My name is Victoria Fierce, a queer renter who thinks cities are our future. I’m running for one of the 11 seats on the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, Assembly District 18 for the March 3, 2020 election.
My reason for running is rather straightforward: the Democratic Party is one of the biggest levers of power available for effecting change on the scale we need to save the world.
I’m helping build a movement in favor of cities, the people who live in them, and the people who don’t live in them yet. I believe that a better world is possible, a world where everyone has a right to the city, because cities are the engines for a better world.
Cities are where you have doctors and patients close enough to make Medicare for All easy.
Cities need to be building social housing so we can spend more of our paycheck on stuff that isn’t rent or war, like public pensions for all or starting a co-op with friends or even nationalizing Amazon.
We also need to be decarbonizing our cities, building up transit, having bigger ideas than paper straws and Spare the Air days. But we can’t be doing this with each city in isolation. We need to be working together, as one Bay Area.
These things won’t just be given to us. There is work to be done, a movement to build that doesn’t stop at imaginary municipal borders. This fight is ours to lose.
Perhaps one day our families, chosen or otherwise, will have a future where nobody needs to fight for a better world. It is quite a radical vision, I know. And I also know that we’re all passionate for it.
But without a Democratic Party that supports that vision, without a party that elects capable leaders to office, without a party that is capable of organizing a movement of support for those dreams, they’ll just be dreams. I know that a better world is possible. We just have to decide that we want to show up and do the work.