Hi, loves. 🌿

On just being part of it

Last Sunday I phone banked for Kamala with a few beloved friends. We got started late this year — for obvious reasons — but I’ve found that phone banking is a little like riding a bike. Inevitably, you feel the terror at first, the wobbly, uncertain feeling, the worry that you’ll fall off and crash and get so scratched up that you won’t be able to face the bike again. But then you remember what your legs can do, pedal like they always have, you’re so coordinated! You know how to stay upright and you realize you can coast, even as any number of things get in your way, even if someone yells directly into your ear, “HAHAHAHA I’m voting for Trump! Fuck that bitch! Take me off your stupid list!”

Unlike the previous week when we called voters in Arizona — a whole slew of Americans who seemed either genuinely undecided, fully committed to Trump, or frighteningly clueless (“Wasn’t she, like, the Vice President?”) — last weekend we were calling Harris supporters all over the country and asking them to join the campaign, mostly to pitch in to call yet more swing state voters.

It seemed — rather useless? I mean, we were just volunteers calling other volunteers? It felt like a Beckett play. Shouldn’t we be calling either undecided voters or registered Democrats to make sure they knew how to locate their polling places? That they had their mail-in ballots? That they were — gulp — properly, definitively registered?

Some of the most exhilarating moments from our 2020 calls were when my friend Ali and I redirected a couple of people who were headed to the wrong polling location. “No!” we’d yell into our tiny phones, all the way in LA, far from the urgency of an Arizona vote, “you should be going to the high school across town! Let me give you the proper address!”

But it turned out that calling other possible volunteers was one of the most enlivening, inspiring ways to spend a Sunday afternoon weeks before — as the script reminded us — the most consequential election of our lifetime: people were nice, genuinely kind, grateful to hear from us, thinking, I assume, that we were calling from some important Democratic headquarters and not from a backyard in West Los Angeles, surrounded by platters of cheese and berries and crackers, bugs buzzing around, children and a dog occasionally breaking into the phone call. “Thank you so much for including me!” a young man kept repeating when I asked if he wanted to volunteer, his voice breaking. “I can’t believe you called me. Yes, I want to help. Thank you for making me feel included. This means so much to me.”

He almost made me cry, and I probably would have, had I not been so shocked and disoriented by his enthusiasm and so preoccupied with getting all the proper information for him to join in on the phone banking efforts. Other people could not help — I heard an alarming number of stories about upcoming or recent surgeries — but were eager to share that they could not wait to vote for Kamala and they were grateful for all the effort we were putting in to get her elected.

And it made me understand something about the Harris campaign (as it had about the Obama campaign) and something about human nature, which is perhaps obvious but no less true — we all, fundamentally, just want to be included; we want to be noticed, we want to be pointed out and asked to join the team. We want to put in the work. We want to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Phone banking in 2020. What a scene. I love how committed we were to our cloth masks.

This is the discussion my friend Ali and I have been having over the last few weeks as we’ve gotten ourselves organized to phone bank again. In 2020, we did it weekly from her backyard from July until the day before the election — it was our sanity and our anxiety relief and our hope and our fun, all rolled up together, supported, each week, by homemade cocktails. Through Vote Save America we’d been assigned Arizona — no one needed to recruit California votes, damn this stupid electoral map — and our investment was outsized. It meant that once the state turned blue and Mark Kelly was elected senator, we celebrated like we had, single-handedly, made it all happen. It was all us! we still joke.

Of course we know we were merely a minuscule part of a much larger effort, but that’s the joy of it: we only ever have to do our part, that’s all that’s asked of us. We don’t have to man the whole ship, we only need to paddle for a few hours, knowing others are also paddling alongside us, behind us and in front of us.

Our lives are busy now, so much busier than they were in 2020, when we were locked in our homes and working remotely and our kids were underfoot and no one was going to dance class or soccer, when school was one big joke, when there were no parties and no plans and it seemed our most important duties were to stay sane and to get that terrifying, dangerous buffoon out of office. And yet, the mantra we’ve repeated to ourselves is not only that we want a Harris presidency, but that we want to be part of it. We don’t just want to be the beneficiaries. We want more.

Phone banking in 2008 in New York on a Blackberry. Photo of 30-year-old me by Matt Murphy.

I can’t help but think back to something I wrote in the waning days of October 2020, when everything was so chaotic and terrifying and we were all so impossibly out of our minds — it feels no less true, which is both humbling and horrid, that the stakes still feel this high:

During 9/11, I was 23 and living alone in New York. One night, a week after the towers fell, when we were all back at work, I came out of my job at a yoga studio on 14th Street and saw a group of people unloading emergency supplies from a truck. People were standing in a line, passing heavy boxes from arms to arms. I have no recollection of what the items were for, or how they'd be used, or even how heavy they were, but I dropped my backpack on the sidewalk, got myself in the line, and helped out.

Soon the line of bodies was so crowded we barely needed to turn our torsos to pass the box along to the next person, but it didn't matter — we were all just so desperate to help, and in those days, there didn't seem like there was much to do: no one needed blood, we couldn't go down to The Pit. On the way home on the F train, I noticed that little bruises were blossoming on my inner elbows from the corners of the boxes.

That line didn't really need me, but I had been of some use, even if it was small, even if I was simply a little cog in a wheel for a moment. The boxes did get where they needed to go, and I made the load a little lighter for someone else.

I thought of this last night as a few friends and I were phone banking for one of the last times. Unlike on other nights, we got a lot of incredibly hopeful responses — people who’d already voted for Biden, or were planning to; and once in a while we actually did help someone by locating his polling place — but we also, as usual, got a lot of wrong numbers, a lot of disconnected ones. There is a tendency to see these calls as a waste of time; hours spent calling no one. But of course that isn’t true. Any data we input is of use — this number doesn’t work, this person doesn’t want to be called. It all adds up. It’s just another way of taking the load of the boxes in our arms for a short period before passing it along to the next person in line. 

Please don’t doubt that whatever small actions you take this week aren’t important. They are. Last night we told a few people where to vote. People who didn't know and, for all we know, might not have looked it up. If we all carry the load for a bit, something huge can get done.

I still believe this — we have no choice — and we have more than a few days now. We have weeks, weeks to give of ourselves in whatever way we can, whether we love Kamala or merely don’t want to see another Trump presidency — I really don’t care at this point. As I often say to my writing students, “I’m not interested in whether you like this poem or story or essay. You still have a responsibility to engage with it.”

We can give ourselves the joy of putting in the work; we can create our own sense of hope and possibility by getting on the phone, writing postcards, knocking doors. We will find others along the way; others, like us, who are so grateful to be part of something, even something necessarily imperfect, just like we are.

I am not one to sell you on the project of America, this is not where my interests lie and half the time I’m not even sold myself; but I will never stop proselytizing about the power of community, whether that be with friends in our own backyards or on the phone with a fellow voter you will never meet but with whom you share a moment of true connection. As Rabbi Brous so beautifully put it in her Rosh Hashanah sermon: hope itself is in the work. I am not going to wait around for the feeling, we don’t have time for that. Let’s, instead, grab onto one another and get moving.

Sending love,

Abs xo