
Win or Lose….
….and I know the odds are not in my favor, these past 13 months since I announced I was running for the NC House have been a case study in how to do something completely irrational with unbending rationality. And that probably makes no sense unless you’d been in my shoes throughout.
But rational doesn’t mean everybody understands it, and that’s why it’s been irrational. It was an impossible game to play, and I played it as if it was the most normal challenge in the world. It takes a little bit of crazy to do something nobody else is doing. So to me, it’s been a completely rational, completely necessary goal. To others, it’s been a stupid, irrational waste of time. I don’t agree with them.
Win or Lose….
….I’m proud of myself. I set a few goals for myself several months before I announced my candidacy, and I have met those goals, even in a pandemic. I had a goal to work harder than I’d ever worked in my life. I succeeded. I had a goal to be the complete opposite of everything you see in politics today; I was going to be decent and respectful and open-minded and tolerant and at all times proving the possibility of compromise and coexistence. I succeeded. I never once strayed from that goal. And it’s exactly why I gained (and earned) a lot of support.
Win or Lose….
….the last goal was often the hardest but also the one that confused the hell out of some people (and made a few of them angry for some reason.) I had a goal that I was going to be me, and that meant I was going to be professional while mixing in some fun. As I told somebody recently, if I had to be serious the entire time, I think my head would have exploded.
But let me tell you, some people do NOT want you to be unique and goofy. I had one guy comment the following on one of my goofy videos:
“Like most everything else, just a show.”
Delete!! He couldn’t belittle me on the 80% of videos that covered serious topics (and covered them really well, if I do say so myself,) but he sure did come out of his hole when I had a little fun with my campaign. Whatever. That brings me to the next one.
Win or Lose….
….I learned a lot about people this year. I think the biggest thing I learned was that people who were critical of my candidacy have no real interest or ability in actually making the world a better place. They just want to bitch about it. They don’t have the guts to try and understand people different from themselves. They don’t have the ability to think critically and creatively and admit that there are other opinions out there that are just as correct as theirs. And then sometimes I can’t explain why they would rather tear people down than build people up. Sometimes they’re just assholes.
Win or Lose….
….my wife is a little terrified of me actually winning. She has a point. I told her the story of talking to Donna White, the incumbent, one day at the polls and how Donna told me the story of the hours she put in in the days after the CARES Act stimulus bill was passed because the state only had about a week to figure out how they would allocate billions of dollars.
She told me about the hundreds of emails she would get each day and the hundreds of texts and how she did her best to reply to every one. (See? I told everybody from day one I had nothing bad to say about Donna White. I wasn’t lying.) You can probably imagine why a mother of three with two toddlers might be a little terrified of the hours her husband might have to work. Lucky for her I’m still a pretty big longshot.
Win or Lose….
….honesty and integrity will FOREVER prevail. I get pissed off when I hear the blatant lies coming from our leaders. It is not their f*&$#ng job to lie. It is, in fact, their destiny to get fired from that job. And it is OUR job as American citizens to not only fire them but to light a fire under our own asses and put people in public office who don’t give a damn about lobbyists or kickbacks and who view politics as exactly what it was designed to be in this great country. It’s a public service done because you have a passion to help make this state, country, and world a better place for everybody, not a f&%$#ng political party or corporate CEO. EVERYBODY.
And win or lose, I sometimes cuss. I don’t apologize. Sometimes things just need the oomph that a good cuss word provides.
Win or Lose….
….I don’t think anybody in the world has a mama quite like my mama. She busted her ass helping me get signatures to get on the ballot and she busted her ass at the polls during early voting. Every person she could talk to she would say, “Let me tell you about my son,” and then she would tell them so much that most of them could have written a short biography when she was done. And she did it over and over and over again, every single day of early voting.
My mama’s not better than your mama because I think all mamas are pretty awesome and it’s really not a competition, but I had the most popular mama at the early voting polls in JoCo in 2020. Hands down.
Win or Lose….
….I regret nothing. It would have been great to figure out the secret recipe for campaigning on a budget in a pandemic, but since the world is a little different than it was during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, I obviously had nobody to mimic. I had to figure out the best I could by myself, and I can’t look back and say I would do anything differently. Not one thing. Did I make mistakes? Sure. But I learned from them, and I will never again regret something that taught me how to do it better next time.
Win or Lose….
….I won. I did something at which fifty people in North Carolina attempted and only one in the entire state succeeded. Me. I actually got on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. I won because I gave the 2021 General Assembly all the reason in the world why the people want to see more unaffiliated candidates on the ballot and why they better make the process easier for them in the future. When a third of your state is registered that way because they want nothing to do with the parties, they better make it easier for us to get on the ballot in the future. There is absolutely no sense in making it as hard as they’ve made it.
I won because I proved to myself that bravery existed within me again. I won because I showed a lot of people that something other than Democrat or Republican existed, and that it exists with an open-mindedness, tolerance, compromise, and creativity that neither of them possess any longer.
Win or Lose….
….there might be another win or lose left in me. Or there might not be. Or there might be a lot. Sorry, dear. 🙂
It’s interesting to note that in the physics of chaos theory, a Butterfly Effect, a small stimulus, may, given its impact on a complex dynamic system, cause that system to behave in unanticipated, unusual, abnormal ways. So, for example, in some ways do deviates from social norms influence the behaviors of complex dynamic social systems. Historically, it is primarily the young & the artists who move the species in positive evolutionary directions. And, of course, all disciplines contain their bits & pieces of artists & youth. It is certainly a form of artistic expression to significantly alter a methodology, especially a deeply rooted one such as that proscribed for running a political campaign, in order to elucidate important and/or visionary views for a portion of a population. I think that is what Denton Lee has succeeded in doing.