The Myth of Individual Action

For better or worse, what we do, we do together

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

I’ve always been a little on the introverted side. I actually love talking to people, and I love parties and going out to dinner and meeting new people, but I suffer from inertia and a long runway. It takes me a while to work up to leaving my comfort zone, and even once I do, I like to hang back and get the lay of the land. I have a long information gathering stage in any new group or situation, but once I feel like I understand the situation and the dynamics, I can be quite social. 

So you can imagine that the pandemic really threw a wrench in my social life. It confirmed my worst anxieties (outside is actually quite scary, you can actually ruin someone’s life if you breathe on them wrong) and ground most of my social interaction to a screeching halt. By the time we were coming out of the worst of the pandemic, the inertia of my isolation was so strong that it feels like I’m only now starting to emerge from my information gathering cocoon into feeling more comfortable seeking social connection and experiencing the vulnerability that comes with it. 

I say this because I’ve been thinking a lot about how isolation and individualism impacts our politics and our volunteering. It’s really easy for me to get into my head about my individual experience of politics - not necessarily in the sense of how politics impacts me and my life, but about how I experience caring about politics and thinking through complicated issues on my own. It’s really easy to feel sometimes like you’re the only person who cares, or that you’re the only person who understands an issue, or the only person who has really considered all the angles. If you’re anything like me it’s even easier to assume that you’re the only one who is wrong about something, or the only person who finds something complicated and hard to think about. 

Social media makes this worse, of course. Not just because everyone on the internet professes absolute and often aggressive certainty, often contending that they are the only person who understands something, and that everyone else struggling with it is in fact an awful person. I was talking to my therapist once about how hard it was to have social anxiety on the internet because of how easy it is to find someone sincerely reacting to a situation the way you are supposedly irrationally afraid someone will react. But social media makes this worse because the algorithm is so individualized that we all really are in our own silos, affirming and being affirmed by machine learning that’s only goal is to keep us scrolling longer. 

The myth of rugged individualism deeply enmeshed in the American psyche doesn’t help either. We lionize individuals, whether they are CEOs or political candidates or inventors or explorers or singers or sports stars. Our political system is constantly trying to force people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps which is, if you imagine it in your head real quick, physically impossible. We expect everyone to have a full time job, a social life, an exercise routine, home cooked meals and a clean house, and if you didn’t suffer so that you could do it by yourself, it doesn’t really count. Unless, of course, you did it with the assistance of “invisible” female labor, which itself doesn’t count. 

This has been true for a while, but it definitely got worse with the pandemic - whether you’re an effortlessly social person, or an effort-ful social person, or an antisocial person, the experience of pandemic was necessarily isolating. And whether you’re still struggling with isolation or not, there is still that sense memory. There is also so much at stake in our politics - lives hang in the balance, at home abroad, and so does our ability to make change in the future, to build power and use it to save, change, and improve lives. We retreat into ourselves, to calcify not just our politics but our way of understanding the world and our own capacity for change in it. 

All this is to say that it’s easy to get in our heads about our own individual actions and experiences and take them as the marker of the whole. It’s easy to say the mean thing, because our words don’t matter, or to stay home because our actions don't matter. I hear this a lot when people talk about phone banking. Some people feel like it’s useless and I understand how you get there. I have had shifts where I only have two conversations with voters, and even shifts where I’ve only gotten hang ups and wrong numbers. And those days don’t feel great. Even on some of my best shifts I’ve talked to some undecided voters but it’s hard to tell if you’ve convinced anyone. What’s the point, you might ask yourself? And on your own, maybe there isn’t much of one. 

But think of it this way - alone you might talk to two voters in a shift. But what if a thousand people are phone banking and they each talk to two people. That’s 2,000 conversations with voters. Over six shifts, that’s 12,000 conversations with voters, and that’s the margin in Georgia in 2020. 

Or think of it this way. You have two conversations with voters during a shift. They are both undecided when you start the conversation, and they claim to still be undecided at the end of the conversation. In the moment, it feels like net zero. But maybe because you marked them undecided, the campaign sends a canvasser there, or even the candidate in a state or local race. That voter also has a conversation with a sister or a friend about something they saw on instagram, they get a postcard from a volunteer in another state that reminds them what we can do when we work together. And all of that comes together so that on election day they go out and vote for Democrats. 

Everything we do happens in context, and it only works because we do it together. Maybe we’re not that effective on our own, but we aren’t supposed to be. There are over 300 million people who live in this country. It’s not just that we all get a say, it’s that we all decide together. We decide by talking to each other, by asking each other questions and caring about the answers, by taking the time to write letters and make phone calls to other Americans who live far away. Our best future is the one we choose together, when we consider each other, when we connect with each other, and when we recognize and fight for the humanity in each other. 

Of course that’s hard when Republicans are demonizing trans people, immigrants, the unhoused, anyone with a uterus, childless women who own cats, queer people, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, and essentially all Democrats. It seems impossible to imagine that there are people still trying to decide between Democrats and Republicans, or whether they are going to vote at all. And it might even feel morally correct to write those folks off, or to berate and dismiss them. But tactically, it gets us nowhere - we live with them, we vote with them, and we can and will reach many of them if we keep trying. We can be safer, and stronger, and the only way to do that is to keep talking when we can, to keep reaching for each other when we can, to fight for a world where all of our humanity is recognized and celebrated. 

If everyone who reads this newsletter does something to help, donates $5 or makes 5 phone calls or writes 5 letters, that’s $2500, 2500 phone calls, 2500 letters. And, that, my friends, makes a difference. 

Start Here: 

1. Make phone calls to your representative in the House, your two Senators, the White House to push for the U.S. to follow existing law and withhold funding and weapons from all military groups that commit human rights violations, including Israeli military units that have never been held to that standard. Push for a ceasefire, because there is a polio resurgence in Palestine and children need to be vaccinated and it would be great if they were able to live long enough to enjoy being polio free instead of being bombed indiscriminately immediately afterward. And push for the release of hostages, whose freedom depends on a ceasefire and who could be killed by Hamas or by Israeli bombs at any moment. You can contact the White House here, and here’s a guide to calling your representation in Congress.  

2. Adopt voters to write letters to through Vote Forward. It’s very easy! You sign up on the website, and you submit a brief sample so that they can verify you read and understood the instructions. And then you get a list of addresses and voter names, and a set of form letters that you print out. On each one you handwrite a message and then come October you mail them all out! 

3. Sign up to phone bank or canvass. You can find high impact volunteer events here. Just scroll past the yellow box and you’ll see three options: Knock Doors Near You, Phone Bank for Kamala, Phone Bank for Down Ballot Democrats. Each shift will have training that will give you talking points, information about the tech you’ll be using, and will have organizers who you can ask questions and get support from. If you have any questions at all, just leave them in the comments!