My biggest frustration with the left has always been the inability/unwillingness to work on making progress inside of the system while advocating for greater change.
I remember the first time I came to this realization.
I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.
Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!
Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.
The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.
I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.
The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.
He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.
But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.
I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.
Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.
The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.
The democrat who worked for those things barely got them through. And it was means tested to hell and back. They weren’t able to get everything they wanted. But what they got made such a huge difference for me, for people like me.
