Caring enough to act is a unique thing

There’s a difference between caring about something and caring enough to act.

I’ve been thinking about that distinction a lot lately because we live in a time when caring, or at least telling other people we care, has never been easier.

Nearly every day we’re presented with something that deserves our concern. Housing is too expensive. Healthcare is harder to access. Young people are leaving communities that desperately need them. Infrastructure is aging. Energy costs are rising. The environment is changing. Local governments are struggling to provide services without raising taxes. And schools are being asked to solve problems that extend far beyond the classroom.

Pick an issue and you can probably find thousands of people who agree there’s a problem. What’s much harder to find are the people willing to make solving that problem part of their lives.

That was one of my biggest takeaways from a recent conversation with Yvonne Taylor on In Focus. If you’ve followed environmental issues in the Finger Lakes over the last decade or two, you probably know her name. Yvonne co-launched Gas Free Seneca in 2011 during the fight over a proposed gas storage project near Seneca Lake. That organization eventually became Seneca Lake Guardian, which has since been involved in debates over landfills, incinerators, energy projects, data centers and a long list of others.

Depending on your politics, some of those campaigns probably make you want to cheer. Others might make you roll your eyes. That reaction is actually part of what interested me about having her on the show.

Environmental activism is one of those phrases that tends to produce an immediate emotional response. For some people, it evokes hope, pride, and appreciation. For others, it means frustration, obstruction, or politics they fundamentally disagree with. But I wasn’t particularly interested in using the conversation to determine whether environmental activists are right about every issue.

I was much more interested in something that is applicable whether you agree with Yvonne on environmental policy or disagree with virtually everything she believes: She cared enough about something to act, and then she kept acting.

There’s something worth examining there because most of us care about plenty of things. We care about whether our communities are affordable. We care about whether our kids will be able to build lives here. We care about having hospitals nearby when we need them. We care about the quality of our drinking water, whether the roads are maintained, and whether the businesses we rely on survive. But caring in the abstract costs almost nothing. Caring enough to actually change something demands time, patience, and a willingness to keep showing up when the issue stops being interesting or the going gets tough.

That last part is probably the most important.

We have a distorted idea of what changing things actually looks like because we usually encounter activism, politics, and civic engagement at their most visible points. We see the rally or packed public hearing. We see people holding signs outside a government building. We read about the lawsuit, election result, or big legislative vote in the news.

What we don’t see are the hundreds of hours that led to those moments. It’s the emails, phone calls, meetings, research, and organizing. It’s reading government documents nobody else wants to read and figuring out which obscure agency actually has authority over the issue. It’s answering the same questions over and over again. It’s losing a battle, waking up the next morning, and figuring out the next step.

That kind of persistence isn’t exclusive to environmental activism, either. In fact, I’d argue that almost every major problem we talk about in this column is going to require people willing to approach it with exactly that mentality.

If you believe housing affordability is one of the biggest threats facing Upstate New York, caring about it means more than saying rents are too high or there aren’t enough houses.

At some point, somebody has to rewriting zoning codes, get projects financed, convince skeptical neighbors, assemble properties, navigate environmental reviews, and build the damn the housing.

This is where I think our current culture works against us.

Social media has created an incredibly efficient system for allowing people to express concern without requiring much meaningful participation. We see something we dislike, write a comment, share a post, argue with a stranger, then move on.

Sometimes tens of thousands of people participate in the conversation, which creates the feeling that something significant has happened.

Usually, though, the underlying problem is exactly where it was before everyone started typing. I don’t say that as criticism of people who have jobs, families, and responsibilities that leave little time for civic engagement. Most people can’t devote their lives to an issue.

The point is we shouldn’t confuse having an opinion with doing the work necessary to produce an outcome.

There’s also the reality here that anyone who spends time around local government eventually learns this: A small number of persistent people can have significantly more influence than a much larger number of passive people.

Ten residents who attend every meeting, learn the process, build relationships, and keep pushing for three years can matter more than 10,000 people who become angry after a decision is made.

That doesn’t mean those 10 people are always right. Sometimes they’re spectacularly wrong.

But persistence compounds.

The people who stay involved eventually learn where decisions are actually made, when opportunities exist, which arguments work, and who needs to hear them. When everyone else moves on to the next controversy, they’re still there.

There’s a lesson in that for people across the political spectrum. We’ve become extremely comfortable describing major problems and extremely impatient with the process required to solve them.

We want housing affordability fixed, but don’t want construction nearby. We want better infrastructure, but don’t want higher taxes or utility bills. We want more economic development, but often dislike the disruption that comes with development or idea of something new altogether. We want better healthcare access, stronger schools, safer communities and cleaner environments, but every one of those goals involves tradeoffs, years of work, and people who are willing to lose occasionally without abandoning the effort entirely.

Point here is that big solutions almost never arrive cleanly. They get negotiated, modified, delayed, and sometimes just sent packing.

That means caring enough to act also has to include caring enough to learn. Persistence by itself isn’t a virtue. A person can be extremely committed and still be wrong. The goal shouldn’t be to fight forever simply because fighting has become part of your identity. The goal should be producing better outcomes.

That requires looking at data, listening to people with expertise, understanding tradeoffs, and occasionally changing your position when the evidence demands it.

In some ways, that’s harder than showing up. It’s easy to become so invested in a cause that admitting uncertainty starts to feel like weakness. But the people who are genuinely trying to fix problems should be more committed to the outcome than to proving they were right from the beginning.

That’s one reason the concept of caring enough to act has stayed with me. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing the problems facing this region. Population decline, housing, affordability, energy, healthcare, economic development, and the capacity of local governments to handle all of it.

None of these problems lacks awareness. We know they exist. We’ve commissioned studies about them. We’ve held conferences about them. We’ve built dashboards, formed committees, and written thousands of pages explaining them.

What many of them lack is enough sustained effort, from enough people, over a long enough period of time to actually change the status quo.

Not everyone needs to start an organization or devote their career to a cause. Caring enough to act can mean running for the school board, joining a planning board, volunteering with an organization, starting a business, or attending meetings before there’s a crisis. It can mean calling lawmakers, helping a neighbor navigate a government program, building something your community needs, or simply becoming knowledgeable enough about an issue that you can contribute more than anger to the conversation.

The scale matters less than the willingness to move beyond recognizing a problem and toward assuming some responsibility for what happens next.

I don’t know that Yvonne and I would agree on every debate in the Finger Lakes. We probably wouldn’t, and that isn’t the point. What I find noteworthy is that 15 years after starting Gas Free Seneca, she’s still waking up and doing the work. She decided that preserving the natural resources of this region mattered enough to make that effort a significant part of her life. You can agree with her goals, disagree with her tactics, or reject her politics entirely, but there’s still something incredibly important to be learned from from that effort.

Because ultimately, the biggest problems facing our communities aren’t suffering from a shortage of people who care. There are plenty of those. They’re suffering from a shortage of people who care enough to act, enough to learn, enough to lose and try again. And more importantly, enough to keep showing up after everyone else has stopped paying attention.

If we actually want different outcomes, we need a lot more people who are willing to show up and act.

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