Like everyone else, I’m trying to distract myself from the headlines the headlines. I have always been serious about following the news as a concerned citizen, but the stories keep piling up: President Trump’s threat to destroy cultural heritage sites in Iran, who will or won’t testify in an impeachment hearing, and elected representatives sharing faked photos.

The work of a concerned citizenry isn’t going to get any easier. I write the Questions of Civic Proportions newsletter twice a month to connect with a community of engaged citizens (check it out here). I can’t give up and neither can you.

Instead of asking, “is it over yet?,” I tried to borrow a phrase from comedian Nicole Byer. On her Netflix show “Nailed It,” she watches total failure creep up on amateur bakers and responds with, “What a time to be alive!” Daily news notifications carry that same sense of slow-moving but still unavoidable failure.

Training myself to us Byer’s response to infuriating headlines proved to be endlessly entertaining. It didn’t do much to fight back the dread though.

While I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was paying attention to, I found another small voice of optimism in the daily mix of news. I’m 2020-ready, and Frederick Douglass helped me get there.

Frederick Douglass Started with Three Questions

The December issue of The Atlantic takes up the question of how to stop a civil war. Because I’m low on hope, I had no intention of ever picking it up. Ever. There was one headline I couldn’t resist: Frederick Douglass’s Vision for a Reborn America.

A man who escaped slavery, fought for abolition, and then watched Jim Crow tighten its grip on the country still had hope for who we could be. If anyone had a reason to give up on the whole project of self-government in the United States, it was Frederick Douglass. Somehow, in 1869, he still saw a country that could live up to its promises.

In The Atlantic, David Blight writes that Douglass, “had always believed that America had a ‘mission’ — that the United States was a set of ideas despite its ‘tangled network of contradictions.’”

As we approach the beginning of a new election cycle in 2020, the mission again seems beyond our reach. The tangled mess of contradictions is all we can see from where we are.

Blight refers to remarks Douglass gave in Boston titled, “Our Composite Nationality.” He planned his remarks in response to efforts seeking to limit Chinese immigration. With Douglass deciding the course of the inquiry, the specific challenge of the moment gave way to bigger questions of purpose and principle. He wove his thoughts through three questions — what we are, what we are likely to be, and what we ought to be.

We are “the most fortunate of nations. We stand in relation to all others, as youth to age.”

We are “a country of all extremes — , ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world.”

When it comes to what we are likely to be, Douglass observed:

“Nature has two voices, the one is high, the other low; one is in sweet accord with reason and justice, and the other apparently at war with both.”

He uses this fact of nature to assure his audience that ‘ignorance is full of prejudice, but it will disappear with enlightenment.”

Douglass sees no reason to listen to “prophets of gloom.” He shifts his focus to a vision for what we ought to be.

Our strength or security depends on the friendship of our people in a country where, “In all matters, — in time of peace, in time of war, and at all times, — it makes its appeal to all the people, and to all classes of the people.”

Looking forward to 2020, we can still choose between the stories the competing voices bring us about what we are, what we are likely to be, and what we ought to be. We don’t have to participate in the dread peddled by prophets of doom. We don’t have to surrender the strength that resides in our principles and our people.

Ready for the Work of Creative Turmoil

In December 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. borrowed a few of these themes when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. After talking about tired feet, dreary days, and darkest nights, he said persisting through these hardships is how “we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”

2020 is our turn at this creative turmoil, and there’s no doubt that we’re up for the challenge. We can see clearly what we are likely to become while we look for strength in working together toward what we ought to be. What a time to be alive.

Thanks for reading. We, of course, would love a “clap” here, but also suspect you enjoy good questions. Sign up for our Questions of Civic Proportions newsletter and let’s keep thinking together.

Surviving Election 2020: How will you resist the “prophets of doom?” was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The basic premise of Politicolor is that we can make it easier to see what active citizens do, how they push against opposition or the status quo and connect with allies, and that showing our work will improve the likelihood that our communities will overflow with good work.

At the very least, we will learn from one another and connect through the ups and downs of civic work.

This question invites us all to go back to the beginning:

What was your first political act? When do you remember first becoming aware of being a part of a political world beyond your family, your house, etc.? That you could take action and be part a part of something much larger than the “known world” around you?

We have a solid start with stories that include football, newspaper flags, classroom moments, and letters to all the popular kids. Check out the whole collection here. The question will take you back to moments in time you haven’t thought about in ages. These stories work that way too. Be sure to check them out as you start thinking about how to tell your story.

At each stop in your own political history, you’ll ask yourself where you got those ideas and if that was really the first time you took a stand. When you finally land on that first time, write that story and share it here.

We would love to see your story become part of this collection. We all have to start somewhere, and we hope these stories will help someone find their start too.

How to Submit Your Story

The story doesn’t have to be long. 300 to 500 words will yield an easy 3-minute read. Longer posts of 650 to 800 words do well too. Write your story using Medium and share a draft link via our contact page.

If writing here is new to you, Medium makes writing on the web super easy. This quick tutorial will help you get started.

Your story should be well formatted, including subheadings and images (with proper attributions) to sustain interest, and be free of errors. Our editors will aim to publish your work unchanged but will correct obvious typos, add photos and adjust some formatting when necessary.

