2024 Activism

I moved to Iowa less than a year before Covid.  Two things made a difference.  We moved into a suburb that has sidewalks on both sides of the streets, so during lockdown, neighbors walked a lot.  We also bought a house with a big front porch. We sat on that porch during lockdown and chatted with people across the lawn as they walked by on the sidewalk.  I put up a sign for a Democratic candidate for Senate.  A couple walked by and asked me about it.  It turns out that they are a retired couple who pretty much spend full time getting out the vote for Democrats in our suburb.  They immediately recruited me to do what I could (summer of 2020).

This is the more formal part of what I do.  The suburb is divided into turfs, neighborhood areas.  Each turf has a leader who is charged with getting out those registered Democrats to the polls.  I’m the turf leader for my neighborhood – there are 75 or so registered D’s in this neighborhood.  I used to do the next one too, but then one of my neighbors decided to step up and do that.  If he doesn’t rehab from surgery next week, I’ll pick that up again.

I do several rounds of the neighborhood to drop literature, for the primary and the general.  I ring the doorbells and try to talk to as many as I can.  Since I’m on my fifth year of doing this, most of them know me by now.  One thing that I notice is that I have several new registered Democrats in their late teens and early twenties, all newly eligible since the last presidential election.  A number of them are the only registered D in the household.  I had one mother, a registered R, remind me to be sure to bring the literature around for her 19 y.o. daughter so that she also could read it.  For the mom, reproductive health issues are paramount and she indicated that she needed D literature for herself to read.

We track absentee ballots too (the organizing couple give us updated spreadsheets throughout the voting season).  When I see that some of my neighbors have requested absentee ballots, but not turned them in, I contact them to see if they have questions I can help with.  By now, I also know who likes to vote in person.  I carry out reminders to vote the week before the election for those who haven’t recorded votes during early voting.

Informally, I walk the neighborhood for exercise but also for chatting.  I know that an older couple is in ill health and check to see if we should organize a meal train.  I know that my neighbor’s father, on the West Bank, had brain surgery and he had to fly back to move his father to Jordan.  We talk about the situation there for Palestinians.  Since the 1970’s, Iowa has been welcoming to refugees and there are about ten Bosnian families, three Vietnamese families, one Cambodian family in our neighborhood.  I look for informal ways to connect with them, despite some language challenges.

I also talk to some of my Republican neighbors, particularly some who call themselves “people of faith.”  That’s how I sometimes find the cracks in what they are thinking.  One was upset about immigration.  The Bible, she said, teaches us to welcome the stranger and she was upset at the anti-immigrant message from her party.  That will be a little crack that I’ll try to widen over the next two months.

I set up a biweekly coffee gathering at the local coffee shop for a group of about eight women, several who are older and live alone.  We chat about politics, yes, but also about other challenges that face our families.  We’ve gotten to know the young people who work there and they sometimes take their breaks with us, sitting down to tell us what is important to them.

As I’ve noted previously on Balloon-Juice, I have another informal project to talk to young people, to reach across the fifty-year divide between them and me, to find out their issues.  This is not quantifiable and less partisan, but more of a desire on my part to know what they wish their elders would address.  I do a lot of this at that coffee shop, but really, most anywhere I might run into them.  I’m genuinely interested in listening, not recruiting as such.  I think most of them pick up on that.

Then there is porch wine.  As I mentioned, we have a big porch and I invite others that I’ve gotten to know through my GOTV work to come and chat.  Through these last weeks, we’ve needed the comfort of each other to sort out the confusion of feeling as bewildered by the Democrats as we have been by the Republicans. We had such a gathering late afternoon today, and there was a request that we do this every two weeks for now.  They are feeling betrayed by Democratic behavior.

I find myself in the role of comforter/cheerleader.  The propagandists, the ones playing the game for power, will be delighted by our despair.  I refuse to give it to them.  I’m not the daughter of a WWII veteran, the wife of a Vietnam veteran, who is willing to ignore the suffering that they went through to protect democracy.  I act in honor of their legacy.

My message to my neighbors right now is to ignore the individuals at the top of the tickets.  We have no power over that.  It’s above our pay grade.  What we do know with blinding clarity is that there are two teams in the running.  One wants to protect democracy.  One wants to dismantle democracy.  It is that simple.  We’re on team Democracy and we resolve to do what we can.