Meet Alex

First off, thank you for reading this, I hope it merits your time.

I’m a union laborer (USA 829 under IATSE) and steward as well as a working artist, living with my young family in the Lake Carmel part of the Town of Kent. I was born into a catholic orphanage, and raised by a nurse and a sheet metal fabricator. As a person from a struggling lower-class family, we were set back time and time again by economic downturns that kneecapped the working class. I'm no stranger to figuring out what to accomplish with very little in reserve. I've acted as a community organizer and advocate for the whole of my adult life, and have worked and managed a portion of the jobs that our municipal employees here perform.

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My wife and I intend to live out our lives here in Kent, as we raise our son and take part in our community. Our town is a beautiful place that seems held together by the separate efforts of many. Elders who have lived here for more than 50 years regularly volunteer and serve in an incredible series of efforts to keep this place going, and we need a new generation to take part as well. Finding that new generation however, proves to be of effort.

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There are no more pieces of mail outside of tax bills, fewer indoor gathering spaces, and not many opportunities to know what is happening in Kent without visiting a website or a Facebook page. I believe this is a problem in towns like ours - towns without a main street, or a downtown. Our town is too big to have a bar or restaurant serve as a lone meeting place, but too small and without a center for people to gravitate around. We have a middle, but not a center, and there is a big difference. Without a center, the edges fall off.

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Having a center is not essential to having a good experience somewhere, but it is essential for community to thrive. Over the last 25 years, and acutely over the last 5 years, we’ve seen a sharp decline in community engagement across our country. Fewer people attend town hall meetings, fewer people volunteer, fewer people frequent spaces and fewer people interact. It’s a systemic problem that has followed the decline of social capital in America.

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Why should we care about these things, you might ask? Maybe we like our privacy, our autonomy. Maybe we thrive in it. Maybe we don’t have common ground with a single other person. Fine, this is America and everyone is free to do and act as they please within the laws set down by the consent (or lack of consent) of the governed. But what about road maintenance? Fire and ambulatory response? Peacekeeping measures like town police and sheriff departments? What about schools and job opportunities? These things are all municipal concerns, and municipal participation is predicated upon a desire to be active within a community.

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If we don’t work together, and come together, the best case scenario for towns like ours will be that they are just places for people to live, as they commute further and further to industry and services that employ fewer people for lesser wages. We need to come together, to focus on the things that seem so small in such a large world. They are of the utmost importance because without them, the large world is just an empty space.

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And so I hope you'll join me on November 4^th at the polls, and in our efforts to help the Town of Kent.

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