Enraptured with Local Politics

I had a good time this weekend with all this Rapture stuff.

I worked my kid’s post prom on Saturday night. I don’t think the public school would have taken kindly to getting a firehose to wash all the kids down in a last-ditch attempt to get them baptized. Although, I think the kids would have been agreeable to the idea because it was pretty hot in the gym.

On Facebook, I ran a couple of joke questions—feel free to participate.

Are you going to get Raptured tomorrow night?

So, how does it feel to be Raptured?

But after the (non)event, I began to think about something.

None of us were Raptured.

We were all Left Behind. (I find the entire Left Behind “literary” series almost self-mocking because of all the non-Christian stuff they do with pretzel-like logic precision for their own self-justification. It was written by modern Pharisees who care only for their own self-adjusted rules.)

That means all the self-righteous boobs who climb on their crosses to tell the rest of us how wrong we are, well, they are wrong. As evidenced by the fact that they are still here.

Do we have a body count of GOP caucus members who disappeared? I think the number is somewhere around zero. Hey—maybe they aren’t as perfect as they are saying.

Last week, we had a here in Pennsylvania. My town didn’t have a strong local Democratic presence before the election. We had five school board slots and two supervisors running as the main local attractions. A week before the election, the Democrats had one guy on the ballot for the school board race. Another woman stepped up late in the game, and the party was running a write-in campaign for a woman with a long Italian surname.

There were three GOP candidates running for the two supervisor slots. No Democrats. One of the three GOP members was a Tea Party candidate. She opted to run a write-in on the Democratic side. The other two candidates, who were endorsed by the local GOP, followed suit.

By the end of the campaign, things got murky as a local evangelical church began to politic for the Tea Party candidate. Evidently, they had her on the stage of the church getting the pastor’s blessing. The assistant pastor sent emails on how to help this person at the polls—to help convince Democrats. 

It gets really murky because last fall, this pastor had reached out to the local Democratic Party for assistance. He made noises that he wanted to run for school board. In fact, all this man had to do was say that he was running, and the local Democratic Party would have likely given him an endorsement. He was qualified, as he represented himself as having an advanced degree in government. (In Pennsylvania, school director is a non-partisan position, and it would have been .)

It gets really, really murky because the church is located in the same building as the local trash hauler. The principles involved with this trash hauler are politically active. The firm uses an elephant as a trademark. (I can’t make this up). After the last local election cycle, the principals of the trash hauler actually sued a couple of the people running for supervisor. They are fighting for residential single-payer trash care for more towns in the area. (Wonder why more people don’t step up to run?)

These factors combined themselves, and the local Democrats finally got fed up. They were offended at what the Tea Party candidate attempted to do and were even more offended at the bald nature of the politics practiced by the people at the church/trash hauler campus.

At 10:15 p.m. the night before the election, two Democrats stepped up and decided to run. The Democrats made phone calls to their own letting them know to get to the polls. This was not just an election—it was a literacy test. The Democrats ran three write-in campaigns at the same time.

By the time the dust cleared, the Democrats had one candidate for school board —the guy who properly filed, with the most Democrats by far going for him. The woman with the long Italian surname had a remarkably strong showing, but did not make it.

For supervisor, the Democrats successfully took the first position by a wide margin and lost the second position by a short number to a non-Tea Party GOP member. On the GOP side, the Tea Party person won, with the other non-Tea Party member taking the second position. The Tea Party person was shut out of the Democratic ticket.

The fact is, had the evangelical church NOT gotten involved, the Democrats would not have woken up.

With the non-Rapture this weekend, will GOP evangelical types reconsider their hell-bent self-righteousness in the political system? Will they be able to ask themselves why they weren’t taken this weekend?

Can these folks see how they take the name of the Lord in vain (violation of Second Commandment—15 year penalty with a demotion of three rings in hell with a heavy dose of bad karma) as they try to render more from the hand of Caesar than they are entitled (violation of the Word of Jesus—another 15 yard penalty with a potential IRS visit to talk about tax-exempt status)?

November is coming. Will the Democrats be able to stand up to these zealots as they pervert the political system?

Get involved to find out.