wait, it's just people?
Today I spent the morning at the Colorado State Capitol building, cosplaying as a lobbyist.
I was there as part of 350 Colorado’s Climate Lobby Day, an annual event where volunteers from near and far swarm into Denver, get trained up, then go nag their lawmakers about legislation they want them to support or oppose.
I realized, as I shuffled through the security line to get inside, that this was actually my first time in the Capitol. I was amused, and maybe a little proud, that my first experience in the building was not as a visitor (I never did take the field trip that so many of my peers seemed to have done as children) but as a lobbyist.
A young woman in my constituent group, Shaina, who had a lot more experience at these kinds of events, told me that she used to be intimidated by the location. It’s an old, beautiful building. You do get a sense that you’re somewhere important, that perhaps you are an intruder in the halls of government and you have less right to be there than the folks wearing suits and striding swiftly to meetings.
But as we, the volunteer lobbyists, were reminded several times in a training session beforehand, the Capitol is kind of our building. We have a right to go in there. The people who work inside technically work for us. Another reminder we received: Our senators and representatives are people. Yes, their job is objectively more important than mine. Yes, they were dressed better than me. But they’re still people.
There’s not a special, secret code we had to use to talk to our lawmakers. Nobody wrinkled their nose at my outfit. My congresswoman, Lindsay Gilchrist, admitted she had voted differently on a bill than our group would have liked, and then said, “But tell me your perspective. I want to hear.” She listened patiently to Shaina’s personal story of how Indigenous communities—including her own—have been affected by nuclear power projects. Her face betrayed the same emotional reactions that I had at especially poignant moments in Shaina’s testimony.
It’s easy for people outside the mechanisms of power to think of government as this incorporeal, arcane force that we can’t understand or access or influence. But today was a nice reminder for me that no, actually, government is just people. Power is just people. It’s just people making decisions, listening to other people, changing their decisions, trying at every moment to do what they think is right and good (most of the time).
This is true, by the way, of all powerful structures. It’s people! The big evil companies like Monsanto and Nestlé and Amazon? People. U.S. Congress? People. The Oscars? People. These are not necessarily people you and I can access, people whose hearts and minds we can sway personally, but they’re still regular ol’ people who put their bras on one boob at a time just like everyone else.
To me, to remember this fact is to remember two important things:
People in power are capable of just as much compassion and humanity as the rest of us (although whether they choose to exercise it is another story).
Anything they build can be torn down. Anything they dismantle can be rebuilt.
A better way of phrasing point 2 is simply to quote Ursula K. Le Guin:
“We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
