Be a Ferret

This is Seeing Clearly — a few minutes of thought about our role in local government, our role as citizens of this state, and our role as citizens of these United States. I have spent a long time on a single question: what does it mean to be an effective citizen in a democratic system? My answer comes out of two careers. I spent years at the university teaching local government management and American politics, and I spent years as an elected official — mayor of a suburb in the St. Louis region, a member of state committees, an appointee on commissions named by the governor of Missouri, and now a member of local commissions here in Farmington Hills.

Through all of it, one conviction held: a democracy only works with an informed citizenry — people who can sit down and talk through the hard issues intelligently, and together.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class on ancient China, and I have never forgotten one detail. The government there employed officials whose job carried a wonderful name. The word was ferret — their task was to ferret out corruption and graft. I have turned that term over in my mind ever since. What would it mean for us to be ferrets today? Can we apply it to life in the United States, to life in our own municipalities? I think we can. Because a ferret has four qualities — and every one of them is something a citizen is called to have.

Trait 01 — High energyThe ferret is never “too tired”

If you have ever held a ferret, you know the first thing about it: these little creatures have enormous energy. You will never catch one saying it is just too tired to play today. And yet that is exactly what we say. I’m tired of politics. I’m tired of the campaigning. I’m tired of all of it. I understand the feeling. But if that becomes our settled attitude, then we ought to rethink what we are doing — because that is not how an effective citizen behaves.

When we check out, we do not actually make the decisions go away. We simply hand them to someone else — decisions that affect our lives, our families, and our property. Carry that far enough and you arrive at a system where the citizen has no real choice at all. Energy, then, is not optional. It is the first thing the work asks of us.

Trait 02 — Everywhere at onceEngaged at every level

A ferret wants to be everywhere at the same time. It wants to know the whole territory — every space, everything available to it. That is our charge too. We are called to be engaged everywhere, all the time: to know what is happening in our city, what is happening at the state level, and what is happening nationally. We dare not decide that one whole realm of government is simply not our concern.

I won’t pretend that’s easy — it makes real demands on your time. So it takes a strategy. Build relationships — with friends, with family, with neighbors and colleagues — so that information keeps flowing to you from every direction. No one ferrets alone.

Trait 03 — InquisitiveInto the box, around the corner

A ferret is relentlessly curious. If there is a box, it goes in the box. If there is a corner, it has to know what is around it; if there is a dark shelf, it has to know what is on it. It has an unlimited appetite to explore. As an informed voter, that is my task too — to be inquisitive, and then to share what I find. Not in a spirit of conflict, but plainly and with some care, so that people actually hear it.

Here I’ll borrow from an old television program. On Dragnet, Sergeant Friday had a line: Just the facts, ma’am. That is all I am after in any political conversation — the facts first. We can agree to disagree about what they mean. But we begin from the facts.

That is also why one news source will never be enough. There are shelves of academic studies on bias in the media and bias in campaign literature, and you don’t need a study to feel it. Every outlet carries a perspective, and that perspective runs through its reporting. When I taught public policy, I told my students the same thing: read widely. Watch the broadcast networks, watch the cable channels, and watch the international coverage too. You have to take in many sources before you can call yourself fully informed. Which brings us to the corners — the places the ferret really lives for.

Nothing should be hidden from the public by someone who is asking to serve it. Openness is not a nicety in our system; it is a basic value. So we go looking — not to embarrass anyone, but because what is in those corners will shape the decisions that person makes on our behalf.

Trait 04 — UntrainableNo one’s trained pet

Here is the last quality, and it is my favorite. Ferrets are very hard to train. Think of a puppy: you can teach it to sit, to beg, to roll over, and when you say no, it stops. Tell a ferret no, and it goes exactly where it was already headed. That stubborn independence is the point.

The great danger in our system is the trained voter. I’m a Democrat, so I vote Democrat. I’m a Republican, so I vote Republican. When we vote that way, we have become trained pets — of a candidate, or of a party. That is not our call. Our call is to know the issues and to cast our vote on the issues. We are independent. We get to decide for ourselves — and we should relish it.

When a candidate says trust me, the answer is not reflexive suspicion. It is homework. Get informed, and then you can extend trust — to a candidate, a party, or a policy — with your eyes open. That is informed trust, and it is worth a great deal more than the blind kind.