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It was a crummy St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Our first false spring ended. The snow had retreated to the shade of the fence along the south side of the yard, but reinforcements arrived to reclaim the lost ground. I ate too much, drank too much, slept too little. On Thursday, Lisa called: Leif was dead.
Leif was 51. He had run for city council and often attended meetings to voice his concerns on issues before the council. He helped Lisa get started in her activism and her campaign for the state legislature, which prevented an unopposed Republican slate in her district in November. Lisa and another friend had not heard from Leif, so they went to check on him. They found packages piled around the door and other clear evidence that something had gone irretrievably wrong.
There was no foul play, if you don’t count a health care system that drove a young man to commit murder on a New York City sidewalk. Leif was legally blind. That’s one of many things that can happen when diabetics ration their insulin. How many Americans like him will be left in desperate straits by indiscriminate cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration?
We lost Leif, and we also lost Lisa for the weekend. She would have been at the Saturday reorganization event for Minot’s four state legislative districts. She is running for vice chair of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL. When she is not at an event, you look for her. I thought Lisa would be here. Leif was the same way.
It was an amazing St. Patrick’s Day weekend. My wife made my favorite cake—German Chocolate—and threw a birthday party for me on Friday night. After a few text messages from people who couldn’t make it, we expected a handful of guests. We ended up with a houseful. Between blowing out the candles and cutting the cake, we had a moment of silence for Leif, and then there were conversations throughout the house. No one was glued to their cell phone. The last guests left almost four hours after the party started. I stayed up a while longer: X ounces of German chocolate cake plus Y ounces of single-malt Scotch equals acid reflux for me. Or maybe it was the tacos.
I’m never going to drink again, I thought on Saturday morning. Or maybe I would just give up tacos. We loaded my wife’s gas-guzzling V-8 Mercury Mountaineer with chili, notepads, nametags, pens, markers, paper plates, bowls, napkins, cups, and zucchini bread and drove to the reorganization meeting site early to get set up. We arrived to find people waiting in the parking lot.
Three years ago, I attended the Democratic district convention for the four Minot-area state legislative districts. I was the chair of a neighboring district at the time and was there out of curiosity and to add moral support. There were maybe ten people in the room including me and a reporter—eight or fewer people representing four districts. I had really felt like an underachiever the previous weekend when just over a dozen people showed up for my rural district’s convention, and I was shocked by the small turnout in the big city.
At Saturday’s meeting of those same four districts, an early count, while people were still filing in, came to at least seventy-five. We had to double the number of tables and chairs set out for the event, and people sat separately on chairs at the back of the room. I was quite happy to be a person of no significance at the meeting, but I did address the crowd to explain what we needed to accomplish and what we would report out after we were done. There were new faces in the crowd, so I asked how many of them had never been to a district reorganization or convention. About a quarter of them raised their hands.
When I put down the microphone, a woman intercepted me to ask about district officer positions and what their responsibilities were. She was interested, she said, but wanted to do something, not just have a title or be a name on some report to the state party or the county auditor. “It’s good to see so many young people here,” she said. I heard similar remarks several times that day, and those young people also wanted to do something.
Before people lined up for food, a devastatingly handsome Lutheran pastor who I barely know and who definitely doesn’t read these posts led a moment of silence, prayer, and remembrance for Leif. The lunch was delicious, the guest speaker brilliant, the crowd engaged, and the election of district officers completed in record time. It’s so much easier when people don’t have to be cajoled or strong-armed or promised that they really won’t have to do much. It’s so much easier when people want to do something.
The Souris Valley Dem-NPL did not have any surprise wins in the last election cycle. We are not where we want to be yet, but we are on the right trajectory. The graph of our progress slopes upward, and attendance at our events has an even greater rise over run. I am speaking at reorganization events over the next two weekends, and I’m confident that the crowds will be larger than the last time I visited those districts. We are seeing it all over the state. Blue dots in this red state are gathering, and they want to do something.

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