An Experiment of One: Eyes on New Mexico
The Straight Talk Express in Las Vegas, New Mexico/Birdie Jaworski
Michelle Obama's speech in Las Vegas, New Mexico/Birdie Jaworski
Two weeks ago, the Straight Talk Express parked in front of Las Vegas' iconic "Calumet Says Howdy" mural. The sexy cowgirl with her endless legs seemed to sit on top of the broad, bold font announcing McCain and Palin, gracing the bus with her campy presence. The Republican contender and his running mate didn't ride the bus this trip; they shook hands through other contested states. New Mexico's five electoral votes wouldn't be earned visiting my small - and mostly Democratic - town.
I live in a state, in a town, where my vote certainly counts. Las Vegas sits on the edge of the Great Plains, the Sangre de Christo mountains to her back, an ancient and wise city with four hundred years of cowboy against native bloodshed, filled with ranchers, university professors, artists, laborers, merchants, and activists, a town completely unlike the big City of Sin in Nevada. Las Vegas is marked by an incredible work ethic, by the role of the Catholic Church in daily life, by a Spanish population whose ancestors, the Conquistadores, rested in our lush mountain grasslands, vowing never to leave.
In the last two elections, the fate of New Mexico was decided by northern voters. The Democrats lost by 5988 votes in the state, votes that could have been obtained if landlocked ranchers and homelocked older folks, university students and hardworking merchants all made it to the polls. The Obama campaign is taking no chances this election. A drive through town reveals Obama-Biden signs on every street, a forest of liberal pinon dotted by the occasional McCain-Palin aspen. Volunteers have walked every street, knocking on each door in town to spread Obama's message of Change.
When the Straight Talk Express hit the streets, exactly seven locals came out to meet its crew - a local congressman and three t-shirted staff members - all anglos, all seeming a bit lost on our edge of prairie forever. Though no less than six Obama campaign volunteers asked for my vote, not a single McCain worker stood on my stoop, clipboard in hand, ready to extoll the virtues of Country First. I hovered near the Straight Talk Express, camera and notebook in hand, wanting to hear their message, wanting to believe they would tell me something other than "the other guy's a bad'n," wanting to believe that the race was about the issues, issues that matter to me, to everyone in my isolated town, issues of education, health care, the sinking economy, the ways a new president could help my own small business. But all I overheard were angry mentions of Ayers and late-term abortion. I wasn't invited into the McCain circle though I inched closer and closer. I left.
Yesterday, Michelle Obama visited Las Vegas, New Mexico. I stood with the press, on an elevated platform overlooking the historic Old Town Plaza. Michelle stood among several thousand banner-waving supporters - men, women, and children I knew, people who live and breathe struggle, people who count pennies to buy bread and milk, people who look for jobs that don't exist. Several schools brought their young students to listen and learn. Though the campaign promised a "free speech" area for those with a different message, no one took them up on the offer.
My 13-year-old son, Louis, inched as close as he could to Michelle's lectern. He held an official red, white, and blue campaign sign handed out to the crowd before the speech - but he didn't wave it. I knew why he didn't pump fists into air, why his eyes stayed riveted on Michelle, why his expression said "please help me, I want to understand."
When I was Louis' age, I wore an activist button on my Clash t-shirt the first day of school. It was four inches in diameter, four inches of slick solar yellow with stark black message. A smiling cartoon atomic explosion with an orange fisted hand pumped in the air considered the viewer with an evil grin. Encircling the button were three words in a puffy, upbeat font.
Atomkraft? Nein, Danke
I sat in the back row of Mr. Giroux's English class. I sat with a practiced expression of disgust, my perfectly-coifed mohawk the result of six egg whites, a small tube of silver glitter, and half a dented can of Aqua Net I stole from my mother.
"Ms. Jaworski."
Mr. Giroux walked down the center isle. He didn't seem to notice the kids who wore pink collared shirts with tiny alligators, didn't point finger at the bulky second-string football jock, the impossibly slim exchange student from France with a finger up his nose. His nicotine-stained index finger hovered one inch from my button.
"Ms. Jaworski. Please explain this."
He tapped the air in front of my chest. Mr. Giroux wore acid-washed jeans and a white button-down shirt with candy-red stripes. His breath smelled like stale cigars, like nights of small town boredom, like academic regret, like one-too-many nights with Jack Daniels and Mork and Mindy.
"It's in German. It means 'Nuclear Power? No, thanks.' Haven't you heard of Three Mile Island?"
I smirked. My classmates tittered. The French boy turned to give me a sly smile, an unspoken invitation to sneak cigarettes under the stadium bleachers at lunch.
"Ms. Jaworski." The second bell rang. "Please walk to the front of the class and explain why you're against nuclear power. I want both a scientific and a social explanation. Thank you."
"It's just a pin, man. Why don't you pick on someone else? Half the class' got Vote Reagan pins. He's scarier than atomic energy."
I rolled my eyes. The class didn't giggle, didn't give me what I wanted. They sat, stony-faced, children of struggling parents, parents who spent long machine-shop hours pressing decorative holes into wing-tipped shoes, who cleaned urine-splattered bathrooms at the state mental hospital. November 4 hovered like Mr. Giroux's finger, hovered outside our classroom. We lived in Massachusetts, lived under the same brilliant fall leaves as Ted Kennedy, but high inflation and the Iran hostage crisis scared my hometown's working class families into switching teams, tossing Carter into the street and grabbing Reagan's charisma and wrapping it around weary arms like an ace bandage.
