Des Moines > Davenport > Muscatine > Kansas City

(Pt. 1) (Pt. 2)

After meeting numerous Yang Gang, Andrew himself, and still running on low sleep I was riding quite the manic high (seems to be a theme of this campaign run to date). Jumping into the minivan with the crew going to eastern Iowa for the final two events that day couldn’t have been better for that state of mind.

Up front P and T bantered constantly like old friends. I’m not sure, but I think they met each other recently through an event or local YG. My reasoning for that assumption is their age gap of about 15 years and the exclusive Yang related content of their conversation. Regardless, their energies play very well off each other.

In the back, St from the morning’s caravan sat beside me in a jump seat matching my own, dripping with enthusiasm about continuing the day’s adventure.

Along the roughly three hour drive east I can’t recall a single appreciable break in conversation, nor anything forced. Every Yang supporter I’ve met has a veritable treasure trove of reasons for supporting his run, and we are all too ready to vomit our tirades on anyone who will listen. With any other political campaign or ideological system I would find this somewhat repugnant, but the thing about Yang’s focus on data and problem solving is that anyone from any background can speak to the problems from any angle and it only strengthens everyone else’s arguments because we are all looking for usable, concrete facts. Each new perspective lends itself to uncovering more of the ever incomplete truth, which helps others fine tune their own perspectives. So unlike rigid belief systems or faith based ideology, we welcome and encourage challenges to our ideas and relish being proven wrong because that is how we grow.

In addition to working together solving all the world’s problems in the van that day, we saw Yang a couple more times, had him sign a Taylor Swift album we bought at the start of our journey (the van had no aux cord, and that was our only album which played on repeat at least 10 more times that day), met a number of awesome people, shared tons of personal stories, dissected tons of policy proposals, debated solutions, and generally just had a wonderful time on our silly, fun, informative adventure together. It felt incredibly comfortable, particularly given the political context, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

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America seems to have a community problem. Trust issues abound and many people have totally unrealistic expectations for relationships (just look at dating profiles). In my thirty years of life I have found a handful of friends I feel incredibly fortunate to know and care for. We have slowly formed an insulating bubble of love, respect, support, and — crucially — forgiveness to navigate together the ocean of loneliness so many Americans are drowning in. I think this isolation issue is getting more attention over the last number of years as we struggle to understand why the American Consumer Dream has failed to make us feel as complete as advertising suggests we would, if only we had that perfect pair of jeans, or that new throw rug to tie the room together.

Personally I have been seeking to fill this void my whole life, whether through religion, sports, school, gaming, romance, online, bars, countless meetup groups — anywhere really. The need has always been roaring inside me, as I imagine it must in so many others, a primitive hunger that drives behavior whether or not it is consciously understood. Only within the last few years, having finally found some soulful satiation, have I started to gain any clarity on the nature of this intrinsic need.

I had my first taste of complete social acceptance at Burning Man in 2013. The city is built up over a couple weeks on the blank canvass of an ancient lake bed known as a playa. At the end of the festival everything is either burned down or packed away so it can be rebuilt from scratch the next year. This deliberate rebirth cycle not only allows, but practically demands the participants to reinvent themselves each year. The principles of Burning Man are designed to force you to dig deep, to elicit the very core of who you are, to radically accentuate it publicly, and to celebrate this communal display of vulnerability.

This flips essentially every conformity inducing, box putting, restrictive rule based aspect of the ‘default world’ most of us inhabit daily. It gives one a sense of security, a sense of belonging. It allows one to give up the fight, and to rest comfortably, because there is always someone weirder than you, probably camping ten feet away. It is an absolutely vital part of being a human to let it all go from time to time, and something that is still incredibly scarce in our country — our world — today. Since my first trip to Burning Man I have started to recognize aspects of this soulful satiety in different groups or situations, but never enough to really feel full. That is, until that three hour ride to Muscatine with a few total strangers from the Yang Gang.

❤ These lovely hoo-mans ❤

That is why I have since dedicated virtually every moment of my existence to this movement. It isn’t about a single man who can magically save our country. It’s about tearing down a system that feeds our souls just enough to keep us teetering on the brink of sanity, while exploiting our humanity as much as possible to the benefit of a small core of individuals. It’s about replacing that repressive and broken system with one that supports every single human’s ability to participate in, contribute to, and simply experience the unadulterated, innate beauty of this strange experiment called life.

The mere shadow of the idea of a global, supportive, creative, loving community is so overwhelmingly attractive that I am willing to sacrifice everything down to my last breath (I want to live to experience it after all) to move us there. The capacity for systemic joy and happiness that exists in that yet-to-be-realized world is so many eons greater than anything the richest, happiest person alive today has ever experienced even in his or her pinnacle moment. It doesn’t matter how difficult this goal is it to achieve, what obstacles stand in the way, or how much suffering must be endured to get there because that potential is so infinitely great that it entirely dwarfs any costs incurred along the way.

It’s gonna be dope ya’ll.

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