Driving Votes: Jenny's Blog

I watched Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention from a pizza shop in midtown Manhattan. Blocks away at Madison Square Garden, our president addressed the nation and presented a rosy simulacrum of reality; schools were getting better, Medicare was strengthened, we had tax relief and a growing economy, we were “extend[ing] the frontiers of freedom” and fighting evil, our foreign policy had made us safer by a process involving “careful diplomacy” and “clear moral purpose”…. Glued to the TV screen and mesmerized by the glossed-over convention world of pomp, circumstance, and applause, I could almost believe that everything was fine.

But then I stepped back on to the streets of New York and the fairy tale snapped. Because here in this city where such an accomplished leader would be welcomed with celebration, the streets were blockaded and guarded by cops in riot gear. New Yorkers and tourists had gathered on corners to watch the spectacle that was the delegates exiting the convention and to greet them with boos and cries of “Shame on you!” and “Go home. Stop using our city!” I stood with the crowds and marveled at the absurdity of it all: that we were thus divided, our leader versus the people, in what had sounded to me like a thriving democracy and during what could potentially be the joyful epitome of the democratic process, the (re-?)election of the president.

While I might write off this negative sentiment as attributable to bad choice of venue on the part of the Republicans, my conversations with people in swing states around the country beg me to consider otherwise. In Nevada, I met an elderly woman who finds it increasingly difficult to pay for her medication and who is definitely not voting for Bush, nor will any of her friends if she can help it. In Pennsylvania, I spoke with a taxi driver struggling to make ends meet for his family who told me nothing ever changes and who’s so angry that he’s not voting at all. In North Carolina, I talked with an aspiring doctor from a low income family who told me of months spent with a toothache because he was unable to get health insurance and who is voting for Kerry. In Florida, I encountered newly registered voters living in housing projects who hoped that the democratic process might lead to better, though they were still waiting and knew it wouldn’t happen under Bush.

These are the works of an administration that believes that "government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives” and a president who seems to think he has accomplished this. Bush’s acceptance speech list of achievements may ring true for some (“careful diplomacy” and “clear moral purpose” in foreign policy notwithstanding- you can only stretch the truth so far even for purposes of argument), but for a disproportionate number of Americans the sound is hollow. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any more from a president who has incited a country to divide over social issues (see: gay marriage, abortion, the role of church in government) while advancing an elitist and neoconservative agenda (see: tax cuts favoring the wealthy, war, diplomatic isolation). However, my unflagging hope that when a figurehead stands before the nation, power just might be speaking truth to the people gives me higher expectations. Bush falls inexcusably short of even my lowest.

I understand the appeal of subscribing to Bush’s convention night obfuscations. Believing that we have done good for our people and the world under the current administration is much more comfortable than confronting the reality that we have failed miserably on both counts. Yet we owe it to the vast numbers who continue to struggle in “the greatest nation on earth” and to those who have died in conflict to put aside the rhetoric. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a cowboy for that matter, to realize that we can do better; it does take a willingness to face our failures head on and to make a change.

There is something admittedly surreal about hopping in a car with four other people and driving twelve hours south through the state of California and east across the Mojave Desert to go register voters in Nevada. Arriving in Las Vegas at two in the morning, the lights of the city appeared suddenly before us as our car crested the last rise standing between just another road trip and our unlikely ambition; I’ve never gone to Las Vegas for exactly the right reasons. The first was to prove that it exists; the second was to get a president out of office.

The next day we canvassed neighborhoods adjacent to the Strip for Democratic and progressive voters in 105-degree heat. The combined effects of the temperature, sun, desert region, and our electoral activism made the reality that had brought me to Las Vegas feel very present. While there are a significant number of reasons why I am personally angered by this presidency -their failure to address the complete inadequacy of our current health care system, their surreptitious and deliberate erosion of environmental protections and our civil liberties, their treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals as second-class citizens- I always come back to the conflict in Iraq as an emotional trigger point.

