Change We Must (or A Lot of Talking Heads)

Change We Need Rally
with Barack Obama

Under the Gateway Arch
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
St. Louis, MO
Saturday, October 19th, 2008

I don't normally talk about politics on this blog. I try to keep it work friendly. I have strong feelings on the topic, but I don't want to make people uncomfortable. That said, I'm proud of my beliefs. I think some people on the other side have been dangerous to our country. Not everyone, but some of them. Every vote on that side strengthens them.

I've been a lifelong Democrat. My parents are Democrats and I was raised that way, same as I was raised Jewish. What made me *own* it, strengthening my own convictions, was the year I spent student teaching. I had gone to public schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and then went on to get a math degree from an Ivy League university. I was going to be a math teacher. I student taught at a school in my city, in the same school district I attended. But the differences were staggering. Only a handful of students were going on to college. Many bright kids could have had the same education experiences that I did, if they had had the same examples that I did of education leading to a good future, a good support system, motivated students around them to provide positive peer pressure.

Some social education classes I took at the same time helped me see the issue as clearly as a math proof. This was a whole generation of kids we were failing to educate. Not based on their intelligence, or even their race, but on their neighborhoods. The affects of red-lining from forty years earlier was still affecting these kids. It's all tied together with white flight to the suburbs, suburban sprawl, decline of public transportation, increased gasoline needs, McMansions, inner city poverty...It's not that middle class whites need to move back to poor neighborhoods to "save" people, but that this mess was created by bankers, mortgage lenders, real estate agents playing to people's worst fears. I don't know the solution, but it's not going to undo itself by telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's still a civil rights issue. Aside from the recent economic problems, the biggest political issue for me is support for our nations' cities. It's tied in with fixing education, using infrastructure we already have, and tearing down both racial and economic segregation.

I agree with most of Obama's politics. But for me, the clincher is his experience in Chicago as a community organizer. Even as a campaigner, he's got the ability to organize all these volunteers into a lean operation, focusing their energy. I can't wait to see what good he can do with the whole country if we are smart enough to elect him.

I grew up in Philadelphia, and it seemed that a lot of people there understood that the issues of race, poverty, jobs, etc. were moral issues and more important than people's sex lives. It's different in Missouri, and that's been hard getting used to. I think people here are too far removed from it. Anyway, this is why I support Barack Obama and why Roy and I went to the rally in St. Louis yesterday.

I found out about the rally on Wednesday. The paper said that it was going to take place, but had no details. We weren't sure if it was just a rumor or not. On Friday, we found that it was definite. The gates would open shortly after 10am and the rally would start at noon.

We planned to take the Metrolink down to the Arch grounds. I was afraid the Metrolink trains would be packed with people, so I wanted to get there early. We left home at 8am and walked to the Metrolink station. At the Laclede's Landing stop, there was a guy with a loud speaker explaining where we'd need to go. Roy and I were going to have breakfast first before getting in line, but this was good information.

There was just one entrance to the rally. The Metrolink station was at 2nd and Washington, and everyone would have to walk a block over to Memorial and down another five blocks to Market to get onto the Arch grounds. Googlemaps says this is 0.4 miles. We walked up to the Lumiere Place casino to have breakfast at their buffet and walked back down 2nd Street. It was maybe 9:30am, and the line now went past the Metrolink station.


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We had to walk a few blocks' worth into the park to get to the end of the line, which went out by the parking lot and metrolink station and around Washington to Memorial. People were selling bootleg Obama pins and t-shirts. We chatted with the couple in front of us and the line moved quickly. Once we got past the metal detectors, we followed the corralled pathways down to an open area. The pathways went towards the Arch on the south side, and then turned north a few hundred feet before the Arch. It let us through to an open area. Later on, as more people were let in, I think the north-south running path was used as a barricade. There were a lot of people behind us, but our area never got too crowded.

I've been to an event before at the Arch where the stage was down at Sullivan Boulevard, east of the Arch and right by the river, and the steps leading up to Arch formed a natural amphitheater. People could sit on the steps and have a tiered view of the concert. I hoped this would be the case this time, so there'd be a better view of Obama. Not this time. The stage was just on the west of the steps.

