Update from Pen

Wherein I discuss why I am tired and where I am trying to get

My goal for this publication is to post every Monday. For the last few weeks, I haven’t met that goal. I apologize, especially to my paid subscribers. Thank you for the patience you have gracefully shown me.

I work full time at a state facility that provides residential and medical care to intellectually challenged adults who also have behavioral diagnoses. Things get chaotic. Timelines get disrupted. The work is meaningful, and that’s why I stay. In the smallest of ways, I am helping people who cannot help themselves.

I’ll share more in time, but for me, the big news this week was that I got elected to my town’s council. Position 5, Utilities, to be specific. I have this dream that one day, in the USA, access to the Internet will be treated with the same energy we now give to demanding that any fool can have as many guns as he or she, or they want to have. If we can have the best gun collection in the known universe, why can’t we have the best Internet in the known universe?

Access to other humans and new knowledge, digitally, is to me is sacred. When information is controlled, societies stagnate. When information flows freely, individuals have the choice to grow and become wise.

So, anyhow, AI isn’t good at generating images related to the topic of free information flow. I tried, I failed, I wish I was a better artist! Just know that I never wanted to hold office. Of any kind. That includes being on a town council in a tiny former coal mining town in the Pacific Northwest.

Trump taught me that political apathy is dangerous though. Trump’s idiotic, malevolent four years of grifting, rambling with his word salads, and spreading mind toxins through the ranks of the most gullible Americans made me realize how valid that trope about being the change I want to see in the world is.

That’s why I ran for an elected office. I cannot stand by while a minority of small-minded, fearful humans flush this planet down the toilet and end the species I am a member of because of fear and ignorance.

I’ll be working on bringing community municipal Internet to my town for the next two years. Expect to hear about the journey here. I hope I won’t bore you, and thanks again for letting me and my stories into your head.

I promise I’m trying to say something meaningful every Monday!

If Chattanooga, Tennessee, can have municipal Internet at reasonable prices, so can Wilkeson, Washington! I’ve lived both places. The lesson I learned from Chattanooga’s incredible, against the odds Internet infrastructure story is that it can be repeated anywhere. Will and way. Stay tuned.