"The impossible will take a little while"

"The difficult I'll do right now..
The impossible will take a little while. . ."
from Crazy He Calls Me,
by Carl Sigman and Bob Russell

Candidates' Forum, McAllen

We began on a hot day in May, talking and planning an area-wide effort to get out the vote. The goals were clear; the task daunting. We would choose ten precincts in the area which had high-voter registration, but low voter turnout. And they would be places where poor families lived. In the last midterm elections (2006), only 17.5 per cent of registered voters participated in the election: half of what happened in the rest of the state.

"We" were the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, a group of community-based organizations located in this corner of the US/Mexico border.

Over the years, I have heard no end of reasons for the low turnout here along the border, everything from ”poor people don’t vote; they aren’t stupid, you know” to “people from Mexico don’t trust the voting process, because it was so corrupt over there.”

I have also heard, over and again, that the Rio Grande Valley is a sleeping giant, and, that if it ever woke up, Texas’ state politics would be turned on its head.

Impossible, that.

Our goals

So we began with the difficult: finding volunteers to go door to door, not once or twice, but three times or more. And other volunteers to make phone calls. And yet others to track down those who could vote and those who would vote, to creating reams of paper so that we could track folks over time. This was not a one time project. We decided, as a group, as the Equal Voice Network, to adopt these ten precincts for a long time.

And increase turnout, in this election, by at least 10 per cent.

Which, in May, when we began this project, seemed like a lot. It would be harder than ever to find reasons for people to vote--the 2008 elections had a huge turn out from the Latino community. People were voting for hope, then, and there was tremendous energy.

But by October of 2010, the Obama administration had deported nearly 500,000 people. While some claimed that these were “criminal aliens”, it turns out that they are mostly not.

In any case, each deported person is someone’s brother or cousin or uncle.

There was “increased security at the border” but there was no immigration reform. “Immigration reform” was the very first request of the 25,000 families in our network.

So, we began with the difficult. And we preached the importance of standing up and being counted. Of speaking, so as to be heard. “Mi voto es mi voz.” And of knocking on doors, and knocking on more doors.

Early voting began on this past Monday. By Wednesday, papers statewide were reporting an astonishment--voting in the Valley was up over 200%. Two hundred per cent more people were voting this year.

We were stunned, we were excited, but mostly we kept on working. There is still another couple of weeks to go.

Perhaps this turnout is driven by some heated local races; perhaps it is up because of angry voters. I of course like to think that it is up because people were responding to someone asking them to give a damn, and to vote.

In the meantime, the large old grandfather clock in charge of marking out history tick-tocks once more towards the moment when the impossible becomes real, something that should happen in just a little while.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

Equal Voice in the Valley

Saturday dawned with a glorious cool, crisp bit of weather that is rare in these tropical parts. Across the Valley, men and women who normally spend their precious Saturday mornings at the market, or repairing the house, or setting straight the things that got of order during the work week, head out the door with a bounce in their step and purpose in their eyes.

It is the “Equal Voice Campaign’s Get Out the Vote” Saturday in the Rio Grande Valley. A thousand strong, at least (I have lost count, for the moment) slip on bright, gold tee-shirts that proclaim “Your Vote is Your Voice”, and head out the door to do some civic engagement.

In Brownsville, the voting promoters gather at a local community center, pick up packets with addresses for door to be knocked on, and head off into the streets. There are smiles all around; the get out the vote campaign in this neighborhood has always been a great success. Those who promote the vote are received with anticipation. In fact the challenge here is to be able to get around to all of the houses on your list--each person that you run into wants to talk politics. There is no voter apathy in this community.

In San Benito, the Get Out the Voters invade the local, and popular, community days celebration, passing out voting commitment cards and encouraging attendance at the candidates’ forum for later on the morning. I worry that people would be more interested in the antique car show or the karate demonstrations, but they fill a small auditorium to listen to the candidates for local offices make their pitches.

Ron Rogers, one of the local activists, tells me that he thinks that with this effort, “We might really be able to control some of the decisions made in this town. Wouldn’t that be something,” he says, “Working families dictating policy.”

In McAllen, some three hundred people pack a meeting room where forty politicians have lined up to learn what the community expects from them. The politicians are not allowed to preach, they are given thirty seconds to respond to questions that the community of poor families have come up with . “What will you do to better school bus service to our rural communities?” “How do you plan to keep school yards open after hours, so kids have a place to play?” If the politician goes on for too long, she is given a small American flag. This seems to be as effective on the politicians as blowing a police whistle.

There is water, but no coffee. This is serious business. But there is a bounce in everyone’s step—this, I think, is a kind of happiness. A precious kind of joy.

Back in Brownsville, I put on my gold-colored shirt and visit the sixty homes on my list. The first man I encounter is delusional and goes on at length about a vision of Jesus that he had when he was six. As he finishes up the detailed description of what Jesus was wearing, he looks at me over his sunglasses, takes the sample ballot, and says, “And that is why I vote!”