"Ms. Jaworski. Take the front of the room. This is not a request."
I didn't budge.
"It's just a pin. It doesn't really mean anything."
Mr. Giroux smiled. He grabbed me around my upper arm - you could still do that kind of thing those days - and hauled me to the slim space between his desk and the good girls in short icy skirts and short, stacked hair.
"Ms. Jaworski. Explain the issues surrounding nuclear power. You have exactly sixty seconds before I send you to the principal's office."
I shrugged my shoulders and fought to keep my voice steady, bored.
"Nuclear power is bad. Everybody knows that."
I raced back to my seat. Mr. Giroux cleared his throat.
"Ladies and gentlemen. There will be no political pins allowed in this classroom unless you can back up your position with a well-conceived statement that you can defend against questions. The right to vote is the most precious right we have as American citizens. When you wear a pin without considering the consequence, or when you spout propaganda you've heard on the idiot box, you are slapping our founding fathers in the face. Heh. That's alliteration, boys and girls. Founding. Fathers. Face. Think about it. You each have the opportunity to become the uncommon voter. The truly educated voter."
Preppy and jock removed Reagan pins. I stuck the yellow button in the front pocket of my tight Jordache jeans. It made an outline against my right thigh, a circular extrusion of fourteen-year-old rebellion.
I skipped the rest of the day, didn't meet my new French teacher, didn't sit in a sweaty windowless band room with a tarnished saxophone in my lap. I didn't tell my friends I was ditching school. I walked three miles to the Longmeadow brownstone exterior of our historic library, slammed mahogany entrance door against stone wall, my mohawk transmitting fever heat anger.
"Tell me everything you know about nuclear power. Or give me books. I need to know everything there is to know. I need to know. Please," I added as an afterthought. "Please, and thank you."
The librarian squished up one-half her aging face, her wrinkled eyes belaying quick calculations about truancy, about percentage chances that punk rock girls with safety pins in their ears would trash the library. Somehow she decided in my favor.
"Okay. Let's start at the beginning. What do you already know? And why do you need to know this - is it a school project? School just started today you know." She paused to look at the antique grandfather clock. Three cojoined livers spots the size and shape of a trio of Tic Tacs connected her thinning eyebrows. "It started two hours ago."
Those days before the internet meant hours in research, meant pulling out long card catalogue trays looking for periodical and dusty tome that might match my request, meant browsing the Encyclopedia Brittanica at the library's heavy oak tables. I poured through microfiche copies of The New York Times, flipped pages in National Geographic and Time Magazine. I read about Three Mile Island, about the Arco Reactor in Idaho that suffered partial meltdown, about Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" speech.
The more I read, the more confused I became. Chernobyl hadn't yet occurred, and aside from a few small incidents and the Three Mile Island accident - a horrific event, indeed - humans seemed to be mastering the intricacies of nuclear power, seemed to be building safe havens where free neutrons run into a particular variety of uranium, causing the atoms to become unstable and split, breathing sheer power into the air, power we needed. I remembered the long line at the one gasoline pump in town, the creep of gas toward an unheard of dollar-a-gallon.
But Three Mile Island... I felt as if my own mind held an isotope of uranium, as if the library bombarded me with neutrons, with neutral statement of fact, enough fact on both sides of the equation to shatter my tiny bad-ass rebel view. I simply didn't know what to think.
Mr. Giroux raised eyebrows in surprise when I slammed my books on a front-row seat in his room. I slid my butt into the small chair and listed my mohawked head in defiance. He smiled, though, when he noticed my handmade pin, a button four-inches in diameter like the German pin I left at home, a pin that simply said "Ask me about Nuclear Power. Or tell me what you know."
This year, Louis made the transformation from soundbite baby to educated political thinker. He isn't yet of age where he can cast a ballot. He reads the papers, reads both sides' positions on the internet, hasn't wrapped my own beliefs and expectations around his slim body. He's suspicious of politics, of heavy blue buses parked under mural, of campaign-sanctioned signs.
"Mom," he sighed after the second Presidential debate. "How can you tell who's telling the truth? I don't want our country to fall apart before I'm old enough to vote. Do you think everyone will make the right decision? I have to stop reading the internet, it's making my head crazy."
But as the sun passed overhead and Michelle took the stage a little past noon, I watched his expression lighten a little as she spoke about her love for the young people of the United States, how she spoke about her love for her husband. Michelle kept her speech simple, talked about the plain-as-day issues that affect each of us, told us how her husband viewed these issues, what positive changes he wanted to make in the areas of health care, alternative energy, education, the economy. The message stayed positive, stayed on-topic, stayed warm, welcoming, without a single harsh word for the competition.
"Mom," Louis smiled after the rally, "we each are an experiment of one, each finding the way to keep moving towards the finish as best we can. That's what any election is really about, I think. Every person studying the issues and deciding what they think is best. And together, those individual experiments add up to some kind of unity. I think that's what your old teacher meant, Mom."
Whoever you vote for this election, remember that. Louis is only 13, but he's right. Mr. Giroux's right. We are each an experiment of one, each of us researching, collecting, concluding, until we reach a still moment in our heart where we find an answer.
Please, go and vote.
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More photos below - just click on a thumbnail to see the full-sized version. All photographs by Birdie Jaworski:
