Howdy neighbors. First, I want to thank everyone in this district -and especially the large number in White County -who voted for me and helped me get re-elected as Executive Committeeman for the Tennessee Democratic Party. My primary goal going forward is to make sure rural and working-class voters all across the state are not ignored or delegated to second place status anymore, by anybody.
For the next two-and-a-half months, we will all be neck-deep in the general election cycle now that we know who our final candidates are. Both parties are going to be deluging everybody with their message. But those messages are going to be -and already are -very different. The Republicans are going to keep hammering away at social issues that do not affect 99+ percent of Tennesseans, as a way to distract you from the real issues. They’re going to try to get you stirred up about trans athletes, when you don’t actually know any. They’re going to try to convince you there’s some kind of immigrant crime wave which doesn’t exist. They’re going to be screaming (they already are) that everybody to the left of Ronald Reagan is a full-bore card-carrying communist, which isn’t true (I just saw someone defending Joseph McCarthy on social media).
Know what they’re not going to talk about? What they have actually done to help you in any real way. Gas and food prices are through the roof, and have kept getting worse -and on our current trajectory, will keep on doing so. People are suffering. YOU are suffering. All while Trump and his family are making billions of dollars due to his office, and while he is obsessed with how much gaudy gold gilding he can cover government buildings with and how many expensive memorials to himself he can put up.
Meanwhile, your bills are getting higher. Your children and spouses are being deployed to a warzone by someone who campaigned on no more wars -and this is a war we started, with no plan on how to win or how to get out, and it is going to be driving our gas prices higher and higher. Our troops are not receiving the support every previous administration would have given them -because they don’t care about the troops, and they don’t care about you. All they care about is how much money they can make and how many idols they can build to themselves -and all most Republican politicians seem to care about is how to help them do it. They brag about how miserable they are making people who are different from you, and say nothing about how miserable they are making YOU or what they are going to do about it. They have done nothing to resolve these economic issues -not on the federal level, and not on the state level. And now they are talking about cutting social security and Medicare.
There are some good Democratic candidates out there, who are your fellow Tennesseans and who want to help solve all these REAL problems, not act tough and crumble up fortune cookies or shoot beer cans. Jerri Green is running for governor by showing up over and over in every county of this state, while Marsha goes to fancy dinners in Atlanta and gets money from out of state, or cruises by on what she made dealing with the drug companies that have devastated our rural communities. Mike Croley is running for Congress -he is a Navy veteran and park ranger who got DOGED out of a job by Elon Musk. Samantha Petit is running for the state general assembly – she is a small business owner from McMinnville.
You don’t have to become a member of the Democratic Party to support these people. You just have to look past the D or R and ask yourself who is running to help YOU, with your actual REAL problems. And who has had plenty of chances and hasn’t helped you at all.
P.S. God bless the memory of editor Kim Wood. Her loss is a loss to us all.
--Troy D. Smith is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech University. His words do not necessarily represent TTU, nor are they connected in any way with his job- they are his own opinions on matters of public concern, and an expression of his First Amendment freedom of speech. He is executive committeeman of the Tennessee Democratic Party for District 15.
You can find all previous entries in this column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
A lot of good points. Hope people take it to heart.
ReplyDelete