Americans, Elections and Service

Last night, McCain and Obama were each questioned for an hour on CNN about the importance of community and national service. (The fact that, at the Republican convention, McCain’s running mate, among others, was busy deriding Obama’s community work felt a little vexing as McCain held forth on the virtues of service. But whatever.)

With this theme in mind, I figured I’d post the equivalent of a public service announcement. It’s an idea for community service—courtesy of my friend, novelist and nonfiction writer, Aimee Liu.

It seems that two weeks ago, and again yesterday Aimee decided to “take a break from my other preoccupations” in order to vote-register newly-minted citizens at the Los Angeles Convention Center. “It was the best political experience of my life,” she said.

Here are excerpts from the account she sent me:

“To give you an idea of the scale of this event, one whole hall of the L.A. Convention Center filled three times during the course of the day to accommodate all the new citizens being sworn in, plus their families. (Several thousand more people were naturalized the day before.). They came from Korea, India, England, Mexico, Liberia, El Salvador, Cuba, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, and on and on and on. Their families greeted them with flowers. The children dressed in their best clothes.. American flags were everywhere you looked. When the new citizens emerged they held their new green leather binders with their U.S. citizenship diploma with such pride, as if it was a degree from the finest university.”

Many of those who volunteered to register the new citizens, Aimee said, were either immigrants themselves, or the sons and daughters of immigrants.

“I’m the daughter of a Shanghai-born father of Chinese and English descent who was naturalized the year I was born in America. Our other volunteers at our huge table included an American astrospace engineer of Indian descent who was naturalized here at the convention center 15 years ago; all-American actor from New York whose credits include Aaron Sorkin productions; a young Filipina-American former American Airlines flight attendant; and a dozen other volunteers I never met because we were too swamped with new voters.

I registered an English-American who said he’d been in this country for 17 years, but with this election looming he could wait no longer to become aU.S. citizen. A family of Scandinavian-Americans reached for our forms. Grandchildren helped elderly Mexican-Americans with the instructions. One young Salvadoran-American woman with her heart-meltingly gorgeous little boy waited with us for her newly American husband, born in Nigeria. A blond man and his Hapa daughter waited for his now Filipina-American wife. There were Japanese- and Sudanese-born couples. Swedish- and Nicaraguan-born. African-American and Korean-born.

For that one day at least, I felt there was no black America OR white America; there was black AND white America, and everything around and in between. I felt like I was watching America marrying into an ever more perfect and expanding union.

Not surprisingly for LA, the majority of the new citizens we registered were of Hispanic descent.

If you are considering volunteering, I urge you to locate the naturalization ceremonies near you. Meet our newest citizens and help them register to vote! It made us feel like proud Americans.

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PS: Aimee volunteered through the Obama campaign, but says that the McCain campaign was there too, and that the rivalry was friendly, but “very spirited.”

Photo by Rick Friedman for The New York Times