John Eder
| John Eder | |
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| Member of the Maine House of Representatives from the 118th district |
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In office January, 2003 – January, 2007 |
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| Preceded by | Mike Saxl |
| Succeeded by | Jon Hinck |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
January 18, 1969 Brooklyn, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Green Party |
| Residence | Portland, Maine |
| Occupation | Political Organizer |
John Eder (born January 18, 1969) is an American activist and politician from Maine. Eder lives in Portland and is a member of the Maine Green Independent Party, the Maine affiliate of the national Green Party. He served in the Maine House of Representatives as the legislature's first member of the Green Party for two terms and was elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2004. Until his defeat in 2006 Eder was one of only a handful of independent or third party state legislators in the country and was the highest-ranking elected Green official in the United States. Eder ran for Mayor of Portland, Maine in 2011. In 2014, Eder won a race for an at-large seat on the Portland Board of Education.
Raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at the age of fifteen, Eder left the home of his abusive and alcoholic adoptive family. After moving between friends and relatives and finally being homeless, he became a ward of the court and entered the Hope House facility for troubled boys in Port Jefferson, New York. At age eighteen Eder entered college in Buffalo, New York to study philosophy. Disenchanted with college and suffering from post-traumatic stress and depression as a result of a difficult childhood, Eder dropped out. He spent the next several years studying philosophy on his own and working at the Greyhound bus station in Buffalo. Inspired by Buddhist teachers and the writings of the Beat poet Jack Kerouac, Eder traveled around the country—backpacking, hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and working as a migrant farm laborer. He went from place to place volunteering and engaging in direct action around a wide range of social justice issues. He spent this period squatting amongst a network of travelers from New York City to Mexico. While living in Austin, Texas he was briefly a Hare Krishna. A girlfriend from this period of Eder's life recounts her relationship with him in a popular episode of This American Life entitled "Cringe".
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