The Docket of Apathy
On Tuesday, I went to Columbia for AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) Advocacy Day. I put on the Top Hat and the yellow shoes, and I walked into the statehouse to deliver packets to dozens of representative offices.
This was Monday at the DD2 meeting. Papa Roach shirt for AFSP on Tuesday.
We played by the rules. We stuck to the facilitator's mandated message. We navigated the marble hallways of the establishment exactly the way they demand to be navigated—politely, quietly, and within the allotted timeframe.
And it gave me a front-row seat to the sterile, disconnected machinery of our state government.
Walking those halls, you quickly realize you are not just fighting an epidemic of youth suicide. You are fighting an epidemic of institutional bloat. You are competing for oxygen in a building suffocated by professional lobbyists whose only job is to funnel money into pet projects that line their clients' pockets.
When your representative tells you that they'd prefer to talk about something "on the agenda for that day," it tells you everything you need to know. It tells you that they are already dealing with far too much bureaucracy. Their bandwidth is entirely consumed by the highest bidder.
But here is the reality check they desperately need: There is no moratorium on important issues just because your docket is filled with pork.
Crises do not wait for a designated subcommittee hearing. A bullied child doesn’t check the legislative calendar before deciding they can't take another day. The trauma destroying families across South Carolina isn’t pausing while politicians debate which corporate donor gets a tax incentive this Tuesday.
The system has become so heavy, so weighed down by its own procedural garbage, that a grieving parent standing in their office talking about suicide prevention is treated as an "off-schedule" inconvenience. That’s not how I was received in every office, but in large out of a couple of dozen that was the expectation.
To the establishment, an issue only exists if there is a bill to vote on today. They have built a culture where assistants are explicitly forbidden from discussing anything personal or human while on the clock. Everything is filtered through the sterile lens of the daily agenda.
But I am not a lobbyist. I am not getting paid to walk those halls. In fact, I have paid the ultimate, unimaginable price just to earn the right to stand there.
We do not need more politicians who only know how to read the schedule handed to them by dark-money PACs. We need leaders who have the capacity to look up from the docket and see the fire burning in their own districts.
If their system is too bloated to process the reality of what is happening to our kids, then we don’t need to ask politely for a spot on their agenda. We need to replace the agenda entirely.
