certified.

But looking through that album of pictures reminded me of the days when those of us who would be considered “TEA Party” seemed to be much more activist than we are now. Sure, some would chalk the change up to a more sophisticated approach, but when dismal failures like Operation American Spring become the norm one has to ask if people are resigned to their fate. Or maybe they’re just trying to scrape by and survive.

With the events in Mississippi revolving around the Chris McDaniel – Thad Cochran runoff, it’s obvious there are some people who are terrified of the huddled masses. Yet while McDaniel isn’t conceding the race, it’s worthy to note no one is out yet protesting the election like, say, union activists harassing Scott Walker and the Wisconsin legislature. (I have many more thoughts on the Mississippi situation I’ll share in a future post.)

At least there’s a political race that has a pulse, though. Look at the pathetic turnout for Tuesday’s primary, where I can give you a good example of this.

As it was in 2010, there were 13 Republican candidates for our Central Committee. In every case – except perhaps the 13th and last position where the difference is small at the moment – either those of us who chose to run again garnered fewer votes than we did four years ago or the person who finished in that position did worse than the last time (i.e. our first place finisher was a newcomer while 2010’s first place finisher chose not to run again. The difference there was a whopping 1,192 votes.) Those who ran both times lost anywhere from 291 to 653 votes, based on the unofficial 2014 results. Put another way, our winner this time would have finished seventh in 2010.

Obviously some will blame the change in primary date, but I think there’s that same resignation and malaise at work in this case, too. After all, compared to 2010 we had a much more competitive governor’s race and a significant portion of our county had two General Assembly races which were quite spirited.

I’m not quite sure what we can rally around anymore. As it turned out, the original “Emergency House Call” rally didn’t matter because we got Obamacare anyway. It’s a little like the philosophy which guided the Long War in that we almost have to be effective 100% of the time to elicit significant change – yes, we got our Dave Brat but it’s sort of countered by the Beltway insiders not losing Thad Cochran – in the meantime, more regulations are promulgated by unelected bureaucrats and a President left unchecked by an impotent Congress. As we slide closer and closer to a yet-to-be-defined abyss, the ideas of the Founders slip out of our grasp.

Sometimes I think ballots will be replaced by bullets, and that’s not something most of us want. But it’s happened before, and history has a nasty habit of eventually repeating itself.