I recently ran for California Insurance Commissioner, as a socialist. Our program? Abolish the insurance companies and provide free quality healthcare for all! And we did very well in the elections, considering California has this totally undemocratic top-two primary and very few actually voted on June 3 2014. I received 5% of the vote–a little over 153,000 people voted for our program. For more on the campaign click here.
During the primary election campaign, the League of Pissed Off Voters endorsed our campaign. One of the paragraphs got me thinking …
They wrote, “Hrizi is running under the Peace and Freedom Party. She’s a public school teacher and a mom with a megaphone! The first thing she wants to do if elected is abolish the insurance companies and offer healthcare to everyone. What’s not to love?” You can read the voter’s guide here.
Granted. The pictures we used for the campaign almost all had me with a bullhorn in one hand and my infant child strapped to my front or my toddler (he’s 4 now) held on one hip. Throughout the campaign, people referred positively to the photo regularly. But I hadn’t really thought much about it until I read the “mom with a megaphone” line in the voter’s guide. How powerful is that! A mom with a megaphone or really any parent with a megaphone or marching or rallying or being an activist is a pretty powerful image. When I was younger, I was so struck by the Nicaraguan revolutionary woman with a baby.
I think sometimes we parents get wrapped up in the daily struggle of being parents. It can be real challenging to get through a morning with a screaming infant or a cranky 4-year-old or (I imagine because I’m not there yet) a surly 12-year-old and work a full day and consider the idea of joining a rally or march. Many, many parents are political with their children and share political ideas with their children. It can be a lot to take it all one or two or three steps further and step into the struggle. But it can be a very powerful contribution we make to creating a better world, a better system for our children to grow up in and be adults in.
And they fit there too, in the struggle. My son has given my younger brother numerous lectures on how to set up a demonstration and introduces the comrades to preschool buddies we meet while leafleting at street festivals in the city. He feels part of something bigger than himself and he gets it, in his own four year old way… that we are all in the struggle to make lives better for people. He has learned to ask questions about political issues—again in his own four-year-old way. He’s asked why people don’t have homes and who is Trayvon Martin and why the banks got bailed out. (Although he did revel in the mischievousness of chanting that in reverse—banks got sold out, we got bailed out—to get a reaction from the adults during the height of the Occupy movement).
So mamas and papas let’s get out our bullhorns and hit the streets and agitate for building a different kind of world.
