And the Job Begins!

It's a weekend day and ordinarily it would be filled with soccer games, family parties and chores, but our job this weekend is to help get out the vote to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. So we head to Reno, Nevada from CA because NV is a swing state with 6 electoral votes at stake.

Little did we know that the very afternoon we we were arriving in Reno, Donald Trump was as well. How did we know? Well, we encountered a very proud Trump supporter with a t-shirt that said "Build the Wall, Trump." He then proceeded to tell us that Hillary Clinton didn't do anything as Attorney General and the conversation went downhill from there. His own mother had to correct him (as we did) that Hillary wasn't Attorney General but Secretary of State. His mother was a Hillary supporter and she told us her son "didn't know anything" and that we should ignore him. He got even more in our faces, so we decided to take the high road as Michelle Obama has suggested in her speeches. We have to remember: "when they go low, we go high." So we shook hands and went back to canvassing in his apartment complex.

SIDEBAR: The Reno Trump rally resulted in Trump having to be taken off the stage because someone in the front rows screamed "gun." Once again another Trump gathering ended up in chaos. Our question: Is this really the way a presidential election is supposed to be-- and will that be the new normal in our lifetimes? We hope not!

That made us even more determined to go door to door and get on the phone and talk to people about how important it was to get to the polls. We had several conversations with people who thanked us for our work and we reminded them that even though we weren't old enough to vote, we felt it was important to be a part of getting the first woman in the White House and the more qualified candidate in office.

Comments

My Letter to Hillary

Dear Hillary Clinton, My name is Elena, and I am 12 years old. I currently live in California, and am in the seventh grade. I have been a tremendous fan of yours since 2008 when you ran against President Obama in the Primary Election. My parents would gather the family, (then just my Mother, Father and I) and sit in front of a very old antenna TV to watch the Democratic debates and convention. I’d like to think that I, only 4 years old at the time, would speak with them intelligently about the political issues being addressed among the candidates, but it was not so. I barely understood what half your words meant, much less the importance of the event taking place on the screen. It all sounded awfully boring to four year old me, but I didn’t care. I liked to watch. Why? Because I thought you were great. Of course, I didn’t understand how great at the time, but pretty great. Great enough for me to sit at the table and draw detailed pictures of you in your orange pantsuit. ...

Stress Among High School High-Achievers: Filmmaker Debbie Lum on "Try Harder!"

Everybody in the San Francisco Bay Area knows about Lowell High School. Founded in 1856 and the alma mater of Broadway star Carol Channing, scientist Dian Fossey, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Lowell is among California’s highest-ranked public high schools. Up until 2020, eighth graders seeking admission to this academic magnet school needed near-perfect grades and high scores on either the California-administered standardized test or the Lowell entrance exam. When I was admitted to Lowell as an eighth grader, I was ecstatic. It felt like a major achievement. In the end, however, I chose to attend a very different kind of school. My boarding school is just as selective as Lowell (the acceptance rate is in the single digits) but it has less than 250 students — tiny compared to Lowell, which has nearly 3,000. The demographics are different, too. While my school is predominantly white and wealthy (I’m part of a small cohort of Latino students on scholarship), Lowell is 59% As...

Modern Day Abolitionist Nancy O'Malley

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley was recently awarded the Modern Day Abolitionist Award from San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking (SFCAHT). During a recent online video interview, she told me about her involvement in human trafficking, her career, and her advice for young change-makers. How did you first become interested in fighting human trafficking? When I was a young prosecutor in 1996, I was assigned a case that involved a 12-year old girl who had been sexually assaulted and raped by a 50-year-old man. She started telling me her story and told me she had a 39-year-old boyfriend who took her out on the streets of Oakland and was selling her eight or 10 times in a night. When the police found her, the 50 year old man who had paid to have sex with her had raped her. That’s when I realized she was talking about trafficking. We didn’t even have a law in California then. That’s how I first learned about it. I started get...

Elena Blogs for a Change

Search This Blog