Copyright HuffPost
I woke up the Sunday before the election and had only just begun brushing my teeth when my phone started blowing up with text messages. There’s a flyer in my mailbox and it’s not good. Cassie, there’s a picture of you blowing the Pope. Call me. My brain and body flooded with white-hot rage and adrenaline, and I called Scott, the person who had texted me, while throwing on jeans in a panic. Scott was one of the other Democratic candidates for city council in our small town. He was a combat veteran and an all-around nice guy who would have made for an involved, thoughtful city councilor had the 2023 election not devolved into a viper pit of insanity. Advertisement “It’s bad, Cassie. I’m so sorry. I’m going to try to walk around and see if I can catch whoever is doing the flyering.” I heard a door slam and he paused. “Oh my god, they’re in every mailbox on the street. I gotta go.” He hung up the phone, and I ran to throw on shoes and meet Scott in his neighborhood. ** I didn’t really consider myself an overtly political person until I moved to Geneva, a small town in upstate New York. We had moved during the pandemic, after I did many rounds of late-night research from my cramped Brooklyn apartment, which had been fine when I was a single lady, but with a boyfriend working from home, two kids doing virtual schooling and three senior dogs, it felt like waking up in an insane asylum every day, albeit with much cooler knickknacks. Political involvement seemed like something meant for other people. I voted faithfully and called my representatives in moments of despair and socioeconomic crisis, but the sort of people who ran for office were surely better organized than I was. Advertisement I still used a paper calendar to cobble together appointments for the kids and my gigs as a karaoke host. Running for office seemed complicated, intense and time-consuming, certainly not meant for someone with multiple jobs and the heavy responsibility of raising their niece and nephew, whose tantrums already occupied the brain space that, in a different timeline, entitled grown men in a political arena would be taking up for a version of myself who really had her act together. Within the first month of moving to a small town, a Republican city councilor threatened to “shoot the squares of everyone on his computer screen” who attended a police accountability forum. That was disturbing, but equally disturbing were the people who rallied around him, as if that were a normal way to react to a call to action during the George Floyd/Eric Garner/Black Lives Matter era. One female city councilor routinely ended up in the local paper, villainized for calling out the weird men on council who had gone their entire lives unchecked. The first rally I ever brought my niece to was one in support of this brave lady outside of where city council meetings were held. My niece, who was 11 at the time, made it into the paper by holding a sign calling the councilor of our ward a bootlicking coward. I bought five copies the next day to send to my mom and her other grandma. Advertisement Where it really started was the DARE program. My niece was automatically enrolled in the fifth grade, and we opted out when we saw the DARE officer’s name. This was a name that had come up in my research of Geneva in trying to determine if it was a safe place for my ethnically mixed family or a residual Sundown Town right out of one of the types of movies that gave me an instant panic attack. I was disturbed that this officer would be teaching my kid, or any other kid in their “majority minority” elementary school, about healthy decision-making. I complained to the teacher, and when that only yielded a shrug, I complained up the food chain to the district office, who said there was nothing they could do about it but I could contact the city council. When a city councilor called me back, I was in the break room of the antique mall where I worked, wolfing down a salad I had made at home. I remember that after 15 minutes of unnecessary small talk, the city councilor finally said there was nothing he could do about it. Advertisement That was bad enough but then he added, “I was once pulled over for driving while Mexican.” He let out a little self-satisfied chuckle. “I’m not Mexican. I just had a really great tan at the time, and the officer let me go, but all that is to say that I understand your family’s plight, I really do, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” I was flabbergasted. He hung up, oblivious to how he sounded. This, for me, was my heel-turn, the moment I went from aging hipster confused by the bureaucracy of this suburban school system to full-blown Mechagodzilla with a Kate Plus Eight bob, ready to torch whatever stood in between me and common sense. “Guess I’m running for office now!” I said to the empty break room once my jaw unclenched. I didn’t know how I was going to make it happen, but it felt like the universe heard me at that moment. ** I had met some other community members interested in change when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I showed up to a demonstration with a gigantic banner of a stop sign that said STOP FUCKING REPUBLICANS. As we held our banners from the overpass above the main drag, we talked over the din of cars honking and giving the thumbs-up punctuated by pickup trucks honking and aggressively giving the finger. No