A friend emailed me last week looking for volunteers to canvass for Senator Obama in Pennsylvania. I jumped onboard because I was feeling useless as I live in New York and Obama has a lock on our electoral votes (barring fraud of course). I have relatives in PA who may be voting for the wrong ticket which is part of the reason I wanted to go there - offset the misguided votes of cousins to whom I can relate on personal terms but not politically. But the main reason is that I have never been so impressed by a political candidate that I thought it was worth spending my precious free time.
But this time it is not about whether the candidate is someone I support on all or many levels. It is about doing something to stop the damage of the last thirty years of regressive policies. This country cannot afford four more years of upward wealth re-distribution, environmental neglect, financial havoc and outright governmental criminality.
It embarrasses me that I have never volunteered for a candidate before. It isn't that hard to do. I am an adult, a self-employed professional and a single parent. I've done many things that appeared difficult at first, college radio DJ, trial lawyer, performing in a rock band (guitar) in NYC, parenting a teenager and a pre-teen. I am not sure that Obama is the best candidate I have had a chance to vote for in my life but the failure to do something (anything), to ensure that we do not have another four years of Republican misrule would haunt me too much if Obama lost.
So I went canvassing last Saturday. It was not the hardest thing I have ever done. It was outside of my comfort zone but it may in some small way be one of the most important things I have ever done.
I volunteered for Obama with the hope that he will prove to be a leader interested in representing the people, not the corporations, that he is better than I think he is, that he will do far more than Bill Clinton did or even tried to do and that he will start our government back down the road of actually representing the people instead of only a small subset of the people. We need a new era of government and if we don't get it, this country is doomed. If one diarist I read could get himself on the "damn phone" and make his damn calls, then I can do the door to door thing. And maybe someone will read this diary and get inspired to do something too.
That said, I had no idea what to expect in Wilkes Barre. (It turned out to be Easton instead.) And it was not what I like to do with my free time and not "fun" although I think I did convince one person (a Clinton supporter) to vote instead of staying home and I also think I got one person to volunteer. (I never got around to researching the current political bent of the area.
I will now be polite to people doing the phone bank thing (at least when they are on my side of the argument) because even when in the middle of work or cooking dinner or whatever. I continue to think about what people who didn't grow up in a liberal atmosphere (Greenwich Village) think Bush/Cheney have done for them and what they thnk McCain/Palin will do for them (other than screw their sorry bottoms even worse than Bush/Cheney). So we shall see.