Eight Days a Week

Talking to some friends before I left the Bay Area, I remember discussing the segment of the book/film, "Into the Wild," when Chris, the main character stops on a farm somewhere in the Midwest and works a harvest season with Vince Vaughn. (Ok, so I watched the movie, not read the book.) A college graduate of a wealthy family, he hadn't done a day of "real work" in his life. I'm proud to say that that isn't true for me – I have done a few days of real work in my life, and I might even have a couple of weeks worth of it under my belt, if you count my summer in Honduras and two trips to Post-Katrina New Orleans. I had brought it up because another one of my many visions for my own future had popped into my head- my want to take time off from whatever I am doing and do a season or a year or a few years of real work, work that involves daily physical labor. For some reason, I have the expectation that it will round me out as person – maybe that's just a testosterone thing, or perhaps I've read so much Calvin & Hobbes in my life that Calvin's dad has actually convinced me that it would "build character." Either way, while I may not be harvesting wheat or pouring concrete, I am indeed working my ass off. And I love it. Kind of.

We received a massive training packet on our first day of training two Saturdays ago, and a few pages in I found a page titled "a typical day for a field organizer." The sample day started at 6:30 AM with either bus-registration (riding the commuter bus routes trying to register voters) or visibility (to a bad field organizer, this means standing on a street corner with a sign. To a good field organizer, this means bringing coffee for the volunteers you have recruited to stand on a street corner and hold signs). The day ended at 10:30 or so – evenings are usually taken up by phone calling, which ends at 9:00 pm – then there's an hour and a half to do data entry and prepare for the next day. I found the whole sheet kind of bemusing, as they also told us that the Fellowship was a 30 hour a week requirement. That would mean it was only a two day a week job, and that's including an hour lunch break!

Go figure, 30 hours is just the bare minimum.

The last two weeks have been crazy. Lots of up, and while I love the purpose that I am working for and love working for a purpose that means so much to me, even more down. This job is HARD, and its something that I have very little experience in. The last two weeks have really been a case study into how we (or at least I) learn, to some extent, through mimicry. I like to watch once through and then repeat, building on what I have observed. This is how the New Orleans trip happened – I used my experience as a participant to help figure out what could be done differently, better, for more people. Without that first experience I would have been swimming in the dark, which is exactly the feeling that has characterized much of the last two weeks.

So, what am I doing, anyway? I am in a group of four Organizing Fellows assigned to what are known in Pittsburgh as the Hill District and Polish Hill. We're supposed to, well, organize.

A brief aside: The Hill District, (or just, "the Hill") currently one of the poorest and most violent neighborhood in the city, shares the characteristics of many inner cities – 90% black and filled with Section 8 and other Public Housing projects, it is in an area that could be and should be quite nice or at the least often traveled through – it is right next to downtown, in the center of the city's geographically defined borders, and, on a hill, it has great views in all directions. Instead, just like Baltimore's inner city, inaccessible due to a beltway that allows commuters and travelers to bypass completely the poor areas of town, or New Orleans' Lower 9^th Ward, which is a twenty minute drive from anything that might even resemble a freeway, the Pittsburgh infrastructure is designed so that visitors to downtown or those traveling through the city never have to and never get to see the Hill. It is really too bad, too: the neighborhood is a cultural mecca, once home to a strong Jewish and then Irish population, Satchel Paige's Negro League baseball team, the bars and clubs that launched many of America's great jazz musicians to fame, and August Wilson. Poor and black, the Hill is natural Obama territory, and was therefore completely oversaturated with voter registration efforts and literature before the primary.

Polish Hill, next to the Hill, mostly white, and working class, is a completely different story. A massive and historic Roman Catholic church looks over the small community, which is surprising still filled with lots of Polish people. It seems to be comprised almost completely of people who have lived there their whole lives, and renters looking for cheap, short-term housing. White and blue-collar, Polish Hill went completely untouched by the Obama camp during the primary season.

One community leader told us that, although the two communities are literally across the street from one another, they "barely know each other exist." And it seems to be true.

Ok, back on track. What's my job? They told us to organize, and gave us not all that much more than that. If you get emails from Barack, (he sends them to me all the time, and text messages; I'm just that cool. Text 62262 if you want them too) you know there are over 3,000 "Unite For Change" house parties happening across the country tomorrow, Saturday. Those are us – the parties are, for the most part, organized by Fellows like me scattered across the country. But beyond the short term goal of the parties, and the never-ending task of attempting to locate and register unregistered voters, our job is to lay the groundwork for the massive field operation that is is the Obama campaign, just getting underway. Essentially, we have six weeks to completely canvass our turfs (in our case, 25 precincts) to locate local resources, hubs of community organization, neighborhoods of support and nonsupport, volunteers, and volunteer leaders.

