Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[L]ast night I attended, for a second time, a postcard-writing marathon in Plainfield Village: the postcards, which we wrote out by hand, all embroiled in the fine details of the coming November elections.
We were 15 people last night, all of us above age 50, and mostly women. Liberals, Progressives and Democrats-mainly-by-default. I was one of just two men in the group. I had attended another postcard-writing a month before where 16 of us, this time, sat at tables writing the same kinds of postcards. (I had missed other sessions between then and last night, because of a pause for recovery from an operation.) That previous time, as last night, there were just two men, the rest women. And all but one of us, again, above 50 … and into the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
As we departed into the night after that earlier session, I remember, one woman, a neighbor, Susan Abbott, remarked shrewdly, that if we succeed in tipping the Madcap Trump Ascendancy in the coming elections, it will be largely thanks to the efforts of women above 50.
Writing these postcards as we do, to voters around the state and around the country, every word laboriously penned out by hand, can feel like building a mountain out of individual grains of sand. As one of the past-50s and then some, I have arthritic knuckles that make it difficult for me to hold a pen squarely and write a fair hand. It’s tedious work, writing the texts of those postcards; nor was my handwriting ever good to begin with. But maybe, I think and hope, my effort and the sincerity of it will get through to the recipient of the card more than a clear and crisply printed text would. The effort of penning the message is part of the message, conveying the idea that this other stranger-citizen of the country, myself the writer, really feels strongly about the election where you, O Stranger, may be casting your vote. And in this hand-at-throat election season most especially.
Eight times more women than men have shown up at the two postcard-writing sessions I’ve attended so far. In this matter, I’ve been following in my wife’s footsteps. She’s one of the women-above-50 who has been writing cards weekly for months now. I’ve made a gesture of support in the past by setting out supper for us and washing the dishes on the evenings when she’s gone off to do that work. As a male, I’ve felt privately that I’m meant for higher things than bending my head down to write out penny-postcards drearily to strangers, on the chance that they’ll be read and have any effect at all.
But it’s dawned on me that in the course of the day and week, I generally don’t, in fact, get around to doing any of those higher things, deserving of my (ahem) higher brain and intellect and general male fineness.
So, having now recovered from my operation, I make the pledge to keep attending those wearying postcard sessions. My penmanship is I’m sure the worst, and my hand is the slowest. But until some genuinely more powerful or incisive action comes to my hand and taste, in this era of supreme political stress, I’ll keep humbly writing postcards to strangers around the country on Thursday nights, urging them, amiably, to take heed and vote, and vote soundly.
At this trying point in American history, I’m one of a third of a billion citizen integers. Until some more glorious power comes into my hands, I have to try to carry at least the weight of that one in almost a third of a billion grains of sand that portions out to my share of the whole in the coming election. So I’ll keep on doing it till the elections come around.
