The arena of politics needs people like myself: intelligent, ethical, well-spoken, informed, incorruptible and gregarious, with a diverse skill set of expertise and empathies. The arena of politics also needs the professionals (often undeservedly maligned in the modern

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“outsider” trope that was sold to the American people as bill of goods to describe amateurism), the knowledgeable, cynical, networked, tireless “Beltway Insiders” who are the actual engineers of political action in the United States.

We live in a time where, as

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John Lawton said, “the irony of the Information Age is that has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.” The rise of social media and YouTube allows anyone with a smart phone, which is most everyone in the post-Steve Jobs era, to comment upon and share that

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commentary with a wide audience.

There are bright voices in the wilderness: grass roots collections of people who don’t want to enter the political game with the typical bankers and backers. People who have the correct temperament to swim against the tide of corporate

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sponsorship and “handshake” corruption; to go into Washington as a Representative who wants to represent. To speak as an advocate for the people of his district, as well as possessing the leadership to speak to his constituency to explain the harsh obstacles facing us

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all, as we battle for the good of the people of Louisiana.

Our Capital is a tough town, one filled with conflicting interests and plenty of “me first” partisanship; we need to break the revolving door of exclusion. We all want and need the same things. For a year of my

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childhood, I spent time in a trailer park, as my dad, a career Navy man, saved up to buy us a house. Far from the grungy poverty that some people might think that a trailer park describes, I have the fondest memories of that year. Most of the owners of those trailers were

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working folks; we had a few elderly people who retired there, and one or two single mothers, but for the most part there were working families in those mobile homes.

We had a woman on the back part of the park who held a weekly Bible reading group; all of us kids went

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and sat for twenty minutes listening to a Bible chapter, because she’d give us cookies when it was over. There were a couple of black families, the next street over, with a bunch of kids who played with all the rest of us, because they had a tape recorder, and we didn’t -

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so, they’d do an audio recording of an Elvis movie, for example, and we’d all lean our bikes and sit in a circle listening to “Blue Hawaii” on a tape deck. A community is a community, no matter how much money is sitting in the sugar jars and bank accounts of the folks

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living in it. Then, and now, I know that your community is who watches out for you, who listens to you, who gives you a hand when problems come up, and who you give a hand to when they need it. A community doesn’t form that way when one part of a group turns its back on

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another part; we don’t want to turn a blind eye to those around us who can’t afford a doctor, or don’t have someone to watch the kids, or need a ride to pick up groceries. We just don’t do that. And our government can’t do that, either, since we are the government.

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It’s us. We may not understand those guys in suits, and they often seem like they’re speaking another language, but that’s because they want the local Refinery to donate to their campaign, and they aren’t speaking to you.
To you, the voters, they use the buzzwords

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like “socialism” or “gun control” or “immigrants,” to try to muddy the waters. I said it before - we are a community. We speak for each other and to each other. Would you look your neighbor in the eye and tell him you can’t help fix the door on his shed, because you don’t

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agree with him about some things? No, you help fix the shed. (And then he buys you a six pack afterwards, that’s the agreement, as we know.)

We want all of our community to have access to doctors they can afford. We want all of our community to have access to good jobs,

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for good money, so they can afford the life we all should have.

We want our community to have good roads and clean drinking water; we don’t ask for a lot.

The irony of a good dream is that we eventually wake up, and the dream goes away.

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For all of us to have the American Dream, on the other hand, we all have to wake up, to make the dream real.

So that we can bring the Dream back home.

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