Women Lead the Way

This election season started early; in fact it never seemed to stop. We’re still some weeks away from November 8th but the campaigning is vigorous and unrelenting. I find myself getting annoyed: not another fundraiser when I’d rather be taking Pip for his evening walk and making some more progress in the book I’m reading!

Yes, another fundraiser.

Friday evening it was for Melanie Stansbury, running as a Democrat to retain her seat in the U.S. Congress as a Democrat . Her district in Albuquerque has been gerrymandered, she explained, “to make it more competitive”—a nice way of describing gerrymandering which is used here and elsewhere to try to retain threatened Republican majorities. New Mexico went blue recently, and that nice shade is always being threatened, particularly in a state full of old-time Republicans, ranchers, developers—men.

Stansbury is an attractive woman who doesn’t make an issue of her looks or her clothes. Like all small women in politics, she’s learned—Hilary Clinton taught us—to wear a simple dark suit, minimal jewelry and subtle makeup. Any outstanding detail becomes a hook to hang a criticism.

She told us about being raised by working parents, not in poverty, but in the precarious economic situation nearly all people in this country face. She told us of working for her education and leaving the state for an advanced degree. She spoke simply yet eloquently of the problems we face here in a poor state with the most children in poverty of anywhere in the country, with out of control development, and a solution for the homeless in Las Cruces that nobody else in the state seems willing to adopt: Camp Hope, a permanent encampment on city-owned land with all the social services provided as well as a kitchen, bathrooms and garbage removal. The tents are provided with three-sided wooden shelters to make them marginally inhabitable in our bitterly cold winters.

I listened with the slowly renewing hope that our women candidates give me. They know what they are talking about. They live the life most of us live. Sometimes where the U.S. seems about to sink into gluttony and selfishness, they seem to provide the only hope. And here in New Mexico, we elect them.

Stansbury listened to me with concern when I asked her about her opinion on the grotesque development at Las Alamos, now primed with billions of tax-payer dollars to produce double the number of plutonium pits manufactured in the past in spite of the utter futility of this production—we already have more than enough nuclear “capability” to destroy the earth—the Lab’s abysmal safety record and the wildfire that a few years ago came within feet of the nuclear dump that has existed on top of a mesa since the 1940’s.

Of course she couldn’t promise anything. Our senior Senator, a cowboy obsessed with the outdoors, vigorously supports nuclear development because of its “economic benefits .”These have never flowed to education or health in this state, and never will, but probably in D.C. where it’s hard to parade on a horse it works to parade alongside a missile.

But she listened. That’s all I wanted. And when I mailed a check to the Stansbury campaign yesterday, I added a note reminding her of our conversation.

I tried the same strategy at another fundraiser—another!—yesterday evening with our Junior Senator, Ben Ray Luján, hoping only that he would listen.

In Politics, New Mexico New Mexico