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 21st 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 11th 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.
