Despair or discouragement

A little more than 5,000 people in West Bend proved that they cannot make an intelligent voting decision yesterday. Vinney Pheng made no attempt to hide what a lunatic he is, but snuck onto the school board anyway. I don't have the stomach to watch video of him ranting about how horrible schools are or what harm he plans to do to the public school system. But it is clear he belongs far from any position of power or authority.
There have been quite a few rumblings of despair today from people who care about educating our children, even from some who, gasp, have no direct involvement. For what it is worth, today we grieve, tomorrow we start working to bring sanity back to local government. Feel discouragement, but not despair. Loonies sneak onto school boards all the time, despair won't stop the next one. Only organization and getting the word out can do that. There are a few reasons not to give up.
First of all, and I may be overstating the effect, but outside events can and do contribute to local elections. Before elaborating, it should be said that West Bend is not a complete freakshow, they just have a slightly higher number of freaks per-capita than usual for Wisconsin. There are quite a few, maybe even a majority, of nice, decent people who don't deserve to be shackled to lunatics controlling schools or other public systems. This is a good enough reason for me to keep trying. All politics may be local, but the fox news crowd certainly had a reason to show up yesterday. Much more than people motivated to renominate the president. But there is no way to know how much of an impact that had.
I suspect it was quite a lot, therefore I found it encouraging that only 600 votes separated the child of light from the child of darkness. Not landslides to be sure. Maybe if mittens romney had the nomination sewn up by now there would have been less motivation for the right wingers to show up.
The Democratic Party of Washington County has been reinvigorated recently. A new office, new members, new energy, and a new climate of can-do optimism. People that value education and other public services could just sit back and wait for the buyer's remorse to set in. After all, our soon-to-be-ex-governor has already done quite a bit of damage to education at all levels. Pheng can only marginally add to that harm. His rhetoric is sure to turn off lots of normal people. No, the Dems tried hard, organized, communicated, researched, and reached out to present a different vision than that of the right wing. I couldn't vote there because I don't live in West Bend. Next time we will be that much more prepared, one setback is not the end of the world. A continuous presence and continual effort can really keep progressive values activated in people that have every reason to focus on their own lives and own situation. But we need to articulate why working together can produce commonwealth, making all of our lives better.
This is short term discouragement, not despair. And coming from a gloomy historian, that should mean something :)