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http://www.AllPowerToThePeople.com/events/NaderDays/page2.shtml



Sending out Invitations

    I asked for a block of 40 tickets. I figured I could sell all those and be back for more in a few days. I took a block of tickets with me to the co-op where there had been a ton of interest. Every time I mentioned Ralph Nader and Patti Smith coming to Buffalo people indicated that they couldn't wait to get tickets. When I finally showed up with tickets, they could wait. I sold about 3 tickets and got hit with a lot of the dreaded "remind me again next week." Remind me next week became the bane of my existence along with "Awww. I'm going to be out of town that weekend." It seemed like all of the people that supported Ralph Nader the most were all going out of town at the same time. Over the course of the weekend I went through my family and friends and managed to sell about 10. It was a lot harder than I ever expected.

    As hard as it was for me, it was even harder for Heather. She went some 70 miles to her old church where she had been part of the beginnings of a Green Party movement a while back only to find out that they now had changed their minds and felt guilty that they had ever voted their conscience and dared to hope. She came back totally deflated and didn't want to try to sell tickets anymore. I spent the rest of the day cheering her up. I think that was the only day in all of April that wasn't dedicated to "the Nader thing." She bought my 10th ticket so that I could table at the event. Thanks.

    We started having two meetings a week so that we could get more accomplished. I went back that Monday somewhat disappointed that I had only sold ten tickets but people were amazed that I had sold that many. Everyone else had sold far fewer. That was the first inclination I got that we weren't going to sell all 2000 tickets that we were shooting for. Days would pass and I would ask how we're doing with ticket sales and the sales were barely going up and Matt would just shrug and say "Ah, we always sell most of the tickets in the last couple days." Then I would nod and pretend to be reassured.

    There were lots of other let downs everywhere I looked. I remember a Saturday afternoon at a peace rally where I went up to one of my friends that works with labor and occupational safety and asked him how to get labor groups listed in the Progressive Directory only to be informed that a lot of labor groups supported Ralph in their hearts but they were all afraid or disallowed to say it out loud. His group would not be listing in the directory not because it was called the "Progressive Directory" but because it had Ralph Nader's name on it.

    Then there was the day that Heather and I went to U.B.'s peace marathon. There were flyers for it all around so I was expecting a well attended opportunity to sell tons of tickets. When we got there it seemed like Heather and I were about the only audience members that weren't speakers. I was still excited because I would get a chance to see who Mike Niman was face to face. He was allowing me to reprint his articles on my website and we had exchanged a few emails but this was my first chance to get to see him speak and I wanted to photograph him to work up a caricature of him on the website. By the time I finally got annoyed with the performance art that I actually left, everyone else had left before me. Heather and I decided to cut our losses and just stick a Nader flyer up on the bulletin board but then we saw that Mike Niman was still in the food court so we stood around waiting to introduce ourselves. Mike Niman was the person who initially gave me names and contact information on the Buffalo and Erie county green party so as I was first getting involved in "the Nader thing" I was expecting a thunderous endorsement of the event from Mike Niman that would encourage everyone to attend. I got to introduce myself and speak with him for a bit and he explained why he wasn't supporting the event and I nodded and "understood" but understood also that Ralph Nader's only coming to Buffalo once and it sucks big time that the Nader team has all fallen apart in advance of his arrival. I didn't get his picture either. I've decided that I suck as a photographer since I don't ever want to bother anyone by taking their picture.

    And then there was the whole Bruce Jackson thing. Egads! Bruce Jackson is a guy with a website about Buffalo and Buffalo politics. One would think that Ralph Nader coming to Buffalo would be, pretty much, related to Buffalo and politics. Matt was trying to get press coverage anywhere he could find it so I'm sure Matt wrote to him. I wrote to him asking him to list his website in the progressive directory. I DOUBT anyone else from our camp wrote him but maybe another person or two did. So then he writes this long article called That Pissant Nader is coming to Buffalo and talked about how Nader's "promotional organization" was flooding him with email asking him to mention the event on his website. The horror! Instead he wrote this long diatribe about how Ralph Nader owed everyone an apology for having run for president. I was incensed and even though I had a million other things to do I took some time and wrote a long response called I Own My Vote!! Felt good to write it. The people down at HQ liked it. Other than that I didn't really have any time to get people to read it.

