Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Caucus-ing Ain't Easy

Last night Chris and I decided to go caucus.

Everything you heard or saw about last night's caucusing is true.
The lines, the confusion, the parking problems, the yelling, the cold, the disappointment...

On our way to caucusing (<----click there, I'm going to start embedding the videos in the sentences) , we learned that neither of us really had any idea what caucusing is, was, or ever will be. We arrived at the library where we voted early, only to find that was not in fact where we needed to be to caucus.

So we traveled onwards.

After getting out of the car and making our way up to the Castle Hills Community Center we searched for anyone or anything that knew what the heck was going on.

We met a woman holding up a precinct sign in one hand and an Obama sign in the other. This woman appeared to be involved on the ground floor of the complicated pyramid scheme unfolding all around us.

She jubilantly informed us in her heavily-accented English that I must locate my precinct and stay with them so that I could fill out the necessary paperwork and be included in the tallying. She told us that we shouldn't trust the middle-aged lady who was barking instructions at us from the front of the throng since she was a 'Hillary supporter.'

The barking Hillary woman was some kind of Captain and was fielding all kinds of questions from the mass of people:
"What are we waiting on?, Where do we nominate secretaries?, Where's the guy selling hot dogs?!" (That last one was my fiance)

The woman became so overwhelmed that she proclaimed, and I quote, "Don't worry about the rules."

Our new heavily-accented friend further informed us that she was very excited to participate in this event since she had officially gained her citizenship five days ago.

Much later in the evening Chris recoiled in shock from the horrifying truth; that an immigrant woman only five days into her citizenship had educated two thirty-year American natives in their own political process.

How ignorant are the white folks? Muy.

We left and went to Chris' caucus location in Lewisville. Even more people, even more chaos, even more cold even more waiting, and still no hot dogs.

I called my folks to see if they were caucusing - nope.

But my sister April was. She was in Austin enduring the caucus there. We told her of our woes. "Caucusing ain't easy," she said.

At 10pm we went home. Completely exhausted and complete caucus failures.
We didn't get our names on any pieces of paper. We didn't get to vote for anything. We didn't get tallied. We never did find a hot dog.

Caucusing isn't for the faint of heart.

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