one was more surprised than me when a member of the Democratic committee later reached out and asked if I would consider running for city council. On one hand, I had been going to council meetings on a regular basis and did have a lot of good ideas for simple changes to our city government that would make it more functional and bring down taxes. On the other hand, I was flattered that anyone would consider me organized enough to manage my time or ideas in a way that benefited the greater good. How would I have time for civic duties PLUS multiple part-time jobs, while scaling an ever-growing Mount Everest of Child Laundry? Advertisement I had once heard someone say, “Bigger dummies than you have done it,” and frankly, truer words have never been spoken when it comes to politics, both on a local and national scale. When Donald Trump was elected, all I could think was, “We elected the guy from the stuffed-crust pizza commercial.” Whenever Mitch McConnell would appear on the news as some kind of senile apparition, I would wonder how we got here. Maybe the answer was that not enough regular people who cared were putting themselves out there and saying, “I’ll give it a shot.” Advertisement ** The local paper had just announced my endorsement when I got a notification that an older member of the Republican committee had just followed me on Instagram. At first, I thought it was cool that someone so far outside of my own social circle would want to know what I was up to or look at pictures of my dog standing upright like a human. Then a sense of foreboding crept in. I blocked him and took a cursory look at my online presence. I had deleted Facebook after the 2016 election, when I realized that much of my extended family had suddenly become flag-waving racists. I had written a book in my 20s and done articles and comics about where life had taken me. Nothing had ever really been off-limits, because why would anyone want to use any story or photo against me? I was no one: a formerly punk-identifying person who used to tour a lot but had chosen a life of making two children peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Advertisement I shook off the creepy feeling. Surely this was a glitch. Two weeks later, I received the most awkward phone call I have ever had in my life. By then, I had become friends with the members of the Democratic committee and the other candidates. Our campaign was going great, and a lot of my ideas were being put into action. We needed money, and I did an instagram video that went viral and generated more than $8,000 in donations. We used this money for campaign literature, yard signs and events, like paying our local woman-owned ice cream truck to give out free cones to kids who were stuck at the public housing complex on Juneteenth while their parents were at work. Advertisement During this process, I learned about deeper issues within local government, formed an ad-hoc committee on flooding and started the process of contacting the local sheriff’s department about creating a voluntary registry for parents of special needs kids or caretakers of vulnerable adults so that they could safely contact the police in an emergency and be assured the responding officer was already briefed on any underlying conditions, triggers or calming talking points. It felt like a world was opened up to me where things that had once felt very out of reach were instead very possible with teamwork and being a decent, rational person who can work well with others. ** “This is very awkward, and I honestly can’t even believe I have to ask you this, but is there a photo out there of you giving Santa a blowjob?” Advertisement Of the friendships I had made along the way in my new town, I really appreciated the one I’d forged with the chair of the Democratic committee. She was a no-bullshit former Long Islander in her 70s, the type of lady I could only hope I would be like in another 30 years. And it was mortifying that I was the reason she was having to use the words “Santa” and “blowjob” in the same sentence. ”Well, um, yes. It was sort of an art project that started out with a pilgrimage to a Don Henley statue in Winslow, Arizona, and it just kind of evolved to blowing statues across the country for the last 15 years. Why? Is that a problem?” ”Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said and took a breath. It turned out that someone in the local Republican Party had done a deep dive into my 10 years on Instagram and had come up with some photos of me pretending to blow a cardboard cutout of the pope in Memphis on a tour in 2016. Advertisement There was also the aforementioned Santa statue, but somehow not the one of me mounting the Jedediah Springfield statue in Universal Studios, the bronze Fonz in Milwaukee or the John Wayne in the Burbank Airport. The photos themselves were actually less obscene than they sound — you’re not seeing anything but my back in the one where I’m kneeling before His Holiness, for example. I didn’t like the idea of trying to tone myself down for public consumption, but I also didn’t want my new friends to have to deal with negative fallout from being associated with me. I went through my Instagram and made anything with my kids in it private for their safety. The rest was already out there, so there wasn’t much I could do. Advertisement ** The Sunday morning before the election, I found myself in the car with my