| Many dedicated PSL members volunteered their time and effort to get the Lindsay/Osorio campaign on the ballot in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin, a region that has experienced a continuous assault on the workers’ gains won through decades of struggle. Even though the petitioning teams often entered political climates that were potentially hostile, and often thought of as rigidly right-wing, we found that most people were either in agreement with our platform or at least appreciative of opening the presidential elections to more than just the two Wall Street candidates. —Sean Pavey |
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| One person I tried to get to sign the petition said he was not registered because he had just moved to New York. In continuing to talk to him about police brutality and our electoral perspective, I found out he was looking to get involved in community organizing. He ended up coming to the next PSL meeting, made comments from the floor and has really gotten into the campaign. Petitioning in the hot sun can wear on your enthusiasm, and thousands of people won’t stop. But the incidents like this make it worthwhile. —Sasha Murphy |
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| I think what makes our campaign unique is its approach to thousands upon thousands of poor and working people suffering under the mental and physical stresses endemic to capitalism. Whether it be unemployment, homelessness, racist police brutality, the attacks on women’s rights, anti-immigrant racism, or anti-LGBT bigotry, we were connecting on a one-on-one basis with people in their own communities and making clear our platform of revolutionary change. As Malcolm X once put it “You can’t lead where you won’t go.” —Victor Quintero |
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| One day in Hempstead, NY, we met a young man who had signed our petition there a few days earlier. With great excitement he told us he had been having discussions over the last couple of days with friends about our campaign’s 10-point program. He had gone to our website, sparking his realization that there are other people who share his revolutionary perspective and are organizing. I gave him the latest Liberation and committed to stay in touch. There’s nothing better than finding people with revolutionary optimism and natural organizing skills. —Ed Felton |
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| Petitioning in Brooklyn, I met a man who used campaign for the Democratic Party. He said that after years of promoting Democratic politicians, he had become very disillusioned about the system. He’d never looked into socialism before, so when I showed him our program he told me that it was one that he would definitely get behind. He especially liked our point about fighting police brutality. He has a teenage son who regularly gets harassed and was upset that Obama would not call out police departments for racism. He signed and said he would get his wife and brother to vote for Peta. —Yvonne Bonilla |
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| Most people who say “I’ll come back to sign the petition” never do. But one day at Fordham Plaza in the Bronx, a woman came back to sign and told me her heart-breaking story: she was trying to get Section 8 housing and disability because she had serious health issues, including fibromyalgia, that prevented her from working. She was a single mom with a teenager still living at home. Hearing stories like this made me want to fight harder for socialism—people shouldn’t have to fight constant bureaucracies in order to have health care, housing and the basics of life. —Anne Gamboni |
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| I was struck by just how many people I spoke with that were willing to share intimate details with me of police brutality that they or their families had suffered. I spoke with a woman whose son had been shot. I spoke to many women whose brothers had been brutalized. One woman in her late-60’s showed me a scar on her wrist. “This is what the police did to me,” she told me. Many had lost hope that anything could be done to stop police brutality, and were energized by a campaign advancing just that program. —Heather Benno |
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| The thing I found most striking while petitioning was the general understanding most people had about the elections being a sham to begin with. I would say that the elections in this country are owned and controlled by the super-rich, that either way the banks win, and no real change will come from the ballot box—and the most common response I got was “well, yeah, obviously.” The conditions for socialist organizing exist. —Michael Prysner |
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| I petitioned in Salt Lake City in 2008 and in 2012 at the Salt Lake City LGBT Pride Festival. I noticed this time there was more interest in our whole socialist program beyond the call for a federal same-sex marriage law. People were attracted to the demands around seizing the banks, canceling student debts and ending interest payments to the banks. There is a deeply felt anger that the same bankers who created the crisis were being saved by the government, which is now cutting services that people need. —Saul Kanowitz |
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| Petitioning for the Lindsay/Osorio 2012 campaign this summer, I encountered people who are for, against and unsure about socialism. Many times the people who originally feared the idea of socialism came to embrace it after a short talk. The working class recognizes the sham going on but is unsure of what they can do. I feel re-energized to combat the capitalist lies and know the battlefield of a revolutionary is in the streets. Only by having a continuous presence in the streets and talking to poor and working-class people will we get this revolution. —Armide Pierre |
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| When I talked to most people about how the cost of basic needs like health care and housing are too high, it only made sense to support a campaign that demanded those basic needs to be a human right. By simply pointing out that there are millions of empty homes right now and millions of homeless people that are sleeping on the streets, it makes sense that something is terribly wrong with this system. Once we pointed this out, most people I came across agreed and would sign our petition. —Orlando Pardo |
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| In Seattle, we recently leafleted for the campaign outside of HempFest, which is a very well-attended annual rally/festival for marijuana legal reform. Over 100,000 people turned out this year. Not surprisingly for an event of this nature, most of the attendees were in a celebratory mood, and did not initially seem too interested. But as we started to agitate around mass incarceration and refined our approach, we noticed more and more people started to read the flier, and respond positively. —Jane Cutter |
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