For as long as I can remember, my mother dismissed politics as something beyond her. She regarded it as a game she didn't really understand played by people who weren't "real" and who didn't live in the same world that she knew. It didn't, she said, impact her life, so it didn't really matter who ran or who was elected.
For most of my life, this strategy worked for her. It was pretty easy to keep up the pretense that a) she couldn't change anything and b) her life was pretty much the same no matter who was in office.
Then came eight years of George W. Bush.
Until the past month, I lived my entire life in a small Indiana city. My town is one of the Democratic oases in that red state, but for all but the occasional minute here or there, I was always the lone liberal in any given room. I've spent so much time being sneered at and shouted down - by my own family, actually - that I learned two basic responses: knee-jerk defensiveness (never effective, btw) and just keeping my mouth shut.
A lot of the shouting down was done - figuratively; not much actual shouting - by my mother. And whenever I was exercising my keep-mouth-shut strategy of dealing with a family political discussion, she would often goad me into participating, or try to. In fact, the one sure-fire way to get my mom to state a political opinion, it seemed, was for me to air one of my own. She would immediately, and pretty much without exception, take the other side, no matter what the topic. We just have that kind of relationship.
When I was sick at heart and outraged during the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, my mother didn't get it. She didn't see how I could possibly "know" that it was definitely the wrong thing to do, and she blithely decided that our elected officials knew best. But by the time Bush was re-elected, she was starting to change her mind about that. And when the media finally reached the point where they had entirely stopped challenging anything the Bush administration did or said, even my mother noticed and commented on it, with a sense of bitter outrage.
So when the primary season rolled around, she was ready for a change. Naturally, we were on opposite sides - she was wholeheartedly for Hillary, because she was a woman. I was not prepared to support Clinton for a number of reasons, but I didn't make up my mind about Obama until I saw his "A More Perfect Union" speech. I decided then and there that I would do anything I could to help his campaign.
In truth, Mom was on the fence. Her gentleman friend and soul-mate was - unexpectedly, because he's rather racist - supporting Obama. ("He reminds me of Bobby Kennedy," he told me once.) Mom wanted to see a woman president, but she also liked what she saw from Obama. Nevertheless, she made sure to play up the Hillary support talk whenever I was around.
Unfortunately for her, I was too caught up in the yes-we-can positive mindset to be baited. My then twelve-year-old son and I spent hours registering voters, doing data entry at headquarters, making phone calls, and canvassing, canvassing, canvassing. We worked the Obama rally here in town. We worked election day. We talked Obama 24/7.
When it came down to it, Mom voted Obama. I didn't make a big deal of it. She can be perverse about things.
Almost from the minute the primary ended, however, she's taken to saying, "I don't know... there's no way they're gonna let him win. The Republicans will take it. The country just won't elect a black man." On and on and on.
Now that I've moved (Portland, OR! Yay!), she always manages to bring up the campaign on the phone. She tells me the latest dire "news," which is ALWAYS some MSM-manufactured brouhaha. I tell her to stop watching CNN and other cable news outlets. She refers to "the latest poll," and I tell her there are lots of polls, and always at least one that contradicts the one the media plays up.
When the Obama campaign opened an office a month ago, I told her about it. She seemed uninterested. "I'm not going to go door-to-door, and I just can't do that phone stuff." For all her bluster, she's shy and insecure about trying to discuss issues. I figured she wouldn't follow through on anything and dropped the idea of volunteering.
But three days ago, she surprised me during a phone conversation. "We went to the Obama office yesterday," she said, referring to she and her gentleman friend. "We wanted to get some yard signs, but they were out again." She told me about all the people who had asked them to pick up yard signs for them, too, and said that she told the campaign workers about my uncle and a friend of Mom's who - at their mid-sixties - both want to register to vote for Obama.
Then Mom started talking about how frustrated she was. She said she wanted to help out, but again, she just can't handle the idea of canvassing or phone-banking. And at that moment, inspiration struck me.
"Mom," I said, "I know something you could do that would help the local campaign more than you would ever believe. You could take in food for the people working the campaign."
I think at first she thought I was throwing her a bone, along the lines of You're good at cooking, so... just cook.
"Seriously?" she asked. "They really need that?"
So I told her about all the hours that people spend in that office or out canvassing. How lots of people come by right after work or a full day of classes and stay for hours, without taking time to get something to eat. How people give up their jobs or take leaves of absence to go to another state, bunking with volunteers, and don't have lots of money for things like food. How there never seemed to be enough food in the office when we were working there in June, and how much we all appreciated it when someone donated a bunch of pizzas or brought in home-cooked entrees and baked goods.
I encouraged her to go back to the campaign office and ask them whether they could use donations of food and when and what would be most helpful. I told her to be sure to talk to a campaign staffer rather than just a volunteer, as a staffer would have the best perspective on it. She hung up cheered but still doubtful that something so easy could help very much.
Well, she called me again yesterday. She and her gentleman friend went back and talked to the staffer - "He's from Chicago" - in charge of the local campaign office. He thought donations of food were a wonderful idea. He also told them that they can always use people to do data entry "for all the information they get from the phone calls," she said. "So [gentleman friend] is going to go in one or two nights a week and do that!"
(She also said, "I told him all about you, how you worked so much during the primary." This was both touching and amusing; she's telling this guy who's probably pulled more all-nighters for Obama than I've done in my entire life about her daughter the volunteer, as though there's some kind of plaque in the office with my picture and name on it!)
But anyway, the point of this long, rambling opus, is this: two people, one in his early 70s and one about to turn 69, who have never had much interest in politics, are now going to be officially volunteering with the Obama campaign. And one of them... is my mother.
I'm so proud!