I put a check next to "yes, I will vote" on my scorecard. He has made a connection between religion and politics that I think that I will leave alone.

The last person on my list turns out to be Lupita, the overall coordinator for getting out the vote in this community.

She is in the driver’s seat of her battered suburban, battling to get the car out of “Park.”

I wish I could help, but I am useless in these matters.

She told me that she had just dragged her sister’s car, parked on the street with the Suburban (the car stalled some place and won’t start). She had parked the Suburban right up behind the one functioning vehicle that remains, so things are an an impasse. Her family has places to go and things to do, but no one is going anywhere soon.

I am thinking that this is a great image for most of the working families here in our Valley along the border. People live surrounded and trapped by things that don’t work the way they should, be it a school system or a job, or a political system that is quickly forgetting what it means to work for the common good.

An unhappy person would give up. Or turn to violence.

I ask Lupita if she plans to vote in this election. She just laughs, a twinkle in her eye. I check the “yes” box next to her name, as she continues to jerk the gear shift back and forth.

As I walk down the driveway and back out onto the street, I am bouncing a little on my feet. I am enjoying the cool breeze, and savoring happiness.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

Alejandra's Home

Alejandra is proud of her home. It is not a house, but a travel trailer, parked in a small space at the back of her mother-in-law's house. We can reach the front door today because it hasn't rained in a while.

Her husband had paid $1,500 or so for the trailer, buying it from a friend who had lived in it for ten years, who had bought it from a couple from Minnesota who, twenty years ago, had used it while traveling through Mexico.

So it is not a house, but it is their home.

"Before," she said, "We would rent a small room from different people. But now we have a home."

Alejandra gave me a tour--a small breakfast nook; a small cooking area, a very small bedroom, and a small, small, small bathroom with a smaller shower stall. There is no hot water, as the boiler burnt out some time ago.

No air conditioning either, which I noticed as soon as I entered. The word "sauna" came to mind at first, but then I remembered that in a sauna you are not wearing clothing, you go there by choice and you can leave whenever you want.

Alejandra closed the door.

Sweat streaming down my face, I told her that I had just lost ten pounds. She laughed and said, "Our trailer is a double-use--a home and a fitness center!"

The screens were intact on the small windows, mercifully keeping out the mosquitoes and flies. Her one year old son was napping in the bed. In the evenings, Alejandra explained, they made a small bed on the floor for him. "We have to be very careful if we get up in the middle of the night not to step on him," she commented.

I carefully backed into the kitchen/dinette/living room. I sat at the small table while she poured me a glass of water, which she then sat upon a napkin.

She filled up a glass for herself, and then sat down opposite me. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. Alejandra sighed, and noted, "We are so blessed."

Then she took a measured, small sip from her glass of water, and smiled again.

The details of my visit were misleading. I had found an obviously poor woman living in a hot, leaky trailer—and she seemed happy about this. “A simple soul,” the uncomplicated part of my brain deduced.

But then we continued to talk and I learned that while this was definitely her home, and while it was a step up from a rental room, it was just that—one more step.

Alejandra had larger things in mind, which involved a decent home for her boy to grow up in and in which her family would create their living space. What struck me most about our conversation, though, was how she continually included the wider community in her dreams. How she would refer, over and again, about how nice it will be when “all of us have decent places to live.”

Her present home was indeed small. Her dreams—not so much.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

The Poor are Much Poorer than You Think

If there is one thing we can agree on, from regular folks to think-tank economists, it’s that more and more people are falling into poverty. What most of us don’t realize is just how poor they really are.

A new study puts it bluntly: In 2005, the richest quintile of Americans owned about 84 percent of the nation’s wealth. The poorest two quintiles put together owned less than 1 percent– an amount so small as to make them literally invisible on a diagram charting this inequity:

The actual United States wealth distribution plotted against the estimated and ideal distribution across all respondents. Because of their small percentage share of total wealth, both the 4th and 5th quintile of earners are not visible in the "Actual" diagram.

You can draw your own conclusions about the ways the recession has affected these numbers. Here’s the back-story: In 2005, Michael Norton, of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, of Duke University, polled 5,522 people – a nationally representative sample of women and men from 47 states, some rich, others middle class or poor; some leaning Republican, others voting Democratic – and asked them a series of questions about wealth in the United States. The result? None of them, not even the poorest, had any idea about the degree of inequity that is our status quo.

For example, the respondents estimated that the middle class owned about 10 percent of American wealth, though actually it’s just 3 percent.

“Americans appear to drastically underestimate the current level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote in, “suggesting they may simply be unaware of the gap.”

Perhaps more surprising, very few of us – including the richest – believe that things should be this way. When group members sketched their notion of an ideal wealth distribution, they suggested that the top quintile own just 32 percent of the nation’s overall wealth, a division more closely mirroring Sweden. Yet all groups, even the very poorest, also desired some inequality.

The takeaway? We may fight tooth and nail about immigration and taxation but when it comes to a vision of the country we all want to live in, certain truths prevail. As the authors wrote: "Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation and income.”