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Mid-Flight in An Election Year The airplane takes off and I’m confronted with the real “Illinois from the Air,” a title my sister had given to one of the artsy hooked rugs she made in her high school days. On a large homespun canvas with woolly loops, it had irregular green geometrics bordered by browns. Here life is imitating art, but the physical landscape soon recedes from my attention as I overview the tapestry of lives and stories I’ve just briefly hooked myself back into. My row-mates on the airplane are a mother and daughter, I gather from conversation, though one wouldn’t notice a resemblance. Mother is pencil thin, while daughter requires a seat-belt extension and billows a bit onto my side of the arm rest. Still, something about their style is reminiscent one of the other. Mother has her white hair in a pixie cut and wears blue chandelier earrings to go with her denim jacket, her hearing aids the size of candy canes around her ears. Daughter also wears her brown hair short with a white cap and small blue gems dangle from her lobes. As usual when I fly, I consider my book my primary companion. But by the time we get to the Rocky Mountains, my neighbors have charmed me with images and comments. Frail, elderly mother on all fours in the airplane aisle, searching for her water bottle, lost during take off. Daughter commenting on the slapstick routine we go through each time one of us needs to go to the bathroom. “Just give us 15 minutes warning next time,” she says. “Is California home or a vacation destination?” I ask. Home. Daughter becomes Amanda and we discover we each have a new Chinese niece. Mother becomes Tabby, nicknamed for her passions for Tabasco sauce and cats, and we find we share elementary school teaching careers. The truth is that I have a bit of an agenda. I am on the look out for opportunities to refine my skills at engaging in political discussion. I’ve been observing others at calling parties and meetings. Old-timers on the phone exuding sincerity and friendliness. At a recent Kerry meet-up, a retired teacher, nearly blind from unsuccessful cataract surgery, has shared her technique of going door-to-door (with her large-type precinct lists). “I always go alone so they know I’m not a Jehovah’s witness. I ask people if they know what’s been going on. I listen. I tell them not to feel guilty. I fill them in on a few things. I’m honest about my own feelings.” Appraising my own style, I realize I fear being cut off by someone who resents my intrusion. I have my little speech. I try to interject it quickly, inwardly cowering against the likelihood of being dismissed. I really don’t listen. So I have determined to open a dialogue in the future. To invite the other person’s point of view, listen to it respectfully. Offer my own, unthreateningly, appealing to the many shared values, concern for children, a safer more caring world. Tabby’s eyes have closed behind the wide windows through which she usually regards the world. I ask Amanda if she’s decided whom to vote for for president. “Oh, I don’t vote,” she says. “Well, I vote in the local elections, but by the time the candidates get to the national level, they’re too compromised. I want Bush gone. But I can’t vote for Kerry.” She says she hasn’t watched Kerry’s convention speech, but she will when she gets home. “He wasn’t my first choice, either,” I say. But he’s growing on me. A lot of heart in his acceptance speech. A positive message of unity and inventiveness, instead of trying to bomb our way out of our problems. And furthermore, there’s a movement growing that’s going to push Kerry in the right direction.” I pull out copies of “The Bush Record” and “Kerry Record and Proposals” and offer them to Amanda. “When you have time,“ I say, but she starts right in reading. Actually, I’ve encountered a series of “Oh, I don’t” voters. A few on the telephone at calling parties, projecting a steely determination that this is not an activity for them. There were several in a campground bathroom in Oregon whom I met the day after a Kerry rally. There was Kayce: “Oh, I don’t vote. I’m a refugee from the 60s.” With her long wet hair, Kayce looked the part. When I reminded her of some of the costs of this war and assaults on clean air and water, she admitted she was also worried about Bush and agreed to have a registration form emailed to her. There was Rosalba, styling her hair with her curling iron at the mirror who asked, “Who’s John Kerry?” I explained and she said, “Well, I don’t pay much attention to politics. I know my husband thinks I should get registered and vote.” Rosalba seemed somewhat impressed by the size of the deficit and the numbers of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s good. You’re making me think.” I offered to bring a voter registration form by her campsite, but this was too much for her. “Oh, no, I’ll just think about it a little more.” Rosalba’s sister-in-law, Blanca, and niece, Michi entered. Blanca seemed like she might have been more in the habit of using her mind, relying less on her looks to get by in this world. Rosalba left, with a toss of her pony tail. Blanca and I discussed the relative merits of San Francisco and