Futility

For a reason I don't recall or was never told, my father decided to run for public office once.  Just once.  Even that once seems like it was too much.

I was in high school at the time.  We were living in Snyder County, PA and had been since I was 10.  PA has elected school boards, unlike MD.  Or rather, some MD counties, as it's on a county by county basis.  Baltimore County doesn't have elected school boards, and I'm quite glad of that.

In any case, running for school board seemed, on its face, like a natural fit for him.  He was an elementary education professor at Bloomsburg University and had been a teacher and principal in suburban Philadelphia before that.  Well qualified, then, for a position involving decisions about education.

To run you had to be running as both a Democrat and a Republican.  That meant getting a minimum of signatures from registered voters from both parties in order to get your name on the ballot.  He did all that.

Of course, he never stood a chance.  Did I mention we were orignally from suburban Philadelphia?  Snyder County was and is a rural county.  People have lived there for generations.  Some interloper with less than a decade of living there under his belt, and a pointed headed intellectual on top of it, has a snowball's chance in Hell of winning over those voters.  Add in that he's an atheist and you've reached Don Quixote level delusion that you can win.

And he didn't.  But, he always was politically involved and something drove him to think it was worth his while to run for this office.  He was a brilliant man, so he had to know he had no chance, but he did it anyway.  Ah, well.  At least he had a nice picture in the paper when they showed all the candidates.