Yesterday I popped into the warehouse of one of my contractors and happened upon an heated discussion among the warehouse workers. It totally caught me off guard since I had never heard any of them talking about politics before. I was short on time and needed to get some work done, but I was curious about their discussion and began to prod them. They were frustrated with what’s happening in this country, but mostly they felt helpless. One woman said, “What can I do? I don’t have the gazillions of dollars it takes to influence politicians!”

Five years ago I probably would have simply joined in on the kvetch session and not much else would have become of the incident. But yesterday, instead of joining in, I plugged them in by giving them the web URLs for the Bus Project and Onward Oregon. When I told them about these organizations and how, by joining them, they can help make a difference, something really cool happened. They got excited and started telling me how they felt about everything from the poverty that Katrina exposed to gay marriage. One of the younger guys piped in and said “And what’s the big deal if gays get married anyway? Aren’t good jobs more important to worry about?”

They went from feeling helpless to passionate in a matter of minutes and I was thrilled that I had walked in on their conversation where I was able to give them an outlet to plug into. None of them had ever voted before despite having been old enough to do so in the last election, but they are now planning on voting in ‘06.

I had always assumed they were apolitical. Perhaps they were, but a lot is at stake and people are beginning to notice. And when they notice, they need to get plugged in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Elections, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.