Thanks for reading and thinking about sharing your story. We, of course, would love a “clap” here, but also suspect you’ve been described as civic-minded. We would love to keep thinking together, so please consider signing up for our Questions of Civic Proportions email.

What was your first political act? was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

John Dickerson made a simple statement on Slate’s Political Gabfest. It sounded like a public service announcement:

There are narratives about who we are in the U.S. that have nothing to do with who the President is.
😱

These other narratives have their sources of power, difficulty, and all kinds of complications too. They have room for us to act. They offer storylines where you can stop watching someone else, where you can imagine yourself jumping in and taking part.

We look for stories like this when putting togheter our Questions of Civic Proportions email, but then spend most of our days watching one guy’s Twitter feed with everyone else. Politicolor’s commitment to a more civic perspective requires coming up for air and appreciating these other stories of who we are.

This last week, we offered three questions that show how these other stories help us see across space and time. That’s how you keep a civic perspective.

Get our Questions of Civic Proportions email delivered directly to your inbox. Learn more here.

Without these other narratives, we might forget our own capacity for sorting through complexities and make sense of them. By focusing on one guy or the latest outrage, we lose our connection to the stories that give us strength and carry us forward.

The word “narrative” seemed so big when Dickerson used it in that single sentence. From anyone else, the word would solicit skepticism. Office holders, candidates, lobbyists, and issues organizations all aim to control the narrative today. That’s a strategic win and proof of messaging swagger. Dickerson’s quick side comment pulled the word out of all this muck. He made it possible to see it again and to remember that these narratives belonged to us before they became the playthings of political operatives.

So, what’s the difference? What do these big narratives have that the marketing strategies only imitate?

In 2003, The Poynter Institute asked journalists: “What is narrative, anyway?” The response ranged from the sort of technical specifics you would expect to colorful allegories, “Narrative is the dirt path that leads us through the impenetrable forest, so we move forward and don’t feel lost.” (Wade Rawlins, Raleigh News and Observer).

A narrative works by offering movement, direction, and purpose.

Bob Barker, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, offered an answer with an even bigger idea, “‘Narrative’ means any technique that produces the visceral desire in a reader to want to know what happened next.”

That’s the mark of engaging a story. You want to know what happens next. You connect to the purpose and imagine yourself as the enterprising American that finds the path.

So, when did you first imagine yourself to be part of the larger story of the United States?

I can’t escape hearing the Hamilton soundtrack here, and I haven’t even seen the production! You can find meaning for your own story by interweaving it with the larger project of the United States:

“Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young, scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwing away my shot! “

(From “My Shot” by Lin Manuel-Miranda)

With a powerful narrative, you can connect to a shared mission and the greater purpose of a political community. Later in the song:

“But we’ll never be truly free
Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me
You and I. Do or die. Wait till I sally in
On a stallion with the first black battalion”

What story made you want to “sally in” and be a part of it?

I wanted to go to the moon. The idea of Americans as explorers, boundary breakers, and scientific geniuses had me thinking about what I could do to be part of this story. The USA would escape the bounds of gravity!

Think on the question for long and you’ll discover the power of Dickerson’s reminder. The possibilities keep coming.

Consider the story of civil rights activists as fearless champions for our highest ideals, and investigative journalists as truth-seeking detectives. We have stories of Generals who stood strong against Fascism and rebuilt Europe. We have today’s innovators working to unlock the power to restore health to the human body and (hopefully) the planet.

These narratives need air time, too. We’re just the people to do it. We know that greatness lies within these bigger stories of who we are and can imagine that “history has its eyes” on us. 😉

What can we learn about the stories we know once we uncover the stories we attempted to deny?

You may have seen the Washington Post article about the Statue of Liberty’s origin story. A French abolitionist organized the gift to celebrate the end of slavery. Early renderings of the statue included broken shackles in her hand. Slow fundraising required opening up the story to “freedom” more generally. With Reconstruction disrupted and dismantled, Jim Crow ruled the South by the time the statue arrived in the United States. That sad juxtaposition might be the best way to understand the country at that time.

This month, we have the opportunity to correct a less familiar story. As we mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, NYC has plans to honor two transgender activists with public monuments. Many efforts to tell what happened there have excluded the drag queens and transgender patrons at the bar that night. As recently as 2015, filmmakers had white gay men playing the lead roles. Getting the details right in both these stories help us see the reality that change moves slowly and often occurs through the risks taken by the most marginalized.

How do our stories help us to see across time, space, and even bureaucratic silos?

In the L.A. Times’ review, they say “‘The River and the Wall’ is a border crossing worth taking.” The film documents a team trekking across 1,200 miles of the southern border. They have faith in the people of the United States and want to make it possible for them to see that part of the country with their own eyes:

“With its intense focus on the natural beauty of the constantly changing environs and the myriad wildlife that inhabit what the majority of Americans tend to only think of as a desert, this is one documentary that should be required viewing for anyone and everyone on both sides of the “build the wall” conflict.”

