Organizing for America | Glenn Lieding's Blog: Peace, Energy, & the Environment: Introduction: My background; Why I'm enthusiastic about Obama

Post from Glenn Lieding's Blog: Peace, Energy, & the Environment:

Introduction: My background; Why I'm enthusiastic about Obama

By Glenn Lieding - Feb 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 am EST

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Tags: activism, barack obama, canvassing, education, Environmental, fundraising, George W. Bush, organizing, peace, Science, training

I just signed up on BarackObama.com today and already I feel more empowered. I'm impressed by the site's organizing and community-building tools. I almost instantly got new friends.

I had noticed myself becoming increasingly excited over the past several weeks about Obama's campaign, eagerly awaiting each next election results as I listen to NPR, and it finally got to the point where I felt I had to do something.

I've been into nature my whole life, and I've been an environmentalist ever since I knew there was such a thing...I had originally wanted to become a scientist but ended up getting freaked out by how we were abusing technology to destroy the fabric of life, and especially about the prospect of total global annihilation by nuclear weapons... So I ended up working as a peace and environmental activist....I had hoped that we would elect an environmentalist President eight years ago, but a couple of weeks before the "election", I had a nightmare that George W. Bush would win by a margin of one vote, and that as a result of that mere one-vote margin, the man would set into motion a chain of events ultimately culminating in the destruction of the world...

I wanted to share all that background information because it will help you understand why, after feeling rather disheartened, disempowered, and discouraged, although not quite despairing, for some time, how refreshing and revitalizing it is to connect with a political movement I can truly believe in, one that renews my sense of optimism for what we can do as a people when we join together with a vision of a better future.

I've been into nature my whole life, and I've been an environmentalist ever since I knew there was such a thing, which goes back to 1971 when the first Earth Day http://ww2.earthday.net/~earthday/ was held in my home town of Ann Arbor, and I had the great fortune of having an awesome environmentalist fifth-grade teacher who took me to the University of Michigan Matthei Botanical Gardens http://www.lsa.umich.edu/mbg/ on the weekends, led an after-school organic gardening club, and taught our class about things like recycling, pollution, urban blight, global warming (or cooling was also considered a risk back then), and the coming energy crisis (three years before the OPEC gas-embargo "mini-crisis"). (Thank you, Frances Lyman!). Also at that time I got my family to participate in one of the nation's first recycling programs, Recycle Ann Arbor http://www.recycleannarbor.org/.

Our grade school also got a computer (a huge, expensive, and rare thing back then), on loan from the EPA, that ran a game-like simulation where you tried to manage the world economy, technology investments, and stuff like that with the goal of trying to avoid problems like energy depletion, economic catastrophe, widespread famine, pollution overload, and runaway global warming (kind of like a crude, blinking-LED-display version of SimEarth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimEarth). And you know what we learned? It's extremely difficult! We never did quite get the balance of variables right. We always ended up tanking our simulated planet. I wonder what happened to educational programs like that? They probably got canned for being too "controversial" for big-energy corporate interests.

I had originally wanted to become a scientist but ended up getting freaked out by how we were abusing technology to destroy the fabric of life, and especially about the prospect of total global annihilation by nuclear weapons (I used to have horrible night terrors about that when I was a kid, after having read about Albert Einstein and Relativity -- and I intuitively realized that good planets are really hard to find!). So I ended up working as a peace and environmental activist. I worked for Sane/FREEZE (an anti-nuclear-weapons peace group -- now Peace Action http://www.peace-action.org/), Greenpeace USA http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/, The Sierra Club http://www.sierraclub.org/, and PIRGIM (the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan) http://www.pirgim.org/, doing door-to-door educational outreach, fundraising, membership-building, and political activation.

One of the high points in my work with Greenpeace was the honor of serving an entire summer as a member of the first team ever to canvass Alaska. Unfortunately for that career, Greenpeace ended up disbanding the entire national canvass operation, a decision so bone-headed that the conspiracy-theorist side of me wonders if the organization was imploded from within by infiltrators (agents-invocateurs?). Do you ever hear anything from Greenpeace USA anymore? I sure don't.

I had hoped that we would elect an environmentalist President eight years ago, but a couple of weeks before the "election", I had a nightmare that George W. Bush would win by a margin of one vote, and that as a result of that mere one-vote margin, the man would set into motion a chain of events ultimately culminating in the destruction of the world. And what really blew me away was when the Florida recount was halted, making Bush the President, by a Supreme Court decision with a margin of ONE VOTE! And everything I've seen Bush do couldn't better have followed the script of someone absolutely bent on destabilizing religious tolerance, peaceful international relations, the economy, energy sustainability, and the global climate.

I wanted to share all that background information because it will help you understand why, after feeling rather disheartened, disempowered, and discouraged, although not quite despairing, for some time, how refreshing and revitalizing it is to connect with a political movement I can truly believe in, one that renews my sense of optimism for what we can do as a people when we join together with a vision of a better future.

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