My Reaction to Ameya Pawar Withdrawing from the Illinois Gubernatorial Race

So I feel like I owe my readers a reaction to Ameya Pawar withdrawing from the Illinois Gubernatorial Race. I won't get into it. I think the letter posted on his campaign website (and to which I just linked) is worth reading. Frankly, reading it made me affected me a little like Barack Obama's farewell speech, especially the parts about his intent to shift the campaign Overton Window further Left than if he didn't enter it as early as he did, his One Illinois PAC ,and his intent to get younger people involved in the Progressive cause. He won't make it to the governor's office, but this man is the real deal.

To start, I want to thank everyone who signed my copies of the petition to get Pawar onto the Democratic ballot. If money didn't become an issue, he 99.99% would have gotten onto it. He had gotten his goal of 10,000 signatures when the minimum to get onto the gubernatorial ballot in Illinois is 5,000. Getting double the signatures should have taken care of challenges to signatures that other pre-candidates and candidates would have very likely made. I only got 18 signatures whereas other volunteers did a lot more to get signatures than I did, but the following Tweet from someone helps prop me up about my minimal participation:

7 is better than none. Every signature helps. Many don't realize how difficult petitioning can be.

— Rod McCulloch (@ILPollster) September 17, 2017

I still plan on continuing (or finishing) my series of posts about my reasons for volunteering for Pawar's campaign, which might turn into my attempt to try weaseling my way into helping his One Illinois PAC once he gets it established and ready to act.

For now, though, my reaction: Sad and kinda relieved. First the sadness. As I said above, I believe he's the real deal. I only met him once and not for very long at his rally before we marched to the debate this past Sunday. I didn't really get much of a read on him other than his reaction to my introducing myself was that he thanked me for the help in his campaign, even though he had no idea how much I helped or even if I helped at all. Receiving instant sincere gratefulness, not some "he should thank me for my help" from me but more of a probably fannish "he thanked me!" reaction, feels great and gives me the impression that this guy has a knack with people and that he knows that they want to feel valued. His withdrawal letter and his performance at the debate this past Sunday further demonstrates his desire to build this sense of value and being heard, both of which the world desperately needs more. It's sad to see that Illinois will miss out on a man having this kind of humbleness being in the governor's chair.

As for relief, I'll get a little into it when I continue my series about volunteering for his campaign. One ruminating fantasy might demonstrate my sense of everything. About a month ago, as I waited for the L to head somewhere, I imagined being in a campaign office the night of the election, and tried to imagine everyone's reaction and my reaction to both winning and losing. I couldn't do it. A part of me feared the peaks of emotion of how high or how so very low I could go with the results.

I had a hard time seeing myself making it that far with the campaign and investing that level of emotion into it. Not that I wouldn't want to, but I feared to do so. The first couple weeks of my volunteering, I didn't participate as much as other people, but I invested some amount of energy into it as a snapshot of society. I'll get much more into it later, but the first weekend of volunteering felt really exciting even though I didn't do a huge amount. Over the week, though, I felt a lot of frustration because I didn't feel an overwhelming response that I had hoped for when I reached out to friends and acquaintences on social media. I may have even gotten into a little verbal spat that didn't directly involve the gubernatorial election.

The weekend after, though, I got a whole bunch of signatures with little effort. I texted someone and met them at home. They pulled me along as they knocked on neighbors' doors to help me get signatures and wanted to get involved in the campaign and asked how to do so (she's a very enthusiastic person).

During that trip, I met up with another friend who had intended to sign the petition earlier in the week, but we lost track of time and I had to get home. I met him while he had a meal with someone at the restaurant. They both signed the petition, then we got into an interesting conversations about the podcasts we like to listen to. A slight disclaimer: I enjoyed having the petition as an excuse to get in touch with friends and acquaintences. I don't think friends and acquaintences feel that I need an excuse, but I've got my hang ups and can end up keeping myself out of some low-level social anxiety or social frustration.

Later that night, I walked into a social gathering, and two or three people immediately called for my attention because they wanted to sign the petition. They had seen my posts on social media and wanted to contribute to the effort to get Pawar into office. It didn't prove difficult to get others to sign the petition that night, either. I felt really appreciated and heck, I enjoyed knowing that people pay attention to my social media posts!

My activity in the campaign took a nose dive after that, though. An increase in other activities played a part, but I kind of wonder if some of it might involve some level of instinctual self defense against disappointment and frustration/anxiety about putting myself out there. I can't really say for sure since empirically other activity increased, but I also ruminated a lot about anticipation for the next stages of the campaign (phone banking and door-to-door knocking, both which I've advocated as very important things for a campaign to do. . .read a few posts back when I criticize for not having an aggressive face-to-face campaign on the local levels).

Honestly, I hoped that the momentum of the campaign would pull me along, fill me with energy and confidence, and contributing during those stages would prove easy. I guess I won't find out how much the Pawar campaign would energize me. Again, sad but relieved.

At the same time, I've gained some experienced in electoral politics and learned a little bit about myself. I plan to continue my efforts to improve electoral politics, keep getting involved, and trying helping the country to pivot toward a better direction politically, socially, and on the everyday level for people and emotional attunement.

I plan to hold back a little from the electoral politics for now. My other activity levels still remain high, day job professionally to keep myself certified and licensed, my professional writing and literary activities, and just LIFE, all of which remain oriented toward increasing emotional attunement for myself and the world. I need to also show myself a bunch of self care, integrate lessons from this experience, and strategize my future political activities. I plan to keep tabs on Pawar's One Illinois and hopefully find a place there if it involves helping younger people get involved (didn't I stress the importance of doing so in this post?).

I expect to stay out of direct activity in electoral politics probably until 2018, but I'll probably still do a bunch of posting on the blog and getting involved on social media. I need to vent my anger and rage at the state of things somewhere!

But who knows? I often plan to stay out of things then get pulled into them, so I won't make a promise on this one. So if there's anyone doing anything for electoral politics right now and wants to try dragging me into it, don't hold yourself back. Give me a shot. I'll probably resist, but you just might have some luck and convince me to go back into the fray. Hell, if I see action on the One Illinois front, I'll probably rsh to participate.

So reach out and contact me if my body might be of help to your worthy cause. Other than for self-care and rejuvenation, we need to continue uniting to resist!

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