Following this strategy of opening up more of the story, activists in Texas took home a win at the end of this year’s legislative session. Lawmakers made provisions for the “Sugarland 95.” These recently discovered remains were likely the victims of the state’s convict-leasing system. The support of the legislature means the site will become a public cemetery, and activists hope this will help people see how racial inequality persisted long into the modern era. Contributing to that narrative, Ava Duvernay has a new Netflix series where the story of the Central Park 5 shines light on the racial biases that continue to shape our justice system.

How do stories help us see ourselves within a narrative that’s bigger than our own?

In a recent piece for The Guardian, author Rebecca Solnit takes the longest view available. She puts today’s protests in perspective with movements from 200 years ago and the efforts that might shape our future. In “Every Protest Shifts the World’s Balance,” she shows how attempting to see a timeline of it all helps us escape a limited view of how change happens. We focus on stories of “violence and brute power” and miss:

“the great power of nonviolent uprisings and those other moments when individuals become a civil society on its feet… It also ignores how the most important battle is often in the collective imagination, and it is won in part by books, ideas, songs, speeches, even new words and frameworks for old evils. “

These extended and connected timelines create opportunities to engage our collective imagination, whatever the medium. A moment last week might help us see how this collective imagination works to weave individual stories together in powerful ways. In Chicago, the Pulitzer board awarded Aretha Franklin the Special Citation honor posthumously. Jennifer Hudson attended the ceremony to perform “Amazing Grace” in tribute to the late singer. This award makes Franklin the first woman to receive the award since it was established in 1930. The Pulitzer board cited “her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades.”

Student journalists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas also received awards that day, and Hudson spoke to them backstage. She shared her own experience of losing her mother, brother, and young nephew to gun violence. Hudson told the students, “the only way we can ever make a difference is for those who have not experienced it, to look from the perspective of those who have. And that’s when the change will happen, you know?”

Our stories represent this collective imagination and serve to show us how we can shape the future.

When you sit across the table from a friend this week, don’t just commiserate over the news. Use these Questions of Civic Proportions to start a conversation that includes one of your favorite stories.

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.

Questions of Civic Proportions: Stories that Carry Us Forward was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We believe reading is a civic duty. The titles getting the spotlight in our #CitizensRead Book Club make their own case for what we can accomplish by reading together.

For one of our first books, we chose Paul Woodruff’s book First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. While turning the pages of this easy read, we revisited the origin story of self-rule and evaluated our commitments.

Recognizing Democracy’s Doubles

In the first chapter, Woodruff outlines the danger of accepting democracy’s “doubles,” those forms that require too little and offer less. He helps readers get to know democracy again through its earliest proponents and its critics. Insight comes quickly. Most of what we promote as democracy today doesn’t measure up, and that failure has consequences.

This democratic literacy serves a counter force against dark moments when people “turn nasty,” thinking:

…their government is failing them. In anger or fear, they may look for solutions outside of democracy, perhaps in the firm hand of a tyrant, more likely these days in techniques for manipulating voters and deliberations.

This perceived failure makes division the norm and tyranny easy to justify. We begin to understand society as winners and losers. This outcome also relates to the very first imposter, one that we know well.

Woodruff names three doubles — voting, majority rule, and elected representatives. None of these practices say much about democracy without further inquiry. Manipulating the system makes it possible to disconnect voters from deciding what appears on the ballot. A winning majority clears the path and escapes the bounds of the rule of law.

And the tyranny of the majority kills freedom as dead as any other form of tyranny. It’s not freedom if you have to join the majority in order to feel you are free.

Woodruff offers readers two channels for knowing true democracy and how it stands apart from its doubles. We can turn to the work of its defenders, looking for the ideas they celebrated, but we don’t them as well as we know the critics. As for them, Woodruff suggests we look at the ideas they most condemned.

With these two approaches, he identifies seven ideas that make democracy possible.

The first three appear in all ancient theories of good government. Democracy separates itself from other forms of government through the four remaining ideas of natural equality, citizen wisdom, reasoning without knowledge, and education. Each idea that made the list carries its own demands and difficulties. To practice democracy you encounter questions with each combination and permutation of these seven ideas.

Generating democratic questions and evaluating the answers

The practice of democracy requires resisting some answers while adopting others and fashioning those answers into a harmonious system. Flaws, fissures, and failures happen. Democracy does not aim to solve these problems. You can assess commitment to democratic principles in seeing how people respond to these crises.

In the remaining chapters, Woodruff works through the seven ideas of democracy to show how ancient Athens used these challenges to continue developing their democratic practices. They failed at times. They also succeeded in giving the world a model that we aspire to achieve. Their work, as Woodruff presents it, reveals the shortcomings of today’s democratic regimes.

In First Democracy, Woodruff explains that these difficulties make democracy worthwhile. He never argues that democracy is the best system of government. Staying true to his chosen topic, Woodruff practices transparency and offers the criteria in play throughout the text:

In truth, the idea of democracy served the Athenians far better than the Athenians served democracy. Yes, democracy is hard to achieve; yes, it is impossible to make perfect. But democracy is not a utopian ideal, because it takes human imperfections into account better than any other ideal of government.