Klamath Falls as places to live and raise children, and what brings us to Emigrant Lake. I mentioned William Shakespeare and John Kerry. I didn’t go into the voter registration issue this time, worried that my great uncle the evangelist’s spirit was making me too zealous. But later I did fold Spanish versions of the Kerry and Bush records and “Cuts in the Bush Budget Affecting Latinos”; folded them up small enough to fit in my cosmetic bag. The next day, over tooth brushing, I asked Blanca what she thought about the elections. “Oh, I don’t know, she said. It seems like the candidates make all these promises, but never do what they say they’re going to do.” “I know,” I said. “They’ve been at the command of the corporations. But something is really changing this year. People won’t go back to sleep… .We’re going to keep pushing.” I pulled out my info sheets. Blanca seemed moved, not put upon. “You mean I can keep these? In truth, there’s not much information that helps us Latinos understand how we’re being affected. ” So now I sit on the airplane, wondering if some of us have been deeply damaged by hopes of democracy repeatedly dashed. I think of my friend, Penelope, who back in 1968 was the president of the Bobby Kennedy campaign committee at San Jose State University. She and one other student had been in charge of meeting him at the airport and ridden with him in the limousine to campus where he would speak. She remembers his tall lankiness, the electric energy that surrounded him, his hair with its red mahogany highlights. She also remembers her committee gathering the following day to watch California primary election returns and the festivities of Kennedy’s acceptance speech turned to assassination horror. To date her appetite for political activism has not returned. Amanda has been studying “The Kerry Record and Proposals.” “Hmmm. . . a new Manhattan project to develop alternative energies. Maybe I will vote this year.” As we prepare to land, I offer her my email address and encourage her to contact me if she has any questions. We say good-by before inserting ourselves into the passenger/luggage-jammed aisles. I feel an aftershock twinge related to the big one I suppressed while saying a last good-by to my aging “Uncle Daddy” in the Midwest. We do exert small and large tugs on each other’s orbits. Like my real father, stationed in Florence in WWII, dragging a skeptical army buddy to hear Puccini. The buddy went on to found the Santa Fe Opera. We cross paths again, Tabby and Amanda and I, they in their airport wheelchairs, me with my wheely suitcase, each with our wounds and our hopes; the new friendship radiates and then propells us forward into the next phases of our flights, our fates. A Poem “Nonviolence is a word of negative construction while in fact the thing itself is wholly positive. Perhaps we should have a contest to look for a new, positive word in English. ” Jonathan Schell Start by bowing your heart Tell the stories: The voting rights marchers said they had become spiritually intoxicated. Blocked in their approach to City Hall by columns of firefighters and police, they knelt to pray. When they rose, elated, they said, “ We’re not turning back. All we want is our rights.” The police chief ordered the firemen to turn their hoses on the crowd, but they didn’t. Instead, they paid homage with tears to the marchers who passed through the lines. Embody satyagraha, Dialogue with Ohio There’s bustle at the Toledo Democratic headquarters, signs, bumper stickers, buttons, sign-up sheets for phone banking. The office manager’s from L.A., a rivalrous New Yorker is second-in-command. Door-to-door canvassing is not a major part of their stragegy. Which is, in my mind, what I’ve traveled 2500 miles to do. But they sign me up for “knock and drag” on election day, which is definitely door to door with chauffered trips to the polls in between. The first day speeds by as I phone potential phone bankers and band literature into stacks of 100. After dark, I come to my hosts’ neighborhood of large, older homes near the University of Toledo, with tall trees and high leaf banks lining the curbs. John and Nancy, dad and step-mom to my friend Heather, welcome me, eager for a sense of what’s going on on the ground out there. John has received an email from Michael Moore giving a phone number for the Toledo MoveOn headquarters. This may be the answer to what I have been looking for. I call MoveOn at 11:10 pm. Jason answers, saying, “you must know something about political campaigns if you expect to find someone here at this hour.” “Oh, yeah,” I agree, thinking of folks I met two weeks ago who were even then getting by on 2 hrs. sleep. “And Michael Moore said ‘operators are standing by,’ but I suppose he was speaking Michaelmoore-ically.” I should go straight over in the morning, but I’m too tempted by the Kerry rally that’s occurring first thing at the University on Thursday. It’s still dark as John and I walk up to the basketball stadium, and an earnest young woman hands me a yellow card which I pocket without reading. The crowd seems half asleep while we wait through musical interludes and some local officials. But they snap-to for the main event. Local Congresswoman, Marcy Kaptur, introduces