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 9th 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:
the "stay at the office until the wee hours of the morning then crash" night;
the "go home at a reasonably normal time, like 9:00 pm, then be anti-social for a few hours and crash" night; and
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.
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