Is it strange to sit in a coffee shop with a warm mug between both hands and ask what I would want from my government?
Is that too big a question for a Tuesday morning?
Or is it exactly the sort of question a person should ask while waiting for the foam to settle and watching other people come in from the cold?
If government is supposed to be something more than a distant building full of people on television, then shouldn’t an ordinary person be able to describe what she wants from it without needing a law degree, a lobbyist, or a donor dinner?
Shouldn’t the first answer be simple?
Shouldn’t civil rights be the starting place?
Before taxes, before speeches, before party strategy, before anyone starts waving a little flag over their preferred procedural excuse, shouldn’t we agree that all people are people?
Shouldn’t every person be treated as fully human under the law, regardless of sex, race, religion, disability, poverty, age, gender, sexuality, immigration status, family status, job title, zip code, or how useful someone else finds them?
Should there be any status more important than personhood?
If the law can look at a human being and say, “not quite,” what exactly is the law for?
If equality is not written plainly enough to survive a bad mood in the courts, why would we not write it more plainly?
If the Equal Rights Amendment has been sitting there like an unfinished sentence in the national notebook, why would we not finish the sentence?
And if anyone hears “all people are people” and immediately starts looking for exceptions, doesn’t that tell us something about the size of the problem?
What would I want from my government?
Would I want healthcare treated as a prize people earn only if they picked the right employer, stayed healthy enough to work, filled out the right forms, and never got unlucky?
Or would I want healthcare treated like plumbing, roads, fire departments, and clean water?
If someone gets cancer, should the first question really be “what network are you in?”
If a child breaks an arm, should the family’s next fear be the mailbox?
If medicine exists, doctors exist, nurses exist, clinics exist, hospitals exist, and the only thing standing between a sick person and care is billing architecture, is that a healthcare system or a toll booth?
Would I want housing treated as a basic human need?
If every person needs a place to sleep, cook, wash, recover, and be safe, then why do we talk about housing as if it were only an investment product?
Why should private equity firms get to buy neighborhoods by the handful while families are told to compete politely for what remains?
What happens to a town when homes stop being homes and become storage units for other people’s money?
What happens to children when every year begins with the question of whether the rent will jump again?
What happens to older people when the house they lived in for decades becomes a line item in someone else’s portfolio?
If shelter is basic, why do we keep letting it become speculative?
What would I want from work?
Would I want a full-time job to pay enough to keep a person alive without three side hustles, a GoFundMe, and a prayer?
If the minimum wage does not meet the minimum cost of living, why do we still call it minimum?
Minimum for whom?
Minimum for survival?
Minimum for employer discomfort?
Minimum for keeping people just tired enough not to ask better questions?
If a person gives forty hours of their week to work that someone needs done, should that person still be poor?
Should a worker have the right to organize without being threatened, stalled, fired, isolated, or gently escorted into economic fear?
If corporations can organize capital, lawyers, trade associations, lobbyists, consultants, and entire political strategies, why should workers be treated as dangerous when they organize each other?
Why is organized money called business, but organized people called trouble?
Would I want groceries, childcare, medicine, and rent to become little private empires where every necessity is another chance to squeeze?
When prices go up because costs go up, fine, can we look at that?
But when prices go up because someone discovered desperation has no bargaining power, should the public just smile and call that the market?
What is freedom worth if a parent cannot afford childcare?
What is freedom worth if medicine is technically available but financially impossible?
What is freedom worth if food is plentiful and still too expensive?
Is rhetorical freedom enough when material life is being tightened from every direction?
Would I want a tax system that treats wages like the suspicious money and wealth like the sacred money?
Why should the paycheck be easier to tax than the fortune?
Why should nurses, truck drivers, clerks, janitors, teachers, welders, cooks, aides, and postal workers have every dollar watched carefully while wealth hides behind appreciation, loopholes, foundations, holdings, and phrases nobody uses at a kitchen table?
If Social Security is important enough for working people to pay into all year, why should the richest incomes get a stopping point?
