Last Saturday, I went canvassing for Barack Obama in Gary, IN. This is the second campaign I have volunteered for, the first being for Democrat Adam Schiff in the 27th district of California in 2000. It took me a long time to volunteer again and be politically active, but I am inspired both Barack Obama and the sheer number of people who have come out to help him.
This diary is a chance for me to address the glaring inequalities I saw, the glaring differences in this election, and why I believe we need to support Obama. It is inspired by Meteor Blades fantastic diary about Wall Street, Main Street, Side Streets.
First, a little something about myself to help you understand the life I lead. Currently I am simultaneously employed full time and a full time graduate student. I am working as a full time resident teacher, teaching 7th grade science on the south side of Chicago at the intersection of 71st and Kedzie (for all you Chicagoans out there). I am also enrolled in a full time masters program working on getting my graduate degree in Education with a Chicago Public School certification with endorsements in math and science. So, I am real busy all the time, don't have much of a social life anymore, just getting by with my salary. And I absolutely love what I'm doing.
Over the last week I decided it was time for me to step up and volunteer for Obama, even if it was just for a day. I like getting around town and moving on my feet, so I decided I'd try my hand at canvassing instead of phone calls. I had been reading on this website about calls for more volunteers and the concern that people were getting over confident and not showing up for their volunteer assignment. I had also noticed that Indiana was becoming a tougher state every day for Obama to win, for a variety of reasons ranging from it historically voting Republican, to deeply embedded racist trends among large parts of the population, and recent attempts by Republicans to shut down early voting sites.
I had to take action and get involved. I woke up bright and early at 5:45 in the morning, inhaled a quick breakfast, took a lightning fast shower, shaved, and grabbed a cup of coffee on my way out by 6:15 a.m. Not having a car, I took the CTA downtown to catch the South Shore Line train from Chicago to Gary. $4.50 each way, not a bad deal at all. It was a relaxing train ride, about an hour long with my coffee in one hand and my Sandman trade paperback in the other.
The first thing that met me when I got off the train was the strong, cold wind and the grey overcast skies that I thought I had left behind in Chicago. Neither of those would leave all day. The second thing that greeted me as I stepped out of the Gary Metro Center train stop was abandoned buildings, empty businesses, and a strange quiet compared to the rush of the cars on the nearby interstate highway. Granted this was my first time to Gary, IN and it was an early and cold Saturday morning, so maybe things would be better in other parts of the city.
I walked past a couple blocks of abandoned buildings and empty businesses before I got to the liveliest part of the city I had encountered so far, and that was the Obama Campaign HQ, right across from the fire department in a small building. I was one of the first volunteers to arrive that morning, with about ten others already there. The first shift was planning on leaving as soon as possible, so they trained us in about twenty minutes for a "Get Out the Vote" day of canvassing. Our goal was to get people out to cast an early vote as soon as possible.
There were some very friendly volunteers who had already done this and since I didn't have a car, they asked me to join them in going to the neighborhood that they were canvassing. We left and got to the neighborhood we would be covering and began at around 9:45 a.m. This included everything east of Broadway and south of the railroad tracks in the image below.
This seemed a little daunting at first, and indeed we were given a list of 103 houses to cover! The most out of any group of volunteers that day apparently as we were told when we got back. I was excited to get this chance, so off we went. We started off together and covered about 20 houses in the first hour as a trio. To speed it up, we covered the rest of the 80'ish homes by splitting up and managed to get all of them done in a little over four hours. Most were receptive, some were suspicious of us, but everybody I talked to said they either were going to vote for Obama or already had. Woohoo!
The neighborhood was a bit stunning to me. I can say from my own life experiences that this was the most poverty stricken neighborhood I have ever seen in the United States. I've seen poor places outside the country, but never anything like this within the country I call home. And I've worked for years in some of the roughest, poorest, most violent parts of the city of Chicago, and they still didn't compare to this in my eyes.
On the about thirty five blocks that we covered, I'd say that just over half of the homes were either abandoned or burned down. Many had been boarded up and severely overgrown with plants, shrubs, and even trees, giving me an indication that they hadn't been occupied for a long time. Within that group was also a large number of purely empty lots, many of them filled with rubble and trash. Sidewalks were completely overgrown in many places and totally impassible. The streets were in miserable condition and there was a lot of brackish standing water from the rainstorm two nights before.
With the houses that were still occupied, many had clearly taken pride and done the best that they could with what they had. I saw a lot of nicely trimmed front yards and fences around them. Yet many of the occupied houses also were in a state of disarray. Plastic covering up where glass should have been in the windows. Squirrels running into holes in the roof. Paint cracking on the sides of walls which were themselves cracking and creasing under a heavy weight unseen by human eyes.
There was a severe lack of any businesses anywhere in the area. I saw a laundromat, tiny grocery store, three marathon gas stations, and a nail salon. There was a boarded up school in the neighborhood, which was a really depressing sight for me to see, being a teacher myself. A "park" existed, if you could call it that with its overgrown grass, deep puddles of dirty water, and messed up basketball court.
The first of two memorable conversations that day took place in one of the marathon gas stations, where we had to stop and convince the owner to let us use his bathroom. He wouldn't let us at first, but when we showed him our materials and told him we were volunteering with the Obama campaign, he happily agreed and let each of the three of us in back behind the counter with the bullet proof glass to use the bathroom.
"Oh, I see how it is. Tell them you're an Obama volunteer and you let them use the bathroom," piped up a very tired looking young man milling around in the gas station store. We all get a good chuckle out of this.
