The shop teacher sage

“You can’t make a fuss if you don’t become a part of it,” said 86-year-old retired shop teacher Don Van Blake as we walked through the streets of Plainfield, N.J., canvassing for Barack Obama.

Five years ago, the only reason I would have watched C-SPAN was if I had trouble falling asleep. Recently, however, I have been following the political scene as closely as the sports page. And one presidential candidate’s challenge to hope and maximize potential has captured my attention.

So I called up “Obama for New Jersey” and volunteered my services on “Super Tuesday,” hyped as the most explosive day in politics since the Burr-Hamilton duel. I wanted to see what this “movement” was all about.

I was assigned to Plainfield and was paired with Mr. Van Blake, a good-humored man who inspired me with his eagerness to climb front steps and engage people at his advanced age. It was an unlikely pairing: an 86-year-old black man going door-to-door alongside a twenty-something white guy in a town that is 60 percent black. Mr. Van Blake reminisced about his work on the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who advocated giving full voting rights to blacks.

What I will take away from Mr. Van Blake was his insistence that he was making a difference. “Never get old,” he kept telling me as he clutched his cane, though his age – or any other supposed impediment – hadn’t seemed to deter him so far.

The rainy weather could have left him saying when he climbed out of bed, ‘I’ll let the next guy handle it,’ but his attitude seemed to be, ‘I am the next guy.’

In my first taste of political activism, Mr. Van Blake showed me that passion and persistence toward a cause trumps any personal uncertainty, uneasiness or doubt. And at a time when few things seem certain, shunning the doubt and insisting on being ‘that next guy’ just might get you through it all. Mr. Van Blake has been through it 86 years and counting...