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Before I wrap this up, a word about community organizing. If you have watched the news in the last ten months, you know that Barack spent a chunk of his post-college youth as "a community organizer on the south side of Chicago." With that background, and the power of the populist movement that makes up the base of his vast support network, the campaign has taken on a wonderfully community-based feel. The line between field organizing, the political term that refers to the on-the-ground portion of an electoral campaign, and community organizing, the act of working with communities in an apolitical fashion to unify them around a common cause, has become blurred. But it has not disappeared. Community organizers enter communities to serve a perceived need defined by the communities themselves. Maybe a neighborhood lacks a grocery store, or two rival ethnic groups are fighting over a few jobs, keeping wages low, instead of working together to demand higher wages. While success may be achieved through political means, the end result is always less political than it is local, ideological. On the surface, field and community organizing appear extremely similar, but a deep chasm separates them. Field organizers may use the same tactics – recruiting volunteers, knocking on doors, making lots and lots and lots and lots of phone calls, talking to elected officials and unofficial community leaders, etc – but we are inherently political and come to the communities we work in with an agenda (electing a president) that we, not the community, set. In this way, we violate the first rule of community organizing.

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Remember that training manual, with the page about the typical day of an organizer? There should be another page, specifically for the typical night of an organizer. In the world of campaigns, only three kind of nights seem possible. There's:

1. the "stay at the office until the wee hours of the morning then crash" night;

2. the "go home at a reasonably normal time, like 9:00 pm, then be anti-social for a few hours and crash" night; and

3. the "hit the bars and get up waaaaaaay too early to go back to work the next morning" night.

If my limited campaign experience tells me anything, the prevalence of night number 1 will stay about the constant for the next 5 months, but as we get closer to November, there will be fewer and fewer night number 2s and more and more night number 3s.

And on that note, let me wrap up one of my few remaining night number 2s and attempt to get a few hours of sleep before I get up for my fifteenth day of continuous work. That number is just going to keep getting higher and higher....

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Up next: How I almost got hired, but then wasn't because they'd rather not pay me, shaking Barack's hand and why it was so disappointing, and wondering in amazement for hours on end how it happened that in a town called "Unity," Hillary and Barack actually split the Democratic primary exactly 107 votes to 107 votes.

"Chapter 6: Hope"

I came up with the title for this blog post about a week ago, on the side of a highway in Illinois. I actually can't give myself credit for coming up with it – that was the doing of (...guess who!) Barack Obama. It had been raining heavily all day, and we had just spent an hour sitting on the shoulder, waiting for the engine of Ben's '97 Jetta to, essentially, dry off.

After losing a day and a whole lot of money to a mechanic in Boulder on Wednesday, we spent Thursday driving from Colorado to the tiny town of Devil's Elbow, Missouri, where Ben's Grandma and some uncles and cousins live. There were no real hiccups in the drive, accept that IT WAS REALLY LONG, STRAIGHT, AND FLAT (the boring half of Colorado, all of Kansas, and half of Missouri = 14 hours) and I got the only speeding ticket of the road trip, a $150 gift from a Kansas State Trooper.

Our radar detector worked great, make no mistake – it was complete user error. It beeped, telling us that it sensed a weak "Ka band" broadcast – one of the more common bands for radar detectors – but it beeped in an odd way, convincing me it was on a weird setting. So I tried to "fix" (fiddle) with it while driving down I-70 at 90 mph. You don't have to know me well to know that's the kind of mistake I would make. I was pressing too many buttons to notice the trooper's signal getting stronger until he was just sitting behind me with his lights on waiting for me to notice him. But worry not about my poor driving habits: you don't really have to watch the road in Kansas, as it's so straight you could tie the wheel to the door and take a nap.

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Missouri was a whole new experience for me, and great – completely green everywhere, with a big river (called something that struck me as very southern, "the big little river" or something) meandering through town. Ben's grandma is one of the sweetest people ever, a German immigrant who fell in love with an American soldier posted in Germany after WWII, and a damn good cook. We went innertubing down the little big river at 1:00 in the morning with Ben's cousins, and got far too little sleep for Friday's drive: Missouri to Pittsburgh, which we had hoped to do in two days, would be another supposed 13 hours. It ended up taking 17.

