Best new thing to come out of this crisis: switching to internet meetings. Now, I admit I enjoy being an active participant in the sausage-making side of elections and party politics. But I can’t handle being stuck in a high school auditorium for an entire day, sitting in seats made for skinny teenagers, being offered gluten-heavy nightmares as the only food options, having to listen to people argue just for the sake of contrariness (because that’s how the democrats do things). It takes serious commitment to put up with a whole day of that.
This year’s county assembly was a whole other story. None of us can be in the same room for several weeks, so the executive committee had to come up with a new plan on the fly. The infrastructure to run meetings online has existed for years, but many people like me had barely any experience participating in them. We stragglers were dragged into the future, and I for one could not be more pleased.
The meeting agenda was changed, allowing for the breakout meetings for different districts to happen one after another instead of concurrently, so we didn’t have to switch feeds. This made the schedule expand significantly, to a very long day. We were instructed to log in at 7:30, to allow everyone to show up and smooth out any kinks in the system. By the time we kicked off at 8, there were well over 700 people at the meeting, nearly all of the assigned delegates. At the end of the day, after 5 pm when we finally got around to voting to approve the platform and adjourning the meeting, there were still somewhere between 350 and 400 attendees. That’s dedication.
I woke at 7, piddled around reading Twitter for a bit, and then got up for coffee and a banana. I settled back in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows, with a blanket wadded up on my lap to set the telephone on to watch the livestream. I wore my pajamas for the first four hours of the meeting, until got a long lunch break and a shower. Athena never left my side for the entire process. My stress level was nil. I was comfortable and happy and I can’t imagine going back to the way it was.
There were a couple excellent quotes I want to share. I need to give them proper credit. The party chair, John Henry Van Zant, said, “We are all Generation Zoomer now.” I loved that one. Then, as I wound down the night the same way I started it, scrolling through Twitter, I saw something by Walter Dellinger. He said he wished that Congress could figure out this whole remote voting like we did, just so he could use the phrase “In the Zoom Where It Happened.” I don’t know whether he came up with that first, but man, I like it.
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