If you are willing to indulge me, the following details my 10 year journal from corporate america to a life in the Netroots...
The Netroots Saved Me
I have been more fortunate than most. I am somewhat financially stable with a healthy family and have had no significant health issues of my own. I had the great fortune to be born a white male to an upper-middle class family living in the United States. My schooling was decent and my home life stable. On paper things looked great. And while I was doing better than most, there was something not quite right. I was 36, 7 years into a job that was supposed to be my career, 2 years after the birth of my second child, and at the start of a nine year journey that could have gone either way, but thanks to the Netroots, landed me in a very good place.
It was the summer of 2003. We were just a couple of months into the Iraq War, Chevron had just bought the company I was working at (doing energy efficiency projects for public institutions) and I was fed up. While I wasn't thrilled about working for big oil, my father had 35 years at Chevron and at the time I was told they would be hands off. Besides, there were more pressing issues. It seemed that everyone was jumping onboard this horrible unjust invasion (definitely my mostly conservative coworkers and seemingly every Democrat on my TV) and I was mad at myself for not doing more. So, wanting to match my actions to my rants, I began looking for a presidential candidate to unseat Bush, and discovered a governor from Vermont who was asking what many of us wanted to know.
Find out what happens next below the great orange lifesaver...
I went to my first meetup with about 8 other people, then scraped together $100 for a private dinner with Gov. Howard Dean here in Kansas City and I was all in after that. Soon the local organizer of the meetups had to back off for family reasons and myself and a couple of others stepped up to organize what would become Dean's western Missouri campaign. Much has been said and written about the rise and fall of that spectacular campaign - and I was there for lots of it, but despite the eventual outcome, I will always be grateful to Dr. Dean and the Deaniacs who helped me get through that first year and pushed me down the path that would eventually lead here.
After the Dean campaign ended I went searching for a community to fill the void and found Dailykos. The sanity and comedy at "the great orange satan" (as we are referred to by the far-right) helped me get through the frustration that was Kerry's candidacy. However, even with this online connection, things were getting worse for me. Bush was still President, the country seemed to be diving more to the right overall, and I began to realize that I actively hated my job.
The work itself had become routine after 8 years and there was no real challenge there. Like most people, I need to be challenged to thrive, but if I am being honest here, I tend to take the easy path if offered to me. I had a job that I could do in my sleep with minimal effort that paid well and it may have been sucking at my soul, but did I say it was easy and it payed well? Yeah - so I kept doing it. Besides, I really liked some of the people who I worked with, especially those who reported to me, so I continued to show up and didn't make any active moves to change my situation.
The problem with working at a job you hate is that it tends to take a toll on those who you love and have to deal with you every other hour. While my family did what it could to fill that void being created by my corporate bosses, it was asking too much from them, so I needed something else. Some people at DailyKos started talking about meeting IRL and that grew to what would become the first YearlyKos in Vegas. I decided to go. I was going solo and replied to a post on DK looking for volunteers for a special project and little did I know how much that one act of raising my hand would help save me.
That first year I carried cameras and helped round up people for the book that was created - UnConventional. The next year in Chicago I helped corral the media. In Austin for the rebranded Netroots Nation, I made the mistake of showing up early and volunteering to handle the registration desk. After that I ended up getting involved earlier and earlier and taking on more and more responsibility. By Minneapolis, I was volunteering for a few months before the convention, taking 2 weeks off work leading up to the convention, and loving every exhausted minute. I really enjoyed the crew of staff and volunteers that I got to work with and if you added up my friends on Facebook and social media, those whom I met through the great community of Netroots Nation outnumbered the rest of my acquaintances combined. Attending a conference each year, while physically exhausting for me, was my way to re-energizing my mind and soul and about the only way I made it through the other 9 months of my job at Chevron. While I was fortunate to A) have a job and B) one that enabled me to spend the time I did volunteering for an Organization I truly liked, it became increasingly difficult to go to that office each day.
I could write easily a 1000 words on everything that was wrong with the company I worked for, but in the end the reason I had to leave came down to two things.
First, Chevron treats its workers like dirt. I am talking about those people who make the least amount of money in the company but do the lions share of the work. As a middle manager, I spent most of my time not on my job, not in serving my customers, but of trying to keep the people who reported to me from being shit on. Whether it was fighting for a scrape of a raise every year (even while the company made record profits) or trying to argue (unsuccessfully) that expecting them to add 3 more tasks to a full time work load because they didn't want to add to the head count was unreasonable, or trying to keep them from adding more red-tape was because some manager went to a new seminar and we had to become sigma-six effective - it was a never ending battle.
Second, and possibly related to the first, there is zero trust of its employees. There isn't even the benefit of the doubt that we are all trying to work towards a common goal of creating a successful and profitable company. New ideas are treated with a mix of skepticism and extreme scorn. Have a plan for improving for flow? You must be trying to get away with something. Let's say you do actually get approval to try something different. You then get to spend months jumping through hoops, convincing bosses that only want to play it safe and risk you own job security if it doesn't pan out. In the end the most likely outcome is that they shit-can the whole project - not because it isn't a good idea - but because they never really planned on letting it go forward in the first place. Or, if all the planets align and you are successful in creating a new successful paradigm, it will earn you zero credibility for the next project you would like to take on.
In the winter of 2011, a perfect storm of company bullshit broke me. Facing another round of parroting the management BS on why people should be happy with the piss-poor raises they were getting once again and coming off a meeting where months of work and planning were once again shot down on a whim, I found myself in the back of a taxi on the verge of tears heading to the airport. I needed out. If only I could work at a place like the community that had grown around the Netroots Nation convention. One where people are not only valued but recognized as the engine of all great changes. And a place where not only are new ideas encouraged, but collaborated on and celebrated with others who share the same goal - regardless of who started the idea and who might get credit. Thanks to the Netroots i knew that my slightly idealized vision for a career was possible as I had seen in action surrounding the convention. A few long months later I was able to make that switch as Operations Director for Netroots Nation.
For those of you fortunate enough to have been able to attend the annual convention or other Netroots Nation events in the past know that my pollyanna view of our commentary is only slightly exaggerated. While any group has its quirks and problems, the positive energy and real impact that happens thanks to this community and our annual gathering dwarfs any other event I have ever attended. While I am behind the scenes and don't get to participate as much as I would like in the fantastic trainings, panels and spontaneous hallway discussions/brainstorms as I would like, I am privileged to be one of those who makes this opportunity available to those who do attend. However, I now get work with the small but fantastic team all year who keep this organization alive. And to be at a place where I am valued, and everyone who works there is valued, and where new ideas are encouraged and celebrated, is truly wonderful thing.
I wrote this mostly to share with friends and family who have been curious about how and why I ended up where I am, and what is this thing called the Netroots. For me, it is the soul of this community that is important, and that is what I have tried to share here. Our convention is in San Jose, CA next month, very close to where I grew up, and if any of my old childhood friends have the slightest interest in progressive activism, politics, or just the opportunity to hang out with some fantastic folks doing amazing things, I hope you will consider joining us. The cost is very reasonable for a 3+ day conference and you will have a great time. I look forward to seeing many of my friends there, old and new. Who knows - maybe someday the Netroots will save you too?