Holyoke hears a “NO”

I picked up my packet at election headquarters in the morning.

It was T-10 hours until the polls closed and I was about to walk the ward I lived in dropping literature in support of a debt exclusion override to build two new middle schools.

City leaders over the course of decades had let the school infrastructure decay so badly there were roofs beyond disrepair, poor ventilation and air quality and classrooms dim and dull from no natural light.

It was easy to be outraged and it was the first cause I threw my heart into since supporting my husband’s mayoral campaign 14 years ago.

There was a track record of denying the schools since I had graduated in 1986 and the city denied helping the schools in 1991.

Could they do it again? Would they? I couldn’t stop wondering.

The ground-game in politics is always an opportunity to see an issue from the inside out. You knock on doors, give people rides to the polls, knock on more doors and make phone calls to deliver as much support as you can muster by talking for the most part to complete strangers. You don’t always like what you hear but the rudeness is almost never as sharp as it is on Facebook.

There was grocery guy, two-fisted with Stop & Shop bags, who curiously watched me crisscross his street with my handouts. I stopped and asked if he minded if I left election material on his doorstep.

“No. I don’t care. Go ahead,” he said and then he stopped to look at me more closely. “Wait. Is it about the schools?”

 “Yes. It is about the scho..”

He cuts me off.

“If It’s about the school you can save your paper,” he said, while his teenager stood nearby. “We don’t need new schools; we need new water pipes.”

I say yes and I think we need both.

He tells me not to argue, he just wants the pipes fixed first before he thinks about schools. We can just paint them.

And I think to myself paint doesn’t solve lead in the water, PCBs, and toxic mold and I move on.

On the other side of the ward beyond St. Jerome Cemetery a woman named Maggie waves me down after I drop my Yes on 1 flyer on her door. She is limping a bit from her knee replacement surgery and shows me her scars. She shakes the paper I gave her in her hand. “THIS is too important,” she said and sits back on her stairs.

 “This (vote) is about respect and dignity,” she said adding that she grew up living in Puerto Rico with nothing. Her “latrina” bathroom was outside.

 This is my house, we have a boat, we have a river to go to, she said. I love my house but “the way we talk to each other in this city about the schools” is so bad.

She shakes her head and tells me she is going to go vote with her husband when he comes home from work and before she reports to her overnight shift as supervisor at a hotel. We need to elect “leaders who have a heart, who talk to one another with kindness.

“That’s a leader,” she said.

 I start to think I might cry.

I circle back and stop at home where my own son is just waking up. I ask him to help me finish my list and without hesitation he agrees. The last time we campaigned together he was a baby in my arms now he is a willing 14-year-old and I am so proud of him for having the conviction. We hit the hills together and head back to headquarters.

“Why are people against this, Mom? Peck is so bad...don’t they get they need to do something?

I tell him about taxes and how people don’t want to pay them for many reasons and some truly can’t afford to and then about some others who are prejudiced – the kind of prejudice people share on local Facebook’s Hello Holyoke that comes in the many flavor-of-the-day phrases like ‘those kids’ or ‘these people’ who have no ‘family values.’ I didn’t have enough time to explain the racist and classist code phrases of the 21^st century, the kind that indicts an entire population and stops short of using slurs so the utterers can throw up the argument – “that’s not what I meant or said,” or squeal, “don’t twist my words” when we all know the lingo and the ignorance behind it.

Next up I hold a sign at Sullivan school for a time while my phone alerts me to Facebook cowboy insults in tagged posts designed to demean, accuse and intimidate even at the 11^th hour and even from people I once knew as friends.

Later in the evening I am in Lyman Terrace, a recently renovated housing project, knocking on more doors to ask if people voted NOT how they voted.

Walking through the courtyards on the back side of the new apartments, I arrive at Senor Santiago’s door. In broken Spanish I ask him if he voted to day.

 A votaro hoy?

No.

Por que? Es muy importante!

We laugh at my broken Spanish.

Senor Santiago didn’t know where to go to vote, he tells me. He asked at an agency but didn’t understand the directions. The last time he voted he did it for mayor at City Hall. I told him his new polling place and my friend with better Spanish said we could give him a ride.

At just before 7 pm we canvassed the last neighborhood on our list – Tokeneke. All of the elderly neighbors tell me they voted at 7 a.m.

In another courtyard, one guy is taking care of his sick mom. He is registered to vote but didn’t know anything about the issues or who was running and another mom just got home from work and is still making dinner. She might go. She doesn’t know. I don’t get a good feeling.

 Around the corner there are three moms in a row with school-age kids. They speak to each other in Spanish and tell their kids to get their shoes on and carpool to their polling place.

At one of my last doors a man says, “We don’t vote.” and shuts the door.

I am at 12,000 steps into my GOTV journey when I pack things in with my friend Rebecca.

What’s done is done.

The outcome as the votes trickled in was worse than I imagined. Only 7,000 people in a city of 40,000 people voted – a mere 4,000 said, NO to new schools and $75.8 M in state aid; effectively deciding for us all; effectively deciding to keep our children in crumbling and unhealthy infrastructure indefinitely.

No one ever surfaced a better plan.

It was the will of the people but it felt like most Holyokers had no will at all.