In League

Fog in the Mohawk River Valley. The trees, brown, red, orange, yellow, and some still green, stand out against the white fog.  October slides down toward Halloween. The valley is so beautiful and the river carries its history.  Long before Europeans showed up this was the superhighway for a big area, flowing east for 150 miles through the Adirondack Mountains to the grand Hudson River.  It is named for the Mohawk people, a nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.  We give little credit to the Iroquois, although we learned so much about self governance from them.  They had a sophisticated government, and shared with the early settlers, who had lived under monarchies, an understanding of self government and how to develop a constitution.

It’s a natural jump for me from the stunning beauty of the Mohawk Valley to thinking about government, since I’m thinking about government all the time these days. September and October are the busiest months for voter services for the League of Women Voters.  I’ve done four training sessions for volunteers, and supported those volunteers as they went out to staff voter registration tables at a variety of locations and different types of events.  So far this year we’ve talked to about 1,300 citizens, and we’ll probably be up to nearly 2000 by election day.  A big slice of that work is being done by my sister Aviva and her friend Roe who have taken on the local colleges, particularly the State University of New York at Oneonta.

This work is mostly fun and inspiring – especially Aviva’s work with college students.  They are eager to vote, many for the first time. They need to understand their options, and then need little more than a QR code to register and request an absentee ballot online.  The older voters we see still often want the paper forms, and we have them. Often, our work with them is trying to turn them into advocates, to get them to think about young people in their circle who might need to be encouraged to vote.  The work of the League of Women Voters has shifted since the passage of the Motor Voter Law.  Most people register to vote when they get their driver’s licenses now.  With all the people we’ve encountered, we’ve given out fewer than 20 physical registration forms, mostly to people who have recently moved.  But many people don’t know about their options for early voting and voting by mail, and most of them are happy to learn from us.

It is a challenge to stay non-partisan this year, to genuinely want everyone to vote.  I went to the county jail and registered seven inmates, five of them first time voters.  They each eagerly disclosed that they were voting for Trump – and it was clear that he was their inspiration to even consider voting.  But I want them to vote anyway.  I want them to see themselves as citizens. I want them to know that they are still entitled to weigh in on who will represent them.  I think that if people start voting they start paying more attention to how they are represented, to what gets done and what doesn’t.  I think that bystanders are a greater threat to our democracy than Trump voters.  The Iroquois knew this.  They built a government based on equal and active participation.

There are a lot of Trump voters along the Mohawk River and throughout these rural counties.  Some of them qualify as members of Hillary Clinton’s ill considered “basket of deplorables”, flying their Confederate flags.  But most of them just feel that he’s the first politician in a very long time who hasn’t looked down his educated nose at them, who understands how much they’ve lost as the economy has shifted and left their towns behind.  What other politicians have failed to do is to tell them a story about their future that they can connect with.  They don’t want their kids to go to college if it means those kids will move away.  They want to find a place in the information economy for their skills, skills we still need in the physical world. They want their towns to have pride again, to grow enough to sustain a high school as they once did.  They want the boarded up stores to reopen in spite of Walmart.  Of course, they are tragically misled by Trump, who has zero interest in their very real challenges.  They’ve fallen for a good entertainer, a talented con artist.  They’ve fallen for the illusion of being seen and heard. 

Harris, and Biden before her, have tried to tell the story of a future they can be part of, and they’ve taken real steps to move us towards that future.  Unlike the charlatan Trump, they’ve actually moved on infrastructure issues that have a big impact on rural life.  Unlike Trump they’ve actually improved health care for rural communities, and they’re bringing good jobs to places that have lost old industries.  I don’t understand why this isn’t seen and valued.  At least part of the reason is that the lying has gotten so loud that it’s just drowned out  the truth.  And probably part of the reason is that it’s a harder story to tell in memorable sound bites.

Smarter people than I have analyzed this endlessly.  But what I have seen out here in a purple county is that we are still neighbors.  The folks who come to our voter registration tables trust us to give them accurate information about voting.  We get an occasional snide remark about how we probably don’t want them to vote if they’re going to vote for Trump, but we’re quick to assure them that we want everyone to vote, that we don’t care how they vote but we do care that they vote. We get a few hostile passersby who say they never vote, and we just wish them a good day.  But of the 1300 people we’ve talked to probably 1280 have trusted us and been grateful for our efforts.

League of Women Voters members sign off “In League”.  We remind ourselves that we come together with a shared mission, a mission  that hasn’t changed in over 100 years.  I love the volunteers I’ve worked with.  I love their commitment to nonpartisan voter education. I love their faith in democracy.  We share this beautiful countryside.  We share autumn in the Mohawk Valley.  We share the houses decorated with pumpkins, squash, corn and chrysanthemums. We share hopes for even the most tired of towns, even the reddest.