kids, driving to the other side of town to intercept whoever was leaving these flyers in people’s mailboxes. When canvassing, it is known that it is illegal to leave anything IN a mailbox, so you usually tuck campaign literature in a doorjamb or next to a mailbox. It was odd that these were going straight into mailboxes. Even stranger were the texts that kept pouring in that these flyers were in every mailbox on every street of our city. I was about to turn at an intersection when I finally saw two kids, a teen and a preteen, with a canvas bag full of flyers. I pulled over like Ice-T spotting a perp and bailed out of the car. My niece followed me, ready to go full Detective Stabler. ”Where did you get these?” I asked them, grabbing the bag of flyers and assessing how bad it was. Not only did the flyer have The Pope Photo on it, but there was also a family photo taken outside of my home with my children and home address in full view for any lunatic to do with what they wished. Advertisement “I’m sorry!“ they said, breaking down crying. “I don’t need you to be sorry. I need you to tell me where these came from.” ”We got them from some guy,” said one kid. ”He paid our dad and a bunch of other people to do it,” the other one said. ”I need you guys to call your dad because you need an adult here. I’m going to call the cops.” The dad showed up before the cops came. His zipper was open. ”Your zipper is open, dude,” I said. ”IT’S BROKEN!” He spat back, like that was a good reason to be strolling from door to door on a Sunday morning with your fly down. ”OK, well, I need you guys to wait here until the cops come, and I need you to tell me who paid you to do this.” ”I don’t need to tell you shit!” ”Look dude, you have kids here. How would you like it if I were walking around, handing out flyers to any old weirdo with their faces on it and your address that might put them in danger? Plus there is a photo of me simulating a sex act on a cardboard cutout. These kids are minors and they’re distributing this?” Advertisement ”I don’t know the guy. It was a paid gig on Facebook, so I only met him this morning when everybody was picking up the flyers. Immediately, I flashed back to the ancient Republican creeper who had followed me on Instagram at the start of the campaign. This man seemed to have unscrupulously paid a street team of children to leave an ancient photo of me giving a cardboard cutout a blowjob in every mailbox. Advertisement When the police arrived, the kids’ father called the man in question, who said, “I told them not to put them in mailboxes.” The responding officer took the phone off speaker, walked away to have a personal conversation with him and then declared there was nothing he could do. He handed the flyers back to the kids’ dad, and I walked awkwardly to my car, not really knowing how I would explain this to my own children, who by now were extremely invested in justice being served. How do you explain to your kids that the law only applies to some people? I decided to soften the blow by getting doughnuts on the way home, and then I met with the other candidates who were affected by the flyer to strategize, but really, this close to the election, there was not much to do. So I went home and made a video that called out how disgusting and unneighborly this incident was, and most importantly, that I remained unashamed. I ended the video with a montage of photos of me simulating oral sex on statues with “Through the Years” by Kenny Rogers playing softly over it. Advertisement The night of the election, I had volunteered to DJ the results party. This had felt like a great idea at the time, but as the results came in, it began to feel like I was DJing my own funeral. What song do you play when a friend loses because of last-minute misinformation and dirty tactics? What do you play when the chair of your committee comes in, makes eye contact with you and shakes her head mournfully? What do you play when the people around you are in tears because they know how hard you worked, not only for your own campaign, but for the rest of the slate? What do you play when you are reminded of the bigger picture: that there is no bottom low enough for the Republican Party, that nothing is sacred, that children are a commodity? HoldThemAccountable Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Join HuffPost Membership The government shutdown puts millions at risk of losing food assistance — and Trump and lawmakers are MIA. We're covering the devastating consequences of the government's inaction. Support the journalism that holds our leaders to account. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. Support HuffPost Already a member? Log in to hide these messages. You play “The Underdog” by Spoon. You think about the 279 people who did vote for you. You think about all the people you never would have met if you hadn’t stepped out of your comfort zone of sorting socks and figuring out how to get your kid to eat food that doesn’t come in nugget form. And you think about how you are going to make sure this never happens to anyone else, at least in your small corner of the world, ever again. Advertisement Cassie J. Sneider is a parent to human children and a dog who walks upright like a leprechaun. She owns a toy store arcade in Geneva, New York. You can find her on Instagram at @cassiejsneider. Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.
