Questions of Civic Proportions: How to respond to “I don’t know where to start.”
I don’t know where to start. News goes by at a staggering pace.
This past week has included shootings in public spaces, a showdown between the Executive and Legislative branches, a new “religious freedom” rule for healthcare workers, and a list of dangerous individuals banned from Facebook.
“I don’t know where to start,” is a perfectly reasonable response to all that.
With our Questions of Civic Proportions email, Politicolor attempts to map a path through all the demands for your attention. This last week, we offered three questions that dig into what happens when you dig in and start something.
Get our Questions of Civic Proportions email delivered directly to your inbox. Learn more here.
Whether you’re engaged in recruiting others to get involved or simply managing your own willpower, you know this feeling of powerlessness.
We forget how overwhelming it can be to learn more in a domain that’s new to us. We also worry too much about getting it right when we simply need to get started. This lesson comes through loud and clear in the book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe.
In her conclusion, she writes:
It’s the building from small demands to transformative demands that has become even more obvious after Occupy… What many people missed was that the occupied spaces… brought people together and helped them see that their problems were not personal but political.
These connections through shared causes, “helped move people from frustration to action.” That’s where we can get started.
We can make “I don’t know where to start” the beginning of the conversation instead of the end of it. We might even unleash a lifetime of transformative civic action.
Here are three questions from the headlines to help you start those conversations.
Can we learn something about how a movement succeeds by talking about what it started (instead of how it ended)?
It might be a mistake to think the Occupy Movement is a story from our political past. This post from Vox, “We are (still) the 99%: How Occupy Wall Street animated Bernie Sanders, AOC and the left,” covers some of the same stories as Sarah Jaffe’s book, Necessary Trouble. Both projects tell stories that could work under the banner of “Where are they now?”
When we look at a single movement, we sometimes miss the bigger story. In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Bill McKibben shows how today’s particularly potent moment for climate change comes as a result of the decades of work that preceded it. Student strikes mark a third phase, “rooted in broad movements, not elite opinion, so it feels different.”
Even a successful PBS documentary can help us see when the time has come to pick up the work we have neglected for too long. Keri Leigh Merrit writes for Smithsonian, “Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary: The success and brilliance of the new PBS series on Reconstruction is a reminder of the missed opportunity facing the nation.”
How does the U.S. Census and our attitudes about what counts reflect how we understand the work of government?
The U.S. Census has operated without a citizenship question for seventy years. Like so much else, partisan beliefs have all the explanatory power in what people think is at stake in the Trump administration’s decision ask about citizenship in 2020. As we all wait for the Supreme Court’s decision, we have time to contemplate how the census has shaped us since 1787.
Writing for the New Yorker, Ted Widmer explains:
This is precisely because the census is more than it might seem, a mirror of our politics. It has always reflected the promise and prejudices of our country and its story drives to the heart of the Constitution… Who are we, the people?
[Read more: How the Census has Changed America]
Widner also shows how this act of counting the people of the United States made data processing part of our governing strategy. The census has brought us punch cards for tabulation machines, the private enterprise that became IBM, and a strong case for instituting the National Archives. Today, policymakers and activists have used data to reduce juvenile confinement in Kansas and to place refugees in welcoming cities.
What matters to us when we see people instead of politics?
You not only get involved but you could take up a cause you hadn’t imagined calling your own.
The people of Poplar Bluff voted for President Trump and believe people who want to live in the United States should “do it legally.” They also rallied to provide 34 letters and 790 signatures in support of Alex Garcia, an immigrant in the country illegally who has now resided in a local church for 18 months. One of Alex’s biggest supporters, Bruce Peterson, explains, “The rules are the rules, but it’s just weird when you know someone. It’s just not right.”
Seeing through the political to something personal has a tremendous impact. This truth gives public-interest journalism its punch. Be sure to read Katrina vanden Heuvel on this year’s Hillman Prizes that recognize journalism in service to the common good. The power of the personal also showed up in memorializing Director John Singleton and his many contributions to helping Hollywood see race.
When you sit across the table from a friend this weekend, don’t just commiserate over the news. Use these Questions of Civic Proportions to start a conversation that might be remembered as the start of something.
Sign up here to get Questions of Civic Proportions delivered to your inbox.
We appreciate your claps here. We’re social animals too! We also encourage you to share this post with someone you thought of while reading. Get together and have a good conversation.
