citizenship – Page 3 – Steven Savage

Civic Diary 7/9/2016

July 9, 2016 by Steven Savage

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

What a hell of a week. Philando Castile and Alton Sterling shot by police. Police shot by an ex-military sniper in Dallas. I won’t lie, it’s left me a bit numb.

But here I am writing, because this is part of my project to be better, and we could all use being better.

With the shootings first of all, there’s really two parts – the first is excessive use of police force against minorities, which is clearly an issue. The second is both access to guns and apparently a man who should have been caught earlier. In short, police force, gun control, and possibly mental health. Issues I’ve covered before, hell have been covered before and we haven’t done a lot about them.

Which really brings me to the whole point of this civic exercise – what the hell do we do?

I think people feel helpless. Want to know why there are thousands at #BlackLivesMatter protests? People know they can do something that way. The evil flipside is our political process, where desperate people are exploited by con-man politicians to vote against their own interests.

The loss of real civic engagement for much of the country has left us truly helpless and vulnerable. We’re not asking what we can do for our community, state, country. We’re not staying truly informed. We’re small atomistic units bouncing around and bouncing off each other, but not connecting. We may even sever connects because some bile-spewing media figure told us to hate some group of people.

I guess I see it this way.

Be informed. Really informed. Know what’s going on, ask questions.
Connect with others. Any way you can – and connect with people different than you (though you have to start with people like you).
Do stuff. Find ways to change the world. Nothing’s too small – I can’t claim to be a person making revolutionary changes (well, not yet, but I have a few decades left in me).

These are not an optional part of citizenship.

Be informed. Reach Out. Be active.

Now as for my own efforts:

I’ve reached out to a local political group’s lead and am going to a meetup run by another on Monday. Once again I’m finding people involved in political groups aren’t too hot at recruiting and expect you to reach out.
More and more since Brexit I’m shifting my news-reading approach to stay better informed as noted before. It’s changed a lot of things for me – but you can overdo it and obsessively check news all the time. I need to learn to be selective.
I’m evaluating some of my other community involvements due to changes in groups I know and work with. Sometimes people don’t need your help or change their missions, which leads me to ask what I’m supposed to do.
Identity is really key to understanding civic engagement – knowing what you can and should do is part of knowing who you are. Which sounds corny but I’ll try to write more later.

And needless to say I need to get off my butt and write my reps on both violence reduction and gun regulation. The latter, again.

– Steve

Civic Diary 7/2/2016

July 2, 2016 by Steven Savage

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

Brexit:

Still watching the fallout from the Brexit. It seems to have been a sadly obvious con, and one where opportunistic a-holes manipulated and scared people. It’s a hideous synergy of crap news and awful people who got people to vote for destroying their economy and their country’s reputation. Honestly, even if the UK doesn’t leave the EU (and I’m leaning to it won’t now) this makes people trust the country less.

It’s also a reminder that something may be imperfect, but may be a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Which, politically, is what we should consider “good” to “excellent.”

So my big civic lesson from the Brexit is to keep up more on news. I did anyway, but I sort of went back to my “news rituals” in force as I’d slipped on them. That involves:

Checking my newsfeeds at least once a day in an app.
Reading long-form articles from reliable sources (I use the AP and Quartz) from said feeds.
I added Politifact to my news scan since it’s useful.
Doing my usual Twitter news scan. Remember I have one list just for government, politics, and activism that helps me stay up to date.

You can’t know everything; you can work to stay informed.

Political Engagement:

Now that I’ve got some leads on political orgs fitting my interests, I’m slowly gearing up. That takes time as people are busy, but I’ve got an actual (almost sure not to be cancelled) political meeting coming up and am in contact with other volunteering options.

As noted my interest is voter registration right now, but as also noted I’m asking what my long-term interests are in political engagement. I’m thinking beyond that education and communication. It’s sort of exciting to think I can apply my hobbies and my career experiences to something.

Political engagement doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t be boring. Look for what fits you.

– Steve

Civic Diary 6/25/2016

June 25, 2016 by Steven Savage

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

Another crazy week. 2016 is filled with a lot of unpleasantness. This time the Brexit.

The Brexit is pretty much a great example of how people do not do well in being civicly engaged when you see how many people didn’t get what the Brexit vote was about. With the UK economy hit (and the world economy taking a blow) and people seeing surprised at the same time, it’s a grand example of BS politics, propaganda, and ill-informed voting producing real problems.

Needless to say I’m 1) keeping an eye on the economy, and 2) even more focused on staying civicly engaged. I certainly appreciate my newsfeed more.

Remember my attempts to hook up with a local political party? Well that kept getting changed due to rescheduled meetings – I think some of that was the group wanting to keep some control over attendees since in-person political meetings can at times attract some pronounced personalities. So I basically did two things:

I went to the first meeting I could find without being selective, informed people there of my goal of getting more civicly and politically involved, and got some ideas and flyers. Fortunately my pick was a group who’s interests aligned with my own, so I may have found the right organization through luck.
Dropped by the office of the local political group and got a card for the person running it. I’ll be writing them soon.

So the big lessons here is:

In-person contact seems effective.
Some – probably a lot – of political groups have issues with recruiting. In fact, one I had trouble getting in touch with asks people singing up for contact want to help with recruiting. It reminds me a lot of the issues conventions have had in recruiting.

I’m wondering if a lot of political organizations are bad at recruiter, only recruit among limited populations, etc. It might go a long-way to explaining lack of civic engagement . . . and points to something I may want to do.

So next up is checking out these groups, attending some meetings (that I don’t expect to be cancelled) and seeing how I can get involved. But I’m one step closer.

Here’s a big lesson for civic engagement – keep trying to find the right group or groups for you. At least in my case it was hard.

– Steve