On Comedy Central today, I heard a very similar message to one I had heard last Thursday in the multipurpose room at my children’s Catholic school. The Comedy Central message, though, had one serious flaw that could be cured by the church hall one.
Jon Stewart, that is, could take a lesson from a 2016 book titled Red, White, Blue, and Catholic by a local Catholic scholar and father named Stephen White.
Let’s start with Stewart and his election 2024 monologue from last night.
Stewart made me laugh a couple of times. (It’s a great throwback to when comedians talking about politics aimed for laughs rather than just applause?) He also made a few good points, especially his final argument, which I’ll quote at length:
“The stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny. It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. …
“It’s all going to make you feel like Tuesday, Nov. 5, is the only day that matters. That day does matter, but man, Nov. 6 ain’t nothing to sneeze at, or Nov. 7. If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country — it is not over. And if your guy wins, the country is in no way safe.
“The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch-pail f***ing job. Day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart, and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues ’til they get a positive result, and even then have to stay on to make sure that result holds. So, the good news is, I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after. Forever.”
What’s true here is that citizenship does not begin and end with our voting. How we vote is not even our most important participation in our democracy.
As a political journalist who is politically independent, I really like this argument. I often cast protest votes, and I can only think of one politician I ever voted for who actually won his race — primary or general. So, for me, voting is borderline futile. Yet I get to participate in democracy in all sorts of ways, including, as Stewart mentions, scrutinizing politicians.
But even nonjournalists have tons of nonvoting “lunch pail” work to do in their role as citizens.
Stewart is a bit vague in what the rest of the work of a citizen is — it involves banging on doors (literally or figuratively?) and grinding on issues. I think it’s helpful to see how White articulated a similar sentiment in his book, which he spoke about the other night.
“Citizenship, in its most important sense,” White writes, “is about participation and membership in a community. It’s about belonging to a community, acting for the good of that community, taking responsibility for that community, loving that community, and teaching others to care for and love it, too. Part of that task is accomplished by voting. But the far greater part, in fact almost everything we do, does not happen in the voting booth. It is in this richer understanding of citizenship and civic life that the Church’s teachings about social justice make the most sense. Citizenship isn’t a trophy or a prize. It’s a work of love.”
The word “community,” central in White’s account, is glaringly absent from Stewart’s. At one point, White defines good citizenship simply as “active and faithful participation in the life of our community.”
A lot of that participation, the vast majority, in fact, will necessarily be local.
The lunch-pail work of making our world better is largely organizing volunteers to clean up a park, running a youth basketball team, running for school board, lobbying your school board, running the local church’s men’s group, lobbying your principal, serving on a search committee, reading at the library story hour, and so on.
But it’s easy to listen to Stewart’s monologue and take away a message that one should be a grassroots lobbyist on federal and state policies — abortion law, gun law, tax cuts, etc. This is not just wrong but actually cruel.
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Average people cannot affect national policy. Making them believe they can and must is sowing the seeds of disillusion, which leads to alienation and apathy at best or extremism at worst.
I hope Stewart will follow up last night’s discourse with a more precise discourse, explaining that this day-to-day work is local, humble, community work, the sort of work that happens in a church multipurpose room.
