Turn Towards Each Other

And a little bit about phone banking

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

I believe in democracy, flawed and unfulfilled as it is. I believe in the power of people to come together and shape the future. I know that there are forces and people aligned against this, but at the end of the day, I believe that together we can make things better, we can help each other and ourselves, and that we can build a world where we can all thrive. 

So believe me when I say last week was hard. I try not to cave too much to doubt and despair in public forums because that darkness is a monster that feeds itself. So too is the endless scroll, the constant search for a tweet or a post that will make me feel better, because there is no poll or analysis or anecdote that can predict the future, but that doesn’t stop me from looking for one and falling deeper and deeper into a cesspool of everyone else’s anger and anxiety. 

In this mood I don’t want to be reassured because that makes me feel alternately like I’m a raving lunatic and like Cassandra, screaming truth and getting called a raving lunatic anyway. And I don’t want empathy either because if you’re also anxious and afraid then it means I have a reason to be. And I don’t want a reason to be. Still, there are things I know make me feel better - cooking, reading, going outside. Pushing through those self-isolating rationalizations and talking to people anyway. I did none of that last week.I just scrolled. I sprawled on the couch and did as many Monday New York Times crossword puzzles as I could while CSI: NY played in the background. I typed out mean tweets, deleted them, scrolled further down my feed, went back up, retyped the mean tweet, pressed send. 

Like all feelings, unfortunately, these weren’t entirely based in fact. I’m not going to make an argument about why things look more hopeful than they seemed to me last week, or why I think we can still win. The problem with feelings is that you can’t be talked into them or out of them, try though I might. If there were an argument that was going to make me feel better, I probably could have either made it myself or found it somewhere. If my despair was based in fact, it’d be because I knew the future and we’d either be stuck in some self-fulfilling prophecy or we’d be able to change it, and that too would solve the problem. 

This has always been endlessly maddening to me. Snapping out of it always makes me feel a little silly - like if there is no objective truth in how I’m feeling, what was the point of it all? Don’t worry, my therapist and I are working on it. 

Which isn’t to say the frustration and fear and anger and horror don’t come from somewhere real. This is an incredibly frustrating election. The Trump campaign has been extremely clear about their plans to persecute people who disagree with them, to execute mass deportations which means sending armed people into communities all over the country in search of anyone who looks like an immigrant. They have been clear about their plans to dismantle queer rights, birth control, and bodily autonomy not just for people seeking abortions, but for trans people too. They actively want to make climate change worse. They want government services and disaster response to be available only for people who voted for them. They want to make the rich richer at our expense. 

And tens of millions of people are going to vote for him. Tens of millions more are going to sit out the election. And while I understand all of the structural forces that get us here, I can’t help but tremble in frustration that what seems so glaringly obvious to me is not enough for us to win. 

And on the other side, it has been a year since October 7th, and there has been so much death and destruction, so much pain, so much violence and so much escalation. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead, including so many children. Disease and starvation run rampant. Whole family lines have been wiped out. Israel has pulled Lebanon and Iran into the conflict. There are still almost one hundred hostages in Gaza and over a hundred have been killed. More people will die. And no amount of protesting in Israel or in the United States has been able to stop the violence or our contributions to it. 

It’s no surprise then that sometimes the despair, the powerlessness, the fear dominates. But my belief in democracy does not require me to feel good all the time, and it doesn’t even require us to win every time. It is not passive and it is not naive. It is the long, slow work of making connections, bringing people together, and degree by degree shifting the course of the huge, unwieldy ship of our future. All it requires is that we show up, which is why even while I was having a huge, sedentary internal meltdown this week, I took two breaks from crossword puzzles, doomscrolling, and CSI: NY to phone bank. 

Yes, this meandering, existential, embodied intro has just been a long con. Don’t quit now, you’re almost there! 

I’ll be honest, I don’t love phone banking as an activity. It always takes me a while to work myself up to it, and I always have to remind myself that no matter what happens, it won’t actually kill me. And here’s the thing - it never does. And sometimes, it’s actually great. 

Here’s how they work: when you sign up for a virtual phone bank, you’ll get an email, usually from Mobilize, but sometimes directly from the campaign, with a zoom link. At the time of your shift, you join the zoom. The first half an hour of the shift is usually a training. An organizer will walk you through information about the candidate and the district or state, major issues at play, and the goals for the phone bank. Sometimes this is persuasion, or talking to undecided voters about the issues they care about so that you can try to convince them to vote for your candidate. Sometimes this is voter identification, or confirming support for candidates so the campaign knows who to send canvassers to, and who to reach out to for GOTV (or get out the vote - more about this on that in a bit). They will also go over the script 

Then, there will be some training on the tech. Usually this is an autodialer - you’ll log into a program and the program will call lots and lots of numbers in the background and when it makes a connection with a real person it’ll beep, and you’ll start with your script. Some people will hang up on you, and some people will sigh heavily, and some people will nicely say that they don’t have time to talk. But some people will answer your questions, and some people will have a conversation with you. And some will even thank you for the hard work you’re doing, and and promise to take their family and friends to the polls, and remind you that there are people all over the country, in every state, in every town, in every district who want the same things you do. 

When I’m on a phone bank sometimes I’ll find myself thinking just hang up, just hang up. I don’t want to talk to anyone - I just want the appearance of it. But every time I try to stop myself. I think I want to have the conversation. I think this next could be the one that makes this whole thing worth it. I think what if I convince the next person? 

A friend of mine wrote a really beautiful essay on phone banking, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. But I want to end on this excerpt: 

“I think of phonebanking now as a sacred ritual of reaching out to strangers to connect authentically, and as a way of acknowledging that my destiny and theirs are entwined. (Perhaps it’s no accident that the predictive dialer term for when someone picks up the phone is “a connect.”) I am entering the plaza and turning right, because today I feel strong enough to hop on a phonebank. Many of the people I call will answer my bid by turning toward me. They will walk to the right with me, cheerfully telling me they will vote – and promising to ask their friends and family to vote too. Others will walk in the opposite direction. They may turn away, but I can bless them anyway. Those who turn against? They are in real pain. Even if we don’t part as friends (as I did with the Pennsylvania voter), I will make sure they know that I see them, that they are not alone.”

When it all gets to be too much, turn towards each other. And sign up for a phone bank.