Parkside Highschool in Racine, WI

DSC_0093, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 16,475
Miles travelled today – 130

12:10 pm – Every year at each convention there is a made-for-TV-though-not-necessarily-aired-by-anyone moment where some precocious teen steps to the podium and explains how she represents the future of the whatever party she is in front of. The crowd applauds and then continues to trade tickets for that night’s parties while they wait for the main speakers.

Racine, Wisconsin has adopted a resolution that allows for more significant participation from the not-quite-old-enough crowd. Any kid with a signed permission slip can take election day off to help work the polls or to campaign.

That resolution may help account for the staggering enthusiasm we were greeted with at Horlick High School and Parkside High School. We had no bands with us and our resident DJ is in New York for a couple days, yet students charged outside to greet us, swarmed onto the bus, and then danced or just listened as we played hip hop from an iPod.

There are some few states that are still registering voters and Wisconsin is one, so apart from enthusiasm we also picked up around forty new voters.

***

Today’s event came after a day with the bus and without internet in Chicago. Chicago may be the most American city in America. Sure, LA and New York are glorious metropolises with history and character, but they don’t have that certain something. And what exactly is that certain something? Square feet. America’s third largest city is a town of enormous two-flat apartments. Really enormous. For what I pay in New York, I could get have an apartment large enough to host touch football games. I hypothesize that most Chicagoans could have a small zoo in their building without really noticing it and many people here actually commute from the bedroom to the front door. There may in fact be cities within the city of Chicago that have yet to be discovered because some irresponsible apartment dweller hasn’t bothered to explore all the rooms in his new condo and then one day he walks down to check the boiler and Boom! A door he didn’t notice with some room that he hadn’t gotten around to and four thousand people have been living there.

To those of us in apartments that make a stockade seem roomy, the whole thing is enough to make you want to throttle a Chicagoan out of envy. Of course Chicagoans have long anticipated this, so when one shows a Manhattanite the eleven bedroom place he is getting for $250 a month, he runs to some far corner of his apartment where the hapless New Yorker could never hope to find him.

Actually: you can see the best that our country aspires to and also our national failures and social disgraces in Chicago. Driving down lakeshore avenue there are the skyscrapers that made the city famous and then the dark and sordid facades of the state street high rises. I was driven away from the city by work and the miserable weather two years ago, but as we approached I couldn’t focus on anything besides my mounting excitement.

“If you look off to the left you’ll see US Cellular field in a second,” I informed my sleepy and indifferent co-workers. “And then to the right there is the Illinois Institute of Technology and then – we’ll see downtown in a second – you can see the Hancock building. Also, if we take lakeshore drive… well that doesn’t really make sense, but we can take Wacker drive and you can see where they shot the car chases in Batman… oh, and there’s the bean downtown, which is technically called the skygate so we should go there too. Did you know that they reversed the flow of the Chicago river at one point? Anyone?” The passengers in my car had drifted off and I was left spouting random trivia and factoids from the driver’s seat for the full hour it took us to slog through rush hour traffic.

In point of fact, we did have young voters fill out pledge forms (URL: http://www.rockthevote.com/pledge/) at one Chicago institution. TJ and Dave (http://www.tjanddave.com/) are my favorite Chicago improvisors. They perform every Wednesday night at 11:00 at the IO theater (http://chicago.ioimprov.com/) (IO used to stand for Improv Olympic, but the litigious wing of the International Olympic committee saw to it that the theater was reduced to two meaningless letters). From scratch, TJ and Dave improvise a forty-minute one act play. At its worst, it is merely funny. At its best: transcendent.

–Nick Brown

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Rock the Vote Bio: Rock the Vote was founded in 1990 to organize artists and fight against censorship of musicians. Since then we've evolved to focus on empowering young people to get involved in the political process. We use pop culture, peer-to-peer organizing, and the latest technology to raise visibility of politics and demystify the process of registering to vote. @rockthevote Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

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