John Glenn who will then introduce Kerry, as real heroes. Kerry’s on, wearing a Red Sox ball cap, World Series light-hearted, but serious about health insurance reform and stopping the hemorrhaging of jobs. The crowd is pumped. More than one in three jobs lost in this country during the last four years has been lost in Ohio. MoveOn headquarters is in the upstairs of a strip mall on Airport Hwy. I open the downstairs door to purple carpeting, white walls, an odor of mold. Long hallway. A two room office. Front filled with boxes, folding chairs, maps, posters. A table with cell phones. Back room crammed with 3 – 4 computers and chairs and Jason-Pete-Steve-Dave. The names whisk past me. Sometime when I’m not looking, Rachel sneaks in there, as well. These folks are all smart, young, funny. The MoveOn program is also competent. It consists of doing issue identification along with candidate preference identification. Rachel tells me that voters are much less guarded in their comments if they’re talking issues. My first assignment: a modest neighborhood of older homes. Nobody home but the dogs for at least an hour of canvassing, but finally, the elementary school across the street lets out its mostly white kids and I start finding people. Margie comes to the screen door with a grandkid in her arms, 2 others apron-strung. She’s so discouraged with both candidates that she doubts she’ll vote. Her issue? Jobs. “But Kerry will close the tax loopholes that encourage job outsourcing.” “Well, that’s good.” “Also, be careful who you listen to, there are a lot of character assassins out there.” Denise has had her nails done in preparation for Halloween – bright orange with black appliqués. She cracks the screen door and holds her cigarette above the top of so that the ash will fall away from the house. She says she’s not planning to vote. “Oh, it’s so important this year. We’re talking life and death, peace and war.” “I know, I know,” she says. I leave her with literature and a thought about leaders who start wars under false pretenses. Friday, Jason and I head over to East Toledo. The new prison complex is over this way and I almost head into its jaws. Then I find the mixed-race neighborhood of ramshackle homes, duplexes, quadruplexes, boarded up windows, boarded up school, rust oozing through the paint of doors, black mold collecting on the underside of stairwells. A man has shouted at me from behind his door that he won’t vote. At one of the houses, a delicate woman has come to the door in her robe. She needs surgery, and exhales her hopes that Kerry’s healthcare plan will be enacted soon. She says her voting registration card hasn’t arrived. Jason tells her the backlog is so great that it’s not surprising, but she should be able to vote, no problem. Push for a real ballot. Accept a provisional one only as a last resort. Seek out the MoveOn person with the red and silver armband for assistance. I wear the KERRY/EDWARDS tee-shirt that I got for $5 at the rally. A woman walking by points to it and says “I like your shirt.” She lives on a cross street and isn’t on our list. I should have tried to recruit her to canvass her neighborhood and given her my shirt as a reward – I am wearing a less festive one underneath. But my acquisitiveness gets the better of me and I don’t make the move and can’t find her later when I return. Jason has to get back to the office but he teams me up with David who lives in the neighborhood. David’s house has a thicket of campaign signs in the front yard, a jumble of toy trucks at one end of the porch; and his living room and car are studded with milagros and portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His wife speaks with a beautiful Latin lilt. David is disabled, walks with a lacquered cane, black with red in the carved out foliage patterns. We pass a child who asks him if he’s in his Halloween costume. He says yes. David tells me that his youngest son, Dominic, was killed. I don’t ask the circumstances. Iraq? A neighborhood incident? His church helped, his union helped. As for the election, “Sometimes we have to remind ourselves we’ve done everything we can. The rest is in God’s hands.” A yellow tree, singled out by the sun, is as luminous as anywhere. At dusk, Elena, very pregnant, comes to the door eating a sandwich filled with macaroni and cheese. She hasn’t received her registration card, either. Back at Democratic Headquarters, I eat take-out Greek food, watched over by signs that read: Italian Americans, Hungarian Americans, Irish Americans for Kerry. I eat at a table where most are punching holes in literature and threading them with rubber bands. There’s Shavauna who taught junior high school for 15 years before she got fed up with a lack of support from administration and went to work as a manager at Arby’s. Her 11 yr. old boy, Rudy, is proudly collecting completed stacks of 100 and putting them in the mail trays. She’s a single mom, pictures Rudy as one of the paid campaign staff someday. One of the attractive young men putting their heads together in the front room. Another time, I sat with a bright young man who’d been doing advertising in Indiana. Laid off, he’d become a manager at a MacDonald’s. Which was fine. For now. He’d have made a change eventually, anyway. Saturday I’ve made a commitment to the Democrats to do phone banking. I’m assigned to a large law firm in Sylvania Township. Virtually every office is taken by a volunteer. I finally find a vacant one that happens to have a view. The wind is vigorous in the tall trees. Fleets of small Persian magic carpets swirl in the air. Our wealth in oxygen measured out in bushels of leaves. The call lists are said to be 100% Kerry supporters but that’s not my experience. About 22 names on a page. 14 answering machines. 