The stories in the chapters ahead give each of the seven ideas their time in the spotlight. Freedom from tyranny, harmony, and the rule of law will be the focus of our next post. They represent the questions of good government and often seem ancient and intensely relevant at the same time.

Experiences from ancient Athens show that there are no fixed answers to the questions that vex a democratic people. To have the best solution on any single question invites failure on others. The claim that we practice democracy requires this tension. It’s this tension that gives us each “the freedom to exercise our greatest capacities” while also protecting us “from our own worst tendencies.” Democracy is good for us even when we fall short.

Like Athens, democracy might serve us better in those moments of conflict than we would serve ourselves or our democratic principles. We recommend reading First Democracy even if you get no further than this reminder of the human condition: we all have these “greatest capacities” and “worst tendencies.” While reading First Democracy, you will find a long list of questions to ask about our politics today.

Fortunately, you will also find a system for evaluating the answers. You will even understand that these questions and the answers we accept tell us everything we need to know about the state of democracy today.

Thanks for reading. We, of course, would love a “clap” here, but also suspect you really enjoy good questions. Sign up for our Questions of Civic Proportions email and let’s keep thinking together.

Keep Dreaming Democracy: Lessons from ancient Athens on practicing democracy today was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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.

Questions of Civic Proportions: How to respond to “I don’t know where to start.” was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Citizen’s Job is to Ask Big Questions

How to engage the ideas of good government

The questions we ask often say everything about the answers we expect. What passes for political discussion today rarely escapes the smallest questions of self-government — who will win and what will they do with that new power? With every iteration of this discussion, we grow more comfortable with the raw use of power. One party won. The other party is whining.

In this scenario, the American citizen has three roles: voting for the winner, voting for the loser and being an object of power. We lose so much when we boil a citizen’s job down to voting. Casting your ballot matters, of course, but that momentary act offers only the smallest and thinnest understanding of what self-government requires of each of us. An engaged citizen is someone who participates in and promotes the most important activity of a civilized people. This engagement is the work of governing ourselves. We cannot afford to accept limits on the questions we ask or the parts we play.

The questions of a more civic perspective

In the name of cultivating a more civic perspective on the work of citizens, Politicolor quotes Cicero as often as American Presidents, reflects on the messages of a Pixar movie as often as passages from the Federalist Papers. At each step, we follow a timeless tradition of using the past to inquire into the present and asking what a “good life” tomorrow requires of us today. We ask big questions as a catalyst to looking forward and gathering all we can from the world around us.

We talk about the good life the way Aristotle did, as an observer of political life. Writing Politics, he followed all the activity of a community and understood the good life to be the purpose of it all. The purpose of life as an individual. The purpose of living together in political communities. The only way for any of us to achieve the highest purposes of humankind.

Power that serves the people focuses on realizing these ends as a higher calling. Pursuing this good life relies on citizens who make an inquiry of it and then share what they learn. Popular sovereignty requires our ongoing participation.

Aristotle concluded that we are political animals as a result of watching us at our best. Today, we easily curse our politics as politicians at their worst. We talk of these office holders as distant representatives that no one likes. Then, at the next election, we vote for our incumbent representative anyway. We accept the diminished idea of our role as only a voter, and we resign ourselves to politics as usual. We will do it all over again when the next election comes.

Accepting such a small role, we give away leverage in our political system. That’s a known cost and an accepted one. When we decide to leave politics to someone else, we opt-out of so much more than an election or the decisions that particular office-holder will make. Aristotle understood us all to be political animals after watching people in society practice the social behaviors that give claim to our unique position in the animal kingdom. What separates humans from the rest of the animals? Language and reason.

We use language and reason in our inquiries to know more and “to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse.”

We use the knowledge we assemble to cultivate “a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust and other similar qualities.”

This perception makes civilized life possible and gives purpose to political participation. This perception makes it possible to live together and to do so with a shared aim of living well.

Through these inquiries, a citizen steps into a much more significant role. When we ask questions of what is good or evil and just or unjust, we put the citizen back in the leading role of self-government.

Political Animals with Purpose

Aristotle would not be at a loss to make sense of our wickedest politics today. He watched how power operated in the communities he observed. He looked to see who had power and how they used it. Aristotle, however, asked questions about the just and unjust use of that power.

If, as an act of engaged citizenry, we want to take the lead in finding a way out of today’s most polarized debates, we might start with Aristotle’s questions.

Aristotle turned to a discussion of purposes to separate good government from bad government. Do these politics work to benefit the one, the few or the many? He distinguished “good constitutions” from “perverted constitutions” by asking if the government sought to serve the shared interests of the community or the personal interests of the ruling class.

The discussion of power alone, who won or who has the majority, risks missing the point. How are those in power using that power? We need to reacquaint ourselves with this task of evaluating the uses of power. When an electoral “winner” uses their newly acquired power, do they direct themselves towards good government or something else?

The questions you ask about politics either work to limit what you know about political life or to expand both what you know and what you expect. The questions you pose direct your attention and what you see in that space then shapes your perception of what matters. The conclusion that political participation has little consequences is troubling on a personal and constitutional level.

Aristotle had high expectations of good government, “the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happy.” As we imagine ourselves to be citizens of good government, let’s train our ears to big, complicated and far-reaching questions.

