Putting My Time and Money Where My Mouth Is

Recently I realized that the time had come for me to I put my money and my time where my sizable mouth (i.e. this blog) is.

The past several weekends I’ve been canvassing for Barack Obama, going door to door to ensure people are registered to vote and, of course, encouraging them to vote Democrat. With only 30 days to go until the election, I plan on taking every weekend until November to get the word out.

D.C. is about as blue a place as you can get, so we’re being farmed out to Virginia, one of the key battleground states. I chose Woodbridge as my area. It was in Woodbridge that I lived when I was last in D.C. fourteen years ago, working for a Republican congressman. I enjoy the ironic symmetry.

On the first weekend the Woodbridge office opened, they had one volunteer. Today, so many people are showing up, they’re chartering their own buses to get there. Like myself, very few of them have done this before. My fellow volunteers are college students and senior citizens, whites and blacks, artists and politicos, religious and atheists, gay and straight, non-profit aid agency workers on their way to Africa and soldiers just back from Afghanistan.

One of my partners today took the cake, however. A Canadian working in Washington, she doesn’t even have the right to vote in this country. But she so believes in Obama and his message that she has been volunteering all of her free time to see to it that he’s elected.

What was my excuse? What’s yours?