9-9-08 sarah palin is my reason to wake up
This morning I was lying in bed unable to wake up, and NPR came on with Sarah Palin’s shrill voice berating democrats and “community organizers”…
I happen to be a “community organizer”, and I work over 80 hours a week and i have a HUGE amount of responsibility, and people who count on me every day. I used to be a procrastinator, but at this job I don’t even have time to procrastinate, because there is always some deadline and people who will be let down if I don’t do my part.
And I know Barack Obama’s job as a community organizer had MUCH MORE responsibility than mine, he was working with large groups of people, different organizations within the community: churches, unions, neighborhood groups, unemployed workers, factories cutting jobs, blacks, whites, latinos, etc….
I challenge Sarah Palin to work for 102 days in a row 13+ hours a day, because that is what my current job as a “community organizer” is. I do not have a day off until after the election. No weekends. No nothing.
So anyway, hearing her obnoxious voice made me so angry I was wide awake and ready to jump out of bed and start my work for the day!
I decided her smiling face would be good motivation for us here at the office. This is what we will get if we don’t work hard enough — Someone who thinks the idea of organizing diverse groups and trying to come to a consensus about how to deal with unemployment and social unrest is a completely laughable occupation.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Take that step today!” is taped to my laptop.
The work we do here will save us from leaders like McCain/Palin. They claim to be “regular people”, yet Palin makes fun of community organizers and is married to oil wealth, and McCain come from a long line of rich Navy men and also married into wealth, and doesn’t even know how many houses he has.
There is nothing wrong with their life stories or their wealth OTHER THAN the fact that they continually claim to be “just like regular Americans”, and make fun of a Democrat who actually grew up in poverty raised by a single mother, and devoted his early career to helping a troubled community on the South Side of Chicago. I don’t understand how the Republicans try to brand Obama as “elitist” and McCain as “just a regular guy”, considering their backgrounds.
And though Palin may have been a reformer in her own state, her addition to the national stage made her decide that community organizing — volunteering for a campaign, working at a homeless shelter, or any other community-based occupation — is completely laughable.
Republicans say they want to get rid of big government and let people work things out on their own — pull yourself up by your bootstraps, deal with your own problems, be responsible for yourself and your family rather than counting on government handouts. Fine. Great. I’m all for it. But someone like Obama who chose a low-paying and difficult job to improve the lives of ordinary Chicagoins — that is somehow not ok either, event though he was not part of government at that time.
So what IS ok? No government.. No community organizers. What are we — as a community or as individuals — supposed to do about our problems? Pray that they will go away? Stop trying to work out solutions and retreat to our bunkers with our guns and hope that we never have a problem that is too big for us to figure out on our own? Hope that we never need the help of our elected government or our community or our neighbors? Because apparently that is the world that Sarah Palin wants to live in. God bless her.
THIS IS WHY I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING.