Attention citizens!
What’s a small kind of citizenship that you proudly practice?
via.
I have in the past suggested one way to stop people doing foolish shit — like voting for fascists ‘cuz they think it would be funny ‘cuz nothing matters — would be to go back to teaching schoolkids civics. By that I mean: We should show them the relationship between how citizens exercise their rights and franchises and what they get from their government, so they know how to work the basic levers of citizenship and can tell when their representatives aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
They would also learn to tell, I should add, when they themselves aren’t holding up their end of the bargain. Because from my observation a lot of motherfuckers around here don’t know how to behave like goddamn citizens.
Maybe civics classes aren’t totally necessary for that. Maybe a kick in the ass and a lecture would suffice.
There’s a lot to admire about Baltimore but we have too many people who just don’t know how to act right. Drivers who run red lights in their cars and not by accident. People who pile their trash cans so full that the garbagemen can’t help but spill them and then never come out and bag up the slop. People who throw trash out their car windows. Who steal whole reams of dog waste bags from the containers in parks.
I have to admit I haven’t always been so great at citizenship myself. In my young days, for example, I just blew off recycling. Just blew it the fuck off. I was an idiot — I thought it was bad enough I had to take out the garbage without having to sort it like it was laundry.
I eventually got with it, but looking back I’m amazed at and ashamed of myself. It’s not like I was a monster or even ungenerous and considerate in one-on-on encounters (well, not most of the time). But I had what I have come to recognize as a fairly typical (white man hint hint) sense of entitlement — a feeling that I was doing enough as it was and who are you, society, to ask me to do more? In part I recognize it because it’s currently the primary political position of millions of my fellow Americans and it’s not a pretty glass-and-darkly reflection.
So now I recycle. I vote. I shovel the walk when it snows — hell, I help my neighbors dig out too if they need it. My relative generosity with the many broke people I encounter on the streets is not so much a moral let alone religious choice as what I consider a requirement of my citizenship, because this city is tapped the fuck out and it’s up to civilians to help bridge the gap. It would be easy enough to say it’s not my job, it’s the city’s, but as we have seen that way assholishness lies.
Believe me, I’m not bragging and there’s more I could do, but I think it’s good for all of us — and I mean an improvement of our own lives as well as the lives of others — when we decide to measure up to our citizenship.
Now, this Fun Friday, my bright idea is to ask you to tell us about something you do out of civic-mindedness, even if it’s a small thing. It could be something you feel, or felt at the time, to be simply the right thing to do, but which you knew was also a boon to the polis. Like combining with your fellow citizens to help out a stranger who falls ill on the sidewalk until the EMTs could get there. New Yorkers, you know what I mean.
I’ll give you a ludicrously tiny example of something I’ve gotten into the habit of doing. I’m aware that our public works professionals are stretched and stressed, I try to make our contribution to their workload less unpleasant. To that end I make sure to wash all our recyclables before I put them out — even the ones that are really hard to wash, like mayonnaise squeeze bottles. No encrusted salsa jars, or plastic jugs that give off spoiled milk stank when they’re crushed. I know, their haul is always going to include a lot of gross, festering shit anyway. But I get some satisfaction from knowing that’s none of that is my doing — and if more of us felt that way, things would be a whole lot better all around.
How about you?
(Oh, and happy Juneteenth, citizens! Enjoy being part of a country that can sometimes indulge its best rather than its worst instincts, and look forward to a time when it’ll do that a lot more often.)
Although I vote by mail myself (well, by drop box; I don't trust the fuckers Trump put in charge of the post office), I volunteer every primary day/general election day and drive people to the polls. Usually these are very elderly folks or disabled folks. I've been driving some people for years. Sure, I guess they could vote by mail themselves, but they prefer going in person and they have the right to participate in the electoral process in the way they choose.
In 2020, in order to quiet the voices shrieking in my head, I signed on as a poll worker in Detroit. Several factors influenced this decision. The pandemic had thinned out the ranks of those who traditionally did the job, i.e. old people. I was working for an organization so persnickety about "bias" no other election-related work would be allowed, even though the country was on fire and one party was handing out the matches. And the city of Detroit had some extra money to pay bonuses to anyone willing to sit for 14 hours, masked, in a polling place. (The money came from Zuckerberg's foundation, and you can see where that asshole's principles went.)
So I took the training and was assigned to one of the poorest precincts in the city, not far from my comfortable home in an affluent suburb. After a career in journalism, not much about poverty surprises me, but it was touching, in the best way, to see how the day unfolded. To watch people whose creature comforts were pretty thin make their way to this COGIC church and cast ballots that probably wouldn't affect their lives very much gave a new aspect to the term "civic duty." Turnout in the city is pretty atrocious, but we had a steady, if thin, stream of voters all day.
The most affecting were the oldest people, most of whom came with younger family members who literally supported them through the process, sitting with them at the ADA-required terminal, or standing at the little kiosk to read the candidates' names to them and then make the proper mark. One old guy took about 20 minutes, start to finish, and as he fed his ballot into the tabulator, I said, "You know, it's easier to vote absentee these days, and you wouldn't have to leave home." He scowled, and his daughter answered, "He doesn't trust it." Just the sheer amount of physical effort it took to get him up, dressed and to and from the polls was considerable; I had to salute the effort.
I went home after we closed up, and curse myself to this day for not going to the TCF Center downtown, where the action was rocking all night. Some of the worst players in the state's political sewers rose up to fuck with the results, and one shared an audio clip he'd recorded at a training, and I know because I recognized the voice of the woman doing it. (Let's say it was distinctive.) She was explaining the procedure for handling no-voter-ID ballots; the ballots are set aside so the voters' affidavits swearing to their identity can be compared to records back at the Board of Elections, and absolutely nothing about it is sketchy. In fact, it's a defense against illegal votes being cast. But this shithead manipulated it and added some shitty echo effect so it sounded like she was instructing us to set certain ballots aside for later destruction. It made me nearly incandescent with anger, and to this day he is active in GOP politics and remains a piece of shit.
I later fell away from the work -- life intervened -- but this year, once again, these assholes are going to try to pull some crap, so I re-signed up. I take the training next weekend. Wish me luck.