You don’t need an Ivy League degree and a seven-figure bankroll to make a difference in the government. You just need to show up.
Hope, I have discovered, is not something you find: it’s something you make.
Melinda Iyer — Special for The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com
This article was written in response and reaction to a story originally published on azcentral.com by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez for The Republic | azcentral.com at 7:02a.m. March 15, 2017. Read it here.
A week after the inauguration, I met a friend for lunch. We only manage to see each other a few times a year, but she’s a treasured part of my life and one of the kindest people I know. On that January morning, she was just who I needed to see. We spoke candidly about hate crimes, xenophobia, and raising our children in Trump’s America. She lamented our contentious national environment and wondered aloud where all the moderates had gone. I wasn’t surprised to hear that, like me, she felt completely unrepresented.
We’d never talked about party registration before, but we did that day. I had always assumed she was an independent. It shocked me to learn she was registered as a Republican. But we were so similar! How could it be that we thought so much alike? How could it be that we had so much in common when our two parties were supposed to believe such completely different things? I urged her to get to her local Republican legislative district meeting.
“Party leadership doesn’t just represent the extremes,” I said. “They represent you, too. They need to hear from you.”
I had gone to my own first legislative district meeting only two weeks before. Much of the advice they offered at that meeting had just been published in a Google doc called the Indivisible Guide. I’d been calling my U.S. senators daily, rewarded with busy signals and full mailboxes. I’d even created and delivered petitions, signed by 500 local friends and family, on the issues of ACA reform and cabinet vetting. The staff at each office accepted them politely, then dismissed me instantly. The focus on local politics at this meeting was a revelation. Arizona has long had a reputation for embodying a particular brand of crazy which is now spreading onto the national stage. The idea made instant sense to me: if we focused local, eventually we would spread national, just as we had before. With a new sheriff and county recorder pledged to serve the people, we were already on the way.
And there was this one new and tantalizing bit of data: Arizona’s Request to Speak program. What is this brave new armchair activism, I wondered? Can it really be true? It sounded like an introvert’s dream: Lobby your rep from the comfort of your couch! Vault your voice above thousands without ever picking up the phone! How could I, someone desperate to be heard, someone who did not find the thought of lobbying her legislators in person the least bit appealing, possibly turn that down?
I figured as long as I was making a special trip to the Capitol, I might as well help out some friends. I posted my offer on Facebook and got 25 responses. I signed those people up and emailed them to let them know their accounts were active. Then I logged onto apps.azleg.gov, saw the number of bills, and wondered what on earth I had done.
Fortunately, I have never let lack of familiarity with a subject stop me from doing anything. With the help of Google, and a YouTube video from Geoff Esposito at Expect More Arizona, I figured out how to use RTS. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, Geoff.
Who cares if your video only has 949 views; it only takes one to make a difference.
The information in that video helped me train a group of people who went on in turn to teach workshops on how to use RTS.
Before the election, I used to spend an hour each night reading before I went to bed. I read novels the way others knit sweaters. It was my treasured time, a way to order my brain, to shut off the day by sorting my thoughts into neat purled rows. Dystopian fiction was my favorite: George R.R. Martin, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler. But after the election, I switched to reading political news. I scoured the Arizona Republic and the Capitol Times to learn which bills had a chance of passing and whether they would affect my life. These political figures and their crazy bills, I decided, were no more difficult to follow than the characters of Westeros. I knew I needed to learn, lest I find myself raising my daughters in the Republic of Gilead.
I jotted notes to myself on the bills I was watching, where those bills stood in the process, and my stance on each of them. A few of the friends I’d signed up for RTS asked me which bills to follow, and I shared what I’d learned. The following week, I dumped all the information into a Google doc to make it easier to share. Sometimes, if the bills were making news, I’d link to an article so I could find it later.
And here I am, being held up as some sort of model for civic engagement, when the truth is, all I did was show up.
I have always been an outspoken person; politics is no exception. Spend five minutes in a room with me, and you’ll know what I think about pretty much everything. I’m pretty proud of being the no-nonsense type. You’d think it might get me in trouble these days, but the amazing thing is, the more I talk to others, the more I find places where we all overlap. You might be a Republican, or an independent. I may be a Democrat. But nearly all of us want high-quality public education for our kids. Nearly all of us are worried about the cost of health care. Every one of us wants to feel safe in our neighborhoods. We all want the same things. The same things!
