The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Universal exhale’ for these activists
Exhale. Rapid-fire social media. Sleep.
Celebrate? Dance in the streets? Not now, the most ardent activists are telling themselves.
Not in this moment, if there even is a single moment when former Vice President Joe Biden becomes president-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump tastes defeat.
Not with control of the Senate stuck in the balance of two upcoming runoff elections. Not with Trump charging ballot fraud without a shard of evidence, lining up an appeal to a U.S. Supreme Court he thinks is locked and loaded.
Not with COVID-19 on the rise.
“I’m just going to chill out. I’m going to take deep breaths,” said former longtime U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, one of the hardest working Republicans for Biden, who, along with four other former members of Congress, organized 30 past GOP members to rise up against President Donald Trump.
“I think there’s going to be a universal exhale from our group,” said Carol Rizzolo, of Guilford, founder of Connecticut Shoreline Indivisible, which mailed out — get this — 165,000 postcards to people color purged from the voter rolls in Deep South states including Georgia.
“I feel like, okay, we’re
going to exhale,” said Jim Chapdelaine, a musician in West Hartford who founded Indivisible Connecticut, with 3,400 members that held rallies, mailed postcards and reached out to elected leaders and voters all over the country.
For these hardest of the hard-core activists who have spent more than four years taking aim at Trump, the moment of Biden’s victory will not be a moment at all. It will be part of a movement for social justice and good government. And in the minds of Shays, Rizzolo and Chapdelaine, this piece of the battle won’t really end until Biden utters the words “so help me God” on Jan. 20 at the top of the U.S. Capitol steps.
The scars of 2020, the scars of the last four years, the scars of a permanently divided nation, temper the glow over Biden’s apparent win for so many Trump opponents, myself included. It was altogether fitting that Thursday and Friday unfolded with a painfully slow count in five states, in a year when colored maps and dribbling, stateby-state numbers rule our lives.
“I continue to be really disappointed in the president’s minions who are coming out and torpedoing democracy,” said Rizzolo, a former physician assistant who earned a Ph.D in mythology nine years ago, at age 55.
A Biden delegate this year, she marked Biden’s hopeful momentum by taking down the BidenHarris sign on her condominium door. “It’s kind of
the first step towards healing,” she said.
I pressed her on celebration. “A moment of celebration? It’s a moment of relief,” said Rizzolo, who speaks frenetically and often doesn’t finish a sentence. “I feel really strongly that I left nothing on the table and however this turns out, I did 200 percent of what I could do.”
The past-tense quickly fades. On Friday, she tells me she replaced that front-door placard with signs for the two Democratic candidates in a Jan. 5 Georgia runoff election, which could bring the U.S. Senate to a 50-50 tie.
“For us, it now is a quick turn to continuing post-carding to Georgia,” she said, even as the world waited for a declaration of
Biden’s 270 electoral votes.
Jim Chapdelaine, a West Hartford guitarist, composer and producer who has toured around the world, founded Indivisible Connecticut in December, 2016. Like Rizzolo, he’s spent four years nonstop — four years of watching social media feeds and membership rolls light up with every Muslim ban, every “fine people on both sides,” every “stand back and stand by,” every new attack on Obamacare.
Chapdelaine wasn’t about to hit the streets whooping and hollering Friday — with or without an election call, with or without a victory claim by Biden.
“It’s not like we won the whole shebang,” he said. “It’s a confusing result because I think we’re all surprised that half of America believes what this guy is selling. And that’s sort of shocking. We’re going to have to figure out something to come to an understanding with the other side.”
As part of the mass of unemployed, self-employed — “completely economically abandoned” — Chapdelaine had more time for politics this year than he might have wanted. “Once it became clear to me that we couldn’t work, I really focused on the election,” he said.
He, like Rizzolo, talked about the Georgia Senate runoffs with zeal. The loosely affiliated Indivisible chapters around the state and the nation, formed after two former Obama staffers wrote a declaration, align with all sorts of activist organizations whose work doesn’t end with one election.
“You have to make sure that you’re not doing this to feel better. But it’s okay to feel better,” Chapdelaine said, giving himself permission. “I feel a little better.”
Shays, a resident of Maryland, won election to the U.S. House in 1986 and represented the 4th District in Connecticut for 22 years until he lost to Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat. Long known as a moderate, some would say liberal, Republican, Shays’ opposition to Trump isn’t about ideology.
“I clearly agree with some of his positions,” said Shays, who remains a registered Republican. But he added, “I can’t stand seeing someone as president being so destructive and so harmful, what he’s doing to my country and what he’s doing to the rest of the world....It’s all about him, it’s not about good government...I just can’t stand it.”
Shays, 75, voews Biden as a great potential healer. He organized former colleagues, worked closely with the Biden campaign, made phone calls and wrote op-eds, including “Our Democracy is fragile and threatened by Trump,” in the Hearst Connecticut newspapers on Sept. 25 — in which he described the awesome feeling of witnessing the “sacred moment” of transfer of power from one president to another.
“It is what gives vitality and integrity to our democracy,” he said.
That Trump won’ respect that tradition disgusts but doesn’t surprise Shays. And yet, like Chapdelaine and Rizzolo, he’s not given to an exuberant celebration when the win is in-hand.
“I’m going to sit down in a chair and just relax because the tension is unbearable,” Shays said “When I see what’s happening in Arizona, I get a stomach ache.”
He might have planned to go to Washington, D.C. to be with friends if not for the pandemic. Now, he’ll have a quiet dinner with his wife, Betsy, stay overnight at an inn and return.
That is so in-tune with 2020. “People are a little bit wary right now,” Chapdelaine said. “At some point we will say, ‘Okay, now you throw your hat in the air.’”
But he added, “It’s muted by the debris of the last four years.”