The first weekend in May I attended the Green Party's second statewide plenary at the Secretary of State's building in Sacramento. It was kicked off with a few words by Jeanie Keltner, who said "the good thing about the recent Iraq war is that it made hiding the way politics is done in this country impossible." The place was a wonderful venue for us, with a room just the right size for the plenary and lots of space for tabling and lobbying outside. There was a great energy in the room, and we got a lot done as the weekend progressed.

All four of the planks in the packet (water, AIDS, Intelligence, and Government Secrets) were adopted after considerable fine tuning by the plenary. In addition to those we consensed to a remarkably aggressive budget and decided to serve fair trade coffee and tea at our statewide meetings from now on. Jo Chamberlain, Alex Brideau III, and James Robert were elected to the Coordinating Committee, Mike Wyman was reelected Treasurer, and Jim Stauffer was elected Liaison to the Secretary of State. In addition to that we adopted a personnel policy and decided that only the Green Party of California (meaning all of us) could use the name "Green Party" for fundraising purposes in California. That alone would have made it a very busy weekend.

But what made it really great was the working group meetings, where I got lots of great tips from other Greens. At the International Protocols meeting one guy from Richmond said he had made a banner that said "STOP THE WAR AGAINST THE POOR" to put on his table, and it had gotten lots of people to stop in and register Green. At the GROW meeting a guy said if we "invoke paragraph #13305 in the election code in a nice way, the Registrar of voters would be glad to include a page from us to our party with the next ballot mailing." People talked really fast, and it was a constant battle to get everything done before we ran out of time and had to move on to the next meeting.

My favorite thing that happened during the weekend was the Saturday evening party. The Swami Beyondananda (Steve Bhaerman), a leading member of the Right To Laugh Party, threw his Turban into the ring as a Candidate for President of The United States. The speech was so funny we were all laughing in the aisles. There was Q&A afterwards. I remember that he talked about the Danish response to Hitler's order that all the Jews wear pink armbands. King Christian told everybody to wear pink armbands, and everybody did. Because of this, Denmark was the only country in occupied Europe to not lose many Jews during WWII. The Germans couldn't tell them from everybody else.

After that we had a variety show which was a real treat. Among many other things, Beth from Nevada County sang Angel From Montgomery, and Don from San Francisco sang a great blues song about how good it was going to feel to vote Green. That one made me feel like I was getting religion on this green politics stuff. The most interesting juxtaposition of the evening was that old Woddie Guthrie song "This Land is Our Land". One local activist sang it with lyrics that boil down to "this town is our town", with verses about Sacramento. Another guy sang "This world is our world", with lyrics that stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Japan Islands. Between acts, I schemed with friends about how to get the Swami into the Green Party's Presidential Candidate lineup.

Tian Harter