Happy Hollandaise! Thank you so much for your kind words and generous support all these years. I can’t tell you how much in means to me, especially when times are tough and there are so many choices. I will never take it for granted.
I wanted to take this moment to thank my morning wing man Tom Sullivan who has literally only taken a handful of days off over many years, once for a medical emergency and the other because he was caught in the middle of the epic hurricane Helene! He is as reliable as the sun coming up in the morning and I think that for many of us his posts are the first look at the news cycle we have with our morning coffee. His writing is passionate, incisive and empathetic and always entertaining. It is blogging at its finest.
As my pal, historian Rick Perlstein, said to me the other day, “Tom’s blogging has been en fuego.” Indeed it has. I am so lucky to have him writing for Hullabaloo and I know it.
However, that’s only part of what Tom does for our country. He is extremely active in the North Carolina Democratic Party, serving as a delegate to the convention last year and working closely with people like Anderson Clayton, the terrific chair of the state party whom he championed for the job. He does the grassroots work that makes it possible to keep that state purple and may very well give us a Democratic Senator next year with Roy Cooper.
But Tom’s contributions don’t end there. As many of you know, Tom goes out on the streets of Asheville with some other activists several times a week to hold up signs on an overpass with funny and poignant political messages, getting lots of thumbs up and middle fingers from the passing cars. He believes that it’s a way of communicating something immediate and personal to a fairly large number of people in his own community and he’s right.
Doing this isn’t without risk in these troubled times. The CPB and ICE are in North Carolina and Asheville is on the target list. But Tom and his compatriots are fighters and they’re putting their time and effort where their mouths are. This is where the real leadership is coming from.
If you are of a mind to keep this little project going for another year, I would be most grateful. It’s a labor of love but it’s also a lot of work and there’s no way I could do it without your help.
We have a big year ahead of us. The world is on fire and our country is in deep trouble. But there are millions of people like Tom out there, fighting back, and it’s an inspiration. We’ll keep trying to make sense of it all and putting it into perspective as best we can and I hope that you’ll keep reading. We’re all in this together.
If you’d like to put a little something in the Christmas stocking you can hit the buttons below or, if you’re old school, you can use the address on the left. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
cheers,
digby
Happy Hollandaise everyone!