Herban Sprawl

This morning, Byron’s ride left him high and dry, so we scrambled around, looking for alternatives. Luckily, just as he was about to seal the deal on a Greyhound ticket, Arun called. He and Travis would retrieve him and he now had a way home to D.C. What a relief! I sure didn’t want Byron stranded here!

Arun and Travis were the two young men I saw that morning, walking along Church Avenue on their way into Tudor’s Biscuits. Like many of the other young people, they were so wonderful - they took time out of their lives to come help us and we needed them so badly. We needed to learn the way of the community organization that is now going to be the wave of the future. This is how things are going to get done in this country, so the rest of us have some remedial work to do to learn the system!

Byron and Cathy drove down from D.C. and hit the neighborhoods in The Independent Republic of Salem. Cathy had to return to work, but Byron, a retired veteran of the American diplomatic corps, remained to continue to get out the vote. We gave him the truck so he could get around and he returned every day to provide laps for cats, put up his feet and get rested for the next day’s work.

Carter was the man with the directions and the answers. All rested with Carter - A cheery-faced young man who ran a tight ship, he made sure everything followed the campaign’s rules and regulations. Community organizing is not a by-the-seat-of-the-pants kind of operation. There was then the tier of paid staffers who were deployed to our area to shore up our end of the Shenandoah Valley. Finally, the tier of young people who volunteered their time to be here.

I wrote previously of the way they worked together cooperatively. Even when things were out of sync, I never saw anyone do more than get stressed. I will admit, I was pretty worried about Ryan’s eye getting so red, and while I trotted off to the convenience store for some eyedrops, I was mentally planning ahead for a call to my optometrist. However,the drops did the trick and he was able to pop his contact back in and carry on. Good thing, too, because his precincts were very conservative. He and Patrick and their tribe of canvassers managed a pretty creditable split. He might look at the numbers and not be terribly happy, but I know the people up there. I am here to state most emphatically, his precincts did way better than I anticipated.

Katie had the area around where I live. She, too, had an uphill battle. There are pockets of extreme affluence around here and they are not about to have their wealth tapped into by an Obama shift in tax laws. To be sure, our neighborhood has seen an influx of young families, but again, they are heavily churched, and they aren’t breaking down the doors of the Unitarian Universalist church down the street! Her precincts did much better than I had expected, as well.

What does this tell me? The organization that the Democratic party employed worked. Sending us people who were trained to campaign is something that is done all the time, but as I watched where the McCain campaign deployed their troops, I could see that they were busy trying to cut their losses. They had a hard time competing with a juggernaut that was trained how to train and then how to manage. These young people trained us, mobilized us and energized us. They shared ownership with us.

Thanking us for putting them up and seeing to their needs was really sweet, but we’re the ones who owe them. Virginia turned blue and it’s because they burst into town and led us on our merry way.

This morning, we are buoyant and cheered. I listened to the Sage of Public T.V., Bill Moyers as he was being interviewed by Terri Gross. He was so hopeful and his feelings are the same we of an age all share. He was also diplomatic as he sketched out why he thought John McCain lost. American has changed, and if we didn’t realize it before, we sure do now. This election alone has changed the way the world views us. No longer can they judge us by the way the current administration has done business. Now they know we don’t share that vision.

I’m not sure what anyone else is doing to celebrate this moment, but I have a kitchen that has not been functional for the past two weeks, and I need to get myself reorganized. I have a lot of campaign stuff that I have collected that I promised to share with Kay, who lives outside Chicago.

She tromped the wilds of Beloit, Wisconsin yesterday, getting out the vote, then turned around and went downtown for the big celebration. She reported that the whoop that went up when Virginia turned blue was pretty huge. Thank you, Windy City! We did the best we could, and we are grateful for the help you sent us! Truly, we are.

Now it’s time to settle down and revel in the fact that the Republicans have to do some serious self-examination. Tina Fey got the big break she so richly deserves and we’ll now find out which Goodwill gets Sarah Palin & family’s gladrags. It has taken a long time for us to bridge that gap between the 1960s and now, in terms of race. The Americans who want to take us backward in time are going to have to figure out how to get along with the rest of us instead of the other way around.

Thank you to those who worked so hard to bring us to this glorious moment in our nation’s history. This is change we have needed. This is change we must embrace in order to rebuild our country’s reputation. The young people are leading the way, so we must have taught them better than we thought ! I’m not too old and cranky to let them lead… I like being the one who can give good directions and who to call for a red eye!