Thursday, April 24, 2008
Rabal Rouser
It’s after midnight and I have to be at work at 8:30am for the start of a three-day meeting, but I can’t sleep. I’m on a completely new kind of high. I was the star of tonight’s town planning board board meeting—I know, exciting, but it actually was. It’s quite a rush to know that your words have an impact—good and bad—on people. Everyone wanted to talk to me after tonight’s meeting where I spoke in favor of an affordable housing development on the other side of a trail near my house.
But tonight was about so much more than this one issue. It’s about a girl who used to be so afraid of public speaking that she would make sure she was always last to give a presentation in class...so shy she had to have her parents call stores to find out if they were open...it’s about this girl facing her fear and jumping up to speak first—FIRST!—about something she feels passionate about. Ok, so I was starving and we’d already been there for over two hours and I was anxious to get home, but still. It was that girl who went up to the developer before the meeting to ask questions about the project and then had a crowd of people behind her as she asked questions. It was that girl who made a point of introducing herself to the local reporter and letting him know that there were other viewpoints at the meeting. Me! I just can’t believe it.
I want to run for office. Obama still needs a running mate, right?
