Cracks in the armor

My friend Amanda Painter works as a phone canvasser for Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive activist group. She has lots of stories about her fundraising phone calls, which sometimes turn into consciousness-raising experiences or something more resembling therapy. I’ve encouraged her to tell some of the stories here — since this is grassroots politics, the real thing. No punditry, just actual human beings talking about the intersection of existence with the political process. Tonight’s conversation deals with the impact of war on a family.

Donald came out of nowhere, yet somehow at this point seems perfectly at home in the context of current events; you know, those recent disturbances of our everyday routine splashed all over the news lately. The ones that almost threaten to become so commonplace we stop noticing them. But that’s not what we’re calling about at work.

We’ve returned to health care reform here on the phone canvass. I’ll admit, it’s an urgent issue, which is why we’ve been calling members about it since the spring. It’s just that, for my taste, the brief shift to election issues was too short to be sufficiently refreshing, and now we’re back. Most of the people I talk to are supportive of the public option but broke. Many are fired up and rearing to get involved. A few don’t trust the government to run health care. And then there’s the rare person like Donald.

I hadn’t gotten very far into the rap when he exclaimed that he was dealing with his own health care issues: the doctor had prescribed a certain heart medication, the insurance company wouldn’t pay for it, and he was blaming all of them for not giving a shit and putting his health in jeopardy. I tried to steer the conversation toward the insurance companies as the bigger culprit. But Donald had a big bone to pick with doctors, too.

“My number one son was in the Army; jumped out of airplanes. He said they were jumping under the radar – that means they were jumping really low. He messed up his back real bad on a jump and wanted them to fix it. But they prescribed him with Klonopin. You know what Klonopin is?”

I had heard of it and knew it had some negative side effects, but before I could remember what the story was, Donald continued.

“They call it heroin with a message. And that message is, ‘Go kill yourself’. And so he did. Started up the boat, put a German revolver in his mouth, and swallowed a bullet.”

That was more than enough to pull me up short, but Donald wasn’t finished yet.

“Those Arabs have it right. What he should have done was strapped explosives to himself and walked into the VA; blow all those conniving sons of bitches in to the river.”

Donald couldn’t see me over the phone, but my jaw dropped. I feebly tried to point out that the real conniving people were a lot higher up the political food chain, dragging us through a couple of unjust wars; that his son walking into the VA strapped with explosives would likely kill a lot of perfectly innocent people. He conceded that there would be collateral damage, but insisted that was the only thing that would get anybody’s attention.

I tried to steer the conversation toward my organization’s efforts to wake people up without violence, but Donald insisted it wouldn’t work. He made some reference to the shootings at Fort Hood. Honestly, I’m not sure whether he condemned the incident or thought Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had the right idea; my heart had been sinking with each sentence and it was a distracting sensation. I wasn’t sure if I could catch it with anything resembling conviction before the end of the call.

For Donald, this was merely another generation of our government, our health care system, and our citizenry failing our soldiers; failing all of us, really. His comment about still dealing with the effects of agent orange, “which they still won’t admit,” made that vividly clear. And in calling our current economic situation a “rerun from 1938 and 1939,” bound to get worse and bound to generate many more suicides, it occurred to me he was viewing life from a pit so low, of course he felt only a violent blast could knock him — and us — out of it.

There were other tangents to the conversation, which was a lot longer than it should have been. But it was late in the shift on the last night of a pay period, I had a cold, I was still feeling the aftershocks of the sudden dismissal of a long-time coworker the night before… I have a whole litany of excuses for why I didn’t try harder to ask for a donation, or try to work some magic and get him to consider a more positive perspective, or even just end the call sooner.

Hell, Donald himself mentioned that he knew we usually ask for a donation and that we do good work. But I didn’t need to hear his comment about how Social Security gives “just enough per month so that you slowly starve to death” to know I wasn’t going to try some of my usual tactics. Yes, my job at work is to get people to give money. But my job on the planet is to be humane. In my opinion, sometimes that means simply listening and hoping that feeling heard is enough for the person on the other end of the phone; all they need to shift something in themselves just enough to let some light in.

Those are the cracks in the armor that simply can’t be forced. But when you see them, you slide through. When Donald remarks that he’s keeping his thermostat at fifty degrees to save money, you reply that you’re all skin and bones and would freeze to death in that room. If he replies that he doesn’t have a woman to keep him warm but has his eye on a couple of fat ones just in case he needs them, you let yourself laugh with him and wish him luck. And you mean it.