In 2004 when I still lived in Salt Lake City, Utah before escaping to Los Angeles, the bigoted, Mormon and other right-wing activists put an amendment to the state constitution barring same-sex marriages. There had already been a Utah law on the books since 1977 which banned gay marriage, and this movement was simply a bigoted culture war issue meant to further harass and demoralize LGBTQI+ people and our allies and to force religious beliefs on the general population in violation of the Constitution of the United States.
In response I joined a group attempting to organize protests at the State Capitol and one night after going dancing I stood outside the largest gay nightclub in Salt Lake City passing out fliers. The security guard at the club threatened to literally physically attack me if I didn’t remove myself to the street, which was both unexpected and alarming, and as I smiled and greeted the hundreds of people piling out of the club no more than about 5 people accepted a flier. The experience was so demoralizing and embarrassing that I didn’t even go to the protest myself, which I heard later had extremely poor turn out. I had known of resistance groups by older gays in places like New York City and the Act Up! group founded by people like Larry Kramer, and Harvey Milk who had been murdered in 1978 for his successful activism, and had just assumed that at least a useful percentage of people could be recruited and mobilized to participate, and it was frightening to realize just how little people cared about the civic process and their own wellbeing.
This negative experience with political activism was further confounded when Democratic asshole Jim Matheson betrayed me and every other LGBTQI+ person who helped his campaign for congress to turn around and immediately vote for the “Marriage Protection Act” in both 2004 and 2006 which sought to ban interstate recognition of the marriage rights of gay people. I had enough with Utah and escaped to Los Angeles in 2005, but then the Mormon church followed me there and in 2008 they broke convention to actively campaign for Proposition 8 which sought to bar gay people from marrying there. I went to one of the rallies outside the Mormon temple in Los Angeles and it was thrilling to finally see some gay people (and their advocates) actually doing something about our oppression, and it was karmically satisfying to see how many members of the church saw the hypocrisy, hatred, and unconstitutional behavior of the church which made them question or entirely abandon their membership (from which the church has never recovered), but the passage of Proposition 8 in supposedly progressive California (because at the time I did not understand that California is actually a centrist hellhole) and the general Democratic establishment’s treatment of socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016 completely eradicated any motivation to be involved in politics.
In a conversation with my straight brother in the late 2000s he apathetically declared ‘he doesn’t do politics,’ and while I completely understood his sentiment and distaste for the conflict inherent to political activity our attitude about politics, civics, and institutional systems is irrelevant to whether they have effects on our lives or not because we live under an empowered system of government which imposes itself onto our lives even if we don’t want it, through such mechanisms as taxes, zoning, regulations, police and criminal prosecutions and imprisonment, and social support systems (or their absence), and since we cannot decide whether society impacts our lives but can influence the nature of that impact it is objectively self-defeating to not actively engage in civic action.
To make matters worse, the attitude that many of us have as members of Generation X, Millenials, and Gen Z have toward politics, especially disengagement, is actually a purposeful manipulation committed by our Baby-boomer parents and their parents which attempted to castrate political opposition from their children which allowed boomers (and their parents) for several decades to dominate the political machine and hoard money and resources for themselves, to then impoverish their children and grandchildren and the conditions in which we currently find ourselves. While this sounds depressing and confusing that people would treat their own progeny with such disdain and contempt it is a consequence of generational abuse and trauma as thoroughly discussed in my book on human psychology, The Perfect Child, which arises out of fear and desire to control our environment, and people like my brother do not even comprehend that their distaste for politics was actually engineered by his own parents and their generation to keep him and us from participating and thus being deprived of the benefits and privileges to which he and his family and all people families are entitled, to neuter political opposition and monopolize monetary and material resources.
Many liberals and conservatives alike believe our country and system of government is ideal and functional, and similarly do not recognize their position as one which results from indoctrination rather than objective analysis. In reality the power of offices like Senators in the US comes entirely from the length of time which they are afforded to serve in positions of power, for six full years which is even longer and more influential than that of the office of President which must be elected every four years. The office of congressperson is elected every two years and thus more closely reflects the direct will of the people since they can be evicted quickly if they conflict with the people, but there are only 435 House seats to represent the interests of 350,000,000 people. The division of the country into States with their own governors and legislatures further helps dilute the power of government in favor of the people, but the ratio of government representatives to the population is still fundamentally insufficient to truly represent our will and is a major reason we constantly face corruption and government dysfunction year after goddamned year.
