Open to astonishment.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

About a month before the election, subscriber named George called me from West Allis, Wisconsin. He wanted to know where he could get an Obama sign. He had tried the local Democratic Party headquarters, but to no avail. It was urgent, he said. He told me he had terminal cancer, but that he wanted to live to see the day Obama won. Many of his neighbors had McCain signs up, and he couldn't stand it any longer.

I told George that we're nonprofit, and we're not part of the Obama campaign, but I'd see what I could do. I made a couple of calls, but couldn't figure out how to get George his sign. So I went by the Obama office in Madison and got him a sign. And rather than mail it off to him by UPS, I figured I'd deliver it myself, since I was going down to Chicago on a route that would take me within a mile or two of his home.

So at about 7:30 one Saturday morning, I found his place and saw the offending McCain signs nearby. I furtively placed the Obama sign on his lawn and drove off.

George later told me that it got stolen that very day, but that the local party office replaced it for him. This made him happy. I know there are other, more poignant stories about people being moved by the Obama campaign. But I was touched by one old white man from West Allis.

W e lost a great human being hen Studs Terkel died at ninety-six, just four days before he had intended to vote for Obama in his wheelchair. Studs was a man of the left, and he saw in each individual, and especially the unsung, the poetry and music of their lives.

In his book Working , he clued us in to his philosophy with this little rumination on the tape recorder: "It can be ... a means of blackmail, an instrument of the police state, or, as is most often the case, a transmitter of the banal.... It can be used to capture the voice of a celebrity.... I have yet to be astonished...