Asking Questions like Answers Matter

Challenge yourself to step outside of the familiar talking points of partisan politics. Adopt the posture of an open inquiry and allow for the generous interpretation of others. Then compare notes on candidates and office holders with questions like these:

By what measure does this person distinguish good government from bad government?

Whose interests motivate the proposed policies and to what purpose? Whose interests are being diminished and dismissed as a result?

How does this person understand his/her responsibility to the broader community, the individuals outside their ruling group?

What do the answers to these questions reveal about this person’s vision for good government and what will it mean for the rest of us?

Engaging Good Government

A citizen who serves as a spectator to elections and office-holders allows these questions to go unanswered. A citizen who understands her role to be an agent of good government looks for answers to questions that matter. She persists in asking those questions of other citizens as well as elected representatives and sees a responsibility in the answers she finds. The responsibility is to use the power the people grant in ways that advance their purposes. The responsibility is to good government.

Thank you for being concerned about good government too. Right now, you can download our “Stoic’s Guide to Surviving Today’s News” when you join our Questions of Civic Proportions email list. Check it out here.

The Citizen’s Job to Ask Big Questions was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A popular refrain of the moment is that we need civics education in classrooms again. More civics. New voices join that chorus without offering ideas about what that civics might look like. We need better civics but requiring all the right answers on a citizenship test before graduating misses the point.

We need to ask ourselves better questions if we want to make civics matter. Let’s start by considering what we believe the citizen’s role is in our constitutional scheme. What about the role matters?

This is the story of one classroom where this question had maximum impact. Students studying government at Case High School in Racine discovered the difference between studying THE FOUNDERS and studying what it means TO FOUND an enterprise— an alliance, a country or a constitution. The distance between these two concepts is the difference between memorizing the three branches of government and understanding what limited government requires. Only one of those concepts make it possible for a free people to govern themselves.

When we ask students to focus on THE FOUNDERS, it sounds as though these individuals made a magic discovery, like finding a lucky penny. They were the mythically right people in the right place at the magically right time.

Teaching government from a bulleted list

Our textbooks, lesson plans, and documentaries then tell the story of one event after another. Our government classes approach the text of the U.S. Constitution as one clause after another. We talk about Supreme Court cases as one decision after another. In one case they got it wrong. In the next case, they got it right. No one knows what shifted between those two statuses. The march of time beats on and on and on. The students’ job is to listen, to recall facts, to know what happened well enough to get the answers right when asked.

Flipping through pages in a textbook and looking only to questions of the past, students want to know what this civics class has to do with anything that’s relevant to them. Most of us have been there. It is a fair question and one that has been used to reduce the amount of class time given to the subject. It’s past time to take it seriously.

Teaching government as problem-solving

The students at Case High School have a good answer where we can all find faith in the next generation. Their teacher Jeanne Schierstedt, approached the 2017–2018 school year with a new plan. She had spent three weeks of her summer vacation studying the bigger questions of political life with the National Academy for Civics and Government, presented by the Center for Civic Education. Ms. Schierstedt took careful notes as she started to understand more about the foundational questions that animate political life and constitutional schemes. She started drafting an outline for moving beyond the small questions of who did what. She was going to make it possible for her students to dig deep into why and how.

Last year, she grounded the approach of her government classes with one question that persisted throughout the semester, “What are we founding here?” At each stop along the familiar timeline, her classes investigated the problems being solved by starting something new and evaluated the effectiveness of those solutions.

With another new school year on the horizon, I asked Jeanne what she thought the results were for her new approach. She kept coming back to the idea that her students had “more why.” With more context for these founding events, Ms. Schierstedt’s students had a better understanding of their own capacity to lead change and their own experience using an important framework for an ongoing inquiry using constitutional questions.

The old approach came by way of powerpoint presentations and student note-taking. The new approach allowed students to drive the inquiry. They learned the process while studying the American Revolution. What was new about this thing called the United States of America that came into existence through its Declaration in 1776?

Some students reported that this was the first time they understood why England would be mad at the colonists and tax them like they did. Their previous courses had only focused on the colonists’ anger before moving onto the next topic. Then students had to think carefully about what kind of government it established. Little of it is familiar to our form of government today but many students get through their required government course without realizing how it was different. This understanding, of course, sets the stage for making an inquiry into the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

What was new about that proposal in 1787? What form of government did it establish? This is where students began to realize that the founding generations saw problems in the original scheme. They saw problems, imagined solutions to those problems and then advocated for the change they believe the country required to survive.

Through open-ended questions, Ms. Schierstedt’s students had access to the whole history of a free people struggling to govern themselves. They now had the benefit of their own experience interrogating the history that revealed there are few easy answers.

Teaching government as unfinished

Then they encountered the 14th Amendment. Students could not decide for sure that it represents another founding for the U.S. They looked at the text on its own terms. They researched relevant cases. They saw something resembling founding more in the equal protection clause than in the citizenship clause and they could tell you why. They now have a framework that requires understanding the experiences of past decision-makers while looking forward to evaluating the solutions they attempted. When it came to the 14th Amendment, Ms. Schierstedt’s students understood its past but questioned whether it had much leverage on influencing the future. This is the same evaluation that some constitutional scholars recently published to mark the amendment’s 150th anniversary.

