The Green Party activity that's keeping me the busiest these days is preparing for our booth at the Wood County Fair. We had two years off for Covid, so it's a bit of a challenge to pick things up again. Still, the T-shirts are ordered, the fair booth schedule is filling out and it looks like we'll be back with a vengeance!

Why do we do the fair booth? Why do we do anything? Some say it's too late to save the planet from global warming, that Republicans have too tight a grip on our country to fight, that the situation is hopeless. Well, no situation is hopeless until you give up hope.

One thing I've learned over decades of Green Party organizing is that every time you actually do something, you change everything. You may not get exactly what you're fighting for, you may not win a particular election for example, but being there, showing up, changes the whole dynamic of the political situation. The more people respond to the Green Party's philosophy, the more we apply the Ten Key Values to the questions of the day, the better our country is. We Greens fought Ohio's HB6. While that terrible law did pass and has ruined Ohio's energy policy, the attention we and others brought to the issue, I believe, led to the kind of oversight that exposed the corruption and millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks that First Energy used to put that terrible law into place. Parts of HB6 have been repealed; nuke plants will not be getting billions in bailouts from ratepayers. That would never have happened if Greens and others hadn't put up a fight.

There's still more to do. We must restore access to abortion in Ohio, CO2 emissions need to be eliminated, the wealth gap needs to be cut down to a rational size. There's always more to do. But, every time you actually do something, it brings us that much closer to a green, sustainable future.

It's the small, mundane activities: passing out fliers; going door-to-door; working at fair booths; or running candidates for office that make a political party. All over the world, Greens are doing what's needed to save the planet. Don't give up hope. Join us.