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Seventeen hours now.

We’re almost there.  Those of us that have behaved as though there was and is no good reason why people of different creeds, and of different races, should be pitted against one another; why anyone that chooses a system of belief that is different than his or her neighbor so long as they do not work to undermine the right of that neighbor to do the same should be sequestered and questioned by the law; why anyone that is of a darker, or lighter, tone, should be considered first inferior; we are close now to sending a message to the world.  We believe in something better, and something greater, than the desperate clinging to a hegemony that discourages equity.  And so, once again, we will move in the direction of being governed by the power of the many, rather than the demagoguery of the few.

It is nearly time and we have long been waiting for this day to arrive, when the land that has long hosted the persecuted and so too has built itself up on the backs of the enslaved and the purposefully forgotten rises up a great many steps towards fulfilling its promise to us all; that because these truths are self-evident, and for so long as we hold them so, we will commit ourselves to the will of our people, for they all, everywhere, are and always have been created equal.  We all, each of us, are endowed with these inalienable rights for only so long as we work to protect them against those that wish to tear them apart, to take them away; these rights for which we must always strive, and for which we must at times fight, so that our government continues to derive its power from the will and the consent of the governed.

Let us not forget that for so long as that place where the best of our will would live there remains only vacancy we shall receive the worst of government as it will represent the cumulative power of the worst in us.  For so long as we turn our backs, choose apathy over action, seek to deride the power to choose to hope for something better and to put our attention and our efforts towards that notion, we will receive the government we create.

I hope tomorrow is the first of many lights.  I hope that we have seen the beginning of something new and lasting.  Not an effortless peace and a mindless good will towards our fellow human being but rather, a commitment we begin to make to one another, by which we emerge from the darkness that has been all around us, and has kept us apart.  Let tomorrow be the first of many days of our coming closer together, and though I do not believe there is a greater force than that of the nature that brought us all here, I suspect that we shall remain here well, longer, if we seek to love and to protect what is best in all of us.

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 

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