With a seemingly small shift from founders to founding, Ms. Schierstedt remade her government class to be a place for constitutional scholars. The students who studied there understood founding as problem-solving and saw themselves being able to do that work. For them, the citizen’s role requires using the Constitution as a tool for understanding problems, recognizing solutions and measuring our success.

In Ms. Schierstedt’s classroom, the citizen’s desk is where it all starts and where it might need to begin again. Fortunately, that is precisely the kind of work these students are prepared to do.

Please share Jeanne’s story with someone you know who is doing the work that makes self-government possible. Favorite teacher. An unappreciated public servant. Check out our collaborative community for the civic-minded too.

Tell them that Jeanne sent you ;)

Better Civics: How to Get the Questions Right was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We met at Austin’s new Central Library. We were a small group of three women and two men. It was a quiet group too. Everyone seemed concerned to be courteous but also a little reluctant to talk. In many ways, this met my expectations.

Who goes to a public meeting to talk about virtue?

Small, quiet and slow-moving, this old-school exercise in civic engagement challenged my own thinking more than I could have guessed.

I am excited to be a part of bringing this project to Austin. Ben Franklin Circles, supported by Citizen University, Hoover Institution and 92Y, are designed to “foster civic participation, open dialogue and ethics-based leadership.” Ben Franklin hosted his first “junto” for mutual improvement in 1727. Seeking to include individuals with diverse skills and interests, Franklin required only a “shared spirit of inquiry and a desire for mutual improvement.” If today’s Ben Franklin Circles were going to follow that model, I knew Austin had to be part of the effort. Austin even had the perfect location for meetings, a new public building with outstanding spaces for conversation.

Our first meeting focused on temperance, one of the thirteen virtues originally identified by Franklin himself. With the first month of the year behind us, we all had friends who had spent thirty days avoiding alcohol or sweets, curbing discretionary spending or trying to maintain a new fitness plan. Keeping it simple for the first meeting made sense but I worried that the conversation would run out of steam too fast. I also suspected that I would struggle to stay interested in discussing temperance for a full hour!

On the first Thursday of February, our small quiet group met in the large silent reading room at Central Library. We started the discussion with Franklin’s words on temperance:

“Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”

First, we identified all those moments marked by this kind of excessive eating and drinking — tailgating, holiday parties on the company’s tab and celebrations like bachelor or bachelorette parties. Then we considered the vocabulary we use today to promote temperance. While the easy answers included phrases like “Just Say No,” one group member suggested that temperance motivates our awareness campaigns. We thought through public appeals to get regular checkups, to eat more veggies or to have a designated driver for the night. While our first take on these messages might be about safety or being healthy, they also make it possible to start talking about how to moderate excess.

We concluded that today’s public conversation about temperance is more likely to tell you what healthy habits can do for you than it is to beat you down over bad habits. Temperance does not require denying yourself anything. You practice temperance when you decide to pursue healthy outcomes.

At the individual level, practicing temperance today happens through making choices like these…

If I resist the temptation to scroll endlessly on Facebook, I’ll have time to get deeper into a book I’m really enjoying…

If I avoid weeknight happy hours, it will be easier to wake up in the morning and get to the gym…

If I eat clean all week, that birthday cake on Sunday is going to be soooooo good! And, a little of it will go a long way!

This approach to practicing temperance today means that excess is not an inexorable part of modern life. It’s not our devices. It’s us. We could decide to turn that long list of digital age maladies around if we shifted our calculations and found more value in spending time offline.

We even discussed how to use this understanding to turn around Mayor Bloomberg’s “soda tax.” Could public policy focus on rewarding healthy behavior instead of punishing (and benefitting from) bad habits? One member pointed out that this is precisely what some insurance companies are doing now, focusing on prevention first by offering incentives for healthy habits.

Not surprisingly, the conversation ended before we mapped out a specific policy proposal. I did, however, leave that night feeling surprised and even hopeful. The seemingly simple discussion of temperance as a practice of denying one’s indulgences quickly gave way to a more complex understanding of the choices we make and the benefits we seek. One participant refused to discuss temperance as denial, he encouraged the group to “focus on the benefits of making the better choice.”

I made a little time for open dialogue that night. In return, my fellow citizens helped me see how temperance influences public life in more subtle ways than issuing a list that starts with “Thou shall not…”

I left that night more convinced than ever that we have to find ways to talk to one another more. Public efforts like Ben Franklin Circles can help us see that we still have shared values buried under the partisan vitriol. It’s up to us to create opportunities for those values to guide our conversations.

If I attend a Ben Franklin Circle this week, I will have less time for partisan cable news and I will leave with a renewed faith in our capacity to work together….

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Austin’s Ben Franklin Circle meets on the first Thursday of each month, from 6:30 to 8:00pm at Central Library. Check their calendar here.