3 disconnected numbers. 1 Bush supporter. 4 Kerry supporters, but often suffering from campaign-phone-call fatigue. This is typical. I call for 5 hours and then I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve got to get back on the street. MoveOn puts me to work in the nearby East Gate area. Bush speaks for a lot of this seemingly comfortable, white neighborhood, though there are Kerry signs, too. A laid-off teacher tells me how lucky I am to have my 2 part-time jobs, and that she’ll vote for Kerry. One large pumpkin has KERRY carved into it. It will shine tonight and tomorrow night. A man with a beer belly under his black and gray polo shirt answers one door. His wife, is on the list, but is indisposed. I take a chance. “Will she be voting for Kerry?” “Not for that guy. He’s a traitor to his country. Do you know what he did?” “I know all about it.” I assume he’s talking about war protests after Kerry returned from Vietnam. “You couldn’t know or you wouldn’t be voting for him.” His voice rising. It’s a rough-and-tumble wind and I’m guessing, with my hair whipping around, that I’m starting to look like a Halloween ghoul myself. My friend Heather is due to arrive anytime. The next day, 10/31, she and I will canvass together. Unfortunately, her brilliant brainstorm of going in costume doesn’t come until we’ve almost finished. Oregon, Ohio is a working class neighborhood, mostly white, no doubt affected by the closing of the nearby Jeep factory. America Votes, the umbrella organization that has coordinated so MoveOn, ReDefeat Bush, America Coming Together, etc. don’t duplicate each other’s efforts, has utter confidence in their lists. So we are not to really do any persuasion, just remind people to vote, passing out completely non-partisan literature. Something has happened that both the Democrats and America Votes no longer trust their polling place data, and we’re told not to give out that information for fear that it’s wrong. I begin to believe that America Votes’ confidence in their lists is misplaced. My first doorknock is at a home where the man takes one look at my Kerry pin and grunts “Bush,” shutting the door in my face. Farther down that block I meet a woman who declares herself an undecided. To heck with not proselytizing. Issues? She says “consistency.” And she doesn’t know why Kerry has been so critical of Bush’s handling of the war on terror. W. had something to deal with that no President before him ever had to face – major terrorism on our own soil. Even Pearl Harbor is not to be compared. I say, but Kerry HASN’T criticized Bush about the war on terror. Just about the war on Iraq and its distractions. “Oh, well, agreed. The war in Iraq is a nightmare.” Honestly, I don’t think I’ve met a single person who thinks the war in Iraq makes sense. But so many don’t hold Bush accountable for it, or they think that he should clean up the mess he started. “But what makes you think he won’t start more messes?” I ask. Around the corner, a woman with a “God Bless Our Troops” sign in the window and a “Welcome to Grandma’s House” on the door. She says she’ll vote, but she’s still not sure for whom. “I really don’t want to discuss the issues with anyone, “ she says, her face stricken. Finally I’ve pulled the yellow card from the rally out of my raincoat. “In the United States, over 1.3 million children die from abortion every year, over 43 million since 1973.” Heather mentions to me that doctors are becoming skittish about prescribing birth control because certain right-to-life groups consider the pill an abortofacient. And that the rate of abortion is twice as high in countries where it’s illegal. Heather’s parents left church this morning to find a flyer on their, and every other, car in the parking lot: “Who want John Kerry in office: Terrorism groups, gay and lesbian supports, planned parenthood and abortionists, pornographers. Those that believe being rich is un-American.” Monday I’m back with MoveOn. Kevin, a volunteer from Chicago, comes to the office to pick me up and drive me to Perrysburg, a township south of Toledo. Our neighborhoods range from older homes to brand new subdivisions with matching creek-related street names, to senior citizen-occupied row houses, and everyone seems to be white. We get a few sprinkles. We’re both in long black raincoats whipping in the wind, followed by long black shadows. I meet a woman who looks young to have a son in boot camp. She’s been registered but never voted in her 11 years in this house, and has no memory of a registration card. I warn her to insist on a regular ballot if at all possible. “You’ve got me really scared now. I want my vote to count. I’m so worried about my son with