If billionaires multiply while hospitals close, schools beg, bridges crumble, and working families panic over groceries, are we looking at prosperity or extraction?
If the country can produce staggering private fortunes but cannot produce decent public stability, should we applaud the fortunes or question the plumbing?
What would I want from rights?
Would I want abortion rights written into federal law so people are not forced to live by the geography of state legislatures?
Would I want immigrants treated like human beings moving through a legal system, not like props in someone else’s campaign commercial?
Would I want enough immigration courts, enough processing capacity, and enough honesty to stop pretending chaos is accidental?
Would I want gun laws that respect responsible ownership while still asking the obvious question of whether background checks and red flag laws might keep more people alive?
Would I want children protected from being turned into bargaining chips for adults who find cruelty useful?
Would I want transgender people, immigrant families, disabled people, poor people, pregnant people, queer people, and anyone else who gets politically convenient to know that their rights are not seasonal?
If a politics sells out one vulnerable group to look moderate, why should any other group feel safe?
What would I want from power?
Would I want presidents to keep collecting war powers like souvenirs?
Would I want Congress to remember that war is not supposed to be a lifestyle brand of the executive branch?
Would I want Supreme Court justices to have ethics rules with teeth, not polite little napkins of suggestion?
If the Court can shape every life in the country, should the country be allowed to ask who is shaping the Court?
If money is treated like speech, and some people have billions more words than everyone else, is that democracy or a sound system rental?
Would I want Citizens United overturned, or would I want to keep pretending that people and corporate treasuries speak with the same lungs?
Would I want the filibuster preserved as a noble tradition if it is mostly used as a velvet rope against popular legislation?
If a senator wants to block rights, wages, healthcare, housing, voting access, or labor protections, should they at least have to stand up and say so until their voice gives out?
Why should silence have veto power?
And what would I want from strategy?
Would I want to keep waiting for someone important to come save us?
Who, exactly, is coming?
A party committee?
A court?
A donor?
A consultant with a tasteful chart?
A campaign slogan tested in twelve suburbs and emptied of all risk?
Or would I want people to build power where they are?
What if politics began with five neighbors?
What if it began with a union hall, a church basement, a mutual aid table, a tenants’ meeting, a school board room, a coffee shop table, a group chat that turned into a plan?
What if ordinary people stopped asking permission to care about their own lives?
What if common ground did not mean giving up on anyone’s rights?
What if common ground meant pointing upward instead of sideways?
What if the person who voted differently from me also cannot afford rent, medicine, groceries, childcare, dental work, car repairs, or elder care?
What if we started there without abandoning anyone?
What if we refused to trade civil rights for economic messaging because both are part of the same human floor?
What if the floor was the point?
What if no person falls below it?
What if healthcare is on the floor?
What if housing is on the floor?
What if wages are on the floor?
What if civil rights are on the floor?
What if labor rights are on the floor?
What if bodily autonomy is on the floor?
What if citizenship processing, fair courts, voting rights, public schools, safe food, clean water, and dignified aging are on the floor?
What if government’s first job is not to inspire us, brand us, manage us, distract us, or scold us, but to make sure the floor holds?
Would that be radical?
Or would that be ordinary?
Would that be socialism, extremism, idealism, naïveté, or whatever word someone uses when they do not want to answer the question?
Or would it just be the reasonable expectation of people who work, pay, care, raise children, bury parents, patch roofs, pack lunches, open shops, sweep floors, drive roads, answer phones, teach classes, stock shelves, and keep going?
What would I want from my government?
Would I want it to remember that people are not abstractions?
Would I want it to stop treating cruelty as seriousness?
Would I want it to stop mistaking donor comfort for national stability?
Would I want it to stop asking working people to be patient while wealth is treated as urgent?
Would I want it to stop making basic decency sound complicated?
And if I can ask all that from a corner table with a scarf on the chair beside me and coffee cooling in my hands, then is the question really too big?
Or have we made ordinary things seem impossible because too many comfortable people benefit from our exhaustion?
And if the government cannot answer a person asking, quietly and plainly, to be treated as a person, then what question is it answering instead?
