The Fierce Urgency of Now
Work has held its share of challenges and opportunities. Most importantly, I'm nervously thrilled about my "apprenticeship" to the mobile user experience design team. Over the next few months I'll be beefing up my graphics and interaction design skills while working on a design project from conception through research, prototyping, testing, iteration, and delivery. It's pretty crazy how I've ended up down this path: my good buddy Charles at work likes the way I think and has been grooming me as an ideas-man; add the ability to draw some shapes and flows, and if everything goes well, I'll be having a hand in some Google products you'll be using in the future. Wow!
Even more exciting, at the moment, has been my involvement with the Obama campaign. As the Mission district's team leader, I'm shepherding a group of precinct captains, Latino community leaders, and volunteers of widely differing levels of commitment and talent to identifying voters, persuading the undecideds, and making sure that our neighborhood votes in nine days.
Yesterday, the state campaign set the goal of making a record-setting 100,000 phone calls; in San Francisco we set the goal of making 10,000 calls with 40 people each in four three-hour shifts. We ended up with about double that number of volunteers, with a couple hundred people contributing toward over 15,000 calls to independent voters (many of whom don't know that they can vote in the Democratic primary in California), and also making the long and poorly ventilated office very warm and stuffy. So many moments from the day were inspiring: every ring of the bell when another supporter was identified, the guy who walked in off the street declaring that he'd switched from Edwards yesterday and wanted to become an Obama precinct captain today, the precinct captains who said, "I'm done calling my own list, who else can I help?," the private citizen who spent $500 of his own money to print signs for distribution (the campaign's done a poor job of distributing materials, to say the least). Of course, the best moment was watching Barack's victory speech from South Carolina with two of the highest-ups in the SF for Obama organization flanking me, and then listening to Congressman George Miller, DA Kamala Harris, and the former president of Chicago NOW (who until three weeks ago was a Hillary supporter) all give poignant speeches about the importance of the work that we as volunteers are doing.
It's been thrilling to work with such a dedicated, friendly, generous group of people -- in the nearly two months now that I've been working with the campaign, I've felt time and again that our grassroots organization is creating exactly the sort of civicmindedness that Obama is hoping to inspire in America as President. This is my first political activity, and possibly my only, but right now I'm so glad to be working to elect the best strongly viable candidate I've ever seen in one of the most thrilling elections in our country's history.
Even more exciting, at the moment, has been my involvement with the Obama campaign. As the Mission district's team leader, I'm shepherding a group of precinct captains, Latino community leaders, and volunteers of widely differing levels of commitment and talent to identifying voters, persuading the undecideds, and making sure that our neighborhood votes in nine days.
Yesterday, the state campaign set the goal of making a record-setting 100,000 phone calls; in San Francisco we set the goal of making 10,000 calls with 40 people each in four three-hour shifts. We ended up with about double that number of volunteers, with a couple hundred people contributing toward over 15,000 calls to independent voters (many of whom don't know that they can vote in the Democratic primary in California), and also making the long and poorly ventilated office very warm and stuffy. So many moments from the day were inspiring: every ring of the bell when another supporter was identified, the guy who walked in off the street declaring that he'd switched from Edwards yesterday and wanted to become an Obama precinct captain today, the precinct captains who said, "I'm done calling my own list, who else can I help?," the private citizen who spent $500 of his own money to print signs for distribution (the campaign's done a poor job of distributing materials, to say the least). Of course, the best moment was watching Barack's victory speech from South Carolina with two of the highest-ups in the SF for Obama organization flanking me, and then listening to Congressman George Miller, DA Kamala Harris, and the former president of Chicago NOW (who until three weeks ago was a Hillary supporter) all give poignant speeches about the importance of the work that we as volunteers are doing.
It's been thrilling to work with such a dedicated, friendly, generous group of people -- in the nearly two months now that I've been working with the campaign, I've felt time and again that our grassroots organization is creating exactly the sort of civicmindedness that Obama is hoping to inspire in America as President. This is my first political activity, and possibly my only, but right now I'm so glad to be working to elect the best strongly viable candidate I've ever seen in one of the most thrilling elections in our country's history.