3 Obstacles You’ll Face in Civic Participation (and Why They’re Worth Facing)

(Source: Flickr/Walker Harris.)

For two years after college, I taught online journalism. One of the most important skills I strove to impart to my students was how to build an orderly story arc out of raw material. This applied mostly when teaching them how to compile a feature-style profile about a person in their community. My students were fairly skilled at identifying facts and raw material, but needed training on how to translate their observations into a compelling narrative. 

Part of teaching them how to do that involved explaining the basic formula for a story: protagonist plus mission, plus antagonist (or challenges). I found a fascinating and more exhaustive treatment of this pattern in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Drawing from thousands of myths and legends across cultures and time, Campbell provides the 12-step foundation to my three-step “cheater’s formula,” and, in so doing, provides a framework for how to think about not just stories, but also life. 

According to Campbell, good stories (and meaningful lives) present us, at some point, with an invitation to adventure, an invitation to move past our comfort zones and embrace a journey into the unknown. Accepting this call makes us the hero on a journey. Along the way, we encounter a variety of helpers, antagonists, and obstacles, all of which aid in our transformation. Persistent heroes eventually experience some type of death and resurrection and are ultimately endowed with an epiphany, a seed of wisdom or insight that they then take back to their community until, of course, the next call to adventure presents itself and the cycle repeats. 

Whether or not you buy into Campbell’s psychological interpretation of the Hero’s Journey, seeing life this way can actually be quite powerful. It can help us get “unstuck,” generate motivation, complain less, and empower us to reconfigure life’s disappointments and setbacks as parts of a redemptive meaningful journey, which can be psychologically transformative. 

When it comes to being involved in our neighborhoods and cities, the hero’s journey can be a helpful way to think about the work before us, perhaps less for the emphasis on being a hero and more for the way such a framework expands our sensitivity to opportunities for growth, strengthens our perseverance, expands our gratitude for helpers when they come, and deepens our grit when obstacles pop up. 

That being said, let’s look more closely at some of the obstacles that you might face on your participatory “hero’s journey.” I’m sure if you’ve tried to get involved in your city, you’ve already faced the reality of external obstacles like confusing rules, complicated government, and red tape. But for those of us getting started, there are three internal obstacles that might not, at first, be easy to identify but that can have a lethal effect on our participatory spirit.  

How We Spend Our Leisure Time

Being civically engaged takes time, which means that it would require a new approach to how we spend our few precious hours that are not claimed by some sort of responsibility. How we spend our leisure time is perhaps the most important consideration when it comes to building civic habits, and it’s here that we’ll find our greatest challenge, due to the alluring pull of television and social media.

In his book, Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam draws a provocative connection between time spent watching TV and civic engagement, ultimately concluding that “each additional hour of television viewing per day means roughly a 10 percent reduction in most forms of civic activism.” Habitual television-watching brings us home and often means being alone, keeping us away from the kinds of local social interactions that are the building blocks for civic life. “Watching lots of TV … cuts collective activities, like attending public meetings or taking a leadership role in local organizations by as much as 40 percent,” writes Putnam.

Shaping our spare time around technology and entertainment has only become more prevalent with the introduction of social media. Reevaluating and even breaking these tendencies would be the first biggest hurdle to overcome for anyone serious about building civic habits.  

How We Spend Our Social Capital

Besides watching television, spending time with friends is the second most desirable way to spend leisure time. This is, of course, a good thing. But when it comes to civic culture-building, it can also prove problematic because civics requires building ties with people who may not actually be our friends (yet). It involves finding ways to build “second-ring” relationships: ties with people in our community who aren’t family and friends, but instead are just our neighbors.

This has become harder to do over the past few decades. Partly because suburbia makes spontaneous encounters harder and organizes people based on similar incomes (reducing diversity), and partly because of how technology allows us to be highly selective when deciding whom we spend our time with, or to avoid people altogether. 

In Vanishing Neighbor, Marc Dunkelman uses three rings to demonstrate changes in how Americans spend their social time. Outer-ring relationships are our casual acquaintances and online relationships. Middle-ring relationships are our neighbors, and third- or inner-ring relationships would be our family, either biological or chosen. Dunkelman says that our obsession with social media has made us more desperate for approval, driving up the amount of time we spend on outer-ring relationships, and pulling resources away from the middle ring. 

In other words, re-evaluating how we spend our social capital will be critical for building civic habits. Are we only investing in outer- and third-ring relationships? Or are we spending time in our communities, seeking to boost our middle-ring relationships also? 

Learning To Care in a Time of Comfort

Several years ago, I spent a year on the road visiting different cities that were trying to rebuild their local economies. At one point, I spent six weeks living and volunteering in Brightmoor, a neighborhood formerly considered the “murder capital of Detroit.” This was shortly after Detroit had declared bankruptcy and the neighborhood, like many in the city, was in decline. 

While city officials worked at a macro level to stage a comeback, the folks in this neighborhood worked around the clock to stabilize their community, taking small, uncelebrated actions to keep away copper scrappers, criminals, and squatters. They poured hours into public meetings, beautification projects, mentoring, and even gardening to try and turn their neighborhood (and their city) around. Just about all of the people I met were taking a gamble. There was no promise that for all their hard work, they would see a worthwhile improvement. 

This is the third challenge for those of us who care: rebuilding civic habits means getting involved even when the results might be hard to measure or not present at all. It means choosing to care even if you don’t own property. It means greeting neighbors even if you may only stay in the neighborhood for one year.

We live in a time of comfort, where advertising and mass media encourage us to make decisions that advance our preferences and comfort. In such a world, choosing to care for cities will feel extremely uphill. It’s not always comfortable and it won’t always be easy to see the payoff… We may not even receive a grand epiphany at the end of our journey. 

Yet, like the hero, we must find a way to look past our present comforts and recognize the worthwhile call to adventure. Ultimately, that’s what civic engagement is. It’s an invitation to rediscover what it means to steward the public sphere. It’s an opportunity to put our values to work in the real world. It’s a chance to allow ourselves to be transformed into (hopefully) better, wiser people.

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