Saturday, January 30, 2010

Where to go in Laramie on a Friday night

It's 10:50 PM on Friday night and I'm sitting in the studio at KOCA 93.5 with 15 other people, hanging out at the weekly broadcast of Meg Lanker's "Cognitive Dissonance." There are always a few students hanging out during the show, but tonight Meg has invited those who have an opinion on the recent Wheatland School Board debacle to stop by and share. So there are people of all ages here tonight, from all over Wyoming, with stuff to say. Progressives in the state are eager to let each other know, and to let the rest of the country know, that what happened in Wheatland is an abberation even in Wyoming.


A man known only as the Angry Malcontent delivers an editorial lamenting Obama's bipartisan naivete. The room bursts into applause at its conclusion. Shy around all the new people, I refrain from dropping the Marxist ordinance
I am impressed by how we find our spaces...from the protest of Dick Cheney's buying a name at UW's international center to the persistence of environmentalism in the state to a group of patient lefties of all ages hanging out at the community radio station on a Friday night. Will we forge enough space to be a home for people like the kids in Wheatland who now feel like they have nowhere else to go? To the poor people in Wyoming who feel as forgotten as the subway beggars of Seoul?  Only if we keep expanding the space.

1 comment:

Meg Lanker said...

Thanks, Matt.