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I have spent the last few days making calls to potential supporters of Sen. Obama, while waiting for the pasta to boil, while asking that the music be turned down and that the dinner table be set. And at every opportunity I have taken time--15 minutes here, 30 minutes there--to make phone calls to potential voters in Texas and Ohio. I know every nuance and every aspect of Sen. Obama's stance, policies, and approaches. I spent my lunch break today making calls--I got through to an octogenarian who called me a traitor to my gender (I kept quiet and listened) and then I got through to someone who wanted to vote for Clinton because she felt that she MUST vote for a woman. Any woman. I think I managed to persuade her to at least consider Sen. Obama. But what stands out about my conversations are, well, the conversations. During our discussions about politics, we talked about family, our worries, the fact that post offices really should stay open after 5:00pm (at least in my state).
My point? When I come into the letters section of this site or, really, the letters/comments sections in all news sites, I hear dismally and depressing reductive and offensively narrow-minded dehumanization of us--Obama supporters or Clinton supporters. The comments are -- for the most part -- so unbelievably disconnected from my experience and from that who have been volunteering for several exhausting months, I sometimes cannot help but wonder if the posters here are computer generated AI robots (mostly malfunctioning ones).
Frankly, the pure viciousness of some of the arguments is precisely what fundamentally makes these "democratic" elections rather farcical and surreal. Today, right now as I write this, fleets of U.S. battle ships are sailing towards Lebanon; all signs are pointing towards a pre-emptive strike against Iran before Bush leaves office; Gazans are suffering collective punishment of starvation...with some doctor recommended doses of heavy air strikes. At home, I watch my house value plummet, my health bills spiral out of control, and I listen to my vet insist that one of my cat's tooth be pulled, immediately.
So tonight, for some reason, I feel weighed down by these comments here because they exemplify the cavernous divide between pundits and us and then those other us.
The polls about and the commentaries on the elections are no better. They are just as reductive, dehumanizing, and often can only elicit outright WTF?, as in the cases of articles like the "The Dude Vote" opinion piece.
Tomorrow morning I will make breakfast for my family, clean the litter box, probably have some arguments about who left the pot roast on the counter overnight, go to work, and then use every free second I can find and call a potential Obama supporter in the hopes of getting him or her to consider voting for him. I do this not because I need a cult to join (my family is all the cult I can handle). I do this not because I am caught up in a fairy tale (thinking I can get my cat into his pet carrier is all the fairy tale I can invest in).
The point of my post here, which may not even be relevant at all, is that those of us who are volunteering for the campaigns are not some alien species, suddenly surfacing from the deep bottom of the Antarctic waters (along with those cool giant water spiders--how freaking awesome are those? Really.) We are just every day people. We bleed red blood when cut (while chopping onions) and not toxic green sludge. We sit around the dinner table and talk about what happened at work, in school, and in the news.
My request (for those of you who are still awake after getting this far): Please, take a few minutes before you hit the "publish my letter" button and think about what you did today for the political process that gives you the right to categorically denounce or reject or to denounce and reject us and our candidates of choice. What and who do these generalized and sweeping vitriolic statements serve?
Maybe I am exhausted tonight, but I feel sad, and have been feeling sad, not at the media coverage (I expect it to be sound-bite driven drivel--yeah, I am including you, Joan Walsh), but at the enmity and abusive responses from people I thought I would find strength from.
For now, I am thinking cat = into pet carrier. And also about whether or not I should heed my own advice and not hit "publish letter" for a post that has, against my best intentions, ended up being just plain drivel.
