Civic Engagement and the Limits of Civility

By Troy Flint

I’ve been thinking a lot about civic engagement and what that means at a time when the country’s institutions alternate between mendacity and incompetence, political and cultural norms have been obliterated, and civility seems a completely inadequate response to the outrages we are subjected to on a daily basis. I’ve been thinking about what that means for the generation that will be shaped by and inherit the results of this current mess.

My two constant reminders of society’s precarious present and uncertain future are four-and-a-half and one-and-half years old respectively. The eldest got her introduction to civic engagement protesting budget cuts and the proposed closure of her preschool program and attending the odd demonstration. Then last year and this spring, “O” and her little brother got an intermediate course in grassroots politics. Through the primary, we spent nearly every weekend knocking on doors for political candidates and many weeknights in long strategy meetings. Not exactly child-friendly activities, but a sense of adventure, an interest in adult affairs, and a willingness to be plied with snacks can sustain a kid through some pretty mundane times.

These are not mundane times, though, for parents contemplating their children’s prospects in an era of ecological and societal collapse. Trying to carve out a better future for your kids while giving them the tools to do the same is more stimulation than any parent wants or needs. As mortifying as these circumstances are, they shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Four decades of increasingly callous economic policies on top of centuries of imperial and genocidal political campaigns adds up to a pretty heavy karmic debt. For the kids who are inheriting that debt, it should be clear that normal political channels are insufficient to reverse the country’s dismaying trends or to reverse its longstanding injustices.

So, I will continue to canvass for favored political candidates with my kids. I will encourage my children to vote when they’re old enough. We will still speak at school board and city council meetings, and write letters to the editor and call our representatives. But I will also stress that the approved, socially acceptable methods of politics are not the sum total of civic engagement, nor is it the final or most evolved state. They will know that, in this most unusual summer of disease, murder, protest, repression, and fascism, it was those who refused to bend or conform who held up a mirror to society. They will know it was those who refused to be “civil” as defined by those who had everything to gain from maintaining the status quo, that did the most to change it. They will know that meaningful change is driven not by advocacy that occurs through official channels, but by the pressure that is exerted outside of it. It’s not a once-every-four-years thing, it’s a lifetime commitment. And if pursued diligently, it can help birth new possibilities from a time of despair.

The author Arundhati Roy said it best in a column she wrote for The Financial Times this April. In Roy’s words, “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”