Peace Begins at Home
I'm glad I threw my hat in the political ring in 2019. The whole process felt like a personal balm in a national political landscape that was pitted, mired, and aflame. My stump speech -- yes, I had one! -- began with these lines: "At a time when the national news is almost uniformly, massively bad, the New London Green Party is collecting, conveying, and amplifying your good ideas, hopes, and visions for our small and dynamic, diverse and youthful, historic and struggling city!"
And honestly we did just that.
I can look at the dates of each of the debates and recall that while we were talking about immigration, the climate crisis and economic development, representation and equity, and how systemic racism plays out in local power struggles, the nation as a whole was mired in a kind of political hell.
Our first debate was held in an elementary school gym. I was nervous, overprepared, and my microphone gave me trouble. My kids were playing in the hallway, while more than 150 people crowded the auditorium. I answered one question in Spanish, said I would reject the $124,000 mayoral salary because one-third of the people in our community were living below the poverty line, and insisted that the police should not cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, in apprehending people in our community without documents.
In the last 18 years, war has seldom been out of the headlines. That very day in the New York Times, for instance, one headline was: "U.S. Disputes Finding That Airstrikes on Afghan Drug Labs Killed 30 Civilians." And war wasn't far from our community either. During the debate, moderated by the publisher of our local newspaper, I was asked with a gotcha edge, "Are you a pacifist and how will that impact your relationship with Electric Boat?" (Electric Boat, part of General Dynamics, one of the nation's largest defense contractors, makes submarines for the Navy in New London.)
I responded calmly: "I am a pacifist. I believe war is a failure of the imagination, that it is never necessary." I then went on to talk about what a bad civic neighbor General Dynamics is. The saying goes, I commented, that "Boeing makes planes, Raytheon makes missiles, General Dynamics makes money" -- and I reminded the audience that New London sees very little of that money, in part because the company is too busy paying its top execs so much of it. It also receives millions of dollars in federal and state subsidies for workforce training and infrastructure, even when orchestrating stock buybacks to enrich its shareholders. Generally, I championed a future New London divested from militarism.
"Don't go against General Dynamics," a man cautioned me after one of the debates, "they are all we got." This is the game that corporations play against communities like New London and the military-industrial complex is even better at it than the Amazons and the Ubers.
They are all we've got? Really? How sad is that? What do we want as a community? How do we want to be known? We used to be known as the Whaling City, a brutal, dirty business if ever there was one. Now, our town struggles. So many of our kids qualify for reduced lunch that the district offers free lunch to all schoolchildren. But here's another reality: the majority of those with good-paying jobs at General Dynamics in New London don't live here. So if that's all we got, we got problems!
The second debate was held in the basement conference room of our library and in that one (I was less nervous) we were asked about climate change. I responded that, as a mother of three kids who deserve a decent future on this planet of ours, climate change was what kept me up at night. As the mayor of a coastal town, I added, my strategy would be to build for a resilient future.
Under my administration, there would be more planning and less zoning. As a town on the water at a time when sea levels are already rising, we won't be able to pump and dump our way out of even the five-inch rise in water levels predicted to occur in the next 15 years, which means every new pebble of development needs to be organized through a climate-change lens. Parking lots -- in other words, stretches of land covered in asphalt? Not when we need to absorb runoff, rather than have it cascading down Garfield Avenue or flooding Broad Street.
Worldwide, climate change hits poor people harder and New London will be no exception. While the poor here tend to live further from the water's edge, the dollar-chasing, asphalt-covered businesses along some of our key commercial streets create ideal sites for increasingly regular inland flooding. The elderly living in high rises are vulnerable to extended power outages when that happens and, as a food-importing community, our food supply is vulnerable, too. All of this hits poor people harder. With that in mind, I added that, as mayor, I would work to make New London greener, more resilient, and smarter about climate change. There's no techno-fix for the predicament our fossil-fuelized global system has left us in, but we have to deal.
One irony struck me that night, as my opponents labored through their climate-change answers: our debate happened the day after an Ohio Democratic presidential debate during which not a single question was asked about climate change. And that night it rained so hard that a restaurant three blocks from the river's edge had water pouring in the back door and out the front one.
The third debate, held at a senior center, was less formal than the other two and moderated by an attorney who gave us each 20 minutes to use as we wanted. That night, I pointed out that, of the dozen or so departments in the city's governing structure, only two were run by women, but that I was excited and impressed by how many women were competing for the board of education and city council. (Thirteen women, myself included, ran for public office that election season.)
Asked (as I often was) about my inexperience in politics, I talked about the toolbox of skills I had amassed in an active life (as well as a life as an activist), including community organizing, consensus building, and deep listening, not to speak of a sense of deep accountability I feel for my community. You don't have to be a lawyer or have a master's in business administration (my two opponents) to work effectively with New London's communities. In fact, professional expertise and ego can sometimes get in the way of representing community interests and truly grasping, no less meeting, community needs.
In the end, on that rainy election day in November, 394 people voted for me. It may not sound like much after all those months of effort, but that was more than 10% of the vote. As a write-in candidate, people had to know me, truly want to vote for me, remember the writing-in process, and then do it correctly. So each of those 394 votes felt hard won indeed.
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