Personal Narrative-Defeat Of A Demagogue

Defeat of a Demagogue
“Ding!” I received a text from Sadie at 9 o’clock the night before we were due to run a canvass to elect Hillary Clinton, who we hope will be the next president. It said “Hey, Brian would like us to come in a little early to help set up and train volunteers.” I didn’t realize what that would entail, so I replied “Ok, cool, dude. See you tomorrow!” and didn't think much of it, then watched The Office until I fell asleep.
The next morning, I woke up to the text “I’m on the way to pick you up.” I scrambled to get ready, and was luckily able to be dressed and ready to go in time. Sadie got to my house, and when I got in the car, I was informed there would be 300 out-of-state volunteers coming to the office to help canvass. We were in for a treat.
We arrived at the office around 10 A.M., and there were already vans of democrats from all over the East Coast arriving to receive packets for canvassing. We were quickly trained by our organizer, boss, and friend, Brian, on how to canvass and teach the other people to canvass.
(Throughout the day, I watched him give the same exact speech, word for word, to many other groups of people.) My friend Luke arrived, and we were quickly moved to another section of our office building that we and the rest of the interns and organizers work out of. Here, we were instructed to hand out packets of addresses of local democrats and independents to all the volunteers. This is where my day got hectic. The hundreds of volunteers, as it turns out, don't
Feinberg 2 really see me, a 17 year old, as someone of any authority. I had been organizing and running events all summer, but they didn't know that. Directions given were often not followed, and people were just taking packets left and right, without signing them out so we know who had which packet, each containing an area to canvass. I had to raise my voice, and eventually was able to make order. Luke and I exchanged many exhausted looks as we handed out the packets to the volunteers.
Once the first set of packets were all handed out, we trained more volunteers, and then went through the same process, and although this time I was much more assertive. It went smoother the second time, as I knew what to expect.
After the volunteers had all been accounted for and given materials, Luke and I had some downtime. Brian let us take his credit card and get burritos from Chipotle, as a thank you for helping run the event, and giving up our whole
Saturday. I would've done it for free, because I love being an intern for the PA Dems, but I am always down for a free burrito. We brought our food back to the office and wanted to watch some college football, and posted up in the upstairs office with a small TV in it. Not 10 minutes into the first quarter of the Michigan game, Brian’s boss, Francis, came upstairs and said “Hey guys, it would be great if you helped out a little instead of watching football,” in an extremely passive aggressive manner. It was alright though; we just took our food downstairs and watched the game on Brian’s laptop with him. Soon, volunteers started coming back after finishing their packets. Our job now was to break down each clipboard, each with maps, voter registration sheets, and canvass papers in it, and organize all the different papers. We formed an assembly line and went at it for the next hour, sorting hundreds of volunteers’ papers, which
they presumably didn’t realize people would eventually have to read, and organize.
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Once finished organizing, we put each stack of papers in the box it needed to go in, loaded them into a car so they could be taken to the main headquarters, and logged into our data.
We sat around for another hour, waiting for more tasks, but none came. Around 6, after doing nothing for 1 ½ hours, I got a text from my friend asking if I wanted to study with him that night.
I asked if I could go, and Brian said “Of course dude, you did a great job, thanks for all the help.” My day was over, and I went home to study with the knowledge that I played a part in making sure that Hillary Clinton defeats Donald Trump this November. Learning to deal with inpatient volunteers and keep everything organized and running smoothly helped me to become a better leader, and in 2 years, I hope to work as a paid organizer for the reelection of Tom Wolf and the other democrats running in 2018.