Many people’s response to this system and its dysfunction is to disengage entirely and refuse to participate in the defacto two-party system. I understand this position and in fact did it for about a decade (especially as I had to put my life back together), a sentiment which arises in part because of our feeling of helplessness in the face of such a powerful, evil institution as the US government and its history of violence, genocide, and theft (the USA has only ever not been at war for just 17 years of its entire 250 year history). But while I chose to disengage for a time from civic action this was also in part because I took on too much responsibility for politics which was beyond my ability as one person to accomplish. As much as I wanted to stop bigots from denying my right to be in a lawfully recognized relationship with a partner of my choice it was not something one person such as myself could accomplish. No matter how much I wanted Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination I also could not personally make that happen and therefore felt defeated and useless and therefore I avoided further opportunity to feel like a failure by disengaging from the process entirely.
After putting my life back together, finding some stability, and practicing an abundance of inventory therapy as discussed in The Perfect Child I began to more appropriately realize the scope of civic duty that I should engage, which is not to form revolutions or stop the bad guys but to instead be helpful where I could help and, as often stated in my work, to show up for opportunity and do my best. In my current profession as researcher, scientist, and writer I am actively engaged in civic duty by helping educate people about biology, health, and food systems and helping them to more effectively care for their personal needs. In this simple vocation I have been able to have far more of an impact than any of my votes or attempted political activism, and civic duty is most important not on national or global levels as we often feel but in the scope of our own personal lives, families, social circles, and local governments. In my article How To Change Politics I talk about how we can change the US political system by getting involved locally, especially in the primary process because power is not decided in the general, November election but in the primary process which is controlled by the establishment parties, and to engage everyone in politics and not only those with whom we align politically. In The Perfect Child I also discuss politics, mostly about the psychological factors which underly political dynamics and why humans divide themselves into competing groups and engage in acrimonious conflict, and the primary source of most political division and conflict simply arises from disengagement, where people who feel ignored or spited will in turn themselves engage in spiteful behavior in response, a phenomenon of human behavior entirely summarized by this funny monkey video.
The act of civic engagement is therefore not effective because we oppose a corrupt or dysfunctional system but because we engage with other humans to form coalitions that arise directly from that engagement, and without that engagement it is therefore impossible to affect change and reform systems. This is also why corrupt and establishment forces attempt to interfere with engagement such as by separating us from each other with hateful, car-centric infrastructure and removal of third-spaces, censorship on social media, elimination of social services, or prosecution of leaders of reform movements. The reason people didn’t take my fliers outside a club on the eve of our disenfranchisement in 2004 was not because they weren’t self-interested but because they didn’t know who I was, and change cannot occur at the moment of peril but instead must be cultivated person by person across time and space, which is why civic duty is so important because it is not opportunistic campaigning which precipitates a civil society but the act of living in a society all year round and not only when it is necessary.
Our individual civic duty is therefore not changing entire institutional structures or stop evil men when it comes time to vote, although voting can help, but instead working on our local school board, city council, participating in local primaries, or organizing civic advocacy groups to lobby local government such as environmental groups, native plant and garden groups, homeless advocacy, youth advocacy, infrastructure and third-space advocacy, volunteering, working at polls for elections, violence prevention, doing advocacy for wrongly incarcerated persons, helping out at schools, community choirs or symphonies, community events like carnivals or fairs, furthering education groups, voting advocacy groups, beautification advocacy, government transparency advocacy, and running for local office, mayor, or state seats if you are inclined. Many of the politicians which successfully ran for office this election season were community organizers for many, many years previous to their campaign, so many people knew them when it came time to run while those who in the spur of the moment decided to run for higher office without any prior support system had no traction whatsoever, because civic engagement is the foundation of civic duty.
Civic duty is thus simply the duty of every person to participate in society, especially in the way we organize society, and without your participation other people will do it for you which may not be to your best interest, and we can all work to reform, change, and revolutionize these systems so they work for us and everyone and not simply the special interests which take advantage of political vacuums. One of the first times I voted in Los Angeles at the 2008 election when Obama was on the ballot was one of the first times I understood civic duty. Standing in line at a polling station felt nothing less than the most powerful camaraderie in my entire life, even though not all of the people in line had the same ideology as myself (as a socialist that would have been rare indeed), but seeing all my local, fellow citizens who believed not in the institutions under which we suffer, but in each other and our power to collectively make the world in which we want to live. When we stop doing our civic duty is when special interests and corrupt people move in to corrupt the system, so it must be something that is built into the entirety of our lives, taking active part in constructing and maintaining the society in which we live and not only when it falls apart. The return of civics education to US schools is requisite to resolving the disenfranchisement engineered by past generations, and forming local advocacy groups to pressure your local schools and school boards to prioritize civics courses in social studies or other relevant subjects should be paramount. A group of several moms in every town and city across the US could more quickly restore civics education in schools than the entire US congress.
Reticence to participate in civic duty also arises from lies we are told about politics, so read The Truth About American Politics, or read about how Infrastructure Causes Psychological and Metabolic Disease or our economic structure in The Stupid Gene.