Do Something About Something
Making Progress in the Age of Trump
It’s 1995. I’m 13 years old. My parents and I are at our rabbi’s house preparing for my Bar Mitzvah.
Get this: turns out our list of family members to participate in the service had more women than our conservative temple would allow.
That, uh, doesn’t sit well with my mother.
She lets the rabbi know it. Right there in the man’s living room. In front of me. No joke.
A back and forth ensues. Neither budges. It gets quiet.
Very quiet.
Mom looks him square in the eye and breaks the silence by telling him that he, as a man, will never understand what it’s like to be told you can’t do something just because you’re a woman.
If there had been a mic, it would have dropped.
In a vacuum, all Mom did in that moment was take a hammer to a single synagogue’s sexist policy. It’s not like she changed the world. But she sure changed my world, and not only because our list stayed intact. You can draw a direct line between that moment and my joining a sexual assault peer education group in college, my time working for NARAL and AAUW, and the type of father I try to be for both my daughter and my son.
For the past 12 years, I’ve been a Capitol Hill staffer, a lobbyist, and a communications consultant. The jobs are different, but the common thread is that I always felt in a position to do something about something I care about. Cultivate a certain set of skills, apply them to a cause, and something good happens. It’s not always easy, but it’s not impossible either.
Two months ago, the American people made a colossal mistake.
In the immediate aftermath of November, my overriding emotion was feeling completely powerless. If the absence of fear is the most emboldening emotion, feeling powerless is the most paralyzing one. I learned quickly that I hated the feeling and needed to make it go away. To make that happen—just like my mom did 22 years ago — I narrowed my field of vision.
Like many at Burness, the public-interest communications firm where I work, I came here to change the world. That’s still the plan. But it’s not the only plan.
For this next little while, I’m also setting my sights on my own backyard.
I live in Rockville, MD. In 2013, I initiated an effort to expand the city’s no-smoking policies. It took two years, but the city council eventually instituted an outdoor no-smoking policy at all city-owned facilities, including parks, rec centers, public office buildings, even our golf course. That’s a good start, but in the aftermath of November, I’m setting my sights higher: next month, the council will open formal discussions on potentially extending this policy to cover all outdoor restaurant seating areas in the city.
This past summer, our family took a vacation to a Hyatt resort on the eastern shore of Maryland. We had a blast, but there was one problem: constant secondhand smoke all over the grounds. Over the past few months, I raised my concerns with the property managers, and they responded by removing 75 percent of outdoor smoking posts. In the aftermath of November, I’m now working with Hyatt’s corporate staff to institute similar changes across their properties nationwide. And soon — very soon — I’ll be able to share more about exciting action I’m pushing at the state level on this issue.
Look, I know this is all small potatoes.
But you know what? That’s the point.
It feels good to do something. It feels even better when it works.
Please, do the same. Look around your neighborhood. Decide what needs changing. Work with like-minded people in positions of authority to get it done.
Do something about something. Control what you can control. Change your world.
The next four or eight years are going to be really hard. This will make it easier, maybe even a little better.
And that’s a start.
