| Today is not my first-time volunteering to work in the election department for the City of Worcester. I have now done this four times, and it is a wonderful chance to see the inner workings of our democratic process. Over the past six years, there has been many accusations of voter fraud and election malfeasance, mostly at the national level. One of the guiding principles of What’s up Worcester is educating our community, not to vote how we would want, but about the process, about the people involved and about why it is so important to participate. As we have been developing the platform, I have had the chance to interview several of the people running for office, and I thought a good perspective piece would help to both summarize this last primary season and start as a jumping off point for the general election that is coming. I think one of the most important things we can focus on, whether as a journalist, volunteer, official or voter is that presence is important. What’s Up Worcester, as most of you reading this know, is headquartered at The Village, which is on King Street right in the heart of Main South. We have hosted several different candidates there, and that presence is being and will be remembered. Today it is raining, seemingly creating a depressing atmosphere for voting. Is that how democracy works? In my assigned location at the beautifully redesigned Worcester Public Library, the setup is beautiful. Spacious, and clean we are located in the Saxe Room, a room named in honor of James Alfred and Mary Wick Saxe, which apparently came from a fund given to the library in 1948. There hasn’t been much of a crowd as I write this around lunchtime, we are only fifteen voters in. Several of those fifteen have had questions about whether they are in the right place. That begs the question: are people getting the information about voting or not? Before I answer that there are a couple of follow-up thoughts that spring immediately to mind: One, if they are getting that information they may not consider it important; Two, as several What’s Up Worcester readers have mentioned, they are intimidated by the process, which is an indictment of our nation; Three, if they are not, it is a black mark on our leaders; and Four, at this point the question itself means we are not doing something right. You may notice that I use the collective we in the prior sentence. I was born in Boston and raised Catholic in an all-Irish home. There is an apocryphal picture of me somewhere, in a suit, on Easter seated next to a display of three pictures: Jesus, Pope John Paul II and John F. Kennedy. I tell you this on purpose, because JFK’s great inauguration speech, you know, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country’, was a tribal mantra for my family. Now, of course, that was spoken by a very privileged individual in John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Pretty easy for an ultra-rich elite to ask citizens for service. There is a problem in this generation, however, that comes close to the great line in Kennedy’s speech: entitlism. This word is marked by Microsoft Word as a spelling error, which may mean I am coining it. Entitlism would be the movement or belief that something is owed to you. I do not find this belief common among the poor or economically disadvantaged people of color. I find it most common among college aged students who are predominantly of European heritage and from middle and upper-class families. I am a night student at Clark University, and I interact with many twenty-something students. Often, I hear complaints about services, about income and about what is owed to them. Often professors complain about how students get upset with grades, and in a couple of cases I spoke with the student in question. They had not submitted an entire semester worth of homework, or the midterm, but expected an A. At my full-time job, last year we had a prospective employee work three days, and on the third day ask for a multi-dollar raise. The same employee had not shown up for 2 of the 5 days he was scheduled and had come in late on the second and third days he actually showed up. Again, a very young person with a high level of expectation. The same seems to be true at the polls, we want change, we demand change, we march for change and definitely tweet for change but when we have to get up and go to a polling location to fill in some circles with ink…. well, that’s too much. At the same time, the last twenty years of national elections have seen dramatic and huge voter turnout, with the huge swings in policy that come from see-saw change. The turmoil at the top, however strong and interest-drawing, does not always translate to the local election ballot box. Here in Worcester the race that has garnered the most attention is for the 1st Worcester State Senate District. Worcester Mayor and City Councilor Joe Petty, a longtime staple of local politics and Robyn Kennedy, former COO at the YWCA, a newcomer as a candidate but not to politics, have run an atypically robust and public campaign for a seat that has long been held by Harriette Chandler. This open seat was thought to be a shoo-in for Mayor Petty, who came with many of the normal Democratic endorsements, but Kennedy has run a very personal campaign, herself knocking on thousands and thousands of doors. I have had the chance to interview them both, and on policy they have some significant differences. Kennedy is viewed generally as the more ‘progressive’ candidate, but I have found her to be open and listening. Mayor Petty has been the same guy he has always been, he listens, and he comes out to different things, and his focus seems to be on ‘delivering’ for the district. I won’t influence you either way but encourage you at least to read and discover both candidates and their positions. I am looking forward to hosting a forum with the winner of this race and Lisa Mair, who is running in the general election, hopefully sometime soon. In another notable