Canvassing

Yesterday my sister and I canvassed in a neighborhood near here for Obama-Biden. It was hard, but we did it.

When we first showed up to the headquarters, where walls were covered in cute sayings on plaques (e.g., "Keep calm and carry on" over the toilet) and with a pool table in the center and a bar to the side facing away from the bay window, the organizer looked at me with serious concern. She doubted I could walk around ringing doorbells with my cane.

"I can walk a mile," I told her, and my sister vouched for me. "She walked all around Paris last year!'

So the organizers gave us the instructions and turned us loose, and we knocked on twenty to forty doors and talked to potential voters; and at the end we felt very tired. Now, at home, I can see them behind my eyes: the doors, the yards with flowers in them, the people on their front porches.

The ones we found home agreed that this is an important election. So did a youngish Republican who was playing with his dog in a park across the street from where we canvassed.

"I think women belong in the kitchen!" he yelled at us.

My 67-year-old sister shouted back, "And I want big government out of my vagina!" 

In the end, we came back to HQ with perhaps twenty commitments to vote. This is the ground operation. Not much, but what we can do.

I never would have signed up for something so strenuous when the campaign was going well.
Now the campaign is not going so well, and I'm sending more money and resolved to oppose these devourers of widows' houses who want to be put back in charge of the country. My emotion is worked up. I feel like crying when I think Obama could lose.

It will break my heart if Obamacare is repealed.