Standing there in Las Vegas under a noonday desert sun, I couldn’t help wondering if this weren’t how Baghdad might feel. My mind reeled with thoughts of war, the loss of a best friend who was a soldier in Iraq by one of the members of our Driving Votes group, the loss of a parent in the September 11th terrorist attacks by a childhood friend of mine ... the ugliness of the circumstances that had brought me to this desert city was overwhelming.

But the thing is, I’m lucky enough that most days I don’t have to feel this. I don’t live in a war zone, nor does my family. I don’t know anyone personally who is in Iraq, U.S. soldier or Iraqi citizen. And I have been fortunate enough to find a rapidly expanding community of people who are just as upset as I am with what is going on in the world right now, with what our government is doing in our own country and in the world right now, and who are actively working to change this.

Meeting other first-time and experienced activists has been one of the many amazing things about getting involved with Driving Votes. Meeting other newly and already registered voters from swing states has been another one. In our two days in Las Vegas, we registered a nineteen-year-old who was excited to participate in his first presidential election and a former felon who had been upset to lose his right to vote, which had just been reinstated due to a new law. We talked with union families and families from low income neighborhoods. In conversation after conversation, the war in Iraq came up as a major issue and source of discontent. In one particular interaction, the person I met told me he was constantly singled out at work and on the defensive because of his views on the war and how good it was to meet people who felt the same way he did. He is getting in touch with the Driving Votes Las Vegas committee right now.

Sometimes perhaps you do have to drive twelve hours to Nevada so that you and the people you meet can realize that there are more of us out there than we might think who believe that what is going on right now is not okay. And through these experiences, people are finding each other, these conversations are being had, and ever increasingly, people are stepping forward and doing something about it.

In December of 2001 my father handed me an article by the conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who was killed fifteen and a half months later in a Humvee accident while traveling as a reporter with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. His column was a sarcastic congratulation to Allison Hornstein, a Yale undergraduate, for arriving at the conclusion that the actions of the September 11th terrorists were morally wrong. Allison had written a piece in Newsweek in which she relayed that as students on the Yale campus attempted to understand the motives and causes behind the terrorists’ actions, conspicuously absent was any discussion of wrongdoing. As Allison explained, the downside of her generation’s schooling in moral and cultural relativity was a resulting collective difficulty with making moral judgments.

I identified with Allison. As someone whose education was also filled with lessons in tolerance and respect for cultural differences, there is a resistance in me to passing moral judgment on the actions of others. My first instinct is rather to attempt to pinpoint where “the other side” is coming from and then to arrive at an understanding that our experiences, motivations, and opinions are just different, a sort of complacent nihilism wherein no one and nothing is ever right or wrong.

I go through these motions when I consider politics and the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq. While I certainly don’t agree with much of what our country has done in the Middle East and in fact experience a feeling of revulsion over the steps our government has taken since September 11th, I still have the initial inclination to: 1) Investigate differences in opinion, 2) Understand differences, 3) Conclude it’s all good.

As Michael Kelly pointed out, the problem with this train of thought is that sometimes actions are morally wrong. Hijacking planes, sending them into buildings, and killing thousands of civilians is morally wrong. I would add that lying to the nation and the world about the certainty of a threat and the credibility of the intelligence behind it is morally wrong. Unilaterally invading a sovereign nation based upon these trumped up charges and killing thousands of civilians is morally wrong. Waiving the human rights of suspected criminals and implementing torture is morally wrong.

But wait, the empathizer in me cries out. George Bush means well, Dick Cheney thinks he has the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind, and Donald Rumsfeld just wants to make the world safer. While this may be true, it may also be true that years of poverty and the U.S. government’s capricious application of justice in the Middle East have contributed to a growing hatred of the West by many Muslims. Does this absolve the September 11th terrorists? Hardly. Can I excuse my government for its lies, killing, and condoning of torture because of its supposed good intentions? I don’t think so.

I have to go through too many degrees of rationalization to even be comfortable with, let alone support, the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, and particularly in an election year, I don’t have that much time. It is up to each one of us to pass moral judgment with our vote. “Draw the line, Ms. Hornstein,” I hear Mr. Kelly urging. “Draw it where you know it belongs.”