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Here in Bastrop County, which is just east of Austin and is growing very fast with instant bedroom communities, we had a big turnout at our monthly meeting last night.
This is an accomplishment, because there are three main towns (Bastrop, Smithville and Elgin) lots of folks had to drive from either Austin or their home towns to the meeting.
Anyway, we had registered quite a few new voters and had had active GOTV efforts, so we needed to discuss what else to do from now on.
The main thing we came up with was that we are going to do more things with the community, and we are going to take pictures of everything we do!
We've had good luck getting publicity in all three weeklies, so when we all bring toys for Pink Santa to the meeting in Elgin next month, we are by God going to take a picture of us donating them AS A GROUP to publicize a) that we are here, and b) that we are public spirited.
We appointed a committee to identify community needs that we can work on (school supplies, poverty, drugs, Christmas dinner, whatever they come up with).
We are also going to begin a college scholarship fund of $3000 this year. That would be $1000 for each of the three towns' high schools.
Our county has the kind of rural area where kids are forced to join the army because they can't afford to go even to community college.
Where will we get that kind of money? Our enthusiastic and young voter registration guy thinks he already knows of 13 successful candidates we helped that he can hit up!
Meanwhile, we held on to our Democratic state representative, half of our county is now under Dem Congressman Reuben Hinajosa although the rest of us are under a RWinger from Houston.
We kept our Dem. County Sheriff and a few other important posts.
The most touching thing was that at the end of this meeting, a rather elderly woman stood up and made a little speech.
Considering the history of our area, she is probably the descendant of slaves.
She quoted Rosa Parks, who said that her feet were tired, but that her spirit (soul?) kept her going.
She said that she would die a Democrat if she were the only one left in the world, but that looking out on our young (Ha!) and enthusiastic faces she had hope once again that she would by no means be alone.
She thanked us from the bottom of her heart several times for being there and coming up with so many good ideas for the fight back, but most of all for coming out that night.
She said she never dreamed anybody would come to that meeting after what had happened the day before.
She closed by quoting Rosa Parks again, "My feet are tired, but my soul keeps me going" and added that we there that night helped her soul keep going.
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