Seattle author Eric Liu has spent plenty of time inside the beltway of Washington, D.C.
He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. President Barack Obama appointed him to a commission on community service.
Liu has also been active around Puget Sound, where he has served on library and education boards. He started the nonprofit Citizen University with his late wife, Jená Cane, which promotes the habits and skills of citizenship.
His new book, Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country, builds on that work.
“I wrote this book because fundamentally, we are in a time right now where our politics is so dehumanizing and flattening, and our culture, even beyond politics, rewards putting people in little boxes,” Liu said.
The book was released in October, just ahead of the midterm elections, so KNKX called up Liu to get his perspective on this moment.
Interview Highlights
Better engaging as citizens
The way I organize this book, Emil, is around eight elemental ways of being, these verbs that we have kind of forgotten how to do in American life: how to see, how to listen, how to feel, how to join, how to fight, how to change, how to imagine, and how to commit. That all of these are elemental habits, that if we don't know how to do these with people we aren't sure we know, or aren't sure we like, then our hopes of creating a durable, stable society where elections don't feel existential every two years get really diminished.
Dealing with national ‘grief’
We as a society are living through...all of these sedimentary layers of unnamed, unacknowledged, unaddressed, unrequited pain, loss and grief. Whether it's COVID, whether it's 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that ended in a shambles, whether it is the fact that we had a “racial reckoning” after George Floyd, and then rapidly retreated from that. Whether it's 50 years of the evaporation of the middle class and the American dream and this sense that, "Hey, wait a minute, this future that I thought maybe my kids could have, much less I could have, is receding out of view." And the pain that goes with that, if it's not named and acknowledged, if we don't practice what it's like actually to make space for each other in facing that pain, it doesn't disappear. Grief unacknowledged curdles into grievance.
What gives him hope
What history teaches us is that at various points that people have thought were “end times,” that they were also simultaneously “begin-again times.” I'm incredibly excited about the ways in which Gen Z and Gen Alpha have come to a much more humane way of understanding the balance of work and life and purpose. I'm super excited about the ways in which people are recognizing across generations right now the power of the local and turning their gaze away just from the reality TV show that is national politics and turning to neighborhood and place.
