Driving Votes: Jenny's Blog - Archived Entry

There is something admittedly surreal about hopping in a car with four other people and driving twelve hours south through the state of California and east across the Mojave Desert to go register voters in Nevada. Arriving in Las Vegas at two in the morning, the lights of the city appeared suddenly before us as our car crested the last rise standing between just another road trip and our unlikely ambition; I’ve never gone to Las Vegas for exactly the right reasons. The first was to prove that it exists; the second was to get a president out of office.

The next day we canvassed neighborhoods adjacent to the Strip for Democratic and progressive voters in 105-degree heat. The combined effects of the temperature, sun, desert region, and our electoral activism made the reality that had brought me to Las Vegas feel very present. While there are a significant number of reasons why I am personally angered by this presidency -their failure to address the complete inadequacy of our current health care system, their surreptitious and deliberate erosion of environmental protections and our civil liberties, their treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals as second-class citizens- I always come back to the conflict in Iraq as an emotional trigger point.

Standing there in Las Vegas under a noonday desert sun, I couldn’t help wondering if this weren’t how Baghdad might feel. My mind reeled with thoughts of war, the loss of a best friend who was a soldier in Iraq by one of the members of our Driving Votes group, the loss of a parent in the September 11th terrorist attacks by a childhood friend of mine ... the ugliness of the circumstances that had brought me to this desert city was overwhelming.

But the thing is, I’m lucky enough that most days I don’t have to feel this. I don’t live in a war zone, nor does my family. I don’t know anyone personally who is in Iraq, U.S. soldier or Iraqi citizen. And I have been fortunate enough to find a rapidly expanding community of people who are just as upset as I am with what is going on in the world right now, with what our government is doing in our own country and in the world right now, and who are actively working to change this.

Meeting other first-time and experienced activists has been one of the many amazing things about getting involved with Driving Votes. Meeting other newly and already registered voters from swing states has been another one. In our two days in Las Vegas, we registered a nineteen-year-old who was excited to participate in his first presidential election and a former felon who had been upset to lose his right to vote, which had just been reinstated due to a new law. We talked with union families and families from low income neighborhoods. In conversation after conversation, the war in Iraq came up as a major issue and source of discontent. In one particular interaction, the person I met told me he was constantly singled out at work and on the defensive because of his views on the war and how good it was to meet people who felt the same way he did. He is getting in touch with the Driving Votes Las Vegas committee right now.

Sometimes perhaps you do have to drive twelve hours to Nevada so that you and the people you meet can realize that there are more of us out there than we might think who believe that what is going on right now is not okay. And through these experiences, people are finding each other, these conversations are being had, and ever increasingly, people are stepping forward and doing something about it.