Four years ago, I was knocking on doors, asking for strangers to give me money, one after another. When I began that work, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I’d just quit the worst job I’d ever had which involved working for an emotionally abusive woman, managing her office, doing her books, listening to her tell me about how she was going to take the rest of the year off while purposefully keeping me at part-time so that she wouldn’t have to pay for my health insurance. When I quit, I decided to take a job canvassing for the DNC and within two days felt like I had reached a new low. Knocking on doors. Asking for money.
It’s not for everyone. My second day I remember walking through a neighborhood in Marin, at dusk. I had about a hundred dollars and about an hour and a half to go. Darkness doesn’t make it easier. I sat down on the curb and I started to cry. You have three days to make staff. Meaning, you have to bring in a certain amount of money or they won’t hire you. Many people give up. A lot just don’t make it. It wasn’t volunteering, and I was broke. My field organizer picked me up that night and I went back to the office and then home and thought about going in the next day and telling them that it wasn’t for me. Knocking on doors, asking for money from strangers in strange neighborhoods isn’t a real job anyway. It’s for people that have nothing else. It was pathetic and beneath me and it didn’t matter if I couldn’t do it.
I gave up a lot as a kid. On sports. On people. I learned early on that you can’t trust anyone and that when you do, you get hurt. The world punishes optimistic people because they forget that mountains don’t debate whether or not it’s right to slide apart and crush sleeping families beneath them. Oceans don’t feel bad for the people in their path. You can hope for the best all you want. A torn, live, electrical line will kill you. And it won’t spend years in therapy wondering why. It won’t stand trial. It won’t ever apologize.
I went out my third night with Holly, Noah, Charmagne, and Rosie. I desperately didn’t want to go back to Marin and when we got our assignments I was given Kent. Kent is one of the richest neighborhoods in Marin and I would be walking around in the dark knocking on the doors of mansions pretending not to be desperate. I came back to the car that night with a little more than three hundred dollars. I’d made staff. In three weeks time, I went from working sixteen hours a week to working sixteen hours a day. It was one of the most exciting times of my life.
We ended up breaking a million dollars on that campaign. Knocking on doors. And we lost that election. I don’t think any of us really thought it was possible. We were young and pissed and excited. We were in it for the fight. We were in it for the ego. We were in it for my friend John, 6’6″, an ex-marine, who stood in a room full of strangers, crying, telling us his friends in Iraq were counting on him to help get them out of there. We were in it for each other. But mostly, I think we were in it for the cause. For the late nights struggling on little sleep and sitting on the floor of a defunct office in the middle of the Tenderloin organizing tens of thousands of dollars for which we’d bartered our self-image and the mornings that followed quickly on their heels. We were part of something bigger, that extended beyond each of us as individuals. It was addicting to give up our comforts for what we believed was the greater good.
I remember smoking a cigarette. The church bell in the distance. The sharp, fall air falling into winter wind. The polls had just closed. I was in Milwaukee with people I’d known only a few days and for whom I felt a kind of camaraderie that I had only known in my closest relationships. That was the first time I realized how important it is to love people you don’t know. That we’re all in this together. Those of us that agree. Those of us that disagree. We went to a bar to watch the numbers come back. The exit polls looked better than good. We were also winning the state of Wisconsin and that’s what I was there to help make happen. After a few drinks we weren’t cheering anymore. Watching that election slip away in the way that it did was one of the most heartbreaking nights of my life. It was having to say goodbye to my grandparents at ten in Pennsylvania, whom helped raise me, and a year later driving down the road, away from our home in Maryland, knowing that I wouldn’t see those people again, either. It was having to negotiate my parent’s divorce. Hayley and I took a cab back to our host-family’s house. Neither of us said a word. Our people we’d sent to Madison were there and when we walked through the door everyone looked at me like I’d been wounded, like it was something that had happened to me and not all of us. I didn’t say anything. I walked downstairs. I took a shower. And I went to bed. The next morning I sat on the floor of an airport in Wisconsin and when Kerry gave up I sobbed while my friend held me in her arms with The Beastie Boys standing next to us. Then we flew to Phoenix. Where people were high-fiving in the airport because Bush had won. It seems like less people are high-fiving these days, but more people than ever want to.
Tomorrow morning I will get on a plane and I will fly to Columbus, Ohio. Noah, the same person that was in the car that night I made staff, the same person whose spot I filled as assistant director on that campaign when he left, will pick me up at the airport. The whole town will be shut down for the OSU-Penn State game. I’m from Pennsylvania, but this year, I’m rooting for Ohio. I’m going to Ohio tomorrow because I believe we are all in this together. Because Barack Obama has made me want to behave as a better human being. I’m going to Ohio tomorrow because I believe that if we come together, we are stronger than if we tear each other apart. That is what I will be representing and that is the fight I bring with me. I’m also going to Ohio because I’m not a Pennsylvanian or a Marylander or a Nevadan or a Californian. I’m an American. And this country needs us, and those like us, more than ever.
When I tell you that I won’t give up if you don’t; when I look you in the eyes and I tell you that I believe, it’s not because I’m so afraid that if it doesn’t happen for us that I can’t bear to go on. When I tell you that I believe; when I look at you and I say to you that it’s worth the risk, it’s because I’ve lived my life as someone that’s given up, as someone that believed that it wasn’t worth believing because people go away, and seas come over walls, and mountains crumble to the ground. And I don’t want to live like that ever again, because I’m not going to live forever.
love,
peter