Pick Up Trash, Save Democracy
A Shared Space is Everyone’s Responsibility.
I pick up trash when I walk. As a devoted birder, I walk a lot, long miles on the towpath along the Delaware-Raritan canal, dug by Irish laborers in the 1830s to connect the Delaware and Raritan rivers. It runs through Trenton all the way to North Brunswick, with a three-mile stretch alongside Lake Carnegie in Princeton. I also walk Prospect Avenue, site of many Princeton student parties. In both places, I encounter bottles, cans, paper and plastic containers and feel almost a compulsion to pick them up and restore the beauty of whatever patch of grass or woods they mar – not just for me, but for anyone else who comes along.
I suspect that passers-by may see me as an eccentric old lady, which may well be what I am becoming! Perhaps, though, picking up trash is a civic act. Boomers can remember the days, dramatized in “Mad Men,” when drivers routinely threw trash out their windows, littering roadsides with a confetti of brightly colored refuse. Then came the Keep America Beautiful campaign, which started in New York as a joint effort between civic and corporate leaders and took off with Lady Bird Johnson’s endorsement in 1965. State “Adopt-A-Highway” programs organize businesses and civic groups to keep specific miles of road free of trash. Political leaders put out the call, and citizens took action to clean up their communities.
“Civic” life, our life as citizens, is bigger than politics. Referring to the inhabitants of a specific place as “citizens” primes their political identity, in the sense of their relationship to their government or to the laws and institutions that constitute a body politic to which they belong. Yet it can just as easily prime their identity as human beings who live together with others in a shared space, a circumstance that gives rise to a set of mutual responsibilities.
The organization Giving Tuesday, which encourages and measures generosity in all its forms, is gathering data on “civic intent,” a concept that combines generosity with a set of additional attitudes and actions: trust in people and organizations, depolarizing beliefs and behavior, and “good intentions to participate in and strengthen one’s community.” Civic intent can include bringing a casserole to a bereaved or sick neighbor, an act that used to be simply part of being a neighbor. “Politics” might make us tense up, anticipating conflict and flaring tempers, but “civic” life — being a good citizen — is rooted in kindness, compassion, and a human impulse to help each other.
All those clubs and Boy Scout troops and elementary school classes that took responsibility for a mile of highway or country road were engaging in this broader notion of civic activity. They were taking responsibility for their shared space, solving the basic collective action problem that any “public” faces. That is what government is for, of course, but one of the great errors of American political life is that the divide over big and small government obscures the clear need for government and citizen responsibility, side by side. Citizen action alone cannot fill the full needs of a community, but government action alone is too impersonal to build the strong relationships that a healthy community needs.
My professional life these days is filled with conferences and gatherings of all different sorts. Groups including thinkers, writers, activists, reformers, artists, philanthropists, and corporate leaders are coming together to reflect on the many things that have gone wrong with American democracy and to exchange information on what we can do right. We explain what we are doing and plan what we can do more of together to build a far better system that works for all.
A near universal verdict emerges from these gatherings: Go local. Americans must rebuild trust in one another and our collective institutions, not just government but all institutions, from media to science to education to religion. This rebuilding can best and perhaps only be done from the bottom up. And it is being done from the bottom up, in many towns and counties across the country. To brighten your days with stories of how, check out the Our Towns Civic Foundation, where James and Deborah Fallows track civic renewal across the country.
That is also the work we are all doing and tracking here at The Renovator: We seek to help build a new civic infrastructure, from political reform efforts to simply coming together to fix our community’s problems, from trash to traffic to teacher compensation.
The key words in that sentence are “coming together.” I prefer solitary walks, but as I pick up litter while listening for a new bird call or warble, I’m still manifesting civic intent.
Care, of one another and of our mutual spaces, builds healthy connection grounded in recognition of mutual responsibility. Healthy connection builds strong communities. Strong, inclusive communities build trust and wellbeing.
What can you do on your walks?