Arizona moves to criminalize some voter registration activities

Jordan Karp wrote recently in these pages about anger at Washington, and the piece has stayed with me, less for the anger itself than for the level underneath it: the quiet, unglamorous work that happens when citizens stop waiting for national institutions to function. I have spent three years watching that level operate at national scale. Israel's war years produced a case study in what citizens can build when they conclude, reasonably, that no one else is coming, and some of it travels directly to the American moment Karp describes.

The Vacuum and the Volunteers

Within days of October 7, the Israeli state, like every state struck that hard, was overwhelmed: evacuated towns to house, farmers without Thai workers, reservists' families without income, a flood of needs no ministry was built to absorb. What filled the gap was not spontaneous kindness alone but something more interesting: organized citizens. Reporting on the period describes volunteer organizations stepping into the space between need and state capacity, neighbors delivering care to neighbors at a scale the formal system could not reach. WhatsApp groups became logistics networks. Synagogue bulletins became supply chains. The country's world-famous tech sector bent its tools to the task, and its ordinary citizens bent their schedules, and for a period the volunteer layer was, functionally, the state's largest operating division.