West Wingers by Gautam Raghavan

Author:Gautam Raghavan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

A CALL TO ACTION

Lynn Rosenthal

As my car chugged up the mountain road in northern New Mexico, I strained to hear the radio through the static. It was January 20, 2009, and a new president and vice president were being sworn in. As a child of Watergate and the Vietnam War, I had learned to be skeptical of politicians and cynical about the role of government in people’s lives. On this day, though, I felt excited for our nation’s future. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were the leaders we had all been waiting for, and I was proud of my country.

Like thousands of others, I had volunteered for the campaign. Clipboard in hand, I trudged down back roads and city streets and through fancy new subdivisions. I met hundreds of people, but one man stood out. A few days before the election, I turned down a rutted dirt road, outside Albuquerque, lined with small houses and trailers. At that point in the campaign, most registered voters had been visited many times, as evidenced by discarded campaign paraphernalia and the weariness of residents when they answered the door. But not on this street. There were no door hangers or flyers or yard signs; no evidence that a presidential election was just days away.

When I knocked on the door of a small trailer, I could hear someone struggling to stand and make his way to open the door. Before me stood a young man, but with a face aged by daily pain. Dragging a walker, he said he hoped this knock was someone from one of the campaigns. He rarely left his home, he said. He had been praying someone would come by and tell him how to get to the polls. He had been waiting, he said. He didn’t want to miss the chance to vote for Barack Obama, no matter what it took to get there. As I handed him the voter pamphlet on how to get a ride to the polls, he broke into a big grin.

Every campaign worker had stories like this one. And every campaign worker hoped to be in Washington, DC, for the inauguration. Now Inauguration Day had come, but I was far away from the pomp and circumstance. Instead, I was in a remote area of northern New Mexico on my way to help a small domestic violence shelter stay afloat.

I’d been working for more than a decade to change the way communities dealt with domestic violence and sexual assault, and nothing was more important to me than being on the front lines. Four years earlier, I left a national advocacy job in Washington, DC, first for Florida and then New Mexico, the state of my birth and the place I love more than any other. I became the executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence, working to coordinate services around the state.

I was usually satisfied with that decision, but on this day, I wondered why I had taken myself off the beaten path.

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