We got a great start Friday morning, but it didn't last long. I took the first driving shift, and about five minutes into the drive it started raining substantially. I'm minding my own business at 70 mph in the right lane of the two lane highway when a big rig with Arkansas plates flies by me at about 95 mph. I don't read anything into it – we're on a downward slope and I figure he didn't want to get his brakes wet or something – until he merges into my lane, cuts me off, and promptly slows down to 65 mph. "Jerk!" I merge left and try to pass him – he merges left, cutting me off again, slowing down to 60 mph. I try again to pass him, in the right lane this time, and then again in the left – he just straddles the two lanes, and my insults quickly turn from printable to not so respectable.

Right then, I am struck with the brilliant notion that the world wouldn't be all that different if Ben and I were dead in a ditch. I egg the truck into the left lane, then drop down to third gear, accelerate behind the tractor-trailer and dart right, half in the right lane and half on the shoulder. 70 mph – 80 mph – 90 mph – at this point I have passed about 2/3 of the truck, and beginning to congratulate myself on my tricky aggressive driving. Too soon – he merges back into the right lane, which I am half in, all but running me off the road. Breaking, honking, and swearing with all my might, I am forced completely onto the shoulder as I slow down and return to my subordinate position behind the truck.

Yeah, so I thought a 10 year old compact just out of the shop could beat an 18-wheeler driven by an angry racist (we figure this was all incited by our four Obama bumper stickers) in a rainstorm. My mom calls me stubborn. I call me principled.

If only it was over: 30 seconds later, the engine loses power, not to start again for an hour and a half. After a tow from the local friendly AAA, a mechanic took a peak and finding nothing wrong, told us to try starting it up. It started, with no trouble at all, and we left Devil's Elbow for the second time, at 11:00 instead of 7:30. After traversing Missouri, Illinois, and most of Indiana, the rain gets heavy again. As we listen to Barack Obama read "The Audacity of Hope" to us (books on tape = best road trip EVER), the engine loses power again.

After putting skills of deduction to work, having a long-distance conference with my all-knowing father, and utilizing picture messaging for the second time in my life (the first time was a picture of a broken car part sent to my dad, also), we come to the conclusion that Ben's distributor is cracked, and when water gets under the hood (first spray from the racist trucker, then the heavy rain) it shorts out the electrical system that normally sends power to the spark plugs.

An hour later, the distributor has dried again, and we start the car. As I pull back onto the highway, Ben starts the book again. Barack reads the last few words of chapter five, and then says, "Chapter Six: Hope." Needless to say, after seven days that included finding out we had positions with the campaign on the other side of the country, planning a road trip, packing, driving across four states, sitting at a mechanic's for a day, driving across five more states, and getting into a fight with a big rig, it captured the moment.

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Since Friday (we got in at 12:30 am), those words have continued to capture the moment: training was lunacy, three 10 to 12 hour days learning about Pittsburgh, community organizing, how to throw a house party, PA's voter registration policies, primary results, and a whole bunch of campaign secrets which I'm not allowed to tell you. Then they set us loose, with little to no direction.

During a break on Monday, the last day of training, I overheard another Organizing Fellow (that's my job title) ask a staffer a question about our extremely limited resources. The staffer replied, "it's a bit of a shoe-string operation right now."

The Fellow responded, "yeah, but with a borrowed shoe-string." More on that, and my first few days, later.

~matt

zen and the art of being american

Written June 11. Postdated due to lack of internet. Pictures to come.

Reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as I drive across the country is a total trip – not only am I drawing connections between the philosophic discussion and my (extremely limited) motorcycle experience, but am following the author on his road trip as I pursue my own. Now, his trip through the West was weeks long, on the side roads, and he was traveling to travel, and ours is one week long, on far more interstates then we would like, and with a most definite destination (and deadline) in mind. But nevertheless, small similarities arise. For one, there's lots of time for quiet, introspective, philosophic thought, of which I am greatly appreciative, as my last semester at school involved next to no time for introspection or quiet.