Let’s Talk More: Austin’s Ben Franklin Circle finds that temperance isn’t as outdated as it sounds was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Casual news-watchers might think the controversy over the attack in Niger started this week. The attack, however, occurred at the beginning of October. President Trump lit up the airwaves this week with his own brand of controversy, over-correcting in response to a journalist’s question about the four fallen soldiers.

Amid questions about a slow response and few public comments about the loss of life, President Trump embellished his account of contacting the families with the erroneous claim that he was doing something other presidents rarely did. It was unnecessary and kicked off a whole series of events that explain why Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, Chief of Staff John Kelly and widow Myeishia Johnson have been stuck in never-ending rotation on CNN ever since.

This timeline might help you find your way beyond that cycle. There are plenty of questions to ask about the event itself, how it happened and what it means for U.S. forces in Africa.

If you only read one thing…

A thorough account from the NY Times points to the Pentagon’s investigation of the incident. At stake in the questions outlined here is whether or not the troops were “simply” ambushed. This scenario would require looking deeper into the military intelligence available in the region and how resources were deployed as a result.

The alternate story is that the troops went off mission, making their own decision to give chase to Islamic insurgents who had appeared nearby on motorbikes. Soldiers involved have given conflicting accounts and there appears to be reason to suspect that village leaders participated in delaying the soldiers’ departure.

The Atlantic’s “What the Hell Happened in Niger?” lays out the questions that should be getting more attention:

This is the backdrop against which a series of difficult questions emerges. There is deep confusion over exactly what went wrong, including why U.S. troops were traveling in unarmored vehicles, how Johnson was separated from the group, how he died, and why it took so long to find him. As public scrutiny of the incident intensifies, so too do the many stories about what may have taken place.

These are the words to remember:

The bond between Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and Sgt. La David Johnson goes back even further than any of the above. A former educator, Wilson founded the “5000 Role Models of Excellence Project” to break dangerous cycles for young minority boys. The program pairs at-risk youth with professional adult volunteers.

The program now reaches a long list of Miami-Dade schools where a network of young people are learning about Sgt. Johnson’s sacrifice:

He was an excellent example of what a role model can do…

He gave the ultimate sacrifice. He was a true role model in the spirit of America.

Officer Greg Williams

You can contribute to the scholarship fund established in Sgt. La David Johnson’s memory via GoFundMe.

The signal to amplify:

There are reports that President Trump was surprised to learn how many U.S. troops were deployed across the globe. Thanks to a report from Pew Research this summer, you can see that most troops are deployed to Europe or the Middle East and that our overseas presence is at a 60-year low. In the six shades of controversy accompanying this story, you may have missed the basic facts about our involvement in Niger.

150 U.S. troops arrived in Niger in 2013 to assist the French military who had intervened to fight against an Al Qaeda affiliated group and other tribal groups who had taken over the northern part of that country. The U.S. mission in Niger has grown since then.

***Politicolor is currently prototyping a daily guide to help concerned citizens focus on the questions that deserve their attention. It’s harder than it should be. If you found this sketch to helpful, a clap would make our day.

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Daily Sketch: For the Sake of the Fallen, Sgt. La David Johnson was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a man in the picture who appears to have nothing. He wears overalls and a hat. His whole face is in shadow but I imagine it to look like pictures from the American dust bowl in the 1930's. This is either a man who has never had a thing of his own or one who has lost it all.

He is also my grandmother’s amazing grandfather who appears in all of her best stories. I feel like I might lose those amazing stories if I stare at this picture too long. They make no sense alongside the utter emptiness of this photo.

My grandmother’s stories include beachside estates and progressive dinners with partygoers riding horses along the beach from one elegant dining table to the next. They roasted a pig for days, in a pit covered by tropical leaves. The stories are opulent and the whole scene is foreign to me. My grandmother grew up on the Virgin Islands. I have a hard time imagining it. The sparkle of these memories, however, always translated, inviting me to see my grandmother as a young girl reveling in the magic. That image matched the woman I knew. My grandmother always believed in magic and that’s how I knew she was from somewhere else.

In the photo of her grandfather, there is a wooden structure behind him. It looks to be made out of scraps and isn’t much bigger than a covered bench at a bus stop. My grandmother noticed when I stopped flipping pages in the photo album. With a flick of her hand, she says, “Oh, that’s after he lost everything in a hurricane.”

Everything. I remember puzzling over that single word. How could her larger-than-my-imagination grandfather be this small man standing in front of a shack of found scraps? Everything. How do you lose everything like that?

Seeing Those Who Lost Everything

Now I know. Recent pictures from Barbuda, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have reminded me of this old photo. Everything is missing. Rooftops. Trees. A clear road out. I have also learned that it was a category 5 hurricane that hit the Virgin Islands in 1928. My great-great grandfather lost his home and all that he owned in the very same way that so many people in the Caribbean today have lost everything.

One photographer captured the magnitude of the devastation and described it:

“From the air, it looked like an atomic bomb hit.”

[You’ll have to click through to se Wired’s photo of the week, Drone Captures Hurricane Maria’s Devastation in Puerto Rico.]

