From The Ground In Philly
An Email to My Friends & Friends of Friends
1AM on Nov. 3, 2020
By Maureen Holohan
Hello!
For the past nine days, I’ve started and ended my days downtown in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the home of The Declaration of Independence, and our nation’s temporary capital from 1790-1800. It is hard to find that love and sense of patriotism these days. A global pandemic with no end date in sight is ravaging our cities. I’ve taken time to chat with the workers at The Rite Aid next door who helped me get into some badly needed rain gear so I could be part of a team that ended up hitting our 144,000 doors in three key Philadelphia counties over a period of 14 days. I’ve talked to gas station, Dollar Store and Dunkin Donuts managers who have been nice enough to let me into their closed bathrooms (after always having promised to buy something upfront). I’ve talked to hotel staff and workers at the grocery store where I get my breakfast and any food I can get before 8am because no restaurants or grocery stores have been open when I return at night.
I don’t know if you heard about the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia eight days ago. I am not sure if you saw or heard about other incidents that have videos posted online. One captured several police officers pulling a man out of a car and beating him in front of his child. Another video showed a car striking a police officer and breaking her leg.
Making matters more complicated, a canvasser who is from Philly said that the city has been struggling with the bombing and stealing of ATM machines prior to shooting and the looting that took place last week. People are desperate for food, cash, jobs, hope. Another canvasser said that she was part of a peaceful protest over the summer that ended with pepper spray and police aggression. A team member who is from West Philly says three days ago that after a woman errantly ran into protesters in her car, and police pulled her from her car and beat her.
As of 1 a.m. on November 3, just hours before polls open, there are dozens of police officers huddled in areas around downtown. We’ve been under curfew for several nights. Now it is advised that no one goes outside at night, which happens to be my rule when I travel overseas alone, especially if I am in a Third World Country.
The collision of all of these terrible and tragic events has led to the boarding up of the stores that have survived on the block, and many in patches of the other parts of Philadelphia. One section of stores in King of Prussia was boarded up. The other part of the area that has the new condos and high end stores had no boards. Earlier that same day, it took me three tries to get to a pharmacy that hadn’t been closed early or boarded up yet. The Rite Aid I found was totally boarded except for the door. Boards covered it, too, but I saw people entering and exiting. The sign on the door said, “Closing at 5:30 pm.”
Plywood started to cover the stores after the police shooting, and it’s continued to go up and stay up as the owners do not know what tomorrow will bring, and who will bring whatever it is, and if nothing happens, it is hours of what’s left of businesses that is lost. I’ve only been here for about 10 days. Early in my visit, grocery store workers hung handmade signs that said PEACE and LOVE hoping for some mercy. The construction workers a few blocks over on the Sephora store were putting a little extra time on their work. One was using black paint over the raw plywood that everyone uses on the block.
“Are you covering it up so it doesn’t look as bad?” I asked him.
He shrugged and nodded.
And in that moment, I realized how many times we keep trying to paint over the pain, the fear and the ugly truths that keep repeating themselves.
The reason why I am here right now in Philadelphia is largely due to my experience volunteering for Doug Jones v. Roy Moore in Alabama in 2017. I’ll never be able to get over how warm and welcoming black Birmingham was to me, a white woman from New York City, and to so many of my new canvassing friends who came from all over the country. I’ll never forget all of the black women on the doors who nodded their heads, assuring me that they were going to save our country’s soul. And they did. Again. What crushed me was the next day when I went to the Civil Rights Museum and read about and saw the evidence of endless acts of murder, violence and corruption during the Civil Rights movement. I could not believe the fact that I was reading evidence of our own governments and police not listening to women who knew that the KKK had killed four girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and that the men who got away with it went on to commit various other crimes, including abuse and rape of girls and women.
It took 39 years for the KKK members to be brought to justice.
That was the number I couldn’t get out of my head.
Now the number I can’t shake is 38.
Thirty-eight is the percentage of people who still support Donald Trump. I can’t even call him president anymore because he is anything but presidential. He is vile and disgusting and as corrupt as it gets, yet I’ve seen a Latino man, a Pakistani man, a black elderly man say that he’s their guy. I have said, “He hates you, and he hates me, too. Why would you vote for someone who hates you?”
They chuckle and smile.
One white guy said to me that he’s voting for Trump.
“I have my issues,” he added.
“Yes,” I said. “You do.”
I walked off and tried not to think about the 52+ percent of white men (in the south it is higher) who voted for this criminal, traitor and predator, and we just sort of painted over those white guy issues. Instead the media covered the white women who sold out the sisterhood, and wrote story after story about minorities not voting, and in the meantime, the white supremacists built their army with a pat on the back and encouragement to standby by the highest level of power in our country.
