Registering voters
Like wizards, Average Citizen Joe feels more powerful on his own turf, and citizens who might be perfectly polite on the street feel safe shouting obscenities at you from within the dark, smoky confines of their own little hidey-holes.
I've been registering voters hard-core, five hours a day for the past week while I've been recovering from a cold and working at the bookstore, and I'm exhausted. One more day to go. I've learned a lot, though. For example, all the apartments in lower-income neighborhoods have steel doors, very painful to knock on, a fact to which my red and swollen knuckles will attest. Also, rudeness is gender-based. Military men who answer, "No, we'll be voting for McCain," are much more polite than their wives, who shout as their husbands are closing the door, "Tell that bitch ain't no way in hell we'd vote for Obama!" or "Don't you like your constitutional rights?"
The worst are the kindly intentioned older (white) women with pictures of the crucifixion hanging in their livingrooms, who frown at me and say, "Sweetie, I think you're making a big mistake here. Did you know that he bases his policies on a Marxist document? I can't remember what it's called, but it was something by Marx, and my nephew is a professor of Political Science over at William and Mary, and he was telling me. And I really think people should really know that about him."
No matter how tired I am, or how elated, there's always a quiver of fear as I knock on a new door. We're simply not supposed to intrude on people the way I've been doing; it goes against all of my socially-ingrained instincts. I'm also actually afraid. Behind the door could be a friendly old gay couple with beer bellies and grandchildren coming to visit, or it could be an angry ex-vet looking to hurt someone, who sees the Obama/Biden sticker on my clipboard and levels a gun at me. Or, as it often is, it could be someone who feels that their personal space is being violated, and yells through the door to go away before I've even introduced myself.
The gay couple was nice, though, watching the Atlantic Coastal Conference game together in their shorts, a box of their grandkids' Shrek toys in one corner. I thought I had the best registering story by registering a guy WHILE he was sitting in a tree, but Maya wins. She knocked on one door this afternoon and heard a woman yell, "Damnit, I can't open the door cause I don't got any pants on. Come in, already!"
I've been registering voters hard-core, five hours a day for the past week while I've been recovering from a cold and working at the bookstore, and I'm exhausted. One more day to go. I've learned a lot, though. For example, all the apartments in lower-income neighborhoods have steel doors, very painful to knock on, a fact to which my red and swollen knuckles will attest. Also, rudeness is gender-based. Military men who answer, "No, we'll be voting for McCain," are much more polite than their wives, who shout as their husbands are closing the door, "Tell that bitch ain't no way in hell we'd vote for Obama!" or "Don't you like your constitutional rights?"
The worst are the kindly intentioned older (white) women with pictures of the crucifixion hanging in their livingrooms, who frown at me and say, "Sweetie, I think you're making a big mistake here. Did you know that he bases his policies on a Marxist document? I can't remember what it's called, but it was something by Marx, and my nephew is a professor of Political Science over at William and Mary, and he was telling me. And I really think people should really know that about him."
No matter how tired I am, or how elated, there's always a quiver of fear as I knock on a new door. We're simply not supposed to intrude on people the way I've been doing; it goes against all of my socially-ingrained instincts. I'm also actually afraid. Behind the door could be a friendly old gay couple with beer bellies and grandchildren coming to visit, or it could be an angry ex-vet looking to hurt someone, who sees the Obama/Biden sticker on my clipboard and levels a gun at me. Or, as it often is, it could be someone who feels that their personal space is being violated, and yells through the door to go away before I've even introduced myself.
The gay couple was nice, though, watching the Atlantic Coastal Conference game together in their shorts, a box of their grandkids' Shrek toys in one corner. I thought I had the best registering story by registering a guy WHILE he was sitting in a tree, but Maya wins. She knocked on one door this afternoon and heard a woman yell, "Damnit, I can't open the door cause I don't got any pants on. Come in, already!"