“You’re so nice!”
I must have heard that once a day last fall when I was registering voters in the shopping plazas and parking lots of Las Vegas. It’s exhausting work to scour the city with a clipboard in the name of democracy. As a swing state, Nevada seemed over-run with scavengers for signatures. Some of us were civic-minded volunteers who had made a commitment to participate in the presidential election. We were out-numbered, though, by paid canvassers hired by unnamed interest groups. It’s messy business, the professionalization of the election process. Those standing on conviction are commingled with gig workers needing to make rent. When you put it that way, no one’s motives are more pure. Yet our default is to distrust any stranger who approaches us, and to trust those earning a buck even less.
There are broadly two ways people register to vote. One is at the DMV. The other is people breaking into your consciousness while you’re picking up half-and-half or turkey for sandwiches at Albertsons. We’ve cast civics onto the street, begging for attention in our highly-optimized, over-scheduled lives.
One afternoon I was packing up in the Chipotle parking lot across from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when someone said it again. It was a sunny day in September, and I’d spent a few hours talking to students, many who had just turned old enough to vote. What issues did they care about? Women, especially, were eager to share their perspectives as newly-independent adults. They trusted me with their views on abortion, or worries about the environment, or concerns about their futures. I loved these interactions, except they weren’t my job. My assignment was to spend only a minute or two with each person, then move on like a shark, swimming to breathe.
A beat-up Civic pulled up next to me and two young men, all limbs and hair, clambered out. They also had clipboards. Paid canvassers. We eyed each other. They probably expected a territorial attitude, but instead I asked about their day. I said the university was emptying out this late in the afternoon. I reminded them to wear sunscreen. “You’re so nice,” one of them said, surprised.
After finishing my MFA, I spent a few months working for a temp agency. My first assignment was reception at a social services clinic in downtown Tucson on Stone Ave. It offered everything from STD testing to utility assistance, and was located next door to a methadone clinic. Many people would get their prescribed dose, then spend an hour or so in our waiting room, safe, unbothered, zoning out in the air conditioning.
My job was to answer the phone, check people in for their appointments, and hand out snacks. I managed a drawer-full of granola bars and bus passes. I also kept an eye on the waiting room, but in my short time there, I never had to intervene. Very few people acted out or even spoke. Instead, they sat watching aerobics workouts and daytime soaps on the TV mounted high on the wall, or they would thumb through novels stripped of their covers. Occasionally someone engaged with me, but mostly I was invisible, barely a head peeking out from behind the counter. This could have been any clinic in America, except many of our patients and clients were unhoused, addicted, living in dangerous circumstances. Despite everything, they still obeyed society’s rules of how to behave in a waiting room.