Familiar Face/Messy Liberty

I joined a focus group that was just by Zoom call this week and it was fantastic. We were asked questions about legal cases so I found it interesting and I got paid and I could do it from home. That was a pretty sweet arrangement!

One of the women in the call was asked by the initial facilitator if they might know each other because "she looked so familiar" to her. She laughed and said that about 35% of the people she meets think they know her from somewhere and that she looks familiar. A lawyer got on later to start asking us questions about a particular case and he told her he thinks he might know her from someplace and we all laughed because we had heard how often she gets that. She did look familiar to me, too. What are the features and characteristics that make a person look and/or feel familiar? I would love to dive deeper into this subject as some point.

The other thing recently going on is that I've spent hundreds of hours this year on various research that has left me with an overwhelming desire to seek out freedom, liberty, and protection for our Constitution. I do belong to a few fringe groups that send e-mails from time to time, although I joined these different groups for alternative reasons. One group keeps inviting me to meet-ups in another city at a library and they have hosted several speakers that are people I know of and try to follow in some way or other. I can't make it to these meetings because of a continual conflict in my schedule. This week they were stepping outside the box and having a breakfast and freedom seminar on Saturday in a park. Tickets were reasonable so I talked to my husband about it and he said we should go but also bring our boys. We let them know the plan and I purchased tickets and looked forward to the event.

Saturday rolled around and we woke our boys up and drove to another county for the event. I have attended fringe interest conferences before, particularly in education and some health topics conferences & documentary screenings as well. There's usually a place to check in and then somebody tells you where to go or what to expect next. This was nothing like that. A bunch of eccentric-looking people were standing around in a park pavilion, some already deep in what seemed like very strange conversations. There was no welcome and no check-in spot. It didn't seem like a welcoming crowd, mostly because it was people that already knew each other & didn't seem interested in really expanding.

It started out strange. We ended up a few minutes late and then struggled to find parking (which are details I hate to admit to-I'm very rarely late) but still nothing had started. Everybody just kept saying, "Jake is coming" and checking their phones and saying, "Jake's on his way." Jake was not who my e-mails come from so for a newcomer, this seemed SO weird-I had no idea who this Jake guy was. Nobody really wanted to start without Jake but eventually they decided it would be okay to at least have a prayer, which I don't really mind. The guy who said the prayer made it clear rather quickly that he felt knowledgeable about "the cause" and would have liked to have been a speaker but hadn't been chosen so he used his prayer to give a talk. The prayer was long, full of too many details, more of a showboat piece than an attempt to connect to diety, and very boring. I had told my kids that my little brother used to give REALLY long prayers, hoping it would get him out of getting asked to say the prayer next time. They asked if this prayer was like that and I said NO WAY-my brothers prayers were long but at least they were funny. This guy was definitely not funny. Finally Jake showed up about 45 minutes late (for a 2-hour event) and said he needed lots of help carrying things in from his car. The prayer-sayer used this opportunity to make a really sexist comment. Jake, once his cargo was hauled over, had all the things for breakfast, which his mom finished cooking, and some audio equipment and what-not. He acted really stressed, kept saying how much work all of this is, and telling us that he was well-prepared but he only has 2 hands...Since I believe he knew he only had 2 hands all along and things were not ready on time, I wouldn't announce being well-prepared. This was evidently the guy in charge. Oh boy!

They got to the first speaker and this is about an hour into the event. We were all running late now and she was supposed to be somewhere else at this point so I thought maybe she'd shorten her 4-page talk but that's silly. She didn't. Her intro was interesting and I liked her demeanor overall. She runs a school. Things took a turn though and it became a big lecture with information overload. She lost the approach of trying to engage the audience and just bombarded information out to us, never summarizing or making the ideas come to life. She did say some good things but those good things could have been expressed in a summary. Next we had a speaker who had not even been listed in the information about the event. He was a confident guy that had a good stage presence. He promoted his new job soon into his speech, which I found more than a little tacky but then he got talking and seemed well-informed. After he'd really gotten going, Jake let him know it was time to wrap things up. I felt happy that somebody was taking control of the timing. I'm time-obsessed and had worried this guy might just talk forever. He had the passion about the subject to do it. Even after he was told to wrap up, he said he'd shorten things a bit but he still wanted to hit all of his points. I was annoyed by that.

I wanted to say, "Hey guys, technically this event is supposed to end in 20 minutes & the people I came to listen to haven't STARTED speaking yet. Can we be a little more aware of the time?" The guy wrapped up and Jake got up. He said he'd been taking notes and had some comments he wanted to make. He was NOT listed on the speakers list and we were now almost 2 hours behind. There were 5 more speakers listed, 2 of which I really wanted to hear. Jake just did a little impromptu presentation on the Constitution, asking rhetorical questions and then awkwardly answering them and going into great detail that was unnecessary. He got carried away with time and I wished that somebody would tell him to wrap things up but I knew from how everybody immortalized this guy before we even got there that nobody would dare cut him off from his unscheduled speech. He spoke for more than 20 minutes. It was past the noon cut-off we had planned for. A lady was the next up to speak that I actually wanted to hear but we had other things going on in our day and had to leave. She's the one I get the e-mails from and she's doing really interesting political things I'd love to hear more about but inefficiency made us miss everything she had to say, along with other speakers I wanted to hear. This was my first attempt to reach out to a group seeking more freedom and liberty and what did I learn? Uh, this group might have good intentions but I don't think I found my people this time around. I believe in some less-popular ideas, such as resisting a public education, which has led me to some eccentric people. I've had to do some self-reflection and recognize I might be one of those eccentric people as well. I can handle a good dose of eccentric but I can't handle being unorganized, not taking responsibility, not being very open to newcomers, even though they were invited, and not being mindful of the time. I can't handle a group strongly claiming to think for themselves and then nearly worshipping their leader. Respecting a leader is fine but hinging so much on a person seems strange and cult-like to me. I will have to seek for liberty elsewhere.

I do need to give my family credit-they were real troopers to endure this & the ride home was hilarious! They fit saying how hard things were into conversations & other little signature phrases they'd picked up throughout the morning. It made a disappointing situation much better. 😀