At first, we tried to get a spot in the center. Roy mentioned the band playing, and I couldn't even tell there were people on a stage. We settled on a spot on the far north side of the closed-in area. There was a fenced off pathway in front of us, so I wasn't surrounded by people taller than me. We had a side view of the band. I was able to see everyone speaking in profile. I think we were 100-150 feet away from the stage. I was in the de facto second row of our section, behind the people right up at the fence. We're still trying to figure out who the band was. They played a lot of R&B classics, and people were singing along and dancing during the wait. Roy thinks it was a quite famous band, Earth Wind and Fire, but we missed their introduction and haven't been able to confirm that.

I was chatting with the woman next to me, who had her daughter with her, a little girl who looked to be two or three years old. The girl looked bored, and I tried to amuse her, watching her making faces and copying them back. The loud speaker played songs like Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and U2's "It's a Beautiful Day". It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 60s. I brought a jacket, but didn't need it. When the breeze died down, it got kind of warm. Volunteers were passing out free bottled water, for which I was grateful. I even got a little sunburn.

I remember looking back at the crowd behind me. At some point, the organizers must have closed down the one-person-at-a-time metal detectors and the narrow pathways. We just saw huge amounts of people walking down the center of the park. I don't know how far back they went, but it was just a sea of people behind us.

I read that the rally was supposed to start at noon, but the program began around 11. There was a whole array of speakers. I don't remember who went on first, but it was:

Robin Carnahan, the secretary of state of Missouri, talking to the first time voters in the crowd and telling them what to expect
Niko Smith, the American Idol guy, singing the National Anthem. I've never watched American Idol, but I guess I've seen one of them now
Lacy Clay, a congressman in the St. Louis area
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic track star
Russ Carnhan, another congressman
Jay Nixon, Missouri attorney general running for governor
Francis Slay, mayor of St. Louis, who got booed
Claire McCaskill, senator of Missouri, who introduced...

...not Barack Obama, but Keenan Morris. He was introduced as a math teacher from a city charter school. The guy actually did a good job speaking in front of the large crowd. He had a degree in engineering but became a teacher instead. He had to supplement his income by taking a part-time job. I feel guilty when I hear stories like this, that I'm not doing enough. I never did become a math teacher, after my experiences student teaching. I left grad school before getting my certification or MSEd. I did work for the next few years as a tutor, working one-on-one with students to help them outside of their classrooms. I got so much out of helping students. I took a corporate job when I moved to Missouri and I feel like I should continue to volunteer. But my time off work is so filled up with cooking and exercise to try to keep healthy and lose weight. Even cutting back on the exercise to take some evening classes affected my weight. I can't see making a long commitment right now.

The math teacher finished his talk. My 100,000 new friends and I started chanting for Obama. It was such a relief to talk to new people and to know you're on the same page politically. Not that we all agree on everything, but we agree on what matters most to us. It made for a friendly crowd.

Barack Obama came to the stage looking casual. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a tie. Most of the people before him had been wearing suits. His speech contained a lot of talking points I'd already heard on the debates or in commercials, but it was electrifying to hear it in a setting like this. Being able to cheer and hear all these people cheering with me. I don't feel like such an outsider in Missouri anymore.



Obama's speech focused on the middle class, how he's going to lower taxes for people like teachers, health care, housing, education, and college. He also spoke about folksy stuff like a diner not having sweet potato pie that made him seem a little more approachable. The crux of the speech was this message: "Because if we’ve learned anything from this economic crisis, it’s that we’re all connected; we’re all in this together; and we will rise or fall as one nation – as one people." I couldn't agree more.

I knew there was a large crowd in attendance, but I didn't realize yet that it was the biggest for Obama. I am so proud of St. Louis for that. I think a lot had to do with the fact that it was on a Saturday during the day, the weather was so nice, and it was a convenient location. But it mostly had to do with Barack Obama's message. I feel like I was a part of history.

After the rally, we walked back to the Metrolink station. There was a long line, easily an hour before we'd get on a train. I joked to Roy that it was only a 7 mile walk home. We decided to have lunch downtown and take the train afterwards. The restaurants in Laclede's Landing were already packed, but we walked downtown and found a hotel restaurant on Washington. We caught the train home after that. It was the Shrewsbury line, which doesn't stop at Delmar. But we live close to both lines, it would still be about a mile walk home afterwards. We got home around 4pm. I didn't think we'd be away from home for eight hours for this rally. We still had the David Byrne concert at the Fox Theater that night, so we both decided to take a nap. I didn't want to be exhausted for the night's concert.