There are things that I think are important to me, that I actually don't do anything to demonstrate the importance of-- but recently I have. For example, WNYC's On the Media (my favorite podcast) often does episodes talking about how local news coverage is collapsing, and how that has negative consequences for the country as a whole. For example, according to the episode "No News Is Bad News":
PENNY ABERNATHY: We lose transparency at the very local level when we don't have someone showing up to cover routine government meetings. And there's been recent research that shows when you lose on newspaper, citizens in a town tend to end up paying more in taxes because there's just no one reporting on the local bond issue. The second thing we're losing is the watchdog function, which expose corruption of both government and business executives and officials.
BOB GARFIELD: I’m thinking of the case of Bell, California, about 10 years ago, where the town council fleeced the citizens of millions and millions of dollars, largely in public meetings attended by no press.
It's something I've been talking/thinking about myself a long time as a result, but I've never taken action on. But the coronavirus pandemic made the struggles of local journalism that much worse-- as the above episode discusses, the problem newspapers have had is that they were largely advertising supported, and as advertising has shifted to the web, they've struggled to stay afloat. (Craiglist was a big part of the problem, as it destroyed the classified ads page.) The coronavirus accelerated this trend: businesses stopped advertising because they weren't open, so there were almost no advertisements to keep the newspapers going. My local paper, the Tampa Bay Times, went from a daily to a twice-weekly.
A lot of local papers are owned by big media conglomerates who aren't strong incentivized to keep the papers going if they struggle to make a profit, or to keep funding big newsrooms. But the TB Times is actually owned by a nonprofit journalism institute, and it is actually a pretty good paper, having won four Pulitzers in the last decade, and having been nominated for several more. So I've been thinking for a year now that if I believe the decline of local journalism is a problem, and if the TB Times is actually a good paper... why don't I do something about? But I never did.
Until a few weeks ago, when the spirit finally moved me. I think I was trying to read some articles on the TB Times website, and I had reached my free article cap, and instead of getting annoying and switching browsers, I was like, "No, you should just sign up." And I did. I did consider an online-only subscription, but a print subscription was only marginally more, and I felt like I was more likely to read the paper if I had an object in front of me. So now, early every Sunday and Wednesday morning, someone drops a newspaper on my driveway!
Attempts to get my wife to grab my pipe for me while I prop my feet up and read the paper after work have proven unsuccessful.
In a similar vein, I, like much of America, have been fretting over the November elections. After ten years of living in reliably blue (though not as much as people imagine) Connecticut, I once again live in a state that could have a big impact on the presidential election. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a 59% chance of winning Florida; recent polls average out to Biden being about 2 points up on Trump. There's an 11% chance that Florida could be what 538 calls the "tipping point" state (the state that puts Biden over the 270 electoral votes he needs to win, if you line up all the states in order of margin of victory). According to JHK Forecasts, if Biden wins Florida, he has a 99% chance of winning the country as a whole; if Trump wins Florida, Biden's chances drop to 49%.
So anyway, it matters!
Additionally, I am kind of invested in our local races. I live in Florida's Fifteenth Congressional District, which takes in east Tampa suburbs, rural Hillsborough and Polk counties, and west Orlando suburbs. Because of recent demographic trends, it has gone from 60/40 Republican/Democrat in 2014 to 53/47 in 2018. In 2018, I attended a forum for the Democrats vying for the FL-15 nomination, and really liked Andrew Learned, a Navy vet and graduate of my own University of Tampa. Alas, he didn't win the nomination. This year, he's running for the State House instead, a seat currently held by a Democrat on the back of 2018's blue wave, but only very narrowly.
I don't see a lot of yard signs in my neighborhood when I take my son out for walks (I feel like I saw more in 2018), but the ones I do see are usually for Trump. There was one house in the whole neighborhood with a Bernie yard sign back during the presidential primary; I don't think I saw any others for either candidate. One neighbor has a Trump 2020 flag and used to have a "Make Liberals Cry Again" sign, though that's gone now. After passing an Andrew Learned yard sign in a roundabout, I started to think, "Should I have a yard sign?"
My first reaction was to say no. I'm not quite sure why. My fear of commitment, of making definitive statements? A vague sense that it was somewhat gauche to populate your yard with advertisements?
But the more I thought about it the more I felt that my reasons were dumb. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I could make some small difference. I used to go office-to-office getting grad students to sign union cards, and I was notoriously good at it! I know people are reluctant to sign up for things, but also that their reasons for not signing up are usually not very compelling. What would I say if I encountered me, I thought?
So I "bought" a Joe Biden yard sign (in exchange for a donation), and made a donation to the Andrew Learned campaign (and asked for a yard sign), and made a donation to the campaign of Alan Cohn, who is the Democratic candidate here in FL-15. (If Cohn has yard signs available, there's no indication on his web site.) FL-15 is in fact the most "flippable" congressional district in Florida, and if it were to flip, Florida's House delegation would become majority Democrat. (Some people claim this could be important if there was an electoral vote tie!)
So, in some small way, I am matching my values with actions, because what are values without action?
If you want to know the more Steve Mollmann thing ever, though, it's this: I never actually read my copies of the Tampa Bay Times, because whenever I think about doing it, I also think, "but if you read a book instead, you will increase your 'books read' numbers!" I have no system in place for reading the paper, so I never actually do it.
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