I want to express my deepest gratitude and respect for my neighbors who, in one week, built an inspired and populist campaign from nothing on the ashes of a terrible tragedy.
I was amazed as I drove around Minneapolis to see the home-made lawn signs of all possible shapes and sizes and colors sprout up like mushrooms. Like rabbitprints in the snow, I would find the handiwork of people working overnight - flyers on my car, new messages tacked on lawn signs. Particularly committed was the guy wandering around lost in Lyndale at 11:00 P.M.in pitch black, but still loyally carrying around his home-made Mondale sign. My job had me criss-crossing south Minneapolis on Tuesday between 9:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. My first surprise was at 35th and the frontage road, where a troupe of people started waving their campaign posters in front of my windshield. I looked down the street, and saw people hanging over the bridge holding huge signs out for the I-35W drivers to see. As I drove around, I saw these scenes repeated again and again at virtually all the major intersections. At Franklin and Nicollet, the Mondale people ran into the Pentel people. Instead of squabbling, they divvied up the real estate and they were all waving around their signs and yelling "vote!" There were so many blue and orange and yellow signs waving up and down that I thought I had fallen into a giant Tide detergent box run amok. Because of my job I try to stay nonpartisan, But I was so carried away with these impromptu street parties that even I would surreptitiously start waving and hooting and honking. The whole experience felt like a cross between a pulsating rock concert and a city-wide block party. At 7:57 P.M. I was pulling into my final stop of the day. There at 27th and lake was still a team of people yelling and having a good time and waving around their signs. When I moved here from Chicago, one of the things I missed was the political theater, what with councilmembers throwing shoes at each other and the mayor trying to drag his opponents out into the alley to pound the living daylights out of them. But the political theater I saw in the past week has exceeded anything I have ever seen in my life. And it was performed not by powerful elites in smoke-filled rooms, but by the neighbors next door on our doorsteps and at our street corners. For those of you who worked so hard to breathe fire into our election process, I thank you for renewing my faith in the power and the vibrancy of our democracy. Jay Clark Cooper _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:mpls@;mnforum.org Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
