Saturday, February 15 at roughly 3:00 pm
“Hi, my name is Natalie. I’m a volunteer with the Pete Buttigieg presidential campaign. Do you plan on caucusing?”
The man at the door is wearing a blue baseball hat over curly gray hair.
“Well, yes, I’m going to caucus. But it’s not like it really matters when the entire country has gone to hell,” he says.
“Yeah…” I stare at him for a second, trying to gauge the intensity of his emotions.
“You know you’re in a red circle,” he’s referring to the conservative cul-de-sac he lives in.
“Yeah…” I said again, though I obviously didn’t know that.
He’s mad, but not at me.
He begins venting his frustrations about the government. I agree with most things he says, but I don’t agree with the way he’s saying them nor how he talks about his conservative neighbors.
A few times he stops to ask, “Do you understand?” or “You know what I’m talking about?”
He’s not concerned about my understanding, so much as he is quizzing me on my knowledge of politics and government.
If I understand what he’s talking about, I say “yeah.” If I don’t understand what he’s talking about, I say “yeah.”
It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk about Pete, but I jump into an unnatural pause anyway. “Do you mind if I tell you why I’m supporting Pete?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think it matters anyway. No democrat is going to be elected and even if they somehow did, it’s not like they’ll be able get anything done…” He continues as if I didn’t ask the question.
Delivery of Doors
Before canvassing, I imagined that when I knocked on a stranger’s door, they would react like they had received an unwanted campaign text. Anger and annoyance are common responses to text-banking (i.e. texting voters through an app that populates phone numbers for us to recruit volunteers or attendees for Pete events). When I read these messages to myself, I can hear their cold aggressive voices. These voices don’t scare me, because I know they are far away. But when I’m canvassing, I expect these voices to live behind the doors I approach.
The app we use to canvass directs us to addresses on a map. When we click on a specific point, the inhabitants’ names, ages, and party preferences appear.
When our data coordinator talks about sending us new doors, I think about the movie Monsters, Inc. In Monsters, Inc., monsters are assigned doors leading to children’s rooms, where the monsters scare children and collect their screams to use as energy (sidenote: now that I’ve typed this sentence, this movie seems a lot creepier than I remember). The monsters are afraid of the children and the children are afraid of the monsters. Neither are actually dangerous.
As canvassers, we collect political support, not screams, though a successful visit similarly energizes us to approach the next door.
I enjoy imagining that the pinpoints on my map aren’t sent to me through a programming language, but from the door warehouse in Monsters, Inc. When we are assigned a neighborhood, the doors leave their storage spots and fly toward our phones, taking the form of pinpoints upon arrival.
In the movie, when monsters approach a new door, they give each other pep talks. Sometimes they are afraid. Sometimes they are excited. Each of the monster’s assigned doors are uniquely painted, reflecting the inhabitant’s personality. What isn’t unique is the red light looming above every door, a reminder that while the monsters enter through doors, they aren’t welcome.
As I write this, I feel happy to be playing with a metaphor. Getting to map a nostalgic movie onto my experiences — if clumsily — is what I consider fun.
However, as thoughts of brightly decorated doors swing through my mind, I keep coming back to a thought that makes me uncomfortable: no matter how friendly, fuzzy, or cute, I don’t want to be the monster.
Saturday, February 15 at roughly 2:57 pm
Moments before meeting the man with the blue baseball cap, I clicked on his house. A single name appeared.
When the man opened the door, I got to meet the angry person I’ve been afraid of. But he wasn’t scary. More than anything, he seemed hurt and lonely. I think he just wanted to be heard. Though I wasn’t comfortable with how he talked about his neighbors, I wasn’t afraid either.
I recognized his loneliness. I’ve felt that loneliness.
When you’re surrounded by people who loudly disagree with you about the things you care about, it feels isolating. Of course, it’s important to have healthy relationships and plenty of conversations with people who disagree with you. But ideally there is some balance. Sometimes you just want to vent to a person who has the same values and frustrations as you.
Every Door is Double-Sided
Like the monsters and the children, standing on opposite sides of the same door, I expected to meet danger and found none.
I suspect that text banking and communicating with strangers online has warped my understanding of introductions, has increased my wariness toward strangers. The harsher the words, the harder they are to forget and the easier they are to recall. I’m used to the frequency and severity of internet anger, so I’ve come to expect it even in my offline interactions. Sometimes I wonder if I’m making up conflict in places where it doesn’t exist.
The one angry person I encountered while canvassing did not sound like the cold, aggressive voice in my head. He sounded like a person with real reasons to be angry. He reminded me that people who send me angry messages have real reasons to be angry, even when they express anger in unproductive or hurtful ways.
Even though he claimed my efforts were a waste of time, I find hope in his willingness to open the door anyway, and before I left, he asked me for the closest location to early-caucus. Even if I didn’t convince the man to vote a certain way, I hope I at least reminded him that his feelings are valid and his thoughts matter.