Angry old ladies, the bum's rush and fish heads

Here I am again, a little later than I meant to be. I’ve been waiting for a burst of inspiration, a gestaldt binding everything together and giving me a handle about how to encapsulate the past ten days.

       Alas, Gestaldt’s R Not Us. Life continues to be a busy jumble of intertwined yet fragmented moments, parts of a whole I can barely sense. There is no routine. I switch, sometimes within minutes, from phoning potential volunteers to entering data, to training people, to doing voter registration on the street, to counting forms or collating packets, to attending a meeting, to answering questions—in short, to doing whatever the moment requires.

       It’s my nature to ask ‘why? What is this for?” 

       But this past week I stopped asking that, and/or looking for the whole picture. The whole is enormous—people like me all over this country, more and more and more of us. (People walk in off the street every day saying, “I want to help.” It makes the heart sing.) The whole picture would show an intricate, brilliant ever-enlarging web of connections so of course I can’t see to its edges or really know it’s shape.

I am one wee part of a huge organism. I am a worker bee, a drone (and I mean that in the nicest way). I don’t understand how the hive works, only my share of it, but I do understand that if I—and the other drones—do our bits, then the hive definitely will work.

       And so I drone on. Happily.

       There are highs and lows along the way. A high for me recently was registering a ‘forgiven’ felon who will now vote for the first time.

       Lots of kids who messed up with drugs or cars or other foolishness decades ago are now disenfranchised middle-aged citizens. So when we register people, we carry information on where felons can check whether they’ve been forgiven (doubtful) and/or how to begin the process towards that. It’s lengthy, and filled with red tape according to “my” felon.

       At first, he waved me off with an “I don’t vote.” His wife stopped him. “You can now! Do it!” And after some hesitation, he took the form, writing, then stopping to talk about the years it had taken him to regain his right to vote. It was an emotional moment and one I’m glad I got to share. We were all beaming when the form was complete.

       (Speaking of felons: last night, I was on a telephone bank and politely asked for a man we’ll  call “Bernie Smith.”

       “Bernie?” a woman’s voice that scalded my ear said. “Bernie  Smith? That @#$% is in Federal prison for fifty years so stop calling him!” 

I don’t think Bernie’s ever going to get his rights back, but I love the little (maybe not so little) stories that even some of these brief contacts suggest.

       Sometimes conversations can be downright silly. Office phones are used for the phone banks. They aren’t personal phones, so they don’t ring—except when one of them did. When I answered, a voice straight out of a horror movie—a low, slow, uninflected growl is the only way I can describe it—said, “Why. Did. You. Call. Me.”

       I said, “You called me. Who is this?”

       He said, “Who. Are. You. Why. Did. You. Call. Me.”

       I told him who we were and tried to explain why he’d been called, but he interrupted.

       “Don’t. Ever. Call. Me. Again.” He had overlong pauses before and in between his growled out words. Creepy, but I was not about to do or say anything that in any way would reflect poorly on Organizing for America or Obama, so I promised we wouldn’t ever call him (and we wouldn’t) if he’d tell me his name. I thought perhaps he was impaired, couldn’t speak normally. Couldn’t think quickly.

       He grumbled again about not being called.

       We went back and forth—don’t call me/tell me who you are so I can remove your name/don’t call me…

       And then I no longer cared if he thought less of me or Obama and I said I was busy and couldn’t talk anymore and I’d have to hang up if he wouldn’t tell me his name.

       And he said “Bah.”

       I waited (for the “Humbug”)  Silence. I asked again.

       He said, “Bah.”

       I said, “Do you think you could tell me your name? Do you need more time to think?”

       By this time, everybody else in the office was watching, amused…

       He said, “Bah.”

       I will spare you how long this went on with the long pause, the question, the next long pause, another few demands that I never call him, and another “Bah.”

       And I finally said: “Please. Maybe you could spell your name for me?”

       I had to ask a few times, and then he said:

“B…….A…..” Nothing more although it took a while for me to realize that.

       Mr. Ba?

       Had I committed an ethnic slur?  Embarrassed an incapacitated man with an unusual name? Had all the “Bah’s” been attempts to answer me? After further prodding, he gave me his first name and hung up on me.

       The odd postscript is that I did try to remove Mr. Ba from the call list, but he didn’t exist. Not with his first and last name reversed, not with initials, not anywhere at all.  I wonder what the whole long call was about. Somebody furious about being called, but so paranoid and angry he wouldn’t tell me the very name he wanted removed?