The disaster has also laid bare an American imperialism that few realize still exists in the modern world. The people of these U.S. territories are citizens but that has always been an unequal proposition. Writing for GQ, Joshua Rivera reminds us:

“But that citizenship is a half-truth, anyway. Puerto Rico is a colony in a world where colonies don’t really exist anymore, where the concept is so foreign that no one can properly grasp how perverse it is that a population lives under the farce we call a commonwealth.”

The people of Puerto Rico have citizenship but no vote to shape the government that decides for them. Amid this tragedy they are being accused of mismanaging their economy and infrastructure. It’s convenient to forget how Washington policymaking renders these questions unmanageable by the people themselves.

A YouGov poll from last year found that only 43% of Americans know that Puerto Rico citizens are US citizens. Seeing the people of Puerto Rico as foreign and distant from us has consequences. It might explain why the hurricane response on the island looks so different from efforts in Texas and Florida. Citing a more recent poll, FiveThirtyEight.com shows that, “of Americans who knew Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens, about 8 in 10 supported government aid, compared to just 4 in 10 people who did not know.”

Public appeals for assistance come from Puerto Rico with careful reminders that we are fellow citizens with obligations to one another. From Governor Ricardo A. Roselló:

“Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States, can turn into a humanitarian crisis… To avoid that, recognize that we Puerto Ricans are American citizens; when we speak of a catastrophe, everyone must be treated equally.”

In Battered Puerto Rico, Governor Warns of a Humanitarian Crisis

The Mayor of San Juan is now a primary target for criticism. She has been seen wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Help Us, We Arre Dying.” Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz found herself stuck in the middle of a fake news problem. President Trump had tweeted that the relief effort was going well and was a “good news story.” Cruz responded with a “mayday” message:

“I am begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying. If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying. And you are killing us with the inefficiency and bureaucracy.”

San Juan Mayor’s Harrowing Plea, ‘Mr. Trump I am begging. We are dying here.’

Rally for the People of Puerto Rico

When decision-makers turn their backs on the people of Puerto Rico, they are doing it in our name. That’s how representative government works. It’s up to us to raise our voices out of our own sense of civic duty and on behalf of our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.

Step One: Decide for Yourself that We Can Do Better

News from Puerto Rico is a jumble. It makes sense to be skeptical. Headlines have rolled by suggesting we’re doing everything we can but the situation on the island is so difficult that supplies aren’t making it out of San Juan. Other headlines suggest the effort is being mismanaged from Washington, leaving millions of US citizens without drinkable water or electricity for more than a week.

This NYT piece, Trump Administration is Pressured to Step Up Hurricane Recovery in Puerto Rico, picks up with the administration’s decisions this last week and offers a fairly thorough review of the scope of what is known and what has been done since the hurricane struck more than a week ago.

The article includes observations from the people in Puerto Rico who report “inhumane conditions” and few signs of any relief effort, alongside complaints from elected representatives in D.C. frustrated by a sluggish response and assessments from those who have led past relief efforts:

“They need to scale up,” said General Honoré, who was widely praised for turning around the response to Katrina. During that relief operation, he said, “I had 20,000 federal troops. Not federal workers, federal troops.”

He added, “And Puerto Rico is bigger than Katrina.”

The article also details the difficulty in moving relief supplies out of the ports as well as the administration’s criticism of the media for exaggerating their reports of inaction. One of these things matters more than the other.

Step Two: Contact Your Elected Representatives

It’s not 2018 yet but repeated attempts at repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act and a largely incomplete tax cut proposal are reminders that all political decisions are calculations for re-election. This is precisely the channel of popular sovereignty that the people of Puerto Rico have been denied.

It’s up to us to call our representatives, to send postcards and to make Puerto Rico part of the conversation. Call them at their local offices. Drop by in person if you find that there’s an office near you. Enter your address here to find a complete list of representatives with office addresses and phone numbers.

If you need one, follow the latest script provided by Celeste P. on Twitter:

Step Three: Send What You Can

Times have been tight at my place too. I know that sending money isn’t always as easy as it sounds, but I would ask you to re-visit the picture of my great-great grandfather who lost everything and the photo of Puerto Rico where it looks like an atomic bomb exploded. Who can imagine having to find your way back from that?

Decide for yourself what you can afford. Fast Company has an excellent list of charities to consider.

More Interesting Stories to Come

Like my grandmother’s stories, the photo of her grandfather only exists in my memory. I’m lucky that her magic lights my steps whenever I make an island trip. With every visit I find it impossible to escape how different my grandmother’s experience was from my own.

But that flick of her hand at the photo album said it all. It suggested I should flip to the next page. Move on. That’s not where the story ended.

There were plenty more photos of family on the island enjoying better times. Those were the ones with interesting stories. Those were the ones I wanted to see.

Today we have to take the time to stare at these images from the Carribean where so much is missing. We have to imagine ourselves in the frame and ask ourselves what we can do to help. Then perhaps, decades from now, someone else’s abuela can flick her hand at the photos and suggest there are more interesting stories to come.

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This post has benefitted greatly from a “Daily Sketch” we’re developing as a way to catch good ideas from the firehose of information coming at us each day. Sign up for our updates and join our effort to promote and practice a civic perspective.

An Old Photo was Missing Everything Until Puerto Rico Needed Our Help was originally published in Politicolor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.