WET IN WATERVILLE

We had 40 people walk 14.4 miles yesterday and the weather was perfect. Cold and sunny, energizing walking weather. Today was another story.

Twenty of us left Showhegan this morning with threatening skies and after lunch the rain started coming down. We walked through a steady rain for the last three hours of the 18.4 mile walk that took us to Waterville.

Waterville is the town where Maine's new tea-party Republican governor hails from. Paul LePage has been the mayor of Waterville for some time and won the five-way race with 38% of the vote, just 1% more than the guy who came in second place. The Democratic Party candidate came in third place with a very poor showing and the Republicans won both the House and Senate in the Maine state legislature - the first time the Republicans have won the governor and legislature since the 1960's.

As we walked today, with me carrying my sign which was becoming limp from the rain, I was thinking of the right-wingers who would now and then blast by us in their super-duper pickup trucks. They liked to gun their engines, with loud mufflers, just as they were alongside us and the noise was their way of blasting us in a militaristic show of their contempt for our walk. I thought about how the election triumph of the Republicans will give these junior brownshirts even more of a feeling of power and license to kick some "liberal" ass.

The walk though also drew a steady, if not overwhelming, number of peace signs, honks, and waves. These folks were generally glad to see us and were often quite animated. They are likely relieved to see some determined peace walkers out on the road of an increasingly right-wing America.

I was reminded that this walk comes at just the right time for the public and for me personally. While I have to admit I miss not be home reading every last word about the electoral debacle across the nation, I am also fortunate to be out walking along the rural highways of our state making eye contact with literally thousands of people inside their cars.

If we are to survive this period then we must be out on the street and it must be done repeatedly in the near future. We must also be offering people a positive transformative vision for the future - bring our war $$ home, convert the military industrial complex, create jobs building public transit systems, weatherizing our homes, building a solar society and more.

Neither the Republicans nor the forlorn Democrats will be raising this agenda. They will be dueling over more tax cuts for the rich, maintaining the corporate insurance plan pushed through by Obama, and bickering over the level of escalation of the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan. It's fallen on us to offer the real solutions to America's economic troubles and collapsing military empire.

Doing so ain't gonna be easy. Right now my feet hurt, I am very tired, and in the morning we expect to be greeted by more rain. But I don't think there is any better way to reach the people than walking through their community - and so we will do it, blisters, sore muscles and all.

Note: All the photos above are from our first day of walking from Farmington to Skowhegan.