Today marks the dawning of a new era. As my political passion grows, I’m finding that my farm house, despite its cavernous rooms, isn’t large enough to contain it. So I’ve decided to take my youthful vigor elsewhere. That’s right: I’ve now turned the page on a new chapter of my voterdom. You might say BBBB has made a shift to BBGA. No, not the Bread Bakers Guild of America. Rather, Bree Barton Goes Abroad.
Well, not abroad per se. But surely Ohio counts as some kind of adventure, right? According to the state welcome sign, there’s “so much to discover!”
Today I braved several long hours of highway—and the splendid autumnal color palette bedecking both sides—to drive to Akron, Ohio, where I now sit. I’ll be volunteering for the campaign on and off up until Election Day. This afternoon, it started with phone banking.
Phone banking is a funny phenomenon. It is especially funny for someone who has a deep, debilitating, and totally irrational fear of phones. Actually, I take that back. It’s not funny; it’s terrifying.
At the beginning, it seems innocuous enough. You’re given a cell phone and a sheet that tells you what to say. The pitch is basic:
“Hi! My name is Bree, I’m a volunteer with the Obama/Biden campaign for Change here in Akron. How are you today? Great! I am reaching out to folks in the area to see if we have your support in November.”
You can vary the amount of exclamation marks in your delivery, of course, depending on how much coffee you have sucked down during your 11-hour shift. But the initial pitch stays constant.
I didn’t get very far. It was my third call. Things started out well enough.
“Hi! My name is Bree, I’m a volunteer with the Obama/Biden campaign—“
That’s when she cackled.
I’m not exaggerating. This woman did not giggle. This woman did not laugh. A laugh is a pleasant, whimsical thing—a puff of air off the arytenoids, a crinkly cricothyroid with twinkly eyes. This woman cackled.
I stopped and took inventory. “Um…” I said, frantically searching through the sheets in front of me, unable to find any advice on how to respond when the person you are calling cackles at you. “Did you…is something funny?”
“You called the wrong household for Obama,” she said. I was still waiting for the attendant “girlfriend” and finger snap when I heard the phone click.
Nobody said phone banking was good for the morale.
This particular woman’s name was Shbeeb. The real question is: Should she really have been the one laughing?
Phones and Shbeebs are one thing. The people here…well, the people are another thing entirely. The people are an inspiration. They are larger than life.
Today I met Belinda Barton, a woman who shares my surname and does it proud. Belinda grew up in Mississippi, walked with Martin Luther King in the 1960s, and is raising her two young grandchildren after her daughter died. This evening, Belinda was canvassing with a high school kid when they came to a house with three McCain signs in the front yard. “Watch this,” she told him. She strode up and knocked on the front door.
Thirty minutes later, the man took down his McCain signs and replaced them with Obama signs as the high schooler looked on in awe. Meanwhile, Belinda also registered the man’s son to vote.
Now that’s change I can believe in.
