This weekend, my parents and I crawled onto an early morning train and spent Saturday on the streets of Southwest Philly, registering voters and hoping to convince them to vote for Barack Obama.

For my parents, it had been 40 years since they last campaigned for a presidential candidate. I know that my experience as a veteran and its influence on my own urge to fix America has helped rekindle my parents’ belief in the ability of citizens to change their country and the absolute necessity for us to do so now. For me, it was my first time working for a campaign, and I feel it is an obligation as serious as, and even more essential than, my service in the military.


Among my friends and colleagues, I’m hard-pressed to find one who isn’t well informed, thoughtful, socially conscious, pissed off with the state of the union, and uneasy about the direction our country is headed in. But depressingly, in this group of potential change makers, I’m yet again hard-pressed to find one who has taken the initiative to do anything about any of these issues.

There’s a reality gap in this country. Even educated, informed Americans (supposedly the minority in our electorate) still think that if they sit on their hands complaining, someone else will pick up the slack for them and deliver the social change they want. Wrong.


Democracy Requires Participation.

This system of government doesn’t work if citizens don’t participate- dysfunctional democracies easily devolve into oligarchies, which is what America is on the verge of becoming. What we have now are two major political parties and the companies that support them cutting up the country into demographic slices and playing these “red” and “blue” states like fiddles to achieve their own economic and political goals. And as each citizen shirks his patriotic duties, the oligarchy strengthens and the democracy weakens. Our country is not weak because of “those who seek to destroy us”- terror is only one of many threats to Americans. Our country is weak because we will not see America to greatness.


Southwest Philly is no picnic. The neighborhood we were campaigning in was the most economically depressed I’ve seen in America, with burned out houses, trash everywhere, closed businesses, dilapidated row houses that haven’t been painted since the 1930s, and storeowners standing behind bulletproof glass. Plenty of streets looked worse than Iraq.

But after a few hours of standing on a street corner, I became familiar with the way the community went about its Saturday business and was comfortable approaching anyone to ask if they were registered to vote. What amazed me at the end of the day was just how many of the neighborhood’s residents were already registered voters.

We did change of address, name, and party registrations and signed up a few 18-year-olds, but most of what we heard all day was “I’m already registered”. Some people we approached were insulted that we’d even suggest they weren’t registered or that they didn’t vote- “I haven’t missed a single vote in 50 years,” one man told me with a wink.

More than once I was surprised by some tough looking kids who thanked me for offering to help out, but then told me that they were already registered. Several times, residents seemed thrilled to find us there- “Oh, I’ve been meaning to do this but I keep forgetting, where do I sign up?!” At the end of the day we had registered over 100 American citizens and felt reasonably assured that nearly everyone we had spoken to that day was registered and intended to vote. I also signed up a handful of volunteers.


I'm always hearing about how America's “idiot electorate” of indifferent citizens is the reason democracy fails (this claim often emanating sardonically and fatalistically from the mouths of the educated, informed, and agitated friends I have). I've often wondered just where these idiots really are. In the trailer parks? In the ghettos? For a day on the streets of Southwest Philly, where by all measures citizens are completely disadvantaged and have every reason to feel disenfranchised, I found that at least 95% of the people that walked past me were informed, socially conscious, and actively participating. We had debates about whether Obama could win the general election, what the Republicans allegedly offered veterans, who had the best vision for America, how the super delegates worked, what the real cost of the Iraq war was, and on and on.

Back in downtown Manhattan, among my college-educated, NY Times reading cohorts, the whining and eye rolling about Bush continued, the lamentations about the war, the head-shaking and the disgust. But ask these Americans what they’ve done about it and they get quiet fast. They don’t vote in the primaries. They don’t donate to the candidates they speak so ardently about. They don’t volunteer for their campaigns. They don't write to their representatives. Instead, they sit and read the newspaper online and act like they give a shit. My question is this: can you really care about something if you won’t do anything about it?


Our experiences in war have helped us realize how important it is for citizens to participate in democracy: apathy begets body bags and the bags are filled with people we know. Unpatriotic isn’t not wearing a lapel pin or saying you don’t support a war- unpatriotic is not doing your part- your duty as a citizen. There may be excuses for not getting out on the campaign trail, but there are none for not voting. If you can’t put out just that little bit, then what good are you to this democracy?