Speech : Opening Address 5/1 -- The Good and The Bad

The Good

WE HAVE BILL BOARDS

That's right fellow travelers, 50501 NOW HAS BILLBOARDS

There are FOUR of them . We exist NOT JUST ON THE SIGNAL

AND ... Best of all ... THE COMMUNITY SPEAR HEADED BY TWO OF US DID IT ON THEIR OWN:

  • ⁨Joe Gispatcho⁩
  • Yogi Taelar

I'd like those two people to come up along with Amy K.

WE HELPED PEOPLE; 50501 ISN'T JUST PROTEST MADNESS

At our last event, we raised 2.2 TONS OF FOOD

That was distributed:

  • 30% to HVAF which is homeless veterans
  • 70% to Food Not Bombs

The food brought today will go to HVAF, a local person of color charity, a latino charity . There just isn't room at Food Not Bombs.

Now the reason I don't have the names of the exact charities is I have candidate charities but I don't know these communities well enough to pick.

My phone number is on our website and if you have knowledge of this community, please send me a text message telling me the charities you have had good luck with

And our very own PRIDE handled not everything but so damn much.

The only reason that PRIDE didn't get a gift is that we're going to do that at the next protest -- keep the good news coming people

WE HAVE AN ENDORSEMENT

My good friend Brad Lorton from the Central Indiana Democratic Socialist Alliance put forth a motion at last sunday's meeting and Indiana 50501 has been approved by the DSA.

Brad can talk more about that but I wanted to publicly thank him

WE HAVE CONFIRMED THAT ELON IS A SUPERVILLAIN

I mean come on, how else can you explain the rain?

  • Every damn protest
  • He must be in his mountain lair
  • In a fortress shaped like his own head
  • And he must be aiming his weather machine RIGHT AT INDIANAPOLIS

WE NOW HAVE AN ADVISOR

I need to extend my thanks up to Canada where Franklin Oliver has agreed to sit in our leadership meetings.

WE HAVE FLATTENED OUR ORG STRUCTURE

This is very much inside baseball and if you don't know what I'm saying then just

THINK MEAN THOUGHTS ABOUT TRUMP for a minute or two

For the past two months, we've had a leadership structure that basically amounted to two cabals --

that's a joke --

but we did have two councils

And there were issues with coordination, with a tiered system and it created INTERNAL POLITICS

I firmly believe that solving today's NATIONAL problems means MORE democracy not LESS and 50501 Indiana resembles that too.

As of Tuesday the 29th, Indiana 50501 has a flat leadership structure 
Thank you to everyone who nudged us along this path

Thank you to my team for accepting my push for this

WE HAVE SOME GRADUATIONS THIS MONTH

Congratulations to

  • Shrinking Eel
  • Galifrayan Valkyrie

You're not here today because of graduation and that's FANTASTIC

Life goes on and that's how it should be. Even in the Apocalypse, good things happen

BIRTHDAYS

We have SOME May Birthdays this month

Happy Birthday everyone with a May birthday!!!!

And one of our newest volunteers NICOLE DAVIDSON baked you all cup cakes. THANK YOU NICOLE

The Bad

Please look at our set. We call these CHAIRS FOR THE DISAPPEARED.

These are the people that can't speak for themselves anymore.

We will be bringing these chairs out until TRUMP STOPS DEPORTING PEOPLE

NOW I'm going to focus on the NATIONAL bad stuff. These are the things that you can bring up to your friends and family to point out how bad everything is:

  • RFK is planning to stop distributing NARCAN to First Responders and Civilians
  • Trump began arresting judges last week
  • Three Democrats in washington -- MFUME, NADLER and KELLY took their names off an impeachment petition. COWARDS
  • DOGE assigned a COLLEGE STUDENT to use AI to rewrite regulations at HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT. I don't know about you but I don't pay my damn taxes for college students to rewrite laws using CHAT GPT
  • RFK has abandoned EBOLA research
  • RFK has abandoned GERM THEORY
  • Florida has banned flouride in municipal drinking water
  • The Supreme Court is apparently going to endorse GOVERNMENT FUNDS for PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS MEANING A DEATH TO THE FIRST AMMENDMENT

The Indiana Bad - Ok. Maybe Slightly Less Good

We mentioned on our 4/19 protest that we need to stand up a secondary team, what I called a Tiger Team structure

and we have started that but we haven't had enough people step up

AND IF YOU DID STEP UP AND YOU ARE IN MY INBOX (MY BAD)

Here are the slots we are recruiting for

  • Offline Promotion
  • Speaker Recruiting and Handling
  • Graphics / Comms
  • Audio i.e. AV
  • Setup
  • Teardown
  • Logistics aka The Borrower of Things
  • Event Signage
  • Crowd Counting
  • Food Charity (unless Pride always wants to run that)
  • Musical Guests
  • Event Operations
  • Merch
  • Partner Liasions
  • Chat / March Coordination

Positions we have filled: * Volunteer Coordination -- THANK YOU LORI * Social Media -- THANK YOU TAELAR * Tech

The Personal Bad

Last time I was up here, I offended a small number of people by my use of shall we say COLORFUL LANGUAGE

So you will see on the lectern is MY SWEAR JAR 
I have cash in my wallet and anything I put in the jar will be a donation to Indiana 50501. SO SAY WE ALL