My son meets Senator Merkley

Oregon's Senator Jeff Merkley visited the nearby town of Monroe today for a town-hall meeting.  We decided it would be a neat idea to take G, our 9-year-old to this event.  He's been doing a lot in his Social Studies class on how to get involved in his community.  Here was a direct way to do it.  We got to the American Legion hall, got a raffle ticket to be able to ask a question, and sat down.  G came with a question in hand about picking up trash left in parks and forests by hunters.  It was a good question from a 9-year old.  In the crowd of about 100 people (standing room only by the time it started) were all the Benton County Commissioners, the mayors of Monroe, Corvallis, and Philomath, the head of the Corvallis School Board, the county fire chief and a police chief.  It was a decent group to ask questions of, since many of the questions were both locally impacting and nationally impacting.  Of the crowd, G was the youngest one by far (a high-school senior was there, as were about 3 college age kids).  Most of the crowd was in the 50+ age.
The Senator gave a nice non-stump 5 minute opening talk and then opened it up to questions.  The questions ran the gamut from Christmas tree burning and supporting that industry, to the gas pipeline they want to build from Canada to Texas, as well as a potential new gold mine in Alaska.  A student from OSU (VP of their student Democrat group) asked how OSU could get away with not following the ADA with their new buildings.  We didn't get called on via the raffle system, but at the end, he wanted to open it up to 'any other students'.  An OSU student went first, then it was G's turn to end the event.  He got up and did a nice job asking his question about how to get hunters to pick up their trash in the forest.  The Senator gave a good response about being good custodians of the land. He then asked where he got this idea from.  G answered that he takes a lot of hikes, he's talked to a lot of people, and "I talked to my mom about it".  That last bit got a good deal of applause from the audience.  My wife beamed at that response.  Senator Merkley asked G how old he was and where he went to school.  After learning he was 9, he said in the 109 town-halls he's held since he took office, my son was the youngest person he's had ask a question.  Cool!  G also liked saying he went to 'virtual school', though the Corvallis School Superintendant wasn't too thrilled.
So, we got some pictures with the Senator (some taken by his staff), got his business card and headed out.  A good event, G was impressed with the wide variety of questions that got asked by people in the crowd, and got a good appreciation for how some things work in the country / local area.  Hopefully we'll be able to tend more of these events in the future.