The First Question to Ask When Making Good Change

You can learn a lot about humanity when you answer the phones in Congress.

You learn how frustrated people are. How angry and lonely they are. How powerless they feel.

But there’s one particular thing that’s stayed with me from being a junior staffer in Congress taking hours and hours of constituent phone calls: we don’t get taught how to make change in our democracy.

“Can the Senator do something about this bonehead of a mayor?”
This is a local issue, not a federal issue. U.S. Senators can’t do anything about it.

“Why does my state allow the death penalty? STOP THAT!”
The death penalty is almost exclusively a state issue, not a federal issue. Put that to your state legislators. (Don’t know who they are? No shame! Find out here.)

“Can the Congressman please vote against this horrendous Supreme Court nominee?”
Only Senators vote on Supreme Court nominees, not House Members - who are addressed as Congressman/woman/person.

I wouldn’t ask my auto mechanic to file my taxes and I wouldn’t ask my accountant to change the oil in my car. Same goes for politicians. The hitch is that we don’t get taught which politicians have which powers. Nobody sits us down and shows us how our government actually works.

One of the core promises of American democracy is that we get to have a say in how we’re governed. But we’re basically given three tools to do that: vote, protest, donate. That’s like trying to repair a ramshackle house with a hammer, nail gun, and half a roll of duct tape. The tools aren’t up to the task.

When folks call Congress only to find out Congress can’t do anything about their issue, it compounds their sense that government doesn’t work. So why bother?

But for democracy to be healthy, we need more people bothering, not less.

So this is all a very long wind up to say that the first question to ask when making good change is: Who has the power to do what I want?

An easy enough way to find out is doing a search for recent articles about your issue; see if they quote any politicians, and whatever level of government that politician is in is the level of government that’s got some say.

For issues where it’s both state and federal government, go closer to home. State legislators are generally much more reachable than Members of Congress.

Our democracy distributes power all over the place: local and municipal government, county government, state government, the federal government.

But it also distributes it to one other very important place: the people. Of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

Your voice deserves to be heard - most especially by the people who have the power to make the change you want.