Secondly, I am finding very true his observation that, when you are tied so closely to your route, your speed, your destination, your vehicle, and your fellow passenger(s), there are good days and there are bad days. Monday was a good day – 750 miles through the Sierra Nevadas and across the Nevada desert on route 50 – the loneliest highway in America – we put Ben's radar detector to good use and traveled, well, above the speed limit (note my comma usage), ended with setting up camp in Bryce Canyon, Utah, meeting some very pleasant travelers setting up camp next to us (an older couple, also from the Bay Area, they were on their last leg of a 5 week trip), and drinking Budweiser. Day two was most definitely not a good day – the check engine light had turned on late monday, and it continued to haunt us, as did interesting noises and weak acceleration, as we drove from Bryce, in SW Utah, to Boulder, Colorado, where we were to spend the night at my friend Annalise's house. Day three, today, was simply a very expensive day – we never left Boulder, and Ben ended up spending a solid chunk of his life savings (which, like my own, isn't very much at the moment) fixing his car.

Let me backtrack a little: for those of you who don't know, I am at the moment driving from Oakland, California to Pittsburgh, PA, with my high school friend Ben Dalgetty. Saturday morning at 9:00 am we will begin the Obama campaign's Organizing Fellowship, a six week volunteer program where, as far as we understand it, fellows shadow paid field organizing staff, learn what they do, and prepare to work for the campaign. If they like you, they hire you after the six weeks. Ben, who is participating in a campaign semester through his school, Occidental college, does not have to return to school until after the general election. I just submitted my Leave of Absence paperwork to Goucher today. Both of us are planning on getting paid jobs with the campaign and working through the general.

As I've been traveling, I've noticed some things (which I would say is generally a good thing):

1. I'm not sure which state it is that officially goes by the motto, “big sky country,” but in most of these western, non-coastal states, it is damn true – the sky just seems bigger and grander in Utah and Colorado. It is so empty, and so beautiful. Even the Nevada desert is stunning in its own, albeit nuclear wasteland sort of way (yes, that's “nuk-li-er,” not “nuk-u-lar”). And the stars.... don't get me started. The night sky from the middle of nowhere, with next to no light pollution at all, is a completely different thing.

2. Drinking Budweiser always makes me feel American. But drinking it next to my tent in a national park just takes it to a whole new level. Plus, despite what my beer-connoisseur friends might say, I have a soft spot for it.

3. On the topic of national parks, why is it that there are ALWAYS more foreign tourists there then Americans? I swear, I saw twice as many non-Americans hiking in Bryce than good old patriots. (we squeezed a short hike in before we left through some amazing rock formations called hoodoos...) Driving through so much empty space reminded me how important it is to conserve its beauty. It's not untouched, of course – we traveled on good roads, hiked worn trails, and our campsite had running water and plumbing nearby – but it is one of the few places left where humans, who after all are just as much a part of “nature” as anything else, being natural and carbon-based and all, don't simply overtake everything around them and bend it to their will but participate in their surroundings as just one group of respectful denizens. And I worry, that with so few spending time in these areas (and therefore often forgetting to participate in nature), that the imagined importance of this not-really-all-that-empty space will fade and groups of motorcyclists, families in rented motor homes, circles of tents, and kids traveling to work for presidential campaigns will turn into more air-conditioned suburbs and big-box stores.

4. If I lived out here, away from cities and on a ranch or a farm, I'd be a Ron Paul fan too. Seriously though – city life, just like any life I guess, gives you tunnel vision – gay marriage is important, fixing our schools is important, and taxes, to an extent, are just fine as they fund necessary public services. Simple, right? But driving along these roads and seeing two mile long dirt driveways, barns, houses, cabins, “keep out” signs, and pick up trucks actually used to haul things and not as testosterone-proving fashion statements reminded me it's not so simple. One image from monday especially stuck with me: we passed a man at one point while on route 50, repairing a section of his miles-long fence. He was standing on a rutted path next to his four wheeler, which he actually uses to get around his property and fix things, as opposed to just doing wheelies, scaring deer, and pissing off the neighbors, as there were tools hanging off all sides and utility bags strapped on the back and front. Who knows what he was fencing in or out, as there were no cattle in sight, probably just defining his territory as his own for reasons that I will never understand. Or maybe I do know – he was separating him from me. The point is, if I lived out here, doing my own thing, working my land or raising my horses or livestock, I'd probably vote for Ron Paul, too.

I think that's all for now. Tomorrow we hit the road again, needing to make up some time. It'll be a 12 hour day, crossing Eastern Colorado and all of Kansas, hopefully to arrive at Ben's grandparents' house in Devil's Elbow, Missouri by dinner time.