How I got here

In my last message I made light of the political divisions in my own family over the current race for the Democratic nomination. Even though the battle between these two strong Democratic candidates continues on the national stage, I think it’s time for us to take a step back from the fray and look at the amazing ground we’ve covered during this time of transition. All over Maine, ordinary people have been turning out in record numbers for legislative lobbying events, caucuses, peace demonstrations, and town meetings. All of them are expressing that they’ve had enough. They’ve had enough of a poorly regulated credit industry, which leaves so many of us with thousands of dollars in debts. They’ve had enough of the patch work, largely privatized health care system that has made health care unobtainable for one in five Mainers. They’ve had enough of struggling to make ends meet on a stagnant minimum wage that has not risen to cover the rising costs of living. They’ve had enough of an administration that has squandered billions of our money on foreign wars, corporate tax breaks and bailouts while our infrastructure is crumbling at home. Never before in my lifetime have I witnessed not only such a strong collective passion for change, but also an unyielding optimism. It fills me with (if you’ll forgive the hackneyed buzzword) hope.

It was eight years ago this November, on the eve of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush came to make one last speech at Drew University, my alma mater. I was a college senior with little idea of what I was going to do for a job after graduation. The towering stack of tens of thousands of dollars in college loans was not on my mind as I skateboarded past the throng of people gathered to hear the future president speak. The fact that I would soon be too old to be covered under my parents’ health care plan didn’t even cross my mind. A tiny crowd of students gathered to protest the president’s visit over issues such as the death penalty and abortion, but I don’t any of them knew what we were in for after we entered adulthood the following spring.

After a summer of painting houses on Islesboro, my friend Andrew and I packed up and set out to see the world. It was a few weeks after 911 and our travel vouchers had been cancelled by our airline as a security precaution, so we decided to take a train from Boston to San Francisco, where we would catch a plane to Taiwan. Having never travelled west of, well Massachusetts, I had never known how diverse our country really was. It seemed that everyone was on that train: National Guardsmen on leave from clearing the wreckage at Ground Zero, stockbrokers, immigrants, authors, college students, Mormon missionaries, boisterous Texans…

But all of the nervous conversations on that train touched on the same theme: “What would this new era mean for all of us?”

In a way, I left it all behind. During those next six years I taught English to young Taiwanese students, I was a political and music writer for a newspaper, I played in a band which toured all over Asia, I worked as an advocate for South East Asian migrant workers, and I spoke at and helped organize peace demonstrations made up of Taiwanese and foreign expatriots on the eve of the Iraq War. All of this time, my friends back home made fun of me for “avoiding the real world.” I was earning a good wage, I was covered by national health insurance, and I never had to deal with the humiliation of being unemployed or working a low wage job with a college degree. All of that changed when I decided to return.

After I came back to Taiwan from playing a tour of Japan, I started thinking about the future. I was getting serious with my Taiwanese girlfriend and I knew there was no way I was going to teach English for the rest of my life. But I had grown to love teaching and having grown up in a house full of teachers, I knew that there were few things more rewarding than working in education. In June of last year, I returned with my girlfriend to Maine. I started taking exams, filling out graduate school applications and I returned to painting houses on Islesboro until the changing seasons would no longer permit it. Before my girlfriend headed back to Taiwan last fall, we decided that she would get married the following summer so that we would finally legally be allowed to be together in Maine. I knew I would have to really hustle if I was going to be able to save up enough money to prepare for her arrival.

Facing a tight job market in the Midcoast, I moved to Portland in search of gainful employment. In retrospect, moving into a town with a seasonal economy in the winter, in the middle of recession, was probably not the best move. But then again, having been all over the world, there isn’t any other place that I’d rather be than Maine. After pounding the pavement for several weeks and sending countless resumes and tailored cover letters into the cyber space employer abyss, the best I could come up with was an awkwardly stitched together assortment of non-profit work, freelance writing gigs, and temporary manual labor positions. Over the following months, I worked the front desk of a homeless shelter, I interviewed local small business owners and artists for a magazine, I shoveled snow for seven dollars an hour after waiting in line from 5 in the morning for jobs to be announced and I worked several forty-hour weeks for eight dollars an hour doing temporary factory maintenance and assembly line production.

It was from these experiences that I met so many hard working Mainers who are in much worse positions than myself. While I’ve been struggling, but with the support of my family, many of these folks are struggling to actually support their own families. It astounded me to learn that they could pull this off while I had been complaining about the difficulty of supporting just myself on $250 a week after taxes. I learned that some of these workers have been able to sustain themselves only because they’ve been able to make over-time pay by working twelve hours a day, seventy-two hours a week on the production line with no benefits. Some of them can’t even make ends meet on their meager wages so they reluctantly accept state assistance. I began to think to myself, “we can do better.”

One night in February I had a painful conversation with my girlfriend in which I explained that the American health care system is not the same as the one she is used to in Taiwan. She has a number of medical problems and I decided to tell her in all honesty that without health insurance, we would be facing possibly thousands of dollars in medical debt over time. But I quickly assured her that we would figure it out. When I got off the phone, I started to wonder how America had ever gotten into this position. In every country I have ever lived, from Taiwan to the UK and Sweden, affordable health coverage is a guaranteed right. I knew from first-hand experience that we could do better.

That night I looked into the possibility of running for state legislature and ever since then, it’s been full steam ahead. I announced my candidacy at the school where I had spent the first eight years of my education in front of one hundred seventy people, the most voters who have turned out for a Lincolnville Democratic caucus ever. What impressed me most was the sheer diversity of this crowd. There were retirees, middle aged folks, many of my former classmates and others who I had only previously known as young children. I was floored when I saw that the little girl, who I had once babysat, had become a young woman, appointed to be a delegate for the state convention. Over the following weeks I learned of other people much younger than me who are currently running for seats in the state legislature. There’s twenty-two year old Monroe resident Seth Yentes, a volunteer fire fighter, carpenter and cello teacher, running for the State House in District 42. Twenty-four year old Adam Goode, a community organizer from Bangor is running in District 15. Alex Cornell du Houx, a twenty-four year old Iraq War veteran and Bowdoin student, has announced his candidacy for the legislature in District 66.

But it’s not just young people. A couple of weeks ago, a group of my friends piled into a car and headed up to Augusta for Maine People’s Alliance’s lobby day. Over a hundred people of all ages showed up to approach our state representatives over issues such as health care and affordable housing. It was the same kind of group that excited me so much at the caucuses. I met waitresses, nurses, teachers, small business owners, students, and trades people, all taking a day off from their work or classes to push for political change.

As I drove down toward Portland on Saturday afternoon, I started noticing groups of people standing on the street corners of the small Midcoast towns, holding placards with slogans of peace. They smiled and waved as cars sped by and it suddenly dawned on me that it was the anniversary of the Iraq invasion. It’s been five years since we had felt the strength of millions all over the world who had plead for a different path, but I knew the moment that I saw those folks standing in the falling snow that this power and momentum had not gone away. It was just dormant. Over the past few years, it’s been all too easy for many of us to feel cynicism and frustration when we think about how our leadership has strayed so far from our core beliefs. However, after witnessing the energy and passion from ordinary Mainers in the past few months, I sincerely believe that we are part of a movement that will bring a new era of peace, equality and responsibilty.

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil once said that “all politics i local.” He was right and we’re going to make it happen. Change starts from the ground up.