Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Energy Through a System Organizes the System



My daughter flew down from her high-pressure job in NYC to spend two and a half days going door to door canvassing for voters here in Northern Virginia where she grew up.

The result of efforts like hers? A New York Times article about How the ‘Resistance’ Helped Democrats Dominate Virginia.

The foot traffic — not just the usual folks from D.C. or Maryland, but people who came from California, Florida and Iowa — was so steady that the campaign began to run out of clipboards. Volunteers would arrive, muddy and soaked, peel off their clear ponchos and hand over their unreadably macerated voter rolls. By midafternoon, they were almost finished with the fifth complete pass they’d done, over their 11-day “mobilization window,” of all 10,000 doors in their universe. Most returnees declared that everyone on their lists had either voted already or was just waiting for a spouse to come watch the kids; some of them stopped Sorenson to tell her stories about how they took a moment at the end of their shifts to circle back around and check on these promissory replies, and more often than not they encountered “I voted” stickers. Then they’d be handed a new packet and sent back out into the rain. Someone in need of reprieve asked Sorenson when she planned to wrap things up for the day. “When do you stop? If your nearest polling place closes at 7:00 and is two minutes away, you stop at 6:58.”

My daughter also flew to Houston to help hurricane victims there after the storm put people under 5 feet of water. 

To quote Pete Townsend: the kids are alright.

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