race, for the Republican nomination for governor, I was able to interview running mates Chris Doughty and Kate Campanale. They came to the Village, a first for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, and sat down with Manny Alvarado and me on a live interview. I found them to be willing to engage on difficult topics, and when Manny, as a man of color, broached the topic of unfairness in the economy and criminal justice systems, they did not shy away from answering or from being open to learning more. I did reach out to both Geoff Diehl and Maura Healy’s campaigns. I had two different interviews scheduled with the Diehl campaign but have been unable to reach a common scheduling point. The Healy campaign very openly said they would wait for the general election cycle. This is the crux of my article. The people of Main South and King Street often do not turn out to vote because leaders often do not show up. They may say in speeches that every vote counts and every voice matters, but in the end don’t we all make the time for people we consider to be our priorities? In the modern American electoral landscape, campaigners often make crucial decisions about advertising that they believe will offset personal time. There are winners and losers in the radio/television/internet ad cycle, and the winners almost always seem to be platforms and the losers seem to be people who live in districts that candidates do not believe will vote. Eventually someone makes a decision, like both Robyn Kennedy and Chris Doughty did, to come down to a neighborhood and seek new voters. Voters who have never voted. Lew Evangelides also came down to do an interview, a video that has been fraught with technical issues for us. He spoke to heart of our community however, that he sees the struggles in his job inside the prison and knows there is even more work to do creating sustainable return to society-based policies. These policies are crafted by officials that we elect. If we do not participate in the process, then we get policies that seem to never quite help the poor, never quite assist the needy, and never quite create the changes we say that we need. Voting is work, but voting is a privilege. It may be the single greatest privilege that we hold as citizens. Many people have fought, and even died for the chance to be heard at the ballot box. Even today we hear about trials of citizens who are being turned away for reasons that seem alien to us, but not to those who fought for change in decades past. Many other media outlets focus almost exclusively on the negative, but here at What’s Up Worcester the goal is to educate and inform while focusing on hope. To have hope, you must believe in it. To say you live with hope, it means you must act with hope. As I serve today, in a very small role, I believe I can set an example for others to serve as well. Service is contagious. I remember a sales training I received many years ago when I worked at RadioShack, it was a short training video accompanied by a booklet you had to fill out. One of the lines in the video was this, “A customer who has a good experience will go and tell one or two other people, but a customer who has a bad experience will go and tell ten or twenty other people.” This line has stuck in my head for two decades, and I cannot shake that our system of democracy has fallen into this exponential cycle. As people have bad experiences with government, they complain to anyone who will listen. It lowers the standard for good conduct by government. When officials just do their basic functions now, our general cynicism makes us believe they are legendary leaders. This has allowed for generations of almost no change. In many ways, as technology advances, the poor and people of color are increasingly left behind. How can a so-called modern society be okay with this? It cannot be about the leaders anymore. It is us; it is WE who have participated in creating this mess. I remember when Barack Obama first ran for president. I believed that ‘Yes We Can!’ I thought it was true. When things did not change immediately, when progress was slowed, I too became cynical, and angry. It did not shift me to becoming either a staunch Republican or staunch Democrat. I just completely gave up on the entirety of the system. As more and more people have come to the forefront to talk about systemic inequalities and the need for change, I would nod my head in agreement. When I think of change now, I am not thinking about the transition from one generation of leaders to the next. I am talking about structural change. To wrest control of the system itself and realign it from the ground up. I am a Christian by faith, and in my faith, there are many leaders who believe in the system. They have an understanding that America is a Christian nation. It is not. There were Christians in the land, and there was a general belief in a Creator. That doesn’t make a nation one that is matched to a faith. Often our thinking is top down, we apply our experiences and ideas to the top of a concept and expect others to accept those same ideas. The problem is with that, is that other people have different experiences. Other people have different lives. Even in the Bible, Jesus does not say the same thing to every person. He says the thing to each person that they need to hear to bring them to a decision point. The point where belief and action coincide. If you desire, for example, to live as a Christian in the real world, that means you have to try to live and abide by the whole of God’s Word. You need to be a minister of reconciliation, you need to rejoice always, you need to forgive people before they ask for it, you need to abide with a brother or sister who is struggling with sin while watching yourself for the same struggle, you need to tell the truth all the time, you need to constantly see that you are unworthy! How difficult is this? So difficult only one man has ever done it, and He was executed. Yet in that very