that man as President.” We hit the senior housing as it’s getting dark. Here people of modest means, mostly positive. One gentleman is so hard-of-hearing that he barely gets my message “VOTING FOR KERRY TOMORROW?” But then he says, “Oh, yes, and we’re supposed to check in with the red and silver armband, right?” A very lady-like woman in white blouse and apron says, “I just can’t bear the thought of another 4 years of that man. If I live through the night, I’ll be there first thing Tuesday morning.” Tuesday it’s “knock and drag” duty with the Democrats. I’m teamed with two locals to work the precinct voting at Flory Gardens, an assisted-living complex. Our mixed-race precinct consists of the complex itself, a trailer park up the street, and several streets of single family homes and apartments. It’s shy of a downpour but raining steadily. Our precinct list soon becomes as translucent as a single sheet of phyllo dough. Much of the trailer park is run-down. Some dwellings are surely abandonned with broken windows, crumbling cement steps, particle board filling the gaps in doors. Katherine Hightower cracks open the door to her trailer. She is black with a somewhat flat face, smooth, short hair, parted on the side. She seems self-conscious of her teeth which appear to have been individually twisted out of alignment, but that doesn’t stop her from smiling and conversing. I ask her if she’s voted and she identifies herself as a non-voter because she doesn’t like either candidate. Issue? She says, “Well, as long as you ask me, and you brought it up, not me, it’s the terrorism problem. I think George Bush is standing up to those people.” “But the Iraqi people didn’t attack us. And Bush lied to us.” “Well, that’s the thing. You can’t be too nice. Now, Jimmy Carter was VERY nice. He was too nice, and I think this other one might be like him. So that’s why I’m not going to vote. But if I did, it would be for George Bush.” Back at the polling place, at least five members of the Democratic legal team – mostly law students -- stand outside in the rain. They report that by 11 am, already 21 voters have had to vote provisionally. There are also two to three election protection monitors wearing black vests with white lettering and the words “You have the right to vote. Ask me.” At the end of a very long hallway of the complex, we knock on apt. 63. Dolores answers the door and says she’s already voted. “What about Mary?” I ask. She says her mother could never make it, walking with her cane, through all those hallways back to the community room. I ask, “If we could find a wheelchair, would she go?” Well, yes, she’d do it then. We hope to find one in the director’s office, but they have nothing. In the lounge, a gentleman is using his chair as a footrest. He allow us to borrow it. Back at apartment 63, Mary comes out, in her denim shift, with her cane and puts her black, dressy hat on her head. “Gotta vote for Kerry,” she says. My team heads back to the street, driving the precinct, jumping into leaf-lined puddles, shining our flashlight to make out addresses, revisiting every house that hadn’t voted as of 4 pm. Then we head back to help at the polling place in case a line has developed. A call comes in from headquarters saying that some polling places are running out of ballots and sending people home. “Make sure that doesn’t happen at your poll.” Roger. But ours has no line, claims to have at least 50 ballots left per person remaining on their list, and is still being monitored by the wet and determined legal team. So back to headquarters as the returns begin to come in. They seesaw, and with them our spirits. The networks aren’t jumping to conclusions, at any rate. I find a quiet corner to meditate now and then, trying to guide the hand of those undecideds I’ve met to the west of here where the polls haven’t yet closed. Breathe in the breath of leaves, breathe out caring, hope, honesty, understanding, wholeness. Tie all of these to Kerry. 3 hours sleep and I miss my hosts entirely. Back in the rental car at 4:15 am, the first news in hours and it’s all about Republicans winning big and Tom Daschle having lost his Senate seat, so I assume the worst in the presidendtial race. But hope is reinstated when the 4:30 news comes on. Hope I nurture all the way to San Francisco. As soon as the plane lands, someone’s on their cell phone and the word is out, “Kerry’s conceding.” I make it to a television at an airport bar and hear most of the speech. One woman dabs her eyes. When it’s over, I try to give her a quick hug around the shoulders, but she turns on me. “America does NOT move forward. America’s going backward. Those people are stupid. They don’t read. They don’t know anything.” Then she turns on her son. “I told you you should have gotten more involved.” I ask if they’ve just returned from a swing state or something. She’s instantly defensive. “No, but I’ve been talking to people.” “Oh, I just wondered, because most people I met in Ohio were not stupid or mean. Basically, I believe we all need to talk more with each other.” A fly flickers across a sunlit window. Phyllis H. Meshulam (copyright by the author, 2004) Home - Past Issues - eCards - Classifieds - Blog Spot - Free Subscription - About Us |