If You’re Not Political Yet, You Should Be
Greetings! My name is Marcus Tweedy, and I’m a “Zillennial” who used to work in organizing and still loves making a difference and getting people involved. I’m here to launch a new project, breaking down the social and political issues we face today, how they came to be, why they matter, and where we go from here.
If you’re new to politics, welcome! You’ve come to the right place if you want to become the most informed person in your friend group or if you want to get involved but don’t know where to start. If you’re already a seasoned politico or activist, great! I’m here to add to your toolkit with extra resources and food for thought.
To help convince you of why it’s so important to understand politics, I wanted to share the following speech:
“This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue…it’s actually cerulean.
You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns…then [it] trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs…you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of “stuff.””
You might recognize this monologue from one of my all-time favorite films, The Devil Wears Prada. When I was a Poli Sci major a few years ago, a professor played this clip for us on the first day of her Intro to Political Philosophy class. We discussed a couple of points that stuck with me ever since and that I want to leave you with today.
Fictional fashion editor Miranda Priestly (masterfully played by Meryl Streep) does a few things. While she takes both the audience and her assistant Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway) through the history of cerulean clothing, she begins and ends the speech by refuting Andy’s belief that fashion doesn’t affect her. Miranda admonishes Andy for selecting a lumpy, cerulean sweater when, if she appreciated fashion more, Andy could have chosen something appropriate for her role. Rather than being exempt from the fashion industry, Andy is unwillingly participating in it. Andy hasn’t made “no choice” in her fashion — she’s made a bad choice.
You can either care about fashion or not care about fashion — that’s up to you. But if you don’t actively make your choices, your choices are made for you.
That’s the other key takeaway here: Andy’s fashion options have been chosen by a group of elites — in this case, the people in rooms like the one she’s in at fashion publications like Runway. In the film, we are repeatedly reminded that “a million girls would kill” for Andy’s job, but that’s not because of the pay or because it’s fulfilling work — the job is awful in both respects. People want the job because it offers proximity to power in the fashion world. Miranda and her fellow fashion elites get to decide what others can wear and how they want to shape our economy and culture, both for fashionistas and fashion ignorers.
Where am I going with all this, and why am I introducing my blog in this way? Miranda’s speech isn’t just about fashion. It’s about everything. Naturally, the professor who played this wanted us to apply these ideas to political life. How we got to modern society as we know it today was only possible because of two millennia of political thinkers, experiments, wars, cultural, economic, and religious revolutions, you name it. That swirling mess that is human history left us with the “pile of stuff” that Andy Sachs fished her blue sweater out of and that we live in today.
I’m here to talk about politics and the social, economic, and cultural sides of political issues and how to engage with them. Like fashion, you can choose to either care about politics or not care about them. You can be curious and engaged with our society or you can just kinda do your own thing and hope for the best. That’s up to you. The choices you’re making, whether about your voting, your resources, or your life in general, are ones I hope you trust yourself to make more than you trust rooms full of elites.
In the United States, where I live, it’s understandable (but wrong) to think of politics as a binary choice people make every four years between two options. A lot of people’s energy in the next year will go toward making sure their preferred old white guy wins in November — and while that matters, it’s even more important to make sure politicians actually serve us once they get into office. I consider myself a progressive and have typically voted (and campaigned) for Democrats in the past, but I believe what you’re voting for matters so much more than who you’re voting for.
I’m here to make sense of the “pile of stuff” that is modern America. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the schools we attend (or send our kids to), how and whether we can earn a living, the rights and liberties we have or don’t have, how our leaders represent us overseas…all of these are deeply political.
We owe it to ourselves to understand the society we live in, how we got here, and what choices we have to try to make it better. I hope you’ll stick around so we can learn together, have some fun, and figure out how to be better citizens of the world we live in.
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My first full piece, which will talk about the presidential primary system and why it’s broken, will go up tomorrow night (April 29th). To get notified when it does and to take this journey with me, you’re invited to follow me on Medium, subscribe to this publication (A Pile of Stuff), like this piece…all that fun stuff content creators ask you to do.
