As part of a continuing series, we're following Obama Organizing Fellows as they share their stories and their experiences. They discuss the people they meet, the hardships of organizing, what the campaign means to them, and how this summer is changing their perspective.
John is an Organizing Fellow in Gwinnett County, Georgia. His stories appear each Sunday.
A while back in this campaign, Senator Obama was saying something that bothered me. He said, “This campaign is not about me, it’s about you.” I used to think to myself, if it’s about me, or if it’s about us, why is everybody waving signs with your name on them? I did not realize then that with these words, Senator Obama revealed to us just what kind of leader he is. If you had come to our office this past Tuesday night, you would have seen what the Senator is talking about. That night, four Fellows led meetings for two towns: Jacob and Nick led Snellville, and Matie and Heather led a group from Lilburn. All four of them are under thirty, and all of them are putting in much more than the thirty hours a week the campaign asks of them. The people come to an obscure nook in the county, they somehow make it through a far-too-secure door, and they plan, and they commit—and we watched the rest of the week as they did great work, and brought in more of their friends, all rumbling for change. They come with something in common--their support for Barack Obama. So Field Organizer Tawny and I started our meeting for Lawrenceville with a question: Why are you here? What brings you all this way to show your support for Senator Obama? We hear answers like, “I agree with him on most of his policies,” or “I like that he doesn’t take PAC money.” But then you will also hear the stories from people’s hearts. Stories like ones you might hear from a receptionist in Lilburn who has a 22-year-old friend on his third tour in Iraq. Which is also a story about how his family worries about him not only on the battlefield, but for when he comes home. They worry about the change they have seen in him and they worry about help for him which they have not seen. Or we hear a story about health care bills, or choosing between bankruptcy or selling a house. We hear many things that bring us there in that office with barely enough chairs, no good way to get in, and no ventilation.But many times, we weave into our stories another story involving “his speech,” which almost always means his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention—the "one America" speech. We look around the room, and we see that the words from that speech are true. We’re all sitting together there, black, white, young, old, for a purpose. And perhaps we don’t realize it at that moment, or not even for a few weeks, but slowly we come to understand that even though we are talking to each other about Barack Obama and the hope he offers, we are really talking about the hope each of us brings to that meeting and to our work as campaign volunteers. We come to those first meetings and events because we support Barack Obama, but we leave them knowing that Senator Obama is our candidate. The difference is subtle, but it is the difference between a hope that maybe this guy will be better and the hope that this time we all can be better. Here in Lawrenceville, we are blessed to work with Donna, a volunteer I call the "Athena of Voter Registration." By work-day she is a chemical engineer; the rest of the time she is a hunter for unregistered voters, not afraid to employ every weapon in her considerable arsenal in a blitzkrieg of direct-citizen democracy. Yesterday, in five minutes, she combined the obligation of parents and a call to live into the legacy of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. with a simultaneous assault consisting of the narrative of American history to blast a hole into the heart of a man who said, “My vote doesn’t count; my vote doesn’t count; my vote doesn’t count.” When we walked away with his signed voter registration form, she said to him, “And I’m telling you, if Senator Obama doesn’t listen to us, we’ll elect somebody else to take his place. That’s how serious we are! We’re getting organized, and we know how to do it now.”And I think that’s what the Senator means when he says this campaign is not about him, but about us. After all of the Fellows and the Organizers have finished their Organizational Meetings, after Donna and the other volunteers have convinced the last voter on the street, after (God willing) Senator Obama has won the presidency and begun the work of good government, all of us everyday people will have molded ourselves into an organized citizenry that realizes its responsibilities and has power to perform them. It takes a courageous leader to trust the people with this power. But because of that trust, after this election we will know that we can face our problems together, and build together our American dreams. We will know that the appropriate place to begin is here, that the acceptable time to start is now. This campaign, as the Senator says, is about us -- “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Check back next week for more from John in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and visit our Flickr page for more of his photos.
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