execution, whether you believe it is true or not, we see the idea of Living Hope personified. We see, under excruciating pain, a man who still loved others. The radical ideas in the Bible force us to see that what has been done to us is truly nothing, and what we have done to others is definitively vile. We can overcome by hoping for better. We can in fact match faith and action in our daily lives, regardless of the outcome. Yet, if we sit on the sidelines and complain, how is that matching effort? How is that consistent with hope? It is almost three o’clock now, and we haven’t hit thirty voters. A precinct with over 1,300 active voters and close to 6,000 on the rolls in total. In elections where a few hundred votes can completely change the outcome for a county or a state! It is possible, and the tools are available. As the clock continues to move, I am thinking about which campaign headquarters I will cover tonight, and which article I will write next. Why? Because there is value in looking forward. I took my break around three for the sole purpose of going to vote. My voting place is less than a minute from my house on Irving Street. The Murray Street apartments are a new spot for me, I was recently in a different precinct and the change is interesting from the St. Spyridion Greek Center, to an active apartment complex. I was the 56th voter, not including early voting. The totals definitely reflect a potential shakeup in certain races. When turnout is low, enthusiasm is often the key. Which coalitions have the momentum? That remains to be seen. Returning to my location we are at 31 just short of four o’clock. As the evening has commenced, there has been a slight uptick in the number of voters, we are currently at 67 just short of seven at night. Some of the other precincts have reported higher totals, but the general consensus is that the overall totals are significantly down from any predictions that were made in the run up to this election. Maybe the early voting totals will make a difference, but so far, the deliveries of those have been pretty low. I am making my plans relative to the Senate campaign headquarters with a goal of going to both. Eight o’clock comes and there was never any rush, never any crowd. The most we ever had in the room was three at once. The team I was with, the warden, clerk, two other inspectors and the officer assigned to us were all fun and easy to work with. It wasn’t exactly a difficult day as far as work goes. The atmosphere was fun despite the rain and despite the lack of people. They all dealt with me pretty well, which is not easy because I am a high energy guy. Their names are withheld here for privacy, but I cannot wait to work with this team again. My canvas is telling me that it looks like Robyn Kennedy is not only the winner, but that she won big, so I am heading to the Petty HQ at El Basha on Park Avenue. My goal is getting a sense of the atmosphere, and to get a quote from Joe. My teammates, Manny and Jerry are going to meet me at the Kennedy HQ at Nuestra on Pearl Street. Arriving at the Petty HQ, I get the immediate sense of sadness, and I stand at the back of the crowd listening to the mayor give his concession speech for his reporters. His family and campaign squad are here, and they love him. The speech is classy and humble, and in classic Joe fashion he throws his immediate support to Robyn and asks his supporters to do the same. It really is a good speech. I decide not to cover it live because it is an intimate moment with a group of people who truly believed in Joe. Responsible journalism sometimes means giving space. I spoke with Joe briefly before I left, and asked the mayor how he felt, “I think we ran a good campaign, and I am so grateful and thankful for my family, my team and my supporters. I wish Robyn well in the general election and give my support to her.” Classy statement from still Mayor Joe Petty. I say my goodbyes to him and some of his campaign team, whom I have worked with throughout the primary. Arriving at the Kennedy HQ, there is a sense of joy and celebration. Nuestra is located on Pearl Street, and it is a wonderful place. As I walk in there is shouting and clapping, laughing and electricity. Spectrum is already here, and Congressman Jim McGovern is leaving as I arrive. I get the chance to greet Robyn almost immediately, and when I say to her that she won, her response is, “No, the community won.” This is how I have come to know her. As the other press outlets talk to her, I was able to get some quotes from other local figures. Representative Mary Keefe said, “I am over the top happy. Relationships are the key to getting things done. Robyn is focused on the care economy and in particular a living wage. I think she and I can work together. Lastly, it seems to show that voters are not willing to always go for the status quo.” Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj says, “This victory is amazing, not that I am surprised Robyn won, but that the culmination of hard work paying off in the community is wonderful.” As the night wore on, other local officials came through and the party lasted into the night. Robyn insisted that she head back to the communities that she had spent months knocking on the doors of, wanting to talk to some of the folks that had told her she wouldn’t be back. As I finish this perspective piece, I know she is going to be back on What’s Up Worcester this week. In the end, as I continue to maintain my public neutrality as a reporter, I will not indicate who I have voted for, or who I support. I will say this: Robyn Kennedy shows up. Agree or not, she is present in the communities that have not had much presence. Very soon we will have her opponent in the general election on, and hopefully a candidate forum with the both of them. I see that this coalition has hope. I hope the general election proves the people have hope as well. Primary day is over, but the work never ends.
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