Las Cruces—Diana Tittle, former journalist and a leading progressive voice in Southern New Mexico will discuss Dona Ana County voters’ pivotal role in determining the outcome of the 2018 election. Her talk, “Your Country Needs You,” will be featured at the monthly meeting of Indivisible LAS CRUCES. The Tuesday, March 13 meeting begins at 11:00 a.m. at Thomas Branigan Memorial Library, Las Cruces. The meeting is free and open to the public.
“A year into the Trump administration, I am more convinced than ever that we are engaged in a war to save our democracy,” she says. Doña Ana County voters are key to the outcome because it is home to one-third of the registered Democrats in the entire congressional district. “These votes are central to delivering Congressional District Two to progressive candidates up and down the ballot in November.”
TorC Indivisible, she says, aims to achieve that outcome through their “100-Days’ Warriors” initiative. The term dates from 1864 when troops volunteered to serve in the Union army for 100 days during the height of the Civil War. While the Nov. 7 election is more than three months away, today’s volunteers are being equipped with the tools and training needed to become a well-prepared army of voter canvassers and turnout experts.
Although Tittle is a life-long Democrat, she has come to activism only since retirement. “I did demonstrate against the Vietnam War and marched on Washington, but I never was politically actively,” she says. Her first political experience was campaigning for Barack Obama. Like many, she dates her immersion into political activism to November 7, 2016 and the election of Donald Trump.
Since then, she has adopted an ambitious agenda that ranges from making phone calls and writing letters to staging a mock town hall and at Rep. Steve Pearce’s office. In Truth or Consequences where she lives, she has helped plan five major marches, held two training and planning events for Indivisible chapters in Congressional District Two, and spearheaded Indivisible TorC’s ongoing 2018 voter registration drive.
As the outreach chair of the Sierra County Democratic Party, she organized both a Democratic congressional candidates forum in November and a Democratic gubernatorial candidates forum in February.
Tittle, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, retired to New Mexico in 2015 after a 40-year career as a newspaper journalist and magazine editor. She is the author of nine nonfiction books, and is a recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature.