The other day, the phone rang and my son answered.
After a couple of
seconds, he called out, “Daddy, it’s Arye Deri.” I got up from whatever I was
doing, looking at him suspiciously and wondering why the one-time Shas
wunderkind, later felon, and now political comeback kid would be calling
me.
Sure enough, when I picked up the phone, there was his voice in
mid-sentence explaining why Shas was the party with soul who would take care of
the people. I chuckled as I put down the receiver on the taped message, and
later recounted the incident to my wife.
“Yes, Shelly Yacimovich called
yesterday,” she said, referring to the leader of the Labor Party, who’s
struggling to emerge at the top of the Center-Left bloc against The Tzipi Livni
Party and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid.
It must be election season if our
politicians are reaching out to us ordinary citizens.
The major parties
are taking advantage of telephone technology to blanket the potential voters,
and the attention is enough to almost make you feel like a big shot.
Of
course, getting junk calls (is that a term?) can have its downsides.
One
friend stated publicly on Facebook that she would discount voting for any party
who called her with a taped message. The way things are going, she may not have
anyone to vote for by election day.
I actually received another call last
week from a real human being, this one also from Shas. The caller wanted to know
if I had decided to vote for Shas and when I said no, inquired as to the
reason.
At that point, I felt obliged to thank him and politely slam the
phone down (it’s really nice to still have a landline phone that’s not
cordless).
Of course, that option can make me a little
trigger-happy.
Thursday night, we were watching Maccabi Tel Aviv play in
the Euroleague playoffs, and in the middle of the exciting third quarter, sure
enough the phone rang.
Since the dawn of the cellphone age, the calls
coming in on the home phone have trickled to a minimum, so chances are it was
another tele-message. What if it was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his
familiar Yogi Bear voice urging me to vote Likud-Beytenu? I would feel
unpatriotic hanging up on him, so I did the only thing I could. I let the phone
ring.
He still has another 11 days to call.