The War Drags On

I’m not ready to write this. Personally, I feel it’s important to allow ourselves the time and space it takes to properly grieve this moment. However, I know how fast the news cycle and all of the horrific things happening right now will force us forward so, here goes:

My first trip with Senator Sanders, was to Norman, Oklahoma. I didn’t know a soul on the campaign, had absolutely no previous experience, and Oklahoma might as well have been Timbuktu. I was scared shitless.

We put on a rally at a park near the University of Oklahoma and though it didn’t thunderstorm as had been predicted all week, it was stiflingly hot. So hot, in fact, that three people passed out. As fate would have it, I, the new girl, was the only person that could reach two of the three. Before that day, I’d never even witnessed someone faint, let alone tend to them. I will never forget running to the first woman and hurling questions at her friend in my clumsy attempts to understand how she’d ended up sprawled out on the grass. The first time I ever heard the senator speak about Medicare for All was the very moment I supported a stranger’s shoulders and learned she had diabetes and was rationing her insulin.

After the rally, as we restored the park to its pre-circus peace, I spoke to a volunteer who was transgender, autistic and clinically depressed. He couldn’t pay for the medication that would improve his life nor could she seem to hold a job. I thought he loved the senator in a unique way — one that was so fiercely passionate surely no one else would simultaneously scream and sob to a stranger about him in the middle of a park. But I was so, so wrong. He was only the first of many volunteers and attendees I met in my time with the campaign that looked me square in the eye and told me they’d die if he didn’t win. By suicide, or simply by this country’s continued feast on whatever was left of them. I lost count of the nights I’d return to my hotel room, sit dumbfounded on the edge of my bed and just cry.

Now that it’s over, I can’t stop thinking about them and what will become of their lives in the coming years. Suddenly, I’m right back on the edge of my bed, dumbfounded and distraught. For them, and selfishly for me and the team I’ve come to love like family.

I’m only 26, but I feel as though I’ve waited a lifetime to find the job I did with this campaign. The senator is known for many things, but his knack for attracting people — from staffers to volunteers to supporters — has been largely misrepresented. I only ever encountered a type of goodness I’ve never found anywhere else. In the last two days, almost every last one of the volunteers I worked with have found a way to reach out, whether to express gratitude, ask where they can send a gift, or to reminisce. I can name two occasions in which I forgot to bring a phone charger to a site and a volunteer disappeared, only to return soaked with sweat, holding a brand new one for me.

That kind of heart was at the top too. A month ago, I wrote about seeing a journalist I’d worked with years earlier who had defended, protected and benefitted from a serial sexual predator at the helm of the publication. He’d shown up to cover New Hampshire primary night and couldn’t look me in the eye as he was checked in. Not a week later, Ari Rabin-Havt took me aside minutes before the senator was supposed to be on stage in St. Paul, asked who the journalist was and relayed the message that he would no longer be welcome at one of our events. “No one should have to worry about dealing with something like that at their job.” It was the first time I truly felt it when a boss told me they cared about me.

I will miss everything about this chapter in my life, but I will most remember what I felt each time I peered up at the senator from the buffer. By the end of the campaign, he was doing multiple events a day, sometimes in multiple states. Yet, everywhere he went, he’d take his place behind the podium and speak with the same passion his supporters did. He said what he meant and meant what he said. Always.

Looking up at him, I’d wonder how a person who, for decades, has witnessed the hypocrisy and corruption of both parties up close, been discredited and often, vilified, and fought so many battles all alone, is able to get out of bed every morning ready to return to the front lines as if it were only his first day. How did he keep himself from growing bitter or despondent or mean?

For the longest time, I couldn’t seem to figure it out. But looking back on it all, I think I have the answer: So long as there are people who hurt — whether it’s a transgender, autistic and clinically depressed woman, or a person forced to ration the very medicine that keeps them alive, or a sexual assault survivor on the brink of losing hope in humanity, there is no excuse and even less time to do anything but to keep showing up for someone you don’t know.

Though we might be in despair, though this country’s cistems may always function to serve the .1%, though the next four years may be as fraught as the last several, somewhere, somebody is waiting for someone to get behind that podium.

Yes, you. Yes, me. Yes, us.