Mr. Whoever. He. Was will undoubtedly be called again. The difference will be that this time, I’m not answering if that call phone rings.

       Less trivial or funny has been the bum’s rush that we’ve received at almost all corporate owned retail sites. We aren’t inside the store or blocking access to anybody’s building—we’re out near the parking lot, standing and greeting people with the question, “Is your voter registration up to date?” That’s all. And of course we register anybody and everybody.

       But way too often, an embarrassed looking store manager comes out to say that alas, Corporate won’t allow “soliciting.” Ah, we say, we aren’t. We’re doing a civic service. The law says so.

       It doesn’t matter. “Corporate” in its far-away office, says no. And the process of requesting and getting permission from Corporate takes forever. “If we let you do this,” one manager told me, “we’d have to let everybody else do the same. Why,” he added, ”if somebody had a petition to burn the Holy Cross, we’d have to let them do it.”

       Did he not have High School English? Did he pass his S.A.T.’s? Where is the analogy there? We’re simply trying to enable people to vote…

       Of course, we are trying to get the people who were shut out by voter suppression rules to vote. Republicans are not out on the streets registering people. This is more suppression, this time orchestrated by remote corporations, and it infuriates me because we have no support of our rights from the state. How could there be? Four weeks before the election, the governor here is trying new ways to purge the polls.

       It upsets me to read newspapers calmly report how Obama is ahead in the polls, but of course, he might lose because of voter suppression rules in so many states.

       A sentence like that should not be calmly stated. This is a democracy. A sentence like that should be a screaming, outraged headline. We should be protesting, loudly, constantly that this is the antithesis of who we are and should be.

       In lieu of that, I’ve been busy, happy, exhausted—and angry about the malevolent shenanigans designed to warp our democracy completely out of shape. However, taken all together, it’s given me a new personal creed:

Nothing on earth can stop an angry old lady.

 Here I am: angry, old and unstoppable…

       And finally—time out, a trip to nearby Tarpon Springs with a fellow Fellow. (These masculine labels confuse me. I’m a Fellow who will be manning an office tomorrow. That’s just wrong, but what’s the female version?)

       Bet you didn’t know that Tarpon Springs was once the sponge capital of the world. Neither did I. Time, sponge plagues and plastic have reduced its prominence but it’s still a place where the men who harvest sponges live. We watched an interesting film about the hard life of a sponge diver, and it included one thing I can’t seem to forget.

       The diver needs to eat during his long periods out at sea, and sponges aren’t gourmet fare, so he spear-fishes. The film showed him preparing his catch (or if speared, is it his impaled?) for dinner. “I get this part,” he said, lifting the head. “I have to eat the head because I looked him in the eye and I killed him.”

       I’m not sure I understand it, but it nonetheless haunts me. Is there something about Romney in it? Obama? Angry old women? Life?

And now, back to work.

Thirty-nine days to go!

(p.s. immediately after writing this, I received news that the administration here is being sued for reneging on their earlier agreement to stop these shenanigans. Good for that immediate reaction—bad that it has come to this.)

        

Yellow Speedo Man

Wednesday, September 19: 

This week men of several varieties fill my memory, but of them, The Yellow Speedo Man figures, er, prominently.

To back up: we’ve got only till October 9^th here in Florida to register or re-register voters, and as everybody probably knows, the entire process was  dramatically slowed this summer by legislation that made it nearly impossible to meet the state’s requirements.

Those impediments, like those in other states were designed by the GOP to keep Democrats away from the polls. Now, most of them have been lifted, but obviously, we’ve got to work double-time to catch up.

So voter registration is occupying my time—doing it, scheduling it, finding places to do it (which is humorous given my total ignorance of this area. I sit with maps and map-books, and google every address…argh!) and finding people to fill those slots.

A week ago, another ‘fellow’ and I went out to an apartment complex. There we were, two gray-haired women with clipboards, knocking on doors and asking people if their registration was up to date. We are non-partisan, registering anybody and everybody (though of course hoping…) It was hot and muggy (or does that go without saying?) providing a sort of steam-room stair-master exercise session as we knocked doors upstairs and down.

Everybody with whom we spoke was polite, and many, as always, thanked us for doing this. And then a man in a yellow Speedo bathing suit appeared on the sidewalk, not far from us and proceeded to bellow: ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU’RE SOLICITING! YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SOLICIT!”

We gray-haired dangerous ladies reminded him we were not soliciting, not selling anything, that what we were doing was legal, a civic--

There he stood, in that horrid bathing suit, shouting: “YOU’RE INVADING MY @#$!!!! PRIVACY!”

