These times are not normal times. There are reasons to be frustrated and angry at politicians, strangers, systems, and all the apparatus of a collective life left limping along. What do we do with that anger? Where and how can we direct it constructively to repair systems rather than destroy people?

Spectacle and the manipulation of perception appear to guide the administration's decisions. Meanwhile, the work of leadership in public service must go on at the state and local level to prepare us for the next incident that will alter the lives of our residents.

Working in public service and governance does not relieve us of our obligations to utilize judgement about what should be done and apply deft skill in doing it. We must choose thoughtfully between the spectacle and the duty. Despite what those above us in the hierarchy of government power might pursue for ill-conceived ends, we must not grow accustomed to the burdens that it imposes on the people.

The obligation remains ours.

Public protection had become a bargaining chip in a dispute over how another public function should operate.

A cut, an elimination proposal, and a threat to withhold funding are different actions. Each weakens the ability to plan and sustain protection. Organizations cannot confidently retain people, maintain partnerships, or make long-term commitments when the resources beneath them are repeatedly put in question.

After November, I hope to see a sustained public effort to hold officeholders accountable, recruit challengers, and build the organizations that make better choices viable. Every office should remain open to challenge. Breaking the duopoly's hold will require work between elections, including changing rules that make alternatives so difficult to establish.

Stewardship gives that work a standard. We should select people who protect the public's right to remove them, safeguard institutions beyond their own tenure, and improve the lives of the people entrusted to their care. Their party affiliation cannot substitute for evidence of those commitments.

If constrained state and local public servants must remain answerable while navigating an unprecedented emergency, the most powerful office in the country cannot demand less scrutiny for itself. Every presidential statement can move markets, alter alliances, begin an investigation, or instigate another act of war. The public has a profound interest in knowing the mind, conduct, and intentions of the government acting on its behalf.

But voting to prevent greater harm is a floor, not the horizon of our citizenship. If our only demand is that an elected official be less dangerous than the alternative, we have conceded too much before that official ever takes the oath. We are fighting for a say in who occupies the room while leaving untouched the question of who gets heard once its doors close.

On Labor Day, we should think hard about who coordinates the labor of humanity and towards what ends. A steward would want those ends to serve workers and citizens, current and future, to ease their burdens and let their industrious creativity push us to greater heights.

The work of citizenship has been assigned to the leftover hours.

The American labor movement once understood that time was part of freedom. The demand for the eight-hour day carried a simple promise: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”

That final eight mattered. It was time for family, education, association, worship, organizing and self-government. Workers were not only demanding relief from physical exhaustion. They were demanding possession of some meaningful portion of their own lives.

The weekend wasn’t discovered. It was won.

Increasingly, some Americans are living in the red on otherwise blue-sky days.

The grid may be operating while one neighborhood remains dark. Food may be plentiful while a family cannot afford to replace a refrigerator full of it. Health care may exist while it is inaccessible. Water may flow somewhere in the system while households go days without it. Because the damage is concentrated by geography, income, race, disability, or simple misfortune, the larger institution continues to describe itself as operational.

There are nevertheless people who believe that they simply know better. With a stroke of a pen, they attempt to demand new facts into existence, as though human biology and viral transmission were matters of opinion. As though the order of physical events could be revised to accommodate political promises. As though matter itself might be persuaded not to matter.

An executive order can change what the government recommends. It can change what an agency is permitted to say. It can change what insurance covers, what physicians must explain, and what frightened parents ultimately choose.

It cannot change what a virus does.

Reading Beth Macy's Paper Girl, her account of growing up and away from Urbana, Ohio, brought Ashtabula immediately to mind. I have spent more than 20 years visiting chosen family there, including a couple of years living there myself. I recognized the landscape and the people who remained after money and opportunity found somewhere else to go.

But I also thought about Toledo.

Toledo felt like it balanced on a narrow ridge between the Ohio of rust and dust and the urbanity of hot rubber, weed smoke, and noise. Drive its streets and you might think a plywood plague had infested the city. As industries faltered and economics shifted, wounds opened in businesses and households alike. Plywood was the texture of the scabs that grew over them.

is supposed to mean.

I grew up with the Pledge of Allegiance as a frequent, if not daily, occurrence. Schoolchildren have been performing versions of that ritual since 1892, but in my elementary years, the pledge was mostly meaningless to me. My peers and I were still learning what words like allegiance meant.

We performed an imitation of citizenship to satisfy the adults around us. We had some vague sense of pride in something we had no hand in building. Some of us tried to reconcile what we heard in one-day-a-week Sunday school about placing no allegiance before God with our five-day-a-week recitation toward a flag. Mostly, we said the words that sent smiles our way or relaxed the hands we feared.

Every friend began as a stranger.

But Americans are increasingly being taught to fear strangers before we ever meet them. We encounter one another through partisan categories, viral clips, demographic profiles, and stories selected to show millions of people at their worst.

The clip may be real. The story constructed from it may still be a lie.

Elected officials, as with the rest of us, grow old, and that isn’t the problem.

The problem is that our political system allows public office to become a possession held until death, defeat, or incapacity finally forces it loose.

Independent institutions depend upon independent people. A commission cannot exercise real independence if its members serve at the pleasure of the president. Protected commissioners cannot exercise informed judgment if the analysts beneath them can be purged for presenting unwelcome evidence. Career experts cannot exercise meaningful discretion if professional disagreement can be recast as insubordination.

Each layer protects the next. Remove enough of them and the institution may retain its name, offices, and statutory mission while becoming incapable of resisting power.

The damage is not limited to this awful moment. Depletion compounds. A missile stockpile can take years to rebuild. Trust in elections can take generations to restore. Institutional legitimacy, once spent, does not return because a better person gives a better speech. Fiscal room, legal consequence, civic confidence, and public competence are not lights that can simply be switched back on after the vandals leave.

Americans have not stopped paying attention.

We may be paying more attention than ever.

But attention is not engagement. Reaction is not power. A republic cannot be sustained by a public that watches everything and joins almost nothing.

America’s 250th anniversary should be a moment of civic reckoning: a chance to remember what the country promised, where it failed, what it repaired, and what it still owes. Instead, too much of the moment is being turned into spectacle: branded celebration, partisan vanity, public symbols converted into personal stages, and attention harvested while the real machinery of power moves behind the glare. The problem is not entertainment. The problem is a republic losing the ability to distinguish commemoration from propaganda. When the White House becomes a fight-night backdrop during a national anniversary, the injury is not aesthetic. It is civic. A people trained to watch spectacle while their institutions are captured, their costs rise, and their rights erode is not being entertained. It is being governed through distraction.