Thoughts on elections: part one
When I was 24 years old, a few months before I got married in a courthouse in Norwalk, CA, I was working my first post-grad school job as a grant writer for a nonprofit that runs programs for victims of violence. I was spending my days navigating the professional world - if I skipped the lunch hour, could I leave early? How did the printer work? Why couldn’t I disagree publicly with my boss? - and the world of big, contract-y type grants from government agencies and huge institutions like Robin Hood and UBS. My bosses boss, a single woman in her 60s, peeled her cuticles from stress and I thought - this all seems way harder than it needs to be.
The truth was I didn’t care much about it. I cared about the programs and the clients we were serving but my heart was elsewhere. Part of it was in England, where my soon to be husband was waiting to come here on a road trip so we could get married and begin the long process of being together in America. But another part of it was with Barack Obama, electrifying the primary campaign trail against Hillary Clinton.
I can never remember a moment of deciding whether I was progressive. I was raised by a single mom in Alabama who ran her own business and took me to Clinton rallies in the 90s, and wore a short leather mini skirt to see Tina Turner with her friends, in a limo that picked them up at my house, in front of which they all stood with their plastic glasses of champagne, giggling, as I took a picture of them barefoot in my pajamas with my babysitter smiling next to me. Before I knew it there were Pro Choice and Start A Revolution stickers on my yellow Beetle, which was routinely vandalized, and was I labeled the bra burning feminist by everyone in my high school. The only natural college choice for a radical such as I was in the “hippy dippy” state of California.
And even though USC was far from some bohemian utopia, I found my people, and voted for the first time there for John Kerry, a man I was genuinely inspired by. A man we all assumed would sail into the White House after four years of the misery that Bush had wrought.
The night Kerry lost I sat on the floor of my roommates’ bedroom, stunned, drunk, but almost giddy with the drama of it, surrounded by our close friends, wondering what happens now. Should we go to the Fox News building on Sunset and protest? Throw rocks in windows? Clearly this was stolen, clearly this cannot be.
The election of Barack Obama was not the first one I knew about or cared about. Politics was deep in me as an innate capacity, like singing or the ability to run fast might be to someone else. I was born into a body wired to care about elections. And yet this one mattered on a level I hadn’t even known was possible.
So back to that 24 year grant writer who hates her job, who is now throwing up in the carrot colored bathroom stall across the hall from her cubicle. Its the day after “Super Tuesday” and its clear that the primary contest between Hillary and Obama wasn’t over yet. I was, to be fair, probably hungover. But after puking up all that anxiety and gin I had consumed the night before, I walked back to my desk and knew that to continue working at this job when what I felt was the most consequential moment of American history was laying itself at my feet, would be to squander what I one day would know to be my one wild and precious life.
It was like being drafted, and I went willingly.
I found an Obama MeetUp online and went to a basement gathering and met a girl who would become a dear and lifelong friend who told me about the Obama for America Tri State finance office, since I was technically in fundraising as a grant writer right?, and I emailed them and said how can I help? And my mom and step father, who had been following my interest in Obama since his speech at the 2004 DNC, offered to help cover whatever money I’d lose by quitting this job to go be part of this campaign.
And so armed with that privilege, for the next six months I sat in an office with some of the greatest leaders of the Democratic party and I called donors, asking them to max out, helping plan and run events where Obama or one of his surrogates would be attending. We had two big TVs in the office programmed to different cable news shows. We lived and breathed every up and down, every twist and turn. We were in the trenches and we were together, and if anyone had bloody cuticles it was for a damn good reason.
In the final stretch of the 2008 election I was sent to West Philly where I lived in supporter housing for weeks and did what we now call “deep canvassing.” Embedding ourselves in the community, we got to know every 2nd grader and every grandmother, the drama of every stray cat and bad landlord.
We went door to door and when we were too tired to walk we phone banked from printed out sheets of paper, dialing every single number on a phone ourselves. (Modern users of today’s technology like HubDialer and Hustle - can you imagine!?). We stayed up past midnight every night creating turf packets for the next day’s canvassers. We ate Dunkin Donuts and pizza and the hearty home cooked meals our neighbors would supply us with. We didn’t have time to drink or party or go see a single site in Philly, but the eight or so of us who spent 20 hours a day in that little field office developed a bond that only can be forged in the trenches.
