While Avoiding the Coronavirus in San Antonio, Wilbo Eats his Fill of Shipley Do-Nuts at the Local Bernie HQ

March 3rd, 2020

South San Antonio, Texas

The big story broke this morning of a woman who was released from the nearby Airforce base, ill with Coronavirus. Her last of three tests showed a weak positive for the virus. She visited a food court and then a hotel before authorities took her into custody again. Now, all people being proposed for release must be checked for the illness three times without a positive. I feel confident that the right action was taken, although brutal, and the virus remained contained. 

I could be wrong. People have written to me, concerned. I've assured them all is well. Could I mark myself on Facebook? Would we call it "The San Antonio Coronavirus Scare"? "Will Juntunen marked himself safe during the San Antonio Coronavirus Fret" will appear on the feeds of my friends.  Or is it too early to tell?

Last night, I walked houses with the Bernie people. I waited forever at the HQ for a crew to come together, one person with a car and one person who knew how to use the canvassing software. I had used Minivan four years ago in Muskegon when I canvassed for Planned Parenthood for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. So a man named Eddie drove and I navigated us to houses of likely Bernie voters who had yet to vote. Not everyone took advantage of a week of early voting. We had to make sure everyone had a plan to vote on Super Tuesday. I have taken to call it Grande Martes, a name speakers of Spanish might like.

We began late and we found ourselves quickly walking in the dark. I picked the path that would take us to the most doors, shown as numbers on the map. Eddie, my partner, dressed in gym shorts and Nikes, kept up a strong pace. I was carrying literature in English and Spanish, looking up data and trying to pick out houses where we couldn’t see the house numbers. After all my years delivering pizza or driving rideshare, I was pretty good at it.

Eddie was driven to hit as many houses as we could before Eight in the evening. He woke up at Three in the morning to begin his work as a lawyer, so he knew how to laser focus on a task. His wife served on the Bernie campaign as a supervisor for all the territory between San Antonio and El Paso, quite a turf to say the least. He saw reaching as many voters as possible last night as a way of loving his wife. I kept up with the man but I must say he gave me a workout.

We wrapped up with a disappointing canvass where we reached only thirty percent of our appointed houses, but that was still thirty attempts to talk to registered voters at twenty houses. We had to search in the dark and use the GPS to find the team of two people we dropped off at an elementary school. In two hours time, the team had walked far enough to reach the elementary school in the neighborhood south of their drop point. We were impressed!

We returned to the Bernie HQ, ate donuts donated from Shipley Do-nuts and looked at our results. Many of the independent donut makers of San Antonio brought donuts to support the Bernie teams. In one month of operation, the San Antonio Bernie HQ had touched seventeen thousand doors, a pretty good record. We went home, hoping it was enough to win Bernie Texas.