Getting out the vote

The presidential elections are of course a hot topic and it's hard not to take sides. For me it's not hard to make up my mind about my favourite candidate though: a lot of things need to change in the way politics is done here in the U.S., and I think Barack Obama can make a difference. His focus on diplomacy instead of war, social security instead of big business, environment instead of oil and human rights instead of terrorism shows that he will make US (foreign) policy reasonable again, instead of based on unreasonable fear. And even though I can't vote myself, I can still try to convince people that they should vote for Obama. So last saturday I joined the GW College Democrats on a campaign-trip to Fairfax, a suburb of Washington located in the state Virginia. That state is still undecided (it's not clear whether Obama or McCain will win the elections there, see this map), so every democrat supporter there who will go to the ballot box can make a decisive contribution to Obama's victory. About 45 students were willing to wake up early that saturday and take a metro to its last stop, Vienna. There, we were told how to go 'canvassing' and we split up in groups, one for every neighbourhood. Each of us had a list of about 50 names and adresses of people who still hadn't decided who to vote for. We went to their houses, knocked on their doors and tried to get them to vote for Obama. That wasn't an easy task. First of all, most people weren't at home. In that case, we could leave a brochure. But when we got to talk to people, it was hard to convince them in just a few minutes. But at least we showed how dedicated the democratic party is to 'get the vote out', and that even students were willing to spend their saturday walking the sun-burnt streets (it was about 33 degrees celcius, I guess) talking to strangers, just to make sure that the US and the world will face a better future. We'll probably go on such trips regularly the next few weeks, until the elections are on the 4th of november.
On sunday, I went out in the streets again despite the high temperature, this time to visit the Adam's Morgan Day-festival. Adam's Morgan is a nice neighborhood a bit north of down-town DC and for the festival some streets where closed for cars. Instead, there were many places to buy food, art, clothes, jewelery, craftwork, stages where music was played and basketball-courts where dances were performed. The most intriguing dance I saw was a group of (I assume) native americans who had bright purple costumes, dancing (or mainly jumping) to indian music with a loud house-beat. Not exactly what I had expected to see from native americans, but a clear indication that they still adapt their culture to changing circumstances. They also invited the audience to join them in the jump-style-dance on the indian-beat-music. Further down the street, people were dancing to salsa in a dancing contest. The high temperature didn't hold them back from giving all they got while a salsa-band provided live music. It was great to see people have so much fun on a spot where normally just cars are driving by. Then I went back home, though, because I decided to change my intermediate microeconomics course for econometrics. I wanted something more challenging, and econometrics certainly requires some time before I completely understand it, so I'm afraid now I really have to start focussing on my studies.