Want a sneak Preview of what America might look like if Trump wins? Pull up a chair.
By Harvey Freedenberg
This afternoon, my friend and I and three other friends went canvassing for Kamala Harris and other Democrats in a suburban townhouse development. Two of us went in one direction, and the other three went in a different one.
About 20 minutes after we started canvassing—during which my friend and I had several positive interactions with residents—one of our other friends called and informed us that a resident in a Trump hat had driven by and yelled at them that we couldn’t canvass in the development and said he was going to call the police. My friend politely informed him that we had an absolute right to canvass despite the HOA’s “No Soliciting” policy (we do; it’s called the First Amendment).
My friend called to give us a heads up and we continued to canvass for a few more minutes before receiving another call. A township police officer had arrived. We terminated our efforts and walked over to where the police car was parked. The officer was very polite, indeed almost apologetic, and said that while he recognized that our position was correct, the development frequently called to eject all kinds of solicitors and he was hoping to preserve peace in the neighborhood. (Footnote: One of the houses our other friends canvassed was a Harris voter, but the occupant informed them that we should expect to have people reporting us.)
Would we have been arrested if we had insisted on proceeding with our canvassing? I doubt it; but I don’t know. We concluded it wasn’t worth a confrontation when our time might be better spent canvassing another neighborhood. The point of our efforts fewer than 48 hours before the polls open was knocking doors, not arguing about our constitutional rights.
But here’s the point: If we had seen a Trump canvasser we would have wished them well and allowed them to go about their business unimpeded. I’m confident that would have been the response of any Harris canvasser, and, frankly, most Harris voters as well. The hostility of the Trump resident is a concrete manifestation of the attitude of his candidate: We weren’t volunteers giving up some of the time we might spend doing other things on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to do what citizens in a democracy should be doing. To him, we were “the enemy within,” and he acted the way one acts when confronting an “enemy” and not a fellow American.
That, friends, is some of what’s at stake in this election.