       It is my personal conviction that a man in a yellow speedo is not one to talk about invading anybody’s privacy. What about mine? His speedo most assuredly provided T.M.I. and I wished I could say so…

Instead, we decided to ignore him and continue on, but then he turned and truly threatened us and we left the place laughing about the twerp and his “privacy.”

Whenever I encounter somebody who is rude about voter registration attempts (and I should say it’s rare, but it happes), I know they are part of the populace who wanted those restrictions to stay in place, so no wonder they’re perpetually angry.

The opposite sort of man who figured in my life this week was President Obama, who took time out, in a day when the tragedy in Libya dominated the news and his attention, to do a low-key closed video computer conversation with the Organizing for America fellows to say thanks for the work. He talked about listening to people, hearing what they are trying to say. The man is a mensch.

Things continue to spin and chug and any other energy-laden word you can think of. I have had moments this past week when I am living the nightmare where you’re given a final to take and you realize you never took the course!

So I often feel a little like a hamster must on his wheel—except that I know there’s a goal in sight and that whir is the sound of moving toward it. Every day the sign changes in the office, how many days left to the  election. I don’t know what analogy to use to convey the sense of urgency—a tied championship game with the clock ticking down those last few seconds? 

I am, however, repeatedly struck by how didfferent this campaign’s operation feels from the other side’s. Ours is completely about people, the incredible numbers (growing) of volunteers reaching out to still more individuals, registering them one by one, talking with them one by one (and listening!) The other side’s impersonal tsunami of money drowns all of us with ads. Robots who can’t listen, can’t understand what the person on the other side wants or worries about, make their phone calls. Humans make ours. And we listen to the person on the other end. To me, it’s the difference in the two sides’ political philosophy reduced to a micro-scale.

I continue to be geographically challenged. I feel elation when I realize I actually know where a street is, but more often, I am crossing four lanes of traffic to get to where I can make a U-turn into the other direction. (Who designed these streets? Who requires U-turns on 6-lane divided roads if you actually missed your target? And why aren’t addresses on these interminable long, long “blocks”? To whom may I complain???)

And speaking of geography: Paul Ryan was here this week. (I assume yellow speedo was in the audience.) He spoke to his crowd about how all-important Pinellas County is—and the I-4 Corridor (I must look that up on my map collection. I have no idea what it is—another of those damnable U-turn highways?)--except that it’s vital to taking the state. He’s right. It is all-important—and his words got me  fired up to work even harder. That I-4 Corridor, whatever it is, is ours, dude!

I am constantly amazed by this new life. Could there be more of a change from a silent, contemplative writing life? I thought writing deadlines were tough—these daily clock-ticking, time-eroding deadlines put the leisurely publishing deadlines to shame. But after 17 straight days of work, I yearned for a break and Monday, for the first real time since I got here, I took the day off, and aside from the joys of doing laundry, I went for a walk on the beach with the lovely lady with whom I’m staying. Beach! Florida! Not the I-4 corridor or the tense polling or the nail-biting worry about who will vote how. Florida! White powdery sand and for once—blue, blue sky and no storm. (Of course, it is raining as I write this, but Monday was beautiful.) A lovely time to clear the mind.

It almost makes the mosquito bites I’m now scratching worthwhile.

And now…back to work. 48 days to go.

Several Elevens

Tuesday, September 11, 2012:   

      

       I’m taking a little time off to remember that tragic 11^th  eleven years ago, but also the infinitely happier whir of the past eleven days here in Florida..

Had I not just counted it out mentally, I’d have said I’ve been here for several months—and yet, time is flying. The days are so packed, tumbling one atop the other that I find myself wondering “when was that?” so much has happened since then--and realizing that whatever it was happened the day before.

Proof of the crammed days is that I find myself saying something I never in this life thought I’d utter: I don’t have time to read! I find it incredible, but painfully true. I am reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins—a delicious contrast to the busyness of the days, but I manage about a page—not even a single % forward                                          on my Kindle—before I fall asleep.

So far, I’ve done a variety of things from voter registration to phone banking to emptying trash cans to trying to remember when meals were a regular event to delivering completed voter registration forms to the courthouse in Clearwater (where I saw one of the more exotic and chilling sights of the week: a bus owned by the Scientologists--they own much of downtown Clearwater-- disgorging several dozen young men, all dressed precisely alike, all built the same way, all with the same haircuts, all with beepers and no expression moving resolutely toward I don’t know what. Truly scary. It’s one thing to see Tom Cruise jump on a sofa and quite another to see this small army of zombies) to going to a ‘watch party’ during the DNC (and wasn’t that splendid?) to handing out water bottles for four hours so that nobody fainted while President Obama spoke to a crowd of 11,000 this past Saturday. (I have also obviously learned to write exhaustingly long sentences.)

