Apr 20 2004
Kicking Off the Political Season
It’s an exciting time of year!
The flowers are coming up, shorts are coming out of storage, and the political season that culminates in this years November elections is ramping up! Jenny and I went to Russ Feingold’s (one of our WI Senators) campaign headquarters grand opening this last weekend, which was pretty interesting. I’ve offered to volunteer for his campaign and am still waiting to hear back about where I’ll fit in best there. One really nice thing is the campaign headquarters is about a block away from work, so finding time to stop in and say hi or asking questions won’t be too hard at all.
Anyways, we got to shake the Senator’s hand and say hello, which is about all we were looking for in the madhouse of people vying for his ear. We did get to spend some time with our Alderman, Michael Murphy, at the event too, and talk with him about our neighborhood a bit. He told us if we were ever interested in helping out with his work, we should let him know. It’s something that I’m going to consider, always the believer that it’s important to focus on local politics since they have a direct effect on our lives.
Also, I shouldn’t fail to mention that our new mayor Tom Barrett is being sworn in today downtown. I’m pretty excited about his election, even moreso because he’s our neighbor two blocks to the North, and for some reason, it’s pretty cool living in close proximity to the man who runs the town :)
Speaking of the house, it seems like that has a lot to do with my increased interest in the way things are run in Milwaukee. We now have a vested interest in the direction that the city is taking, and not just monetarily in the way our house value is tied to the ‘value’ of our neighborhood and city, but an interest in the social and civic direction the city is taking as well.
I guess you could boil that down to ‘civic pride’ or something, but I think it’s more than that… A lot of people in the city have civic pride of course, which is great, but I think there’s a difference between being ‘proud and interested’ and ‘proud and interested and involved’, and I’m pretty excited to get involved in what’s happening on the city/state level in addition to keeping a close eye on the national elections.