When Wolf Blitzer announced that Obama would be the next President, people in the church basement we were watching the returns in fell to their knees. People screamed and sobbed and thanked god. People held each other, holding up the weight of another person’s body, limp with relief and joy. After the first shock of tears which lasted for at least 15 minutes, someone turned the music up and the place became technicolor with dance and laughter - dance through tears, laughter through tears. We ran into the streets screaming, horns honking, people hanging out of their windows.
And in that moment, it was all for us. It was by us. We didn’t need to claim it, we needed no recognition, we wanted everyone we saw to participate in the ecstasy along with us - but we knew had made this collective soul rocking euphoria possible.
That night around a bonfire we made in the bottom of an empty pool in the back of a community center, one of my fellow field organizers turned to me and said “Should we have sex?” There had never been any chemistry between us, not a hint of flirting, not even the omnipresent push and pull felt between straight people of opposite sexes. There had been nothing over the past few weeks other than the head down focus of people living in the barracks, surviving. But now this war was over and we were free, and it was such a legitimate and logical question. We can do anything we want now, we can cry we can dance we can even fuck. Me telling him that we wouldn’t have sex didn’t change the fact that we could, that we made it out alive.
Eight years later, when it was clear that Trump would win, after people slumped out of our Red Hook apartment where my 2 year old son was sleeping and into whatever the next phase of this nightmare would bring, a friend who had watched the returns with us texted me, “maybe this will foment the liberal revolution.”
That next day after a few minutes of disjointed, agonizing sleep, I moved from one activity to the next, numb from grief as if I had just received a call about the shocking death of a dear loved one. In the back of a cab on the way to meet a donor for the nonprofit I was working for at the time who was, thankfully, a die hard Hillary supporter, I watched Kaine and Clinton give their concession speeches on my phone and howled with sorrow. The driver reached back silently and handed me a tissue.
In 2018 when I was 35 weeks pregnant with my second son, after months of anguish about family separations at the border and hosting dozens of phone banks for Beto and wondering how this psychic stress would affect my unborn baby, I drove down to Andy Kim’s district to go canvassing by myself on Election Day in the blanketing rain. We didn’t know for a week whether he had won because the election was so close. But he did. He won.
Then there was that sunny Saturday in 2020 when the networks finally announced what we had known for days but was agonizingly just out of our reach - Biden would be our President. And the streets erupted in the joy that had no parallel.
I needed to be reminded of all of this to think about my thoughts on elections.
Elections represent the full extent of the capacity for human emotions. The birth of my children was ecstatic but no one dropped confetti on me. I have had some epic parties celebrating my marriage to Chris that did actually involve things falling from the ceiling, but still, when we stepped outside of that venue no one was hanging out of their apartment windows, waving flags and cheering.
My whole life I’ve been called the drama queen. Told my only path was to be a soap opera star. Teased for how easily I cry, how deeply I feel. We all have a refrain sung by the chorus in the Greek tragedy of our minds and mine is: “Stop being so sensitive.”
So maybe politics wasn’t baked into me, but this desire for feeling was. And every two years I get to do it all fully, and no one can blame me or criticize me or roll their eyes at me because how can anyone deny how high the stakes are?
At a relatively young age I found the thing that let me be who I really was. Someone who cared.
We are one week out from an election that will have more direct consequences for the lives of my children than any other election I’ve been a part of before. If Democrats lose control of the House and or the Senate, there will be no more baby gate preventing us from toppling down the stairs. It will give the fascists attempting to take over our government the crossing guard wave to come on ahead.
You think I’m dramatic? In this case I wish I was. I so painfully wish I was.
When you do something to influence an election, whether its quitting your job to work full time for a campaign or phone banking once or canvassing every weekend, the celebrations and the mourning at the end are for you.
I don’t mean that people who haven’t volunteered or cared up until that point don’t get to participate in the impromptu parade on Maplewood Avenue, or a tearful hug on the street with a stranger on November 9th 2016. I mean that no matter how much you try to welcome them into that moment it will never be theirs in the same way its yours.
