Last Push to Election

I was out for several hours canvasing yesterday and will be heading out in a short time to do it again today. Although Minnesota is shown to have moved from an undependable pale blue to a solid blue over the last week, I continue to feel compelled to work on the get-out-to-vote effort. I guess I'm feeling like I need to see it to believe it. I need to talk with my fellow suburban Minnesotans to hear their rationale and gauge their enthusiasm. Also, I need to do something, anything in these final remaining hours before the election.

I admit it, my anxiety is high. As I have written in past blogs, I feel the middle class dreams of America are being stripped away by large organizations with enormous power to wield over our modest financial lives. When describing the current financial burdens of health care, energy, education and housing prices to a young Swedish man during our trip to Argentina last week, his jaw literally dropped. He is married to an American and they are considering their future plans, which include moving back to the states to be closer to her family. Their time line may be altered by my husband and my description of our lives as a young family. Just describing the costs for having our second son, a mercifully healthy process beginning to end, led the young Swede to proclaim repeatedly, "That is outrageous, that is outrageous!"

While changing airports going in and out of Argentina, the drive around Buenos Aires brought home to me the fundamental difference between first and second world country status being one of the health and opportunities for the middle class. Flying into Buenos Aires, there are many mansions peppering the landscape illustrating to me the fact that Argentina has enormous national wealth. This wealth apparently isn't generously shared as driving through Buenos Aires one sees a city of innumerable high rise slums. Despite wealth and a healthy number in their educated class, they are a country who has suffered a "dirty war" in recent decades and only several years ago a complete economic collapse.

Many Americans like to kid themselves that this could not happen to us, that we are somehow protected from the worst of the natural results of corrupt government. This is a silly illusion, but a very painful one when it is stripped away by reality. We have our own high rise slums and the hellacious aftermath of Hurricane Katrina tore back gauzy illusion to expose the gangrenous rot of poverty and social injustice. One place where the people of our nation are already suffering a second and third world nation lifestyle was broadcast worldwide. One of many shameful situations we have as a nation revealed. And of course, the very dirty techniques ordered from the highest levels for treatment of prisoners in the current war where our government has enacted exactly what it says we're fighting against. Thank you John McCain for supporting that Bush/Cheney policy.

As Garrison Keillor wrote recently, anyone not supporting Barak Obama for president at this point cannot be convinced by any use of the English language. There is no point in trying to convince anyone of anything at this point in the game. Undecideds are likely just those who know it is folly to vote for McCain/Palin, but know in their hearts they will not vote for a Black man who supports populist policies.

We, the Obama/Biden supporters, simply need to get out there to vote on Tuesday, or earlier if possible. And additionally, we need to get every single Obama supporter we know out to vote as well. If this requires making phone calls, knocking on doors or even driving someone to the polls, do it. Do this for your country and your countrymen. Washing the polls with Obama/Biden support is our patriotic duty at this time.