(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)
Jesus it’s been a month since the last Civic Diary? My whole once-a-week experiment truly has not gone well. The last 3 months have been nuts with work, reorgs, and lots of illness. I’ve been sick four times, my roommate three, friends and co workers quite a bit – short form is it seems that kids dragging diseases around produced an unholy synergy. Oh, and allergy season.
So all those plans? Yeah. I gave up and just donated money to the Clinton campaign. If I’m going to be miserable and watch my schedule constantly change then at least I can do is put my cash where my yap is and do some good that way. I certainly understand now why people sometimes just donate, life gets in the way.
That’s my plan for the rest of the election at any rate, since things are saner, but my chance to do GOTV myself is diminishing. I’m going to keep this in mind in the future.
(Part of me wonders if I’d be so calm if Clinton wasn’t so far ahead.)
Also I’ve been bad about contacting my representatives. That’s on me – I set an alert and promptly ignored it.
However I still plan to be more civicly engaged, which comes down to:
- Still plan to get involved with a local branch of a political party. Only in this case it’ll probably be post-election.
- Gonna remember this “donate” thing more than just presidential elections.
- Still following the news like a fiend. In fact, more on that later.
- Still planning to look into a city council advisory position next year.
- Assessing my choices and schedules to free up some more time for civic engagement or anything else. I’ve realized I get into ruts and will do things automatically.
But a few realizations:
First of all, our news media is awful. I’m wondering if my focus as a civic geek should be on that. I’ve signed up for action alerts from Media Matters For America which I’ve found very useful. That’s an issue with civic engagement, there’s so much to do.
Secondly, related to this, misinformation is incredibly high. I’m seeing why I need to practice debating, engaging on media, etc. Not for the all-to-common showing off, but just to promote intelligent discussion.
Third never forget that civic engagement is on all levels. Despite the crazy of late, despite the illness, I took time to do non-political civic engagement – speaking, helping our friends, etc. As nuts as it was I kept engaged.
Fourth, seriously, if you are civicly engaged go easy on people who aren’t. My attempts to do it have been far below my expectations.
Well except for the illnesses going around work is saner and life is saner. So my quest continues – being a good civic geek.
– Steve