A divided nation, an economy in recession, and a generation of students who learned what “unprecedented times” meant before they learned to drive.
Walking across the Pierce College Fort Steilacoom campus on any given afternoon, you’ll find people who carry all of this on a day-to-day basis. Between shifts at work, between classes, between the notifications that tell them that the world they knew is coming to an end in some way or another.
There’s a young woman in the library who hasn’t checked the news in three weeks because she can’t afford to. There is a man in his forties back in school for the second time, wondering if it will matter. There is a student government meeting happening right now in a space that fits twenty, attended by six.
This isn’t apathy. Or at least, it’s not just apathy. It’s something more complicated; a kind of despondent pragmatism that sets in when the distance between your daily life and the levers and cogs of power that keep our systems moving feel so detached, so far-flung, that one might as well forget that they exist. And yet the question doesn’t go away: what does it mean to be politically engaged when you are already running empty? More specifically, what should that look like here, at Pierce, among students who are rarely setting the agenda for the policy they live in daily.
A study published in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning found that students’ political engagement is often not absent, rather “situational, emergent, and co-creative,” shaped by the realities of their daily lives rather than by abstract ideals of citizenship we are told to believe in.
What looks like disengagement from the outside is often something else entirely: exhaustion, calculation, survival. The students in that study, like those at Pierce; many working jobs, navigating instability, and coming of age during crisis, did not lack opinions or values. What they lacked was a sense that their participation would meaningfully connect to systems that felt distant, opaque, and, at times, indifferent.
This is something that I’ve navigated while leading legislative affairs and civic engagement on the Fort Steilacoom Campus. Through this work, I learned to reconcile the deep desire that students have to make a change with fear that said change wouldn’t come.
When I worked to construct the legislative agenda for this year’s Washington state legislative session, I set out to gauge where students stood through a survey. I tabled at welcome days and pushed a survey out through Canvas. Nothing revolutionary. A sign, a QR code, and the usual infrastructure of student engagement. And in all honesty, I expected indifference, or at best, polite participation from students who had somewhere else to be.
What I did not expect was the question that kept coming back, in different voices, from different people pausing at that table and asking, “What can I do to help?”
It stopped me. Not because the question was hard to understand, but because I didn’t really have an answer. I had built a mechanism for measuring concern, and students had shown up to it with something closer to readiness.
What they were waiting for was a door, and I was standing in front of one I hadn’t really thought to open.
That gap between a student’s willingness and an institution’s ability to receive and transform it, is I think, where most political energy at community colleges dies. The survey told me what students felt and what they wanted to say, but the welcome days tabling showed me that they were ready to move. But readiness without infrastructure is just another form of waiting, and these students had already been waiting in a hundred different ways before they ever stopped to talk to me.
What I took from that is something I am still working out. It wasn’t that the engagement effort had failed, the survey itself got over 200 responses. It just needed something I didn’t accommodate for.
Let me be direct about something that student government representatives rarely say out loud, and that is practically unheard of from someone in my position: yes, much of what we do is performative. Student policy gets shaped in nearly rooms, testimony gets delivered to legislators who have already made up their minds, and the institutional power available to student leaders is real, but it’s also narrow. Pretending otherwise does a disservice to the student body we represent.
What I would argue instead is that performative does not mean meaningless, because the tools are real. Student government at Pierce can pass resolutions, deliver testimony at the state level, build relationships with legislators, and shape campus policy in ways that touch students’ daily lives. We can do all of this and more. But, the most underestimated capacity we have is not institutional at all, it’s relational.
It’s coalition building among peers, the slow, unglamorous work of connecting the woman in the library who hasn’t checked the news in three weeks or the student who stopped at my table asking what they could do next. It’s building the connective tissue between people who share conditions but have not yet recognized each other as political actors.
There’s a reason people use the language of seeds when we talk about change we cannot yet see. A seed does not ask for proof that it will grow before it goes into the ground; it does not wait for favorable conditions, or a better season, or someone to guarantee the harvest. It just asks for the ground, and the willingness to begin.
This is what political engagement has to look like at Pierce right now.
Not a movement, not a march, not a resolution passed, but a seedling I and so many before me have tended to when it seems like the world is falling apart, and one that I hope and pray will outgrow me once I leave this position.
The students at this institution aren’t apathetic; they are politically exhausted, which is a different thing entirely, and it requires a different response. For someone to show them that their willingness act has somewhere to go, and that it will make a material difference in their lives.
So, this isn’t a ploy to convince you to apply for student government, or to talk with your representatives, or to go vote, or any of the generic advice that people give out. This is an invitation to believe, before the proof arrives, that what you do here, in this community, on this campus, is the ground in which something grows. That you are making the way for a world that is coming, whether the current one is ready or not. We may not see it, we may be gone before it breaks the surface, but plant anyways.
