Main Street

Making Connections

By Kimberly McMurray — Philadelphia

I have heard time and time again that it is insufferably cliché to start a piece of writing with a quote from somebody else. However, I must acknowledge that sometimes a famous dead writer can express an idea far better than I can. Thus, it is with slight trepidation and a full understanding of the risks that I give you a sentence I stumbled upon in Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

In our age of technological decadence, where many people are more connected to their Facebook pages than to their neighbors, Working America goes back to the roots of community organizing. Sure, we send out emails and post on blogs, but more than that, we knock on doors. Every night, Working America organizers interrupt roughly a thousand dinners and tv shows around the country to talk to real people about the economic issues facing the middle class. We sign up members and help constituents write letters to their elected officials. We form connections in communities. This is what makes us strong.

A couple weeks ago, an organizer in the Pittsburgh office named Austin went out for the night. He knocked on the door of an unemployed machinist. The man, wearing a Penn State t-shirt, told Austin how he had been looking for steady work for months but had been unable to find anything. He was experiencing firsthand the plight of the middle class in this economy and understood how isolating unemployment can be, day after day searching for work with no reward. He signed up as a member and thanked Austin for stopping by.

A few houses down, Austin met another man who wasn’t quite as on board with our issues. This man told Austin that without government intervention, businesses would be able to work their way out of this economic downturn and then hire more people. Austin very easily could have walked away after this, taken his clipboard in search of a more supportive person at another door. But he didn’t. “What do you do?” he asked the man. It turned out he was a small business owner. It turned out that just that month he had hired two machinists and was looking for one more.

“Did you know that your neighbor down there is an unemployed machinist and has been scrambling to pay his bills and feed his family for months?” The man had no idea. It was a quiet community, the neighbors didn’t really talk. He told Austin to give that man his number, to tell him to call and he would try and find a place for him at his company.

Austin did. Instead of moving on to the next door, he went back and told the man in the Penn State t-shirt that he might have found a job. The man was ecstatic. He called his neighbor right away and scheduled a time for an interview. Austin went on his way.

Connections are what make a community strong, they save us from the utter isolation of unemployment or personal struggles, they make us invested in creating a better future. You can bet that those two men will never forget the night a Working America organizer stopped by, they even might greet each other now when they pass on the sidewalk.