Growing up a preacher’s kid in a small-town
I was ten years old, huddled with my mother and brothers in the dirt lot between our house and the church building, watching flames claw fifty feet into a smoky, pre-dawn sky. Lightning had struck the steeple. A neighbour had seen the fire, tried our unlocked back door, and clanged our pots and pans together to wake us.
I remember the orange silhouette of the cross against the inferno. I remember my dad talking to the media and firefighters, his voice steady. I remember our neighbour—a church elder—putting a hand on my dad’s shoulder and saying, “We’ll get through this together.”
Weeks later, that same elder delivered the news with one sentence and left. The congregation wanted a new preacher to go with their new sound system and the insurance-funded building. My dad, who had preached about feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, took a job at a door and window factory. We had to find a new place to live.
That was my first lesson in systems: how quickly solidarity can dissolve into real estate. How the structures meant to sustain community can instead become instruments of exile.
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My childhood was steeped in this tension between sacred calling and small-town politics. My dad was a preacher in the Covenant Church, a mundane mouthpiece for divine authority if you buy into that sort of thing. My mom was a piano teacher—a world where music has no president or congress, where you’re either good at it or you’re not. Nobody goes around striking out old scales by bureaucratic flat.
We were outsiders in a Minnesota town of cows and corn, white and Canadian enough to be called “the most polite foreigners” at a fish fry, but still carrying the scent of somewhere else. We were telling people how to live their lives, and the community gave us mixed reactions. My brothers and I learned to wield sarcasm as a fencer’s rapier, to pack our arguments with the weight of a sledgehammer if we cared about something. We learned to patch drywall holes—both the physical ones from teenage scuffles and the metaphorical ones left by bylaw officers who fought my dad on every nonstandard renovation of the old church building we turned into a home.
The rules, we learned, were never what they seemed on their face.
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The real resistance, the kind that roots deep, came from my grandparents.
My grandfather was a mechanic, a woodworker, a choir director, a doctorate of theology, and the president of a bible college. His workshop was a sanctuary of order: tools cleaned and labelled, manuals meticulously organized. A whitewashed wall bore a handmade oval plaque of wood from the property, with an enormous golden and neon blue dragonfly mounted at its centre—a preserved ancestor of the dragonflies in the marsh where I played.
When I was seven, I asked him how he got so smart. He handed me a book on speed reading and said, “It’s all about reading more than you can understand.”
I still try to do that.
My grandmother was a nurse, a mother, a teacher, a musician, a baker, a gardener who kept notes on the birds in her yard. One morning at a family reunion, she caught me slacking off for the fourth time. In the shrillest, angriest tone I’d ever heard, she said: “Get up, you lazybones! Go help them!”
I wish I’d recorded it. She was always helping people. They both were. They did hard things that desperately needed doing, because they could, and because they felt a duty they could fulfil.
They were my first model of citizenship: not as a right, but as a responsibility. A daily, granular, often frustrating practice of repair and care.
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In history classes, I devoured stories of Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony—marvelling at how humans built systems to wrangle power. But I felt a disconnect. The grand councils of history had somehow produced the petty squabbles I saw on the news: tax tweaks debated for months, housing bills gutted by some suit’s ego.
I started reading everything I couldn’t understand. Not just the assigned textbooks, but the bookshelves at the Java Joint, a coffee shop covered in graffiti and piss and grace, with a take-it-and-leave-it policy. I found zines with quotes from Proudhon and Marx. I read Kropotkin and Trotsky, learned about the miners in Virginia bombed by their own government. I joined a protest to get military recruiters out of high schools, marched with anarchists and antifascists, my marching band skills repurposed for dissent.
I didn’t think we affected much. But I never saw politics the same way again.
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What does this have to do with building a democracy app?
Everything.
Senatai isn’t a piece of tech that fell from the sky. It’s the product of a specific soil: the garbage under my bed where Freedom’s Ghost was hatched, to borrow a line from the song that’s haunted me for decades. It grew from the tension between my dad’s sermons and the church elders’ sound systems. From my grandfather’s belief that you repair what’s broken, and my grandmother’s insistence that you get up and help.
It grew from the realisation that systems—churches, towns, governments—are just groups of people making choices. And those choices can be changed.
The “resistance” in this week’s title isn’t just protest. It’s the stubborn, often quiet act of rooting somewhere, of paying attention, of learning how things work and why they break. It’s the resistance of my grandfather labelling his tools, of my grandmother noting the birds, of my dad fighting bylaw officers not with anger, but with an invitation to walk the property and see why the rules needed to bend.
That’s the kind of resistance Senatai is built on: not a smash-and-grab revolution, but the slow, patient work of building better infrastructure. Of creating a system where your voice isn’t lost in the gap between grand ideals and petty realities.
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Call to Action
My grandmother’s question—“Get up, you lazybones! Go help them!”—echoes down the years. It’s not a scold; it’s an invitation.
This week, I’d like to invite you to share a story.
Where did your political conscience begin?
Was it a grandparent’s lesson? A book? A moment of injustice you witnessed? A protest you joined? A feeling of powerlessness on a job site or in a voting booth?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and I’ll share a few (with permission) in a future post.
Next week: The Mess We’re In. We’ll get into the guts of the problem—how democracy hollowed out from job sites and phone surveys, and why “pay-to-win” isn’t a bug in the system, it’s the system.
Until then, keep rooting.
—Dan
P.S. If you know someone whose political conscience was shaped by a place, a person, or a stubborn act of care, please forward this to them. Roots grow stronger when they intertwine.
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📬 Missed Week 1? [Read “The Father’s Project” here]
🔗 Follow the project: Senatai.ca/blog
🎵 This week’s soundtrack: [“Grandma’s Hands” by Bill Withers]https://music.apple.com/ca/album/grandmas-hands/293521570?i=293521574
& [“Small Town” by Sam Balson]https://music.apple.com/ca/album/small-town/1496083518?i=1496083523