“What the Hell Are You Doing Here?” — Rethinking What It Means to Be a Good Citizen

Finding patriotism in a stuffy room with bad air conditioning.

So I serve as a community representative on a school council near my house in Chicago. My son doesn’t go there, but I spend time trying to help this community improve their school and make sure these kids get a good education.

At our meeting yesterday, someone on the council asked me a funny question. She said she’d Googled me, seen my work, noticed how successful it’s been, and then asked something along the lines of, “What the hell are you doing here? Why are you spending your time this way?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer her in the moment, but that question’s been rattling around in my head ever since.

For me, it boils down to this core question I’m always wrestling with:

What does it mean to be a good citizen right now, in a time when every incentive in society tells you to be more selfish?

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We’re living in an era where politics and business might be more self-serving than ever. There just aren’t enough people willing to step up and do hard, thankless, unglamorous work.

Yesterday, we spent hours deciding who the next principal should be. I won’t get into details for privacy reasons, but what struck me was the sheer passion—sometimes even when I disagreed with it—that parents, teachers, and community members brought to the table. They care deeply about the school, about their kids, about building something better. They are enthusiastically engaged and actually give a damn.

And honestly, there’s something weirdly romantic about that. Especially when you hold it up next to the national circus: a president who couldn’t care less about anyone but himself, a Congress that’s more interested in performative bullshit than solving real problems, and politicians on both sides chasing TV hits, social media clout, and donor checks instead of doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, in a stuffy room with bad air conditioning, a bunch of everyday people, are volunteering their time to make their kids’ education a little better against a system that is, frankly, oppressive . That’s patriotic. They’re showing up and they’re trying. And that’s the point. And I know it’s not just happening here—it’s happening in school gyms, church basements, community centers, and kitchens all across Chicago and all across the country. People are just trying to make their corner of the world, however small, less broken.

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When I think about what it means to be a good citizen, it’d be easy to hang my hat on the flashy stuff—“I have a million Substack subscribers,” or “My tweet went viral,” or “I booked a Fox News hit.” And I’m proud of that work. But what I’m most proud of is what I do in my own community. In my own house. Today, I am at home caring for my son who is feeling under the weather. I don’t know if that makes the world a little less broken, but showing up for my child when he needs me and supporting my wife so she doesn’t have to take the day off, makes our small world a little more whole. Even if just for the day.

We spend so much of our mental energy—because the media and our leaders train us to—on shit we can’t control. Gaza. Sudan. Washington. This crisis, that mess. And it’s not that those things don’t matter—they absolutely do—but we don’t spend enough time keeping our feet on the ground, dealing with what we can touch.

I can’t stop Trump from doing whatever hellish thing he’s doing today. But I can be a good father to my son. I can help my local school get more resources or hire a good principal. I can make sure some kid in this ecosystem gets a better shot. I can push my local elected officials to give a damn. That’s something. That’s real.

Showing up and giving a shit matters. It compounds!

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I think of citizenship as concentric circles. The innermost is taking care of myself—my body, my mental health—so I can actually show up for the people I love. Then there’s my family: being a good husband, a good father, raising my kid to be the kind of person who builds and loves and contributes—not someone who just chases clicks and clout.

Then there’s the community. That’s where the real work lives. Picking up trash. Showing up for local events. Gathering petition signatures for a neighbor running for judge. Sitting in school council meetings. That’s what makes me feel like I’m doing my part.

So maybe the best response to the chaos isn’t to run to our keyboards and rage-tweet every time Trump opens his mouth. (And don’t get me wrong—I do that too. You’ll find plenty of F-bomb-laced posts from me about D.C. nonsense.) But if I can carve out even a sliver of time away from client work and cable news and put it toward doing the hard, slow, unsexy work alongside passionate parents and educators—if that means one kid gets a slightly better education because I showed up—then it’s worth it.

That’s my messy, evolving answer to what it means to be a good citizen today.

Now I want to ask you:

What are you doing in your community that makes you a good citizen? It doesn’t have to be some grand, sweeping gesture. You don’t need to run for office. But I genuinely want to know.

In this moment—when we’re facing an existential crisis about who we are, what we value, and what kind of country we want to be—how are you pushing back against selfishness? How are you modeling the opposite of what Trump and so many others are doing? How are you showing up?