If the Steelers (?) won a football game (?) and were celebrating in the streets, I could absolutely go out there and say WHOOOHOOOO!!! and get champagne (beer?) sprayed on me. No one would roll their eyes or kick me out. But that celebration isn’t for me, and there’s no amount of whoohooos I could shout to make it different. It’s not anything someone could else bestow upon me, its just that I am not even sure which city the Steelers are from, and I couldn’t name a single player if my child’s life depended on it, and I have never watched a game. So even though I love a street party, and am invited to participate, this glory isn’t mine.
But unlike the outcome of the Steelers game, the win or the loss of an election is yours, and your parents’ and your children’s and every human’s you’ve ever met, because it has more impact on our collective lives than any other moment we live through. Those of us who turn our careers over to politics, phone bank during the kids’ dinner time, canvass in between birthday parties, do it not in spite of other people’s ignorance or disdain or apathy about politics, we do it because of it. We know that not everyone knows their life depends on it. So we’ll fight harder than any one person should have to fight, we’ll care so much that we break ourselves, because this desire for change wasn’t born into you the way it was for us, or it was but you never had the privilege to ignite it, or because it feels too much and you are willfully creating distance from the drama rather than running towards it.
And let’s ⚠️ be real ⚠️, its not all parades and tearful hugs. Its getting a 105 degree fever after Obama’s election and sleeping for 48 hours straight. It’s sobbing at a hotel receptionist days before the election because daylight savings time is tomorrow and you don’t know if that means you get more sleep or less. “Just tell me,” you beg. “Is this the good one or the bad one?”
It’s time away from your family and your kids. It’s feeling resentful of your friends. It’s tension headaches and exhaustion and eating too much fast food. Its getting shingles, like I did a week ago, and then a sore throat that you think is Covid, like I did last night, and getting in a fight with your husband, like I did an hour ago, because you’re hosting a Zoom pep rally to give people one last boost of motivation before the final week. “You have to take care of yourself,” he says. And it’s feeling like you’d rather be hospitalized than not show up for that final call.
I don’t want to run for office. I can’t think of anything worse than being in that ring, so beaten and bloody. But I don’t want to be in the audience either. I want to be the one who takes out the boxers’ mouth guard, mops her face of blood and sweat, grabs her face by both hands and says “You got one more punch in you. Don’t stop now.”
Who’s the boxer? my therapist asks when we talk about this.
At first I think about the candidates themselves. I think about Fetterman, who sure as hell has been in the ring for a round or two. I think about my friend running in a hideously contentious local Board of Ed race. But then I think about all of the thousands and thousands of people who take the clipboards and go out for one more shift. Who stay courteous and respectful on the phone even when they’re being yelled at. Who bake us the lasagna and wash dishes at the field office while we’re making those turf packets. Maybe its not the candidates in the ring, maybe its the people who are brave enough to knock on someone’s door unarmored, to have an honest, face to face conversation about what’s at stake when we vote. I was born to cheer those folks on.
The election will be over in a week and only the goddesses know what comes next.
But whatever happens I’ll be there, in the place where the grandest and most universally human of all of our emotions, the most collective of all our yearnings and the darkest of our all fears, can emerge and be held without judgement, without wide eyed shock. Fall to your knees, sob to a stranger, have sex just because you can. No reaction is off limits.
I don’t do this because I’m selfless. I do it because I’m selfish.
I want permission to access the one thing I was told I had too much of. The thing I was taught to fear. Emotions. Feeling. The swell of the music as the credits roll.
If you haven’t ever before seen confetti fall and looked up and thought “this is for me,” I hope that the first time you do, its because you’ve changed the course of human history. If you haven’t ever before cried in the arms of strangers, I hope that when you do its because at least you tried.
Those are feelings that no one can shame, no one can touch, no one can take.
All it takes is throwing a punch. And I’m here on the ropes, your face in my hands, saying - look me in the eyes. You got one more punch in you.
Grateful for these words!
I’ve missed you! There’s nobody better to urge the fighter on and wipe her blood, sweat and tears.
Thanks for your commitment and energy.