We Need More, Not Less Carts

Sylvan Goldman was the owner of a chain of grocery stores called Humpty Dumpty in Oklahoma City. He observed the difficulty women shoppers where having, trying to balance a hand-held shopping basket full of groceries and hold her child. He wanted to alleviate this problem in his self-serve store in 1937. Plus, he was thinking of how he could increase his business for shoppers to buy more goods while in his store. The solution was a wire framed cart with wheels that had multiple baskets or as his patent was titled, “Folding Basket Carriage for Self-Service Stores.” Today we know it as the shopping cart. At first this wheeled buggy did not catch on. Women thought it too much like a baby carriage. Men thought it too effeminate to push. Frustrated with the lack of acceptance of his invention, Goldman hired models to push his invention in his stores to demonstrate its use and hired greeters to invite shoppers to use his shopping carts. In time they became wildly successful. Even today online websites refer to their customers purchases as filling their cart. In politics, the goal of any political party is to increase the number of voters for your candidate or public policy position. You must make it easy for the voters to like your ideas and platform. You must help make the voters comfortable with their buying decision and get more of them to vote your way and fill their cart with friends and family to vote with you. This proximity impact moves the needle and wins elections. The political party one belongs to needs more people pushing more carts of like-minded people voting, supporting, and investing in people and thereby getting their candidates elected to represent them. The goal of a political party is simple; to get people elected to represent their party and fundraise to do so. They should have some philosophical platform that guides them, like protecting individual rights, or advocating for a limited government, or leaving people alone to pursue their own happiness by embracing freedom and rejecting force. A political party should activate citizens to get involved and work towards these goals. Imagine being an active member of a political party and holding the position of Vice-Chair, District Captain, and Precinct Committee Person. Imagine having the responsibility of administering the party’s social media, participating in their communication team, and volunteering for the last ten years conducting their monthly morning meetings. Envision yourself a participant in the county assembly and a delegate to numerous state conventions. Walking in parades, knocking on doors for candidates, making countless phone calls and attending innumerable executive committee meetings. Investing your time tabling at countless community events and having been called every name conceivable for representing your party. You have volunteered in the trenches and worked tirelessly for your party, which has led to lifelong friendships with the best people, who you value for their fortitude and prudence. The County Party you worked with built relationships in the community, by attending community events and working with all involved to protect rights. A trust and an understanding were created over time. Then, imagine a new regime is elected to lead your state party and the new leadership, and its chairman no longer do the one thing they were elected to do, bring party members together. The new regime’s leadership is tasked with building unity and coalition with volunteers to elect and fundraise for candidates. Instead of showing how shopping carts work and adding more people to push and purchase the ideas and the candidates you’re selling, the leadership divides, demigods, and destroys the very thing you and many others have worked to help build. You have read leaderships divisive emails calling out people they disagree with, and they use their religious viewpoint to proselytize. They demonstrate a lack of ethics and leadership by excluding rather than building a bigger tent and filling their carts with more people. They endorse candidates prior to a primary, even if it is permissible in their rules, which is not good public relations for their party. They allegedly use party infrastructure to run their own Congressional campaign, while remaining as party chair, which also has the appearance of a lust for power. Their behavior, choices, and actions define their character and as such you can no longer follow the leadership of the state party. In effect you resign from your local party activism because you can no longer support what the state leadership represents. In my opinion, that state party needs their own Sylvan Goldman to build and fill more carts to hold more people who believe in the principle of individual rights. That party should encourage more people to join the cause through electing and fundraising principled candidates. It should be encouraging free people to innovate, create, and produce, not indoctrinate, and tyrannize. That state party should use the power of persuasion for bigger and better ideas, and not use their position for personal gain. Carts are for filling, not emptying. https://shorturl.at/ajynW