I joined DSA in January of 2025 shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration. I’d been a Leftist since stepping off the plane at Rammstein AFB in Germany back in 2009 and DSA aligned since Bernie’s first presidential run in 2016. But it wasn’t until May of this year that I became active in the movement and shortly thereafter, began helping the chapter become more organized in Macomb County.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about the why of geogroups. I think the best way to do that is to talk a little bit more about why I wasn’t involved prior to May of the past year, what brought me in and what I’ve been up to since.
Like so many people, in the early winter of 2025, I found myself in a state of despair. Unlike many, I hadn’t been surprised by Trump’s win. I expected it or something like it since Biden won the 2020 Democratic primaries - if Neo-Liberalism were going to defeat Fascism, Trump wouldn’t exist. But watching Fascism ascend in real time was incredibly disheartening. I had to do something, but what to do? I became a dues paying DSA member. After that, I didn’t do a whole lot. I looked at the calendar a few times after becoming a member - everything seemed so far away.
I want to be clear about what ‘Far Away’ meant to me. I’m in the southern part of Macomb County. I live within spitting distance of where 696 intersects with 94. With clear traffic, I’m about 25 minutes from the typical DSA event. For a lot of folks, that probably doesn’t seem like an incredible drive. But for most of the last decade of my life, it definitely has been. Aside from working the typical 40 hours a week job, I also serve in the National Guard. I lose at least one weekend per month. It averages to noticeably more than that. On top of this, I’m a father.
So, the thought of spending about an hour on the road to go and meet people I didn’t know on top of everything else I was doing just seemed like way too much. And that’s how it was until around April. It had probably been close to a year since I’d even bothered looking at our chapter events calendar. Who knows how many hundreds of texts I’d gotten from Lila and Rachel that I’d left unread. But I finally found myself in a place where I thought I might have a little time to dedicate to DSA, so I checked the calendar. To my surprise, there was an event not 10 minutes from my house at a little coffee shop in Warren. Alex and I weren’t going to miss this opportunity. So we went. We met Chris and Corry, Holly and Taylor. The truth is that I immediately fell in love with DSA and determined that I would make time to get involved.
And then another month went by. I kept looking for other events in my area. They didn’t materialize. Somehow, I joined the Slack channel. I started looking for Committees or Teams to join. Given my tech background, I initially thought I might be working with Tech/Comms, but the lack of events in my area and the fact that I’d been a dues paying member for more than year before finding a way to be active…. No, tech/comms wasn’t that. The barrier I experienced getting involved drove me to join the Member Engagement Committee. After all, if I was experiencing this hurdle, clearly other people were too. I decided to try to be part of the solution.
It was as a member of MEC that I began to question why METRO-Detroit DSA didn’t have more going on in my neck of the woods and what we might be able to do to address this. I kept wondering why I was getting all these texts asking me to drive 30+ minutes to areas with which I was not familiar to canvas for people I’d never met. Don’t misunderstand. Those campaigns are worthy campaigns and the comrades doing the work are heroes. But I didn’t join DSA to spend almost as much time on the road as I do actually doing the activity. I joined to do Democratic Socialism in my neighborhood - a neighborhood that needs DSA as much as any neighborhood in the Metro Detroit area. So I began to ask, "How can we do more things out in Macomb County."