I am normally not a travel writer, but I thought I would share some of my work. I was able to raise $590 by crowd-funding to North Carolina this past week to work for the state's democratic party and wrote about my travels.
Post One:
The “organizer”* of our mission, Josh, has mentioned that this is a really unique grassroots movement because a lot of its members weren’t active in politics before Hurricane Trump. In fact, I’m not sure if I can remember much about my political leanings before November of 2016 and, to be entirely honest, I found people who posted about politics on their facebook walls to be irritating. But if the government is extreme enough and tangibly damaging lives, you have to react if you have empathy.
*Full disclosure, I don’t know who is organizing this mission. Josh just sent
me the initial email and when I spoke with him, he denied being the organizer
of anything almost as if it were a criminal liability. He attempted to explain
me the hierarchy of how all this works but it was a snoozefest, so I tuned out,
sorry.
At the same time, it’s another thing to get into. For about a dozen years I
followed the NBA closely but as the players with whom I was most familiar
retired and they kept having so many drafts where people who were younger than
me kept entering the league whereas my ability to jump, dunk, and run got
worse. Kind of depressing. Apparently, the people you’re voting for being
younger than you will pretty much never be a problem in this sport.
In that same sense, I’ve devoted much of my energy in the past four years to
learning the names of the 100 senators and familiarizing myself with where they
stand, because: 1) Let’s be honest, 435 Represenatives is way too many so screw
them and 2) We unfortunately couldn’t do anything about the executive branch
for four years, but congress had the power to keep him in check. I also called,
visited the offices of, and wrote emails to the offices of senators who sucked
at their jobs (and wouldn’t you know it, they were all Republicans).
Fun fact: I was sort of kind of named for one of those 100 senators, Orrin G
Hatch, and I had the pleasure of delivering a hand written letter to his
staffers somewhere in 2017 about how I was ashamed to be named after him when he
absolved filibuster rules to confirm a corrupt Health and Human Services
Secretary Tom Price, who (wouldn’t you know it) resigned in disgrace.
In all honesty, following the NBA and following the Senate isn’t actually that
different. Instead of box scores, you can check voting records or polls or
scores. It’s also interesting to note that there are several Senators like
Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, and Ted Cruz who the average person knows of
because they make the news often, while there are several of them who get by
under the spotlight. Have you heard of a guy named Ron Wyden or Deb Harris? Or
maybe her surname is Fisher? She’s a Republican from Nebraska and I actually
met her through Capitol Hill but I can’t remember.
In 2018, I was a member of the press club and surrounded by a more politically
active group of people and one introduced me to a site called Real Clear
Politics where you can follow the polls day-by-day and I started realizing that
about eight states were in play in the Senate race (we ended up winning Nevada
and Arizona while losing Florida, Texas, Indiana, North Dakota, Missouri, and
Tennessee) and wanted to make a difference there. I originally decided to phone
bank, but looking for creative ways to take vacations, I considered possibly
getting employment in Tennessee or Florida and moving there temporarily. The
getting-paid-to-go plans fell apart and I contemplated travelling to Florida
anyway and staying in a hostel.
Not doing that was a big regret I’ve had over the past two years. And to think Floridian Senator Bill Nelson lost by 10,000 votes to a guy who distanced himself from Trump at the time and claimed bipartisan credentials but voted to deny even hearing evidence at the impeachment trial and has blamed the failure of things to get done in Washington on a leftist obstructionist agenda. Think of how the Supreme Court battle or the impeachment trial or several other issues would have changed in the last two years if we’d had one more Democratic seat in the house.
So I’m going to North Carolina this week. Everything is in play here. A close
senate race, the governorship and more. I don’t have clear instructions of what
I’m doing (I blame the orientation for being so boring) or how much of a
difference I’m making, but it’s an adventure.
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| Darren Keeps His Distance From Us |
Post Two:
If I’m going to attract people to my writings here, it behooves me to paint
myself as a heroic crusader to protect the integrity of the vote, but so far
I've felt pretty unheroic in the first two days.
A party organizer named Gary explained that a lot of the rural districts where
things lean very red is where voter suppression is most likely to happen which
is where I am not.
The main things to look for in voter suppression are lines being too long, rejecting
ballots that shouldn’t be rejected, an unnecessary police presence,
misinformation being given to voters, and intimidation. The “intimidation” call
is a fine line that I’m not sure if I’m trained to make.
I’m not sure if it’s Southern hospitality or a small sample size
but I didn’t seen too much of anything but civility.
On the first day, I encountered an African-American democrat named George and
his white Republican counterpart Darren.
AJ told me that the Republicans lie and something like we’d be screwed if the
Republicans win but he also said that Darren is fine people. I was too tired of
wishing the Republicans dead at this point so I tried to make a peace offering
to Darren by saying that I hope we’d have a more bipartisan country when the
election is over, but he responded that he didn’t trust the other side. At the
same time, he softened over time.
Because I was sitting farther away from the stream of people on the first day,
I was left to hear the conversations of AJ and a security guard who had an hour
break and went to go hang out with us. They talked about how the KKK was nearby
and when I asked if there was a lot of fear of growing up black in this area,
they said well, there is racism, but there’s just a lot of crime around here.
Also, this is 2020 and the blacks have guns now. Touche!
More than anything else, this is an economically depressed town.
