Fighting City Hall

Photos By Jan

Our friend GQ, the Great Questioner asks, “When is it time to stop fighting city hall?” Asking me that question is like asking a pyromaniac when it’s time to stop playing with matches. GQ’s question – implying that there is indeed a time to stop fighting city hall – is spot on, especially in these contentious and polarized days.

City hall around here is two nice ladies behind the counter, a town manager, and a code enforcement officer. The tax collector, shared with four other towns, is in a day a week. I’ll do almost anything to avoid a fight with that bunch. But I think GQ is asking us more generally, when is it time to recognize a bigger power and back off?

Thinking about this question, which I initially thought was an easy one, has been more difficult than I anticipated. After a while, I came up with guidelines for responding to GQ that I’m calling the 3 P’s.

The first is process. In organizing class they taught that you always play to win. In some battles with city hall, that’s a good idea, when the goal is concrete and achievable. Other times, though, the superior power you’re fighting – say a mean boss or a scary armed sheriff in Maricopa County – makes determining a clear cut victory hard to see or even  impossible. That doesn’t mean you don’t fight.

I want to suggest that we down-play winning. Many of the best fights don’t produce immediate results. You can decide to focus on the process of struggle because that keeps you from giving up if the goal is too hard to see. And keeping your eye on the process of resistance might discourage people in power from thinking they should keep moving the goal, so people will give up or never get into the fight in the first place.

We need to know what we’re fighting city hall for, even if we don’t aim to achieve a specific objective right now. But we do need to keep on pressuring or resisting when something strikes us as unjust or destructive even if we’re don’t set out knowing what a “win” would look like. And that leads to number two:

Proportion: I know there have been times in my life when I’ve been carried away with a small fight, unable to let go. This is way easier to see in other people than in ourselves, so we can help the general cause of city hall fighting by kind of policing each other. We can kindly draw our friends and relatives back from spittle-spraying rants at city council meetings when the issue is placement of a new culvert or shifting $150 in the school budget. Sometimes you stop fighting city hall because it just isn’t worth it.

We city hall pugilists sometimes see too many slippery slopes and matters of Great Principle, especially in local battles. Backing off can increase, not decrease people’s sense of your own power, because you appear to be a person who is in control, not governed by internal furies or bursts of testosterone or other hazardous hormones, but by larger ideas and principles. Even if you're not.

And that takes us nicely to P Number Three:

Peacefulness. So many times I have fallen into a battle and become a prisoner of the fight , captured by the heat and frankly the fun of the brawl. I have annoyed my friends and irritated my family. I think the world benefits from having fewer fanatics. Once again, it’s easier to see the loss of peacefulness and the onset of militancy in others. When the tone of your life is hot, angry, agitated – maybe it’s time to stop fighting city hall.

Process means play to play, not to win.

Proportion means picking your battles strategically.

Peacefulness means keeping a calm heart and head.

Keeping those three items in mind, I’d say to GQ: it's useful to know when it’s time to stop a particular fight with city hall, but give up fighting city hall in general? 

Never.