Benji’s Backstory: Nov 8, 2016
November 8, 2016 was a formative day for me. It was the climax to a summer of 100-hour weeks working to organize my assigned purple slice of NW Illinois for the Democrats. Fresh out of college, I’d energetically put myself out there, making calls, recruiting volunteers, believing that Hillary and the Dems had this and if I just did my job, the coattails would be long enough not just to win at the top of the ticket, but all the way down to the bottom.
The signs couldn’t have been clearer that this was not going to happen, but I could not have been more oblivious to them: week after week of being hung-up on, listening to Democratic voters slander HRC, and feeling that I was pulling teeth to make anything happen.
On election day morning, I got my clearest sign: when I arrived at the union hall that was my campaign HQ, there were literal snakes: half a dozen of them infesting my workspace, something my union contact assured me had never happened before. After sweeping the snakes out with a broom, I hustled all day, shepherding volunteers out the door, monitoring progress of other staging locations, and reporting to Chicago headquarters. Early intel was good, and they called the local house race for the Dems at 7:00pm, then the senate candidate I was working for successfully flipped a senate seat.
When polls closed, I packed up, and I drove from the staging location to a results watch party blasting 50 Cent, pumping my first. When they called Florida, most people started getting nervous, but I remained so certain it’d all work out. It did not. They didn’t call the election that night, but the message was clear. That night, I felt disgust unlike anything I’d felt before. I went to a bathroom stall and made myself throw up. I came out, sat on a chair and held my head in my hands. An old man came up to me, patted me on the back, and said, “Could be worse, young man. When I was your age, they were trying to send me to ‘Nam.”
Without this experience of failure, I would not have, a month later, followed my passion for cooking and applied to be a prep cook at Momofuku. And without that job, I would not have gotten the next job, or the one after that such that today I am sitting here with almost a decade of experience working in restaurants.
Initially, this pivot was an act of escapism, as I tried to distance and distract myself from the mess unfolding around me in DC. But of course, everything is political, and through restaurant work, I relearned the importance of politics. I had undocumented coworkers share their fears of being deported. I had coworkers without access to healthcare die preventable deaths. I learned about the unsustainable environment small businesses face and the inadequate support for working people in this country. It’s ironic that while working as a political organizer, politics felt so abstracted, turned into the blur of a horse race, but while working in restaurants, politics and its impacts came into sharp focus.
Now, eight years later, my head is in my hands again. Everyone seems to have their take on why we lost the election and what needs to happen next – I’ll avoid the self-indulgence of such a rant, but since working in restaurants brought to life the importance of politics for me, I will share a little perspective from my experience in the hospitality industry:
I’ve heard a lot of people saying “we have to keep fighting” or referencing “the long battle ahead.” I get why this language is motivating, but I think it is a little irresponsible and distracts from the fact that what will change the outcome next time is not more “fighting.” It is approaching each other with a smile (even if it is a forced one), it is listening to a long list of baseless grievance and responding with empathy, and more than anything it is coming together and breaking bread.