Racism is alleviated a fair bit through the military presence I’m told, but the
military can’t fill all the empty storefronts.
Fayetteville doesn’t have a lot of local investment in industry
like the nearby research triangle (Durham-Chapel Hill-Raleigh) so it’s struggling.
It does have the largest military base in the country up the road and everyone
loves the second amendment no matter who you are. This metropolitan area ranks
among the highest in gun ownership. The security guard is on duty (which I’m
presuming grants him a gun already?) and still his own gun in his car while
Mike had eight guns.
A number of people at the polls who were first-time voters were
very celebratory and were taking selfies. A group of four (three adults and one
kid, I’m guessing two of the adults were a couple) came out of the polls asking
a poll worker to take their picture because it was their first time voting.
Wanting to commemorate the occasion is more than I’ve ever done but I can get
that. What I don’t understand is if you have that much excitement about voting,
why didn’t you do it before? Strangely enough, many of these people were older
than 22. I’m not surprised that people aren’t passionate about politics; I’m more
surprised they didn’t step up to the plate when voting itself doesn’t require a lot of effort.
I asked these people a couple questions and the general consensus is that they
didn’t vote before because they didn’t feel as strongly. The missing piece of
information I had is which candidate roused you to action? I didn’t feel
comfortable asking that piece of information (and it might have not been legal,
anyway).
One young woman I spoke with was pretty defiant of her mother
who said “I’ll take the Democratic literature, thank you” while her mom said
“don’t worry her mama’s a Trump supporter.” For some reason, being at the polls
made me number than I would have been in cyberspace to see an enthusiastic
Trump supporter. Maybe knowing the polls favor Biden helps? The daughter said
health care was the biggest factor in her vote.
George’s niece and her family came by and they were talkative (Southern charm?)
with me which was pretty surprising not just because it seemed like an
inappropriate place but because, well, I read as white. To the degree that I’m
scared of white Republicans, I’m also a little weary of engaging in serious
talks with black people with such a climate of micro-aggression policing.
What everyone could agree on was that I was “way out in the
country” but I was within five miles of city limits. Apparently, if it’s a
small North Carolina town, there really isn’t much in the way of suburbs. I
could have run a 10K race to get back to Fayetteville and they treated me like
I was on the movie Cast Away when I told them I had Ubered. At the end of the
night, Darren, my enemy, kept worrying about me and telling me to get an Uber
back.
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| First-time voters taking a selfie |
Post Three:
Today I stopped by the makeshift headquarters and met Ronnie. She is a young,
overworked desk jockey who will give you a free t-shirt and stickers if you’re
nice.
As Trump is saying more and more ridiculous things, I keep getting the
motivation to want to work and beat him, but I had a thought: What happens when
that motivation is gone? If he loses, where do we put our political energy? One
certainty is that as I talk to people here who have a “what has government done
for me lately” attitude, I realize that the solution is to have a public who
knows exactly what government does and doesn’t do, and what it is currently
doing. Then they won’t be willing to toss aside a very real functioning
institution for an abstract vision sold to them by a madman who yells louder
than anyone else.
Today, in my quest to know “what is voter intimidation”, I had to contend with
a Vietnam veteran for Trump named Mike who I didn’t know how to classify. One of
the first things he said was how he wanted to rip up those Biden-Trump signs and had torn down 250 of
them this past week. Exactly what you’re supposed to not be doing! It turns out
that he and his democratic counterpart at this station, AJ, had been here for
almost two weeks together and developed enough of a camaraderie that they could
make jokes like that. I still cautiously sent a note through the reporting system.
If you’re not sure what constitutes voter intimidation, Mike is your worst
nightmare. He also is a bit rough around the edges. He engaged in some “locker
room” talk about the female voters passing by and made an off-color joke about
San Francisco and gay people that was probably 15 years away from being
considered acceptable.
But had an interesting history. Mike was a Vietnam War veteran who illegally
voted four times against Ronald Reagan and is still a registered Democrat. He
enthusiastically voted for Obama because he grew up with mostly black friends,
but he was disappointed with Benghazi. When I pointed out that most prominent
military leaders have broken with Trump, he said that he knew Mattis and John
Kelly (the DHS Chief and Chief of Staff) and they were both not well-respected
(which brings the follow-up: Why did Trump hire them?). At the very least, Mike
could list me some prominent generals he liked.
When I said that maybe it was best to not discuss politics, he
asked if it bothered him that he was smarter than me. I wasn’t really in the
mood for argument and felt the need to try to talk about how I’m for
bipartisanism and talk about stuff I might politically have in common with him.
Eventually, I saw the good in Mike. As a sign of the camaraderie between AJ and
Mike, the latter offered to give the former a lift when the banks closed and asked
me to distribute pamphlets of both parties. In fact, Mike and AJ agreed to
distribute each other’s pamphlets when the other took a break.
I had the feeling that Mike was just an elderly extrovert who really needed to
talk to people for his own health. When I started ignoring him and putting on
headphones, Mike talked harder to me in desperation to have someone to talk to
and asked about bars in DC or if it’s easy to see the monuments in DC. Besides
he knew the rules: He never explicitly campaigned for Trump and engaged both
democrats and Republicans.
On the second night, Gary gave me a ride home and said Mike was
harmless. There had really been one report of a legitimate threat in the 12
polling stations that day so I missed out.
