Last night Meredith met up with some women from the neighborhood she didn’t know. She’s part of a Facebook group for moms, and last week somebody posted a kind of general invitation for group members to meet up during Lent. My sense is that it was really positive.

In all the hand-wringing over social media’s effect on the social fabric (and it is serious), we risk missing this kind of thing. This is how to use Facebook–to facilitate in-person connection, both with people you already know and with those you don’t. With those you don’t, the function of an online group is partly to help you screen for affinities, which lowers the barriers to in-person connection.

It’s three years now since Meredith and her merry band of rabble-rousers welcomed a family of refugees from Syria during the swirling turmoil of the travel ban. What followed was at least a year’s worth of intense collaboration to help that family get situated, much of which was facilitated through the Facebook group. Two years on, those connections are still there, and it turns out that one of the women at the meetup last night was the one in charge of the refugee welcome project.

Facebook groups can do good. Rather, enterprising and brave people like Meredith and her friends can use Facebook groups to do good.

Eitan Hersh wants people to stop confusing news consumption for meaningful civic engagement.

He’s won me over.

Not my sixth grader’s Social Studies teacher, though, because Kiddo is still required, once a week, to consumes some news artifact and summarizes it in writing for a Current Events grade.

Confusing news consumption with important work is taught.

This post originally appeared in March, 2014.

I waited in the church parking lot for Barbara and Bill to return for Barbara’s purse, which she had left in the sanctuary after the service. Well, not left it really–she thought she had lost it, and, after about 10 minutes of turning over pew cushions to find it, she and Bill fled the Ash Wednesday worship–only just beginning–to find it.

I had noticed her searching, had heard the first rumbling of trouble before the quake, when she asked (as if to anyone within earshot), “Where’s my purse?” She was only in the second row. I was in the first, along with the three high school students and one Youth Intern who were leading worship. Several searching turns of the head did not produce the purse, and by the Call To Worship Barbara was in a panic. She stooped to scan the undersides of pews. She darted to the side aisle to pace the length of the sanctuary, back to front, broadcasting a desperate search. And then she was gone, so the contemplative peace of youth reading prayers and smudging ashes could resume as I’d planned it.

The purse showed itself from the opposing front pew shortly after the sanctuary had emptied. I put away the microphones, cleaned up the little dishes that had held our ashes, turned out the lights, and then scooped up the purse and proceeded to the office, where I called Barbara at home. As soon as I announced myself into the phone, she announced, “You have my purse! I’ll be there in 20 minutes!” She hung up instantly.

I drove a worshiper home who lived less than a mile down the street and then returned to the church to wait for Barbara and Bill. The night was warm and clear and quiet, and thoughts or inconvenience or irritation troubled me not at all. I was grateful for an unscripted interlude to stare dumbly at passing cars and sing “Come And Fill Our Hearts” to the moon. I was sad when it ended, when searching headlights found me and made straight for me.

I heard the tale then of the confusion surrounding the purse’s disappearance and of how Barabara and Bill had retraced the evening’s steps, from Target to Burger King, and had eventually used Bill’s phone to call and disable Barbara’s cell phone. They were moments from calling the bank about her credit cards when they got my call. Barbara was apologetic. She regretted the disruption to the service. I assured her it was no disruption (which was true; hadn’t the service continued anyway? Can worship be so easily derailed?). Then I excused myself, wished them a good night, and climbed back into my car as Barbara exhorted me to go home and play with my daughter.

“I will,” I said. Then, through the closed passenger side window, I added, “She wants me to bring her home some ashes.” There was an uncovered dish of them right there in the cup holder.

“Ashes!” Barbara exclaimed, testifying to just how far away from the night’s occasion she had chased her purse. “We didn’t get any of those.”

It was the most reflexive thing I have ever done to grab the dish in my right hand, open the driver side door with my left, and round the trunk to stand at Barbara’s window. She hadn’t noticed my approach and only saw my when she turned around to begin backing out of her parking space. When she did, she quietly rolled down the window and lowered her head in observation. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Then Bill leaned over from the passenger seat and received his ashes and his incantation.

“Have a good night,” I said and once again returned to my car.

“You too,” Barbara answered. And then, “We love you.”

“I love you too” I shouted as they backed away, staring forward across the church lawn through a streaky windshield. I paused one more moment to listen, then drove home in silence.

On school days, Daughter’s alarm sounds at 5:30 (it’s ringing as I write this). Does she need to wake up at 5:30? No. She likes to be awakened and then to turn the alarm off before she goes back to sleep; she treasures the I-can-go-back-to-sleep relief.

How much do we subject ourselves to just because it makes us feel good, for a moment?

The sweaty instructor’s eyed bored through the screen to gasp at her pedaling pupils, “What is something you want to accomplish?!” It was meant to motivate, but it mostly made me ruminate.