The president’s visit was, of course, the highlight, even though I only actually saw him through the crowd for a nanosecond.

Before the event, I went down to the site twice to help distribute the tickets, which were free. (They were being given out at other sites in the county as well.) When two of us arrived an hour before we’d begin the distribution, we were greeted by tv camera trucks and an enormous line that snaked around the campus, around a building and all of this in 90 degree heat.

No one complained. Not one person who finally reached us uttered a grumpy word. They clutched their tickets and thanked us. 

Parents brought young children who glowed when they were told they’d see the President. People whose accents suggested the long road they’d taken to get to this country and day felt the need to explain to me—passionately—why Mr. Obama had to be re-elected. The only sadness was when we repeated the distribution the next morning with the remaining tickets from the entire county and ran out before we ran out of people.

The event was a happy one even though I had to get up at 4 a.m. for it. People started camping out on the sidewalk at 2 a.m. so that they’d get to stand close up (seats on the field only for the disabled) People without tickets were also lined up by 5 a.m. just to see the motorcade. We’d been trained the night before, so I was pretty expert with those water bottles (Oh, the skills I'm learning and the glamor of this Fellowship!) when the ticket holders began to be admitted around 8 a.m.

We waited for the predicted major thunderstorms and happily, they didn’t happen. It was 90 degrees or more, but everybody waited without incident for hours while more and more people poured in. There were spontaneous cheers of “four more years!” And “All fired up!” and a general good feeling. (And lots of water—did I mention water?)

It’s hard to describe the buoyancy, the excitement, the delight on faces even after they’d endured the long, long lines and security checks. This is how much it mattered to people: I saw several seeing-eye dogs guiding their owners, people in wheelchairs, people with ALS, people with oxygen tanks and walkers and even one man brought in on a gurney. The passion to hear and be near the president—and to be near people who shared that passion--was overwhelming.

I haven’t yet managed a day off, have become  expert at the water bottle thing, entering data, and learning how to get around a little more successfully (but I am still eternally grateful for the car’s GPS.) I continue to be impressed with the organizational savvy of the Obama team and most of all, with the dedication and yes, I need to use the word passion again, of the Obama people, on the team or not.  Yesterday, for example, I was “manning” (why isn’t there a female term for this?) the office as new volunteers signed on, and a woman appeared laden down with snack foods and banana breads she’d baked. “Enjoy,” she said, and she waved and left. I’d heard about the office “Food Fairy” and yesterday, I guess I glimpsed her. And an hour or so later, a woman from Oregon appeared. She'd been driving through Florida on business, and had stopped at an Organizing for America office and noticed that people were searching for non-existent rubber bands. She tried to give them a donation for office supplies, and when informed that wasn’t allowed, she began visiting offices and buying items on their wish list. For us, a much-needed case of manila envelopes and two dozen clipboards (used for voter registration.) She wrote down the addresses of more offices and off went the office-supply angel.

Of course I’ve spoken with cranks and grouches (but not many at all.) From volunteering whatever time they have, to baking treats, to providing manila envelopes, people are amazing, although I can only speak for those with the same value system as the president.

       Eleven years ago, so much human malevolence, suffering and pain. It's good on my eleventh day here, to reflect on how good people and their ideals can be. (And a little pity on the side for those robotic men that I saw...when was it?So much has happened since--ah yes,  it was yesterday.)

 September 3^rd—happy Labor Day!

       The story so far…        

A day or two before I left for Florida, I was in the car with my fine husband telling me about a friend who, upon hearing about what I was about to do, passed along a bucketful of excited compliments.

       This was not a unique response. I’d been feted and gifted and praised way beyond what I thought was deserved. (That includes the heartwarming, very moving, comments so many people wrote after the first blog. Thank you all, but really…read on)And so I said, “I’m not going to Botswana or Darfur or Afghanistan. I didn’t join Doctors Without Borders. I’m going to Florida, to a nice house, to work for President Obama. People are overreacting.”

       And my fine husband said, “Don’t you understand why everybody’s so excited that you’re doing this? It’s because you’re so old!”

       What is there to say about that? I’ll stick with my initial stunned silence for fear he might be right.

A second interesting moment happened at five a.m. this past Friday morning, again with my fine husband at the wheel and Sunny-the-dog in the back seat, all of us driving in the dark to the San Francisco Airport. That’s when I had “that moment.”

