The Crossed Pond

Part I is here. Our unveiling of “Dispatches From the Front Lines”, a new regular feature in this vein, is here.

One of the neat things, for me—and I’m sure for Kari—about doing our little traveling roadshow, is how many genuinely selfless, inspired people we run into. Going to a rally is one thing, but when you’re actually there for a reason—in our case to be able to get as many people as we can, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it, to camp out in New Hampshire for Ron Paul (and now we’re thinking of other states, spearheaded by other Meetup organizations, if we get enough funds to share the wealth and keep the New Hampshire thing self-sufficient)—you really get to see a different side of things.

People try to play us off as wild-eyed, angry, catastrophic, whatever. And, some of us are, to be sure. But for the most part, from what I’ve seen, people that are drawn to these events, to Ron Paul, to the message, are doing so for exactly the right reasons. They’re coming out of the woodwork—and to be sure they’re not going to be your typical button-up Republican Kiwanis Club crowd for that reason—but by and large they come out because they love their country, because they believe in the ideals it was founded on down to their very bones, in a way that is probably unrecognizable to people battered down by cynicism from years of lowering their own bars in elections that seem more and more to be limbo contests. But that’s their problem. If anything, pity them. It sucks not believing in anything but power and partisanship.

What amazes me about these things, though, is the profoundness of hope. None of us, frankly, have much reason to be very optimistic. But everybody, somehow, seems to be.

Kari called from the road, leaving Ann Arbor Michigan. Ron Paul, after the debate, hopped in a van and headed there himself, scheduled to speak at 7:30. Kari got there a little before then, and set up shop. Immediately, she was amazed by how huge the crowd was.

As she described it to me, it was two or three times the size of New Hampshire, which would put it at 2500 (give or take; it’s notoriously hard to judge crowds). But Kari’s been around….rallies a fair bit, and she said it’s the biggest she’s seen yet.

As with the debate crowd, everything was orderly, polite, but still infused with enthusiasm, and again, the crowd skewed even younger than usual. College students were out in droves, huge flocks of them. Some people even said they’d never seen that many students out for an anti-war rally, let alone campaign rallies.

We probably won’t cover the actual content of the speeches much, because we’re not there just listening to the speeches. Kari was working to raise money, selling shirts.

One bit from that:

“Lots of people were paying in liberty dollars,” she said. “It was all over the place. Which I’m not going to turn down, I’m just not.” Kari said it was kind of a pain in the ass to take liberty money, but she had no intention of turning it down. So, instead, she started asking people, while making change, “do you want your change in dollars, or liberty money?” and the funny thing was nobody turned down the liberty dollars. They took the liberty money every time. One kid, she said, spent all his money investing in liberty dollars, so he couldn’t eat (we were the only vendors accepting liberty dollars), so he bought a shirt for the sake of some dollar bills (Kari slipped him a little extra).

The crowd was huge, and ecstatic, through Paul’s speech. The only thing Kari wanted to make sure I related was that Ron Paul, 72-years-old, had traveled to Michigan, spent the entire day doing debate prep, spent two hours in the actual debate, then drove to Ann Arbor to give a rally there, and, according to Kari, stayed at the rally well after he was finished, leaving at 10 o’clock or so and outlasting much of the crowd. “He looked tired,” she said. “But real happy, and what was amazing was he made sure he stood there and shook every…single…person’s hand that had gone up to meet him.”

Finally, and the reason I prefaced the post as I did, I shared an anecdote from New Hampshire about an anonymous Good Samaritan (if you want a better re-telling of it, check it out here), that I thought was a one in a million sort of thing. But Kari’s got me beat. It sounds almost too schmaltzy to be real, but she’s got a witness and pictures to prove it (which I’ll post tomorrow, after she gets back to Pittsburgh, sleeps, and sends them to me).

During the whole rally, there was this guy in a motorized wheelchair zipping around, handing out bumper stickers—not taking any money, just making sure everybody he could reach got one. Kari didn’t say, but I’m sure he had all kinds of Ron Paul schwag adorning his chair. He was working the crowd, so when he came to Kari she chatted him up.

Anyway, the guy is a disabled veteran, and the story she got out of him is that he had spent a bunch of his disability money on a gross of bumper stickers, and had come to make sure as many people as wanted them could get them for free, for the sake of campaign advertising. His only comment was that he really hoped a lot of people put them on their cars, to get the word out.

That story is inspiring in its own right. It’s also ironic—he’s getting government money and handing out merchandise to advertise for a candidate in favor of largely getting rid of government money. But it’s also a little maddening, for me. This is a guy the Republican party is saying it doesn’t want

Well, you’ve got him.

How you deal with him is up to you.

So, like I said, it seems everytime we go out to these things, we find a little something that just really makes us step back and wonder at the power of hope, of the freedom message, and of the humanity that’s still lurking somewhere in the deepest recesses of the Republican electorate.