All of this is part of the GOP playbook. They fight with razors in their gloves and never criticize each other while Dems want degrees of progressivism outlined in a Power Point. Dems never shy away from calling each other out. Today I saw the GOP pull what is apparently one of the oldest tricks in the book after it played out right before my eyes. I’d read on our group chats that there was voter suppression literature (flyers) going out that was designed to confuse voters in the blue-collar and working class area of mostly black Americans while I was in that area with my crew. I saw a photo of the flyers from my phone, and then I bumped into a man in a bright yellow vest who had the same info in his hand. He was a black man. My boss told me to take a photo of him. I thought that was kind of rude to do without his permission, not to mention just too soft.
I decided to get out of the car and ask him what was on my mind.
“Why would you do this?” I said.
The man winced at me in confusion.
“Do what?”
He was in his car by the time I reached him.
“You’re handing out lit with wrong info on it.”
He looked up at me and said, “What group are you with?”
I told him the answer. He didn’t seem to know the group he was with.
“Do you know that you are giving out literature that is confusing to people?” I said. “It’s intentionally confusing people about voting. Why would you do it to your own people?”
The man didn’t know what I was talking about. He was paid to hit doors, he was doing his job, and the flyers said VOTE TRUMP OUT.
What was wrong with any of this?
I explained that the info on all of his flyers was listing all of the wrong voting locations. There is no more early voting. There is only one place for all these folks in this area to vote, and all of the addresses listed were sent to them to send them off to the wrong polling location on Election Day.
And then came the heartbreaking look on his face.
I slowed down. I asked him his name, and explained that I didn’t think any of this was his fault. I asked how many weeks he’s been handing out literature, and he said “a few weeks.” I asked how many black people are doing it with him? He didn’t answer me. He turned to his flyers and his script and let me take photos of all of it. I said that this is what the GOP does. They bump and surround Biden’s bus and think it’s funny. They look the other way when the police spray peaceful marchers to the polls in North Carolina. They cry voter fraud as loud as they can to hide the razors they have in their gloves, and they hit below the belt as many times as they want. Why? Because right now, they can. Because right now, nobody is telling them to stop.
What is happening feels like an endless Twilight Zone where we have the 38 percent of Trump supporters so hyped, motivated and emboldened by our own traitorous dictator that they own us right now. That means almost 4 out of 10 people are fine with every single terrible thing Trump has done and stands for.
Tomorrow we can start to change it.
We have only one shot to right this wrong.
As a matter of pride, I want PA to open up what feels like it’s going to be a razor-thin margin and to be part of that correction.
But there’s something I want more.
I want our country to stop painting over ugly things just to make them look better.
This will be my last email to all of you who were kind enough to read and reply. Thank you all for your hard work, patriotism and support. If you were able to contribute financially, know that it helped put boots on three million doors in about three weeks over nine states in many areas that Hillary did not touch.
Our team in Philly has to watch the election all in our hotel rooms, homes and apartments and meet via google hangouts. We have staff who flew in from Hawaii and California, and others who drove from North Carolina and Vermont.
To prepare, I went to a grocery store outside of downtown at the end of my shift tonight, and I somehow ended up in a giant Korean grocery store. As a non-drinker, I randomly picked out some hard kombucha. A teenage kid packed my grocery cart with “not terribly unhealthy” snacks in bags and labels that I cannot read. Never in my life did I imagine myself sitting in a hotel room in Philly eating Korean snacks and kombucha texting with my team, cousin, sister and friends with all of us waiting to see if our country makes it or not.
The better people must win.
Maureen
Post-script: Early numbers hit me hard. I found myself rushing out of the hotel the next morning wanting to be with my niece and nephew in NJ. When I got to them, I left my phone home, went to the park and we played hide-and-seek for a while. Within a week, I’d be thinking about numbers again. My guess that 38 percent of Americans supported Trump was too low. The most troublesome numbers for me were knowing that Trump received the support of 58 percent of white men; 56 percent of white women; 51 percent of the military. So the story got worse except for our clutch citizens. Black women saved us. Again.
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Writer and author Maureen Holohan was a three-time All Big-Ten basketball player and journalism award winner at Northwestern University. After playing pro ball overseas briefly in Greece, Hungary and Israel, she served in various roles as a teacher, director, entrepreneur, volunteer and activist. For more info on Mo, go to her To the Rim - Storytelling & Leadership blog and website (totherim.com).