    So after a lukewarm response from the peaceniks and activists, a thanks but no thanks from labor and a not interested from a lot of local media, I went looking for the minority community. I grew up on the east side, I'm half black, if I don't make sure the east side gets an invitation who will? I went and flyered all the main streets on the east side on my bike. In retrospect I realize that the flyers didn't really say WHY anyone should go see Ralph Nader, they just said Ralph Nader was coming to Buffalo. If you didn't know who that was, why would you care? The next thing I wanted to do was to get to a church or two on the East side. I'd done as much as I could do in my UU church where I'm still pretty new; I've been a member of the Quaker church in Pittsburgh since I was about 8, so I figured I'd give the Quaker church on the east side a try.

    No black people.

    Not really any young people either.

    The church seemed to like me a lot. I stood up and spoke about my mother and her Quaker memorial service but all in all I didn't even end up getting any of their social justice organizations listed in the progressive directory. I made some friends there but didn't get anything accomplished that helped the event.

    So former masten district councilman David Collins' house is right next door to the Quaker church. He's been a friend of the family since before I was born and I worked as a summer intern in his office for a few years when I was younger. I stopped by and paid him a visit. I didn't expect him to want to get involved but he did. He even came to one of our Democracy Rising organizational meetings. He put out the word for me through the organizations that he was associated with. It didn't actually work, but I sure appreciated the attempt and the support.



The Last Days

    In addition to everything else that was going on Matt informed me that a very important part of the whole event was getting organizations to table at the event. They needed to help buy or sell 10 tickets and they could table. I figured that I could help with that since I was contacting organizations anyway for the Progressive Directory. Helping out with tabling turned into Matt asking me to do the whole thing. I told him that there was no way I could add that to everything else I was doing and he agreed to find someone else to do it but suggested that I should do it while he was looking for someone. I kept looking around the office and there didn't seem to be a lot of "someone"s to chose from so I got the impression that it was going to be me.

    As hard as I tried to get volunteers down there I was getting no results. I was still reminding people and outright begging people to go down there and help out but I had given up on the idea that it could actually work. Then one day I went down there and a guy named David M. was there and he said that I had told him about it. I didn't remember but I was about ready to do a cartwheel. He started doing flyering and helping out at the office. A couple other people were starting to show up so I was freed up to do other stuff. Super!

    So then came Christina. One day she was just there. She called me on the phone and said she was available to help me set up the tables and asked what I needed her to do. I, apologetically as possible, informed her that I needed her to do the whole thing. Without missing a beat she started in on getting people set up to table and without her we'd have been in deep doo doo.

Christina

    Christina came on a little strong though. She was the kind of person that looked at you, assessed you, figured out what you were capable of, got you to commit to doing it and then followed up to make sure you did it. Heather and I had already been committing to doing things and doing them for weeks without a Christina there so we were a bit resentful at first of her style. We're quiet folks at heart and Christina is very outgoing. A lot.

    Another thing I scrambled to get done toward the end was to include ALL of Earth week. We were calling this event Peace on Earth Week after all. There were a lot of environmental events going on during Earth Week. I decided to generate some greater than the sum of our parts action going by reaching out to everyone I could find that had an event that week and come up with one flyer that had all of our events that we could all participate in distributing. Mostly I was the only one that ended up distributing it but it was good to have a flyer that they would allow us to put up in Erie County Libraries and it also had a Buff State sponsored event listed on it so we could put it up at the college.

Jason

    Then one day we looked up and there was Jason. I didn't know where he came from or what he was doing there but in the final days he was always at the office and I gradually became aware that he was the boss. At first I thought he was just pushy. He had a way of saying "Okay this is what we're going to do," when everyone was already doing something. He kept trying to communicate to everyone that we shouldn't worry and everything was under control. Before he started doing that no one seemed worried but now people were looking around all paranoid like "Sweet Jesus! Is everything out of control and no one is telling us?"

