One of my professors told the following story in class today:
He was consulting on a city council race in NYC in the Battery Park area. Primaries in NYC are this time of year so he was down there doing some GOTV. Suddenly, he saw a plane crash into his base's biggest polling place, aka the World Trade Center. So what did he do? Run? Call 911? Call his wife to let her know he was okay? Nope. He called the Board of Elections to make sure his constituents would still be able to vote. (The guy at the BOE was unaware of the crash and told him he would have to call him back.)
The story was sad and funny and definitely something I could imagine one of my colleagues doing. One of the worst (and sometimes best) aspects of campaigning is its all consuming nature. We become so obsessed with an election that we forget why that election matters, what it represents and the underlying ideals that we are fighting for. Yes, elections are important, but they're important because (we hope) they bring forward the best people and ideas. Elections are a mechanism by which we can indirectly control our quality of life, but they are not life itself...a reminder I think we could all use sometimes.
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