Here’s what I want to accomplish: a routine. I’m trying to achieve a rhythm of working, homekeeping, exercising, studying, parenting, spousing, neighboring, friending, citizening, and soning. Some of those pieces are more amenable to specific accomplishments–master Melissa Clark’s roast chicken, take a canvasing training, finish the degree–while others are not; When have you achieved as a parent? Even with exercise–and to answer the instructor’s question–the exercising is its own accomplishment.

I’m not an achiever. I never have been.

The message asked a straightforward question: “Do you think it’s okay to attack Trump supporters?” It was accompanied by a video by American Voices captioned, “This is getting scary!” In the top right corner of the video is the name of its producer, Daily Caller News Foundation, and across the front is promised the outrageous spectacle of Trump supporters being attacked and that being deemed “okay.”

So many things are activated in just one second, and without even playing the video. Because you don’t need to watch it to recognize that it is an inflammatory piece of media designed to rally one side of a fraught political conflict. Both the producer and the distributor are ideologically extreme advocacy operations, one of which masquerades as a journalistic organization and the other of which breeds in the Facebook swamp.

The number of instances in which Trump supporters attack opponents comes immediately to mind, as does all the times when the President himself, both as a candidate and now the Commander in Chief, has urged violence against protesters. So much content could be marshaled to argue with this video.

But it was sent by a personal relation, and it asked only one question. So instead of sending back links to opposing videos or articles about the bald bias of The Daily Caller I decide to just answer the question and leave it at that.

“Of course I don’t.”

On Saturday I spent two and a half hours phone banking for the upcoming elections, and I did not come away feeling like I’d done my duty as a citizen. Using my personal phone (which still has a Los Angeles County area code), I sat in a musty room of a public library in Chicago and called dozens upon dozens of numbers in southwest Michigan to inform voters about the application process for an absentee ballot.

Logged into a voter database, I clicked through number after number after number. A full seven out of every 10 numbers I called were disconnected. Of those that were working numbers 75% didn’t answer, and I was instructed to not leave messages. Of the very few instances where an actual human being answered the phone, many reported that I’d dialed a wrong number. One thought I was a bill collector.

One: that was the final tally of people I reached with whom I got through the call script about the absentee ballot. One. It did not feel like meaningful citizen engagement.

I just read Eitan Hersh’s Politics Is For Power, and I badly want to be less of a hobbyist and more of an engaged participant in the current election cycle, but, man, this kind of activity feels demoralizing, not engaging.

Maybe my expectations of what “engaged” means are too romantic. Maybe musty public library rooms and outdated call lists are the stuff of a vigorous democracy.

I filtered my entire Spotify songs library by the word “love” and plucked from the results these 15 songs, all of which have the word in the title. These are my favorite “love” songs for February 14th, 2020. They’re a mix of gooey romance, gut-churning angst, and even detached reflection, but they’re all “love” (i.e. no “lover,” “loves,” or “loving”).

Enjoy, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

Daughter went all out on her social studies project. She went to Michael’s a week before it was due to purchase supplies: wooden dowels, ribbon, beads, hot glue, and various other accessories for a scroll-like map of the Fertile Crescent. To construct it, she printed a map from Google Images, soaked it in coffee water, dried it in the oven, ironed it flat, and then glued the edges to the dowels. The ribbon was glued to the back.

It looked great, and it was finished days before it was due, because Daughter was into it.

Then, at 10:00 last night, as she is preparing it for transport to school in the morning, she looks carefully at the map’s text, really for the first time. “Dad,” she says (I’m bent over the laptop strategizing a fix for a dead Prius battery), “There’s something weird about my map.”

“Uh huh.” I don’t look up.

“It has the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on it, but it doesn’t say ‘Mesopotamia’ anywhere, and there are other weird place names on it, like ‘Desert of Bones’ and ‘The Great Barrens.'”

Uh oh. Now I look up.

Sure enough, the map she has so painstakingly assembled is not a map of the Fertile Crescent but someone’s rendering of World of Warcraft, from what I can gather searching Google, though for the life of me I cannot relocate this exact map. In her focus on the style she flubbed the substance. A part of me wants to advise her to turn it in as is, trusting that nobody will really notice. I suppress that part, so when she declares that she needs to start all over (at 10:07) I can calmly agree.

She’s finished with it in about 90 minutes and she goes to bed having learned a valuable lesson about attention to content before flourish. I’m still working on the battery.

[Name],

Thank you for being a previous voter. Who you vote for is secret, but whether you vote is public information. Vote Tuesday, April 7th!

Rocky

I wrote those three sentences to dozens of Wisconsin residents last night at a “postcard party” my friend invited people to for his birthday. It was held at a local sports bar, and the New Hampshire primary returns were broadcast on CNN as we wrote.

Because my friend is the kind of person who wants his friends to engage in citizen activism to celebrate his birthday, I brought him the book I started reading last week after hearing John Dickerson recommend it on the “Political Gabfest.” Its main thrust is that we treat politics too much like a sport and that those of us who pay the most attention to politics are doing the least good.

Happy birthday Jack!