President’s Message by Pete Rockwell
The program for the February meeting
I first joined the Culver City Democratic Club in the summer of 2017. I went to a membership meeting and asked to circulate a petition I’d started to have a march for healthcare for all on the first anniversary of the Womens’ March. As things turned out there was a second Womens’ March on the date I had picked in January of 2018, and Cynthia Hart (my new wife) and I marched in it together. We have marched together in all three Womens’ Marches in Los Angeles.
Cynthia and I first met at the Fiesta La Ballona in August of 2015. We were volunteers handing out leaflets for the brand new long-shot presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Cynthia had been a member of CCDC off and on for nearly thirty years, but she had not been very active as a member.
Practically the day we went to our first meeting together we learned that the Corresponding Secretary of the Club, who had also been editing this newsletter, had just quit both tasks. Cynthia soon became the new Corresponding Secretary and I became the editor of the newsletter.
We both voted for Bernie in the California primary and for Hillary in the general election.
The only political experience I had before coming to the CCDC was as a union activist. I’m retired now, but in my life I have been a member of six different unions and I’ve worked full time for the Typographical Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers.
So… I join the Club and boom! I’m putting out the monthly newsletter. Then a year and a half later, boom! I’m president of the Club. It’s the kind of thing that might go to a man’s head if he wasn’t aware that nobody else wanted the job.
But I have a plan.
People are so mad at the would-be oligarchs in the Republican Party right now that they are joining the Resistance in greater numbers than I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I first voted in 1968—way back when you had to be 21 to vote. All we have to do is channel enough of that energy and determination into the Democratic Party to make the old donkey start kicking again like it did in the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
What’s this got to do with the February 13 meeting? We’ve invited Jackie Goldberg and Kelly Kent to take part in a panel on charter schools, the teachers strike and funding public education. That’s where we start. Then we take our country back.