And look where we are as a country. How did we get here? Last week, I learned that the drinking water in many Arizona schools contains harmful levels of lead. Raise your hand if you think that’s OK. Anybody? No? That’s what I thought. And yet our legislature here in Arizona has cut taxes so deeply that our budget can no longer maintain the buildings in which our children spend their days. I can’t be the only person who sees a disconnect in that.
Our country needs a change, it’s true. Change is something I have always been used to. In fact, I think it’s built into my genetics. When my mom was 12, her father had a heart attack in the field he farmed in rural Kansas. He didn’t come home for dinner, so they went out looking for him and found his body. My mom remembers her mom standing outside in the yard late at night after she thought all the kids were in bed, asking her brother, “What am I going to do?” Fortunately, Grandma was the first woman in our family to have gotten a college degree. She’d gone to Washburn University on a full scholarship, then earned her teaching certificate. After my grandfather died, she dusted off that certificate and went back to work. She moved her four kids from small town to small town every year, switching jobs to get a little more pay or slightly better perks. My mom has told me about the pep talks Grandma gave them before each move: “I wonder what the new town will have — a merry-go-round on the playground — or even a library!” It wasn’t a hardship. It was an adventure.
My mom took Grandma’s work ethic and went to college with it, graduating in business administration as one of 9 women in a class of 600. It was a given in my grandma’s house that all of her kids would attend college, boys and girls alike, even though the clipboards at the career center read “MEN ONLY” for every job except secretary. I have teased my mom for living through the ’60s without putting flowers in her hair, and for making it through the ’70s without somehow ever hearing a single Zeppelin or CCR tune. But as the first ever female management trainee at Southwestern Bell in Kansas City, she had different priorities. It didn’t matter to her that nobody had done those things before. She just went ahead and did them.
I didn’t learn until I was an adult that my grandma’s mom had dropped out of high school her freshman year because girls were required to wear dresses and she only owned one dress to wear. But I’m not sure it would have changed my approach to life. Growing up, I attacked everything I did with full-throttle enthusiasm, never weighing or even considering the struggles the women in my family had faced. It seemed like ancient history. I never doubted that I would be able to accomplish everything I set out to do. It had never been any other way.
I have always been comfortable being different. In elementary school, I was the only kid I knew who listened to classical radio. I got made fun of for it, but I still saw no reason not to enjoy both the thundering crescendo of a Beethoven symphony and the driving backbeats of Michael Jackson. Through the last two years of college, I saved relentlessly from my part-time job so I could spend three months backpacking through Europe alone. Nobody I knew could believe I was actually going by myself, but that trip turned out to be one of the most empowering and formative experiences of my life. I will encourage my daughters to take similar journeys.
This election has changed my life, but not in the ways I expected.
I hear from so many people that they are demoralized, discouraged. But I find myself filled with an almost electric hope. Where can you find this hope, you ask? As with so many things, home-grown is best. Hope, I have discovered, is not something you find: it’s something you make. Did you know some species of bamboo can grow almost 30 feet in one day? Hope is like that. Once the energy starts building, it spirals exponentially upward.
It’s been my experience that the most hopeful people are also the most engaged people. They’re volunteering daily, helping others, fighting poverty, combating injustice. They are the heroes of our stories and the changemakers of our world. By contrast, the most cynical people are also the most disengaged people. Who do you suppose is happier? We can’t keep on waiting on the world to change; we are not a John Mayer song. Let’s admit it: that song is catchy at first, but when you start thinking about the words, it’s kind of depressing.
If you’ve read this far, guess what? You are part of the solution. All you have to do is show up — and then keep showing up. It’s OK if you make mistakes; failure is an inevitable and necessary part of learning. Don’t give up! As you learn, you will do better. And before you know it, people will start asking you for advice. I know because it happened to me. I have met so many people over the last three months. I am surrounded now with people from all walks of life, all age groups, all party registrations. What we share is a passion for our country, and a drive to make it better. Frankly, it’s been amazing.
I don’t know if my friend went to her legislative district meeting or not. I haven’t had a chance to catch up with her. But I sure hope she did, because it’s up to us to fix things.
Our country is broken, and we — you and I — are the missing piece. Our government needs new minds, new thoughts. It needs us. It’s time for the rest of us to get involved, the regular people, the ones without a seven-figure bankroll and an Ivy League degree in political science.
We don’t need a degree to make us care about our communities. If we are committed to creating the world we need, we can learn what we need to make that change happen. And once we do that, we are going to transform the world.
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