The Voice of the LC Dems: Veritas lux mea

Around 11:00 on the night of Nov. 4, with the closing of the polls on the West Coast, the major news channels all called the presidential election for Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). As is understandable, I was ecstatic that a Democrat was elected back into the White House.

In between the jumping around and yelling, I received a phone call. I answered it thinking it was someone from home whose number I didn’t have, even though the area code was 303. Instead, it was a woman I met a little less than a year ago. She was from Colorado. She, a bunch of her friends and her son had made a day-long trek to Western Iowa to help campaign for Senator Obama before the Iowa Caucus in December. I trained her and her son and we went out to canvas neighborhoods. She was very pleasant and her son was a nice young man. After the day was done, I thanked them for their service, gave her my cell phone number in case of an emergency and promptly forgot about them amidst the trials and tribulations of my senior year of high school. I forgot about them, that is, until Election night.

So fast forward to the present: this woman is on the phone with me explaining between sobs of joy who she was. Almost instantly, recognition hit me. After we exchanged hellos, I asked her why she had called me, specifically. Obviously she was happy about the election, but it seemed odd that she chose to call me.

Then she thanked me. I asked her what she meant. She said that I had touched her life, and that I was her son’s role model. Apparently the day we canvassed she believed that I was a high school teacher. When she learned that I was a high school student, she said, she understood how important this election was, and realized that what we were doing was historic. She said I inspired her to stick with it even when the going got hard. She told me that her son talked almost continuously about me on the car ride back and still talks about me back in Colorado.

I was speechless. Many emotions cascaded in my mind, but the biggest one was pride. Throughout the primaries and into the general election, I wondered every day if I changed even one mind, even one vote. Apparently I changed these people’s lives in a way I never thought possible. It was the most humbling experience of my life, and one of my greatest moments.