    Matt had been keeping things at a more even keel. We all knew that we weren't selling the ticket numbers we were hoping for but Matt had a perpetual stay positive attitude so we all just stayed positive for him. Personally I was just glad Nader was coming and that I was playing an important role in helping out. For as few people as we had we were accomplishing a tremendous amount. Matt kept getting us into various newspapers and weeklies and the phones began to ring a bit more. I was trying to get as many tickets sold as possible, even if they weren't counted as my sales. If I could get someone to buy a ticket from one of the ticket vendors or one of the organizations hoping to table it was all the same to me. I had sold my 10 tickets so that I could table for GBINet.info. At first I had in mind the fact that they said they would put the organizations who sold the most tickets near the front but over time I realized that I was going to be the person deciding who goes where and I could just put myself up front. It was pretty clear that there weren't going to be other organizations selling more tickets than me anyway. Nobody was coming back and asking for more than their 1st ten.

    As we were heading into the homestretch I had sold about 20. When I tried to get volunteers down there it generally failed, but when Christina tried to get volunteers down there it was working. In the final days there were about 6 to 10 people at any given time at the office, many of them, I'm guessing, were friends of Christina and they were dedicated and diligent. I stopped through a couple times a day picking up more flyers or dropping off ticket money and coordinating the tabling and the Progressive Directory. I was working on a few hours sleep every day and wondering what it was going to be like when this event finally happened and I could get back to my regular life.

    On the day before the show I stopped down in time to see the Green Party rolling out the giant Earth Ball. It was a big 8 foot globe that they rolled all around downtown with their green party hard hats. It was quite a sight and I hear it generated a lot of interest. I had come down to show Matt the Progressive Directory final design and then borrow his van to drive the final version all the way out to Lancaster. This was pay dirt for me. The idea that everyone who attended the event was going to get a copy of this directory and have the contact information for all of these wonderful organizations was the best reason to be involved in a project like this. We ended up having to get the directory printed as cheaply as possible and it wasn't stapled together quite the way I had envisioned it but it was a start at least. My latest GBINet project is called ProgressiveDirectory.com and it has grown out of what was begun back in April.

    Just as I was getting back home they called me to remind me that they needed laminates. Lots of them. I had offered to make them since I had a color printer but I wasn't expecting to add that to the list of things I needed to do at the 11th hour. Fortunately Heather had taken the day before the show off and she was willing to help print up laminates and print up GBINet stuff so that I could table at the event while I ran to photocopy a gazillion more things in her car. I was trying to decide whether to skip the last organizational meeting and work straight through it or go to the meeting and just stay up all night. Heather had a severe stress headache so I stopped to tuck her in so that she could sleep it off and then I went to the meeting so I wouldn't be keeping her awake with printing and typing and everything.

    I got down to the office and it was pretty pandemonious. Phone banking was going on. There was a crew in the back room cutting out and laminating the volunteer, security, backstage & access passes that we'd just finished and run down there a few hours earlier. Matt was on the phone with one person then the next. Christina was locking down lots of last minute tablers. Jason was reassuring people that everything was under control. Ed from the co-op was getting the stage crew and final stage preparations finalized. The meeting did NOT look like it was going to come together any time soon. So I started photographing people in action so that I could include pictures in this article someday. Then I went in the back and helped people laminate.

    An hour later the meeting still showed no signs of coming together. Jason kept calling the meeting together and everyone kept right on working. Someone had asked one of the backroom folks to run to an office supply store to get some supplies for the podium banner that I had made. It was going to create a big disturbance in back room operations so I volunteered to go. Then they started suggesting a million billion other things I could go and get for them while I was out and I told them I was going to the office supply store and nowhere else. I lied. I went to the office supply store and then I went home. I checked on Heather who was still awake with a pounding headache. I massaged her head for a bit and then headed back downtown hoping I had missed the meeting. I hadn't. At 10pm it was finally just getting underway.

    I don't remember if anything happened at the meeting. The rest of the night and much of the next morning were a blur. I know I must have done all of the stuff I needed to do to get ready to promote GBINet.info but I don't remember. I don't think I got any sleep.

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