This Is Why I Don't Like to Phone Bank (Part of the 'I'm NOT The Politics Guy' Series)

This piece was written very shortly after making a few cold calls to random strangers on behalf of Governor Buddy Roemer for President.

            I haven’t closed my phone banking documents yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m done for the night. I’m emotionally about to explode. I need to vent, decompress, reboot. My life is a day to day basis. Everyday I have to reboot and reconfigure. That doesn’t mean I’m remaking the entire operating system, it just means that there are updates and changes to be made. I’m an emotional creature. Weak and open and bare. I chose to be. I want people to see in me the things their too afraid to see in themselves. I operate under the assumption that we are all weak and alone. That we all long to be loved and fear being unloved. No one fears being hated, we all fear being unloved. Lack of love is a cannon blast compared to the sling shot presence of hate. If someone hates you, you can take solace in knowing you’ve evoked such powerful emotions and passions. If you are simply unloved by someone then you suffer their indifference. It eats at you. You have to know, to understand, “Why are they indifferent? Why do they not care? Why don’t they Love me? Should I make them hate me?”

            And we do. Those who we are unloved by, we torture them and fight with them until they hate us. Success. We have forced them from indifference to passion. We have waged war and won. We are more miserable for it, but we accept it. The odd pain of a person’s unlove is too much to bear.

            … Phone banking is the most humbling thing I’ve ever done since my birth nineteen years ago. I bear my soul bare, I offer myself up, a humble servant to a noble cause, to people who have little to no interest. Nor do they have anything to gain or lose, so they can be as mean and cruel as they wish. And they are. They don’t want a candidate to come to them anymore. They want a pretty, dressed up candidate who makes all the pundits on t.v. go wild (Writer’s note: That is an edit to make the reading more PG). It’s a sick system. A Horse and Pony Show where money buys candidates and honest men and women get the shaft. Isn’t that the case in life anyway? Honest men and women always get the shaft. People take advantage of us. They abuse our honesty and our honest nature. They spin us up in their lies and laugh at us. Call us weak and say we need to be stronger. By stronger they mean less honest. We need to learn to lie and deceive, they mean. The only way to win the game is to play it. But if you play a game with deceitful liars aren’t the dice already loaded? The deck already stacked?

            Don’t fool yourself. From the time you’re born you’ve already lost. Dishonest or not. There are no winners. Even the winners lose. Show me someone who wants or needs for nothing and I will show you a liar. A Holy man hoping to win with faith, a rich man who sacrificed everything to win with money, a poor man who can’t afford to bury himself, who leaves his family in debt. We are all losers. It’s true and inevitable. Look in the mirror. See all your dreams? Your aspirations? The book you want to write? The C.D. you want to make? The public figure you want to be? The love you want to have? They’re all pipe dreams that lead you softly to death. We all die. When you die you will smile out loud at all your accomplishments and cry on the inside about all your failures. Everyday I wake up to a life that is a cosmic joke. I am a lover with no one to love. A leader with no one to lead. I stand alone in a world full of people. I do not fear death. It cannot be anymore lonely and painful then life, can it?

- Alexander Fisher
J.Fisher2028@yahoo.com
@JAFThrasher


"Those that dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the day to find that all was vanity, but the dreamers of the day, are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams and make them real."