"You can come through here all you want, but its not going to make a difference," he says to me.
"Why's that?" I ask.
"I can tell you're not from here." I guess it was pretty obvious, being the only white male in an all black community, he made a pretty accurate statement. "Take a look around, you see this neighborhood? People are struggling real hard here. I hear these candidates spend an awful lot of time talking about the middle class this, and the middle class that; when do they talk about us?"
I didn't have an answer for him. I couldn't lie to him and tell him I understood, because I didn't. I'd never lived in a neighborhood like his and didn't know what it was like to struggle so hard. He went on to tell me how hard it was for people to pay bills for heat, and how families were worried with winter coming on so soon...
He told me about how people struggled to feed their families even with the meager food stamps they received...
He told me how people struggled to find jobs in their own community, and how he had to take the train every day to work a minimum wage paying job in Chicago...
And he told me how they felt that nobody listened to them, nobody cared about them, and that they felt nobody gave a damn about what happened to them. The frustration was real and evident by the pain on his face as he told me these things.
We talked, but it was mostly me listening to what he had to say. He was very friendly, but upset with what was happening to his community and tired of living the way that he was. He shook my hand as we left and told me to have a nice day, but didn't care to talk about politics.
The second conversation that really stuck in my memory was with a ninety two year old resident of one of the homes I covered. She lived in the same house for sixty years, and I asked her how she's seen the neighborhood change while she's lived there. Her response was that it was deteriorating and it made her very sad, but it was her home and she was going to live out her days there. She also told me that she was going to vote on election day because "Somebody waited in line for me forty years ago and I am going to do the same!"
After talking some more, I thanked her for the conversation and made my way on, wrapping up the remaining houses for the day.
I'll be honest, at the end of the four hour shift, my feet were very tired and I was ready to call it a day and head back home on the train to Chicago. Before I left, I dropped off my materials at the Obama HQ in Gary where I saw upwards of one hundred volunteers! It was all very exciting and put me in good spirits that we had a good chance to win in Indiana despite all the dirty tricks that the Republicans were trying to pull off in the state.
When I boarded the train back to Chicago, something didn't feel right to me. How could I just get back on the train and go home and be comfortable, knowing that as an unmarried man with only bills to pay for myself I didn't have any true fiscal troubles? That my life was luxurious compared to what I just came from. I got off the train at downtown Chicago and it hit me even harder, like a brick in the stomach. Here I am surrounded by opulent luxury, by the palaces of modernization and commercialization. Hundreds of people walked around without a care in the world, and they needn't face these types of problems and hardships in their own lives like the ones I had seen back in Indiana.
So why bring this all up? Because to me this is exactly what this election should be all about. This is what should be the determining factor between voting for Barack Obama and John McCain.
When Barack Obama says he wants to eliminate the huge tax breaks for corporations and oil companies because it only rewards the super rich, and the Republicans scream foul, that is the problem.
When Barack Obama says he will raise taxes for people making over $250,000 and Joe Biden says its patriotic to do this, and the Republicans scream foul, that is the problem.
When Barack Obama says he wants to "spread the wealth" some from the rich to help the poor that are so desparate, and the Republicans scream "Socialist! Communist! Marxist! Thief!", that is the problem.
But its more than just a race thing. It goes beyond that it so happens to be that Barack Obama is black and McCain is white. It goes beyond that the Democrats embrace diversity of ALL measures and that Republicans simply "tolerate" it. It goes beyond that Republicans ignore the black poor of this country and let one of its poorest black cities drown in a hurricane. It goes beyond that to something so much deeper.
They resent people who are poor, who don't have a chance to bring themselves up by their bootstraps, a.k.a. the American Dream. They can kick and scream all they want that its poor people's fault for being the way they are and that they need to get out of it on their own without the government's help. They can kick and scream all they want and say that its all a bunch of handouts and expanding government.
But would they say that to the face of a single mother who has to take two, even three jobs just to raise her kids because her husband is in jail for a minor drug offense?
Or can they say that to the face of a child who has known nothing but the crime of gangs and the violence of drugs in his neighborhood?
Or can they say that to the face of a ninety two year old woman who has struggled to live, succeed, grow, and raise a family in the same community for sixty years? Who may die seeing that same community disappear around her?
Can they tell somebody to their face to get a job, but they'll have to move out of their community to do that? Because they're forced to make a choice between paying for gas to commute for work and heating oil? Or food to feed their kids?
Can they say that to the face of any poor person they see without assisting them, and still call themselves a good Christian? Or Jew? A good Muslim?
Here lies the crux of the problem. When I spoke to that young man in the gas station, he understood it. He thought that nobody cared for him, and yet its really the people who have been in power in the last eight years and the hyper conservatives who don't care for him. If I had a chance to speak to him again, I would tell him what the answer to this despair was...
It is the hope for change. A change from what has been happening in this country not just for eight years, but for decades. A change from the ways of racism and trivialization of the poor.
I won't be naive and say that electing Barack Obama will be the magic solution that will solve everything. But it is the first and most difficult step in my opinion of beginning to overcome some of the very deep opinions and beliefs that many in this country have. The same deep seated beliefs that keep electing people into power who shun the poor and reinforce racism.
To vote otherwise would simply continue the status quo, and that is something I fear we can no longer afford to do. Not in this point in history and not in the direction our country is currently headed. We need to stand up together to do this, just like Obama has said, and take this country in a bold new direction together.
Somebody once wrote down these words of wisdom.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Lets end this insanity.