I have dogs. Big dogs who love to break free and run the neighborhood.
I know how problematic this is, and I am always filled with so much stress when they take off. Of all the stress, crises, and traumas in my life, my dogs running loose is the one thing that breaks me. Threats of the road, the neighbors’ dogs, the neighbors themselves, and the adorable little bunnies who simply want to quietly eat clover, are next level to me.
It’s always a crap shoot whether there will be injuries, and I don’t handle it well. So I decided that I’m building a fence.
Thinking about the fence requires brainstorming how to get this done. First of all, I don’t know how to build a fence. Enter obstacle 1: Find someone who does know how to do it. That leads to obstacle 2, finding someone I can afford to pay. Obstacle 3 is finding someone in 1 and 2 who has the needed tools because I have nothing.
I put a shout out on Facebook and my brother said he would do it. Well, alright then. He even said, “I have the tools,” but he couldn’t haul 8 ft panels because they wouldn’t fit in his vehicle, but I honestly knew in my heart that I could rent a U-Haul. Easy peasy.
Friday morning, I was calm and positive that this would be easy. I called every rental place and was told there was nothing available for 50 miles. Wait. What? That couldn’t be possible because I had a strategy, a plan, for this project, and every bit of it hinged on the fact that the materials were actually at my house.
Instead of giving up, I switched gears. I headed to a store that rents a trailer. I was so excited when the employee told me they sold hitch balls! I had done it. Well, the trailer they rented was in need of repair and wasn’t available. Un. Freaking. Believable.
I turned my head to talk to my brother and there, in the bottom of the parking lot, was a shiny flatbed truck. I wondered where the owner was, and, suddenly, light bulbs started going off in our heads. We would call inside and say the lights were on … or say we hit it … or ask for the owner to be paged. It was great stress relief and gave us a few laughs. My brother said, “It doesn’t say ‘Not For Hire.'” Then it got real.
Every man that walked out of the store was immediately under scrutiny. “Which car is his” became a parking lot game. And then a man walked out and we somehow knew he was the man with the truck. As he walked by, I yelled, “Excuse me, sir? Is that your truck?” And just like that, the strategy that I wasn’t even sure was a strategy worked. And yesterday, my brother was working on my fence.
Strategy. The thing about strategy is that it has to be fluid, especially when you’re organizing a campaign for change. You don’t want to have one plan and only one plan because politics is always moving, and we’re typically not privy to those moves on the outside.
Let’s talk about U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin. There are national groups galore in West Virginia right now, hiring and seeking volunteers to raise the pressure on him. The frustrating thing about Manchin is that no one ever really knows what he’s going to do in the end. He says “this” and then someone from the other side gets to him so he spins and goes the other direction. After a while, it seems that someone else has him doing a 360 and sends him in a tailspin again.
I hear a LOT of talk about how we don’t like outsiders coming in here, but they have to because we simply don’t appear to have a strategy that involves enough people or enough concern to rattle the windows of Manchin’s office. Strategy escalates, and this is something that Manchin obviously understands because of the op-ed stunt he pulled last weekend. We, the people of West Virginia, need to be pounding out the steady drumbeat.
Call. Call. Call. Email. Email. Email. Call. Call. Call.
If that’s all you have, it’s enough! But we have to keep the rhythm going at all times so the other groups can ground themselves and feel supported. Manchin can single handedly destroy the protection of voter’s rights for all Americans, but especially for the black, brown, and indigenous communities, and it’s our responsibility to the nation to steadily remind him where he came from; West Virginia, the state that was born out of the resistance, the March on Blair Mountain, teacher’s strike, Mine Wars …
Onward,
Amy Jo
