It's All Right Now (in fact, it's a gas!)

This evening I attended a very nice Tea Party in the next county. I was asked to give a short speech about the education/activist group that has formed from the April 15 Steubenville Tea Party, Steubenville for Liberty. So I did. I wrote out my thoughts last night at adoration, and went to give the speech with just my notebook which I looked over for a few minutes before I spoke, but had never actually practiced. This is so unlike my experience of organizing an event in April, where I was anxious for weeks beforehand, feeling the weight of what I had taken on myself. I enjoyed that in a very different way... sort of in the way one "enjoys" a fruitful Lent. I really had fun today. My speech felt a little heavy-handed, because I talked about Corrie Ten Boom and Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein and their experiences of living in concentration camps and still caring for the people around them, drawing them together in unity and inspiring them to hope and charity. But hey, you ask a Theology Masters student for a political talk, and this is what you get! Interestingly enough, the first speaker, who was immediately before me, was a man from Austria who had grown up under communism in East Germany. It was kind of a nice dove-tail for me to tell people "you are free people; you are human beings! Let's live that way!" This is my vision of grass roots political effort: we need to remind each other that we are free, and we need to live our loyalty to the people right around us, instead of fearing what government can do to us and feeling ourselves pawns in the hand of some nameless, faceless system. Am I an idealist? I don't know. I told people in April I don't like politics, and I wasn't lying. But I do value freedom. Very highly.

Right after I finished, a woman came over and said "Thank you! I'm thinking of becoming a Libertarian." I wondered, do I ooze Libertarianism or something? Or is it just the organization name: Steubenville for Liberty? If people are savvy they probably realize the name "rhymes" with the name of Ron Paul's group Campaign for Liberty.

Several people thanked me for my words. Several more people thanked me "for all that I'm doing." People's graciousness and appreciation catches me off guard. I never expect it so I'm always really touched by it. People in this Ohio Valley really seem to me more gracious than your average folk.

It was also really nice to see Jim Babka of DownsizeDC.org and his wife again. I admire his willingness to tell people not to get caught up in supporting political parties, but to stick instead to true principles.

Best of all, my husband drove the extra 25 miles from work and got there just as I started speaking. He and I both helped Jim Babka hand out registration forms for DownsizeDC (with Jim admiring how Erol was going after people on the far side of the crowd after everything was finished to get them to sign up!) Erol and I don't exactly see every political detail the same, but having his support for my endeavors is priceless. He's the political one of us, after all! I'm just out there singing this song.

Really, I felt like doing cartwheels tonight. I have secretly always wanted to do public speaking, but I never dreamed it would be this sort of thing. And it is so much more fun without the stress of organizing.