Black Wednesday

Nebula Award-winning author Mary Turzillo sends us this first-person report from the front lines of the election battle in Ohio.

Rain
by Mary Turzillo

Reporting from Cuyahoga County, the heart of the heart of it all, the city that couldn’t deliver, the city where it rained.

I don’t know. We sure as hell tried. We weren’t slackers, Bob. I did phone banking, I did canvassing both Monday and election day. I went to be trained as a Voter Protector Sunday and there were so many volunteers at the Lakewood (suburb east of Cleveland, heavily Kerry) they were standing in the street. They had to split us in two groups and they asked some of us to canvas instead. I gladly did. I went to the Kerry rally with Bruce Springsteen on election eve. Geoff and I sat on a newspaper vending box (Scene magazine, actually) so we could see the screen. We shared it with a woman who’d lost her job of 20 years at MCI. The estimates of over 50,000 were correct. People were wearing a lot of creative buttons and shirts: “Bush is so full of shit we need two Johns” being my favorite.

My sister went out and canvassed. Everybody I knew who could legally do so canvassed for Kerry. (Hatch Act.)

But I looked at Weather Underground on Sunday, and it called for rain on Tuesday. My heart sank, but you can’t give up because of a little rain.

The strategy for this late canvassing, weekend through election day, was just to turn people out, just get them to the polls. It was too late to change people’s minds—just get the Kerry voters to the polls on Tuesday, I heard a lot of hesitancy: people who had moved and weren’t sure where to vote, women who had changed their names through marriage, people whose absentee ballot hadn’t come.

In Ohio you can get an absentee ballot if you’re over 62, among other reasons. Personally, I don’t think an absentee ballot is worth Harry Truman’s bucket of spit, because I think half the time they declare the winner without ever opening or certifying them.

I also encountered people who wanted to vote for Kerry but hadn’t registered (too late) or who seemed a little reluctant (guy in an elevator of a high rise—why did I think he might have been a male hooker?) for whatever reason.

And then Tuesday dawned, and it rained. It rained. It rained.

I canvassed again—only two hours—that was the day they gave us the high rise apartment buildings, where you had to be buzzed in. My two partners were a Pilates teacher and a woman who knew the area. We bluffed our way into one of the high rises and put flyers in the doors. We were afraid to knock for fear of having a resident call downstairs. We got kicked out, but by then we’d papered 200 doors and talked to a couple residents—ones that looked Democrat.

The workers applauded canvassers when they came back in out of the rain.

They had so many volunteers to drive people to the polls that they had to turn some of them away. They were phone banking when I left to get ready for our election nigh party. When I came home I found two sweet college girls crossing my lawn, canvassing for Kerry for America Coming Together.

What did we do wrong? Kerry was here. He said the right things, even though he had a really scratchy sounding throat.

Hell, I got into an argument on line with a woman who couldn’t even spell the President’s name. She was worried about terrorism and I was a foolhardy, and she was going to vote for “Busch.” And she voted. Yeah, she was an Ohio voter. On the dark side.

Ultimately, I think it was the goddamn rain. A minister at the rally had prayed for a good turnout and good weather. But we didn’t get it.

It rained. It rained. It rained.

And now what?

The Supreme Court is the real problem. Bush has free rein to write history for the next forty years. Reverse Roe Vs. Wade. Possibly make birth control harder to obtain, even. Some pharmacists even now are claiming that the common birth control pill (not the morning after pill, guys, the ordinary old birth control pill) somehow allows viable fetuses to be flushed.

I think the arts are in for a dark ages. Not only will American arts institutions—including publishing—go down the tubes, but censorship may well be back. And our library records may wind up as public record. Or at least available to the fumbling idiots who are in charge our security.

We’re a laughing stock in the world. This time, we not only let a knave sneak in, over half of the voters actually voted for him.

More lives will be lost in wars that have nothing to do with our security and everything to do with enriching Halliburton and the administration’s oil cronies.

Education is down the tubes. To quote Sheila from our party last night, “No child left behind? No, now they’ll ALL be left behind.” Because quite aside from Bush’s attitude toward spending, school levies went down in flames.

Health care? This is particularly scary to me for a personal reason. My son has been hanging on to his health insurance by living with my ex in a city which has almost no jobs. He’s never going to be able to enter the labor market, because he hasn’t had a job in five years. If he does get a job, minimum wage will be so low he can’t afford a place to live.

The environment will be up for sale to the dirtiest bidder. Wilderness areas “managed” for oil and lumber. Parks closed for lack of staffing.

What did I forget? Having to listen daily for four years to an arrogant, self-important windbag who thinks God has picked him out for special privilege, unless we smash our TVs.

I’m trying to think of one good thing that will come out of this. Consumer Reports on Money even says that the stock market does better under a Democrat (if any body has the energy to look it up, it’s at: Wall Street reads the tea leaves: Why Wall Street just doesn’t get presidential politics).

So I guess we should buy bonds. Except I’m not sure what we’re supposed to buy them with.

The volunteers worked our little hearts out here in Cuyahoga County. Commentators are saying Kerry should have played the abortion thing down, played the values thing up, should have “spoken more from the heart.” I don’t know. But Bob, I have my own theory. We lost because it rained.

Because it rained. Because it frigging rained.

Save us all.

Mary Turzillo is the author of dozens of short stories and poems. Her novel, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, was recently serialized in Analog magazine.