I spend a lot of time imagining what great tales I will have to tell my grandchildren one day. This is a bizarre fact being that I have no children nor any immediate prospects and I just ain't gettin' any younger. Okay I know 33 isn't old but seriously, I've got lots of story-times planned with my non-existent grandchildren and only an occasional date through OkCupid so you do the math.
Still, I will be proud to tell my grandchildren that when I was a young lady living in NYC the Bush administration finally made me pay the fuck attention to politics and was just so out of control that I finally compelled to DO SOMETHING. I finally felt driven to get out in the streets or find ways I could change an unhealthy situation. There was the Pro-Choice Rally followed by an Anti-Bush Rally all on the same weekend I moved into my 2nd apartment here. My mother's fears of my heading out to an anti-Bush rally were based in her experiences living through the tumultuous 60's. These were dangerous times! I know....I saw "Forrest Gump". What I experienced that year (just before his reelection) was incredible and peaceful. Nothing violent occurred in the slightest-which is fantastic, but I can't help but wonder if that really was for the best. Taking to the streets with like-minded individuals on the streets of my now home of NYC was liberating. This bubble of like-minded folks blinded me to the reality that the majority of our country still wasn't convinced we were up shit-creek and Bush was continuously tossing our paddles out of the boat as we just kept handing them to him! I canvased in the swing-state of Pennsylvania on election day and went to the bar to watch the results with my fellow canvasers. Unfortunately we saw how that one panned out. To say that this changed me is to understate something I still haven't found the words to describe. Up to that point, I had never experienced anything quite so life-altering as I did that election day.
Throughout the next four years I attempted to continue supporting issues that were important to me. Excited by the notion that, if enough people were pissed off about Bush and what he was doing, at SOME POINT they would ALL feel compelled to get out there and DO SOMETHING...even if that something was walking down the street screaming something out....letting it be known that they did NOT approve and support him. I traveled to one rally in Washington D.C. the week that the now majority-Democratic Senate was back in session after the holidays. We were there to show our support and remind them what we wanted them to accomplish in there. The organization we went with also had some other things on our agenda that they hadn't been all that informative about prior. We were, evidently, also there to don orange prison outfits complete with black hoods over our heads - Guantanamo-Bay-style and kneel on the lawn with our hands tied behind our backs. This was in protest of the poor treatment/torture of suspected "terrorist" prisoners. We did as we were told but most of us hadn't signed up for that! Nor did we sign up to walk the streets of D.C. with these hoods over our heads while holding up GIGANTIC heavy signs they wanted us to carry. The worst part about all of this was the fact that we were told thousands of people were meeting us in D.C.. When we arrived, our numbers totaled about 300 or so. We were this tiny smattering of New Yorkers bused in for some huge rally that just never came to be. My heart sunk. Didn't people CARE?!?! Weren't people even more ready now to DO SOMETHING? Evidently not. I don't think anyone even knew we were there that day. Needless to say, I was not inspired or proud. I felt like an idiot running around in my black hood. It was around this time I started realizing the power of being "for" or "against" something and how most protests are "against". This one definitely was. I started to understand that, were I to take part in something else such as this, it was going to need to be FOR something positive.
So yeah...I did go out and canvas in Pennsylvania again for Obama. I lost my voice screaming in Times Square when he was elected. I've been to rallies in support of gay's rights to marry and things of that nature, but haven't felt too inspired to "go anywhere" until John Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear". The timing of it and the free Huffington Post buses were all too hard to pass up. Little did I know that this is what I will get to tell my grandchildren about that day....
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