Petitioning with Sierra Club

We found out at the last second that another ride was heading down to Venice to do more outreach on behalf of the Bucket Brigade (in our experience by far the most organized and motivated organization down here), though we were ultimately unable to get down there. It's lame not having transportation. So, after a morning of blogging and trying to figure out where the money for the Gulf Aid show was going, we headed out to the Sierra Club to do more work in town. This time, we'd be helping them with a letter writing campaign (essentially a petition) to try to get more federal resources down to the gulf and to get a moratorium on offshore drilling.

I don't think I'd have the patience to work the political side of things like Sierra Club has become so known for - I'd rather get my hands dirty. At their offices, we walked down a long hallway lined by offices with people dressed nicely sitting behind desks typing away and shuffling through papers. The volunteer coordinator gave us our shirts, clipboards, pens and a stack of pre-written postcards asking the Obama Administration to both put all possible efforts towards mitigating the current crisis and reinstate the 2008 moratorium on offshore drilling. Off we went.

I don't like to be pestered, and I don't like to pester people, but in this case I'd make an exception. We stood on the sidewalks outside a big, free open-air concert to try to get people to put their information on the postcards which would get sent to the white house and - hopefully - try to persuade him to not do offshore drilling anymore. Jamie and I got the whole gambit of responses as we tried to get people to sign the cards. One the one side, a number of people were eager to do it and thanked us for coming down. On the other side, we ran into a number of people working for the oil companies in various capacities that respectfully declined our offer (of course). And then there were the outliers: one girl yelled "Drill, Baby, Drill!" in my face and walked away, for example.

All in all, we got about sixty people or so to sign the cards. When we couldn't take it anymore, we took off our Sierra Club T-shirts to enjoy the last act in the concert before a night out on the town listening to a great honky-tonk band.