Months after hearing about this, talking about this, thinking about this, applying to do this, saying I would maybe do this, then saying I would indeed do it—I was en route to the airport which meant: I was actually doing this and what on earth had I been thinking?

       I felt trapped in a moralistic children’s tale: I’d shot off my mouth—and why? Because it sounded so good? Was it all about telling a good story? Worse, I’d told it for so long and to so many people that now I had no options. There was no turning back.

 There’s a saying by Thornton Wilder that I’ve loved for a long time, perhaps because until now, it was theoretical, academic. It says, “The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

       So there I was, definitely in the “I have got myself into an awful mess” phase and yearning to put the car in reverse and go home.

       But since I couldn’t, (the humiliation! the shame!) here I am, in Pinellas County, Florida, living with a lovely couple and two cute dogs, exhausted and exhilarated.

Friday evening my fantastic sister-in-law and brother-in-law who live in Orlando, met me at the Tampa Airport, and after we went out to dinner, they gave me one of their cars to use the entire ten weeks I’m here, an incredible gift. But beyond that, unless they, too, decide to chuck everything familiar and leap into the unknown, I’m sure they will never understand what it felt like to see a friendly face after my pre-dawn shakes.

       And conquering one of my biggest fears—getting lost in a strange city at night—I made my way with only a few lamentable mistakes, like driving on the wrong side of a road once…Not entirely my fault. The GPS insists on saying “make a slight right” when it means: turn right. Is there a way to help the GPS express itself with more precision? Anyway, I reached Palm Harbor near ten p.m. with enough time to say hello, unpack and pass out—and then wake up early to go to nine hours of training back in Tampa.

       There were several counties’ worth of new fellows of all ages, skin colors, sexual orientation, physical wellness and disability, and all passionate about re-electing the President. It is so thrilling to feel oneself suddenly become part of that kind of community that all my fears of falling asleep during the sessions were forgotten.We each had to briefly tell what had brought us there. There were tales of medical disasters and lives being saved by Affordable Care. There were students managing to go to college on Pell grants. A lesbian professor, now “under employed” married to her partner in California but unable to share her health insurance here…There were people who came from Massachusetts to make sure they never again had Romney as their leader. One of my favorite moments was from an extroverted, high-energy black man who said in a rich boom: “I’m here because Romney boils my grits!”

       The Field Organizers and staff were incredibly organized and moved through those many hours with speed and precision talking about goals and how to achieve them and techniques and information and, and, and… I hate talking about “energy” but you could have run New York for days on what they projected. Energy and urgency (as in the countdown to election day) and smarts and I realized I was intensely glad that I was a part of something this important. I’m one small pebble in an enormous mosaic, but it’s great being a piece of the picture.

       It appears that Florida is even more important than the label “swing state” implies. This state could guarantee a win and furthermore, my county, which is “purple” is intensely important to that win. (It is possible that the staff said something akin to that in every training session in every county in the U.S. yesterday, but all I can say is—my trainers convinced me that I am in the very heart of the heart of this election battle.)

       The Democrats in this part of Florida, but they apparently keep a low profile. A person who was registering new voters remarked that the Republicans said their party affiliation. Democrats whispered it.

       My hostess suggested that I remove the Obama-Biden sticker from my sister-in-law’s car lest the car be keyed or worse . She also mentioned the possibility of my being shot. Her husband seemed to think that was extreme. I have removed the sticker.

       Right now, I’m home from getting trained and certified to do voter registration, and tomorrow, (Labor Day is not a holiday for them) I’m going into the office to meet my Field Organizer and plan out the week. So far, he’s only said that I’m going to work hard. I have no idea what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be doing it, but I’m looking forward to it, even if I am so old!

      

One more thing: In full disclosure I should disclose (fully) that all the new volunteer fellows signed non-disclosure agreements, and I understand completely. Not that I’ll know strategy or inside gossip but—if I do, I’m not sharing it till after the election. Be forwarned--the  adventures of a Very Old Organizer and Confused Driver may well become—or already be--the world’s most boring blog.

       Meantime, three days into this adventure, I  miss my loves but am glad I’m not sitting home, wishing I were doing something—and I’ll sign off the way my young Field Organizer does each time,

       Fired Up!  -- Judy  

p.s. I'm sorry the font is so huge and it might sound as if I'm shouting. I don't know how to fix it--blogging is as new and semi-terrifying as any other part of this adventure! But next time, smaller font, I promise.