Once upon a time when we were younger -- an admittedly longer time ago for some of us than others -- we were frequently asked what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Answers tended to vary depending on age ("older" was definitely a snarkier reply) but most of them focused solidly on jobs that weren't that solid – exciting stuff like policeman and astronaut and professional athlete, etc.
"Boring" jobs, the sort of thing that people need but that don't necessarily appeal to a 12-year-old, never made the list. At least until we figured out, collectively or individually, space is a long way off and we don't have the skill set to play centerfield for the Cardinals.
Because, well, we didn't want to be bored. And stuff that didn't involve burning buildings or distant planets or game-winning home runs just didn't seem that exciting to us. The mundane has little appeal when you're fully engaging an imagination that doesn't rule out the possibility of there being monsters under your bed or an elf who comes down the chimney with presents. Even if you don't have a chimney.
But now, as I survey the landscape, I've got to say, "boring" is having a moment. And not necessarily in a good way.
For instance, up until about two months ago, how many of us ever uttered the words "supply chain" together at one time? That's because it was the boring part of how things get from the factory to your fridge. We didn't want to know the details, because the details were a 127-slide PowerPoint presentation followed by four Zoom calls and things like "we're looking at a 0.4% growth rate year over year, excluding the holiday traffic, which gets us up to 0.8% ..."
Yep, I know. It's all right if your eyes glaze, as long as you don't drool on your shirt.
Now, if we can't find our specific brand of toothpaste from the 400 or so options presented to us, we want to declare a global emergency, call out the National Guard to man our nation's ports and declare war on China. Not necessarily in that order.
Minty-fresh, it turns out, is important.
And then there's public health. If we did inquire about further employment opportunities for junior high students, few of them would mention a desire to get expensive, incredibly challenging and all-consuming medical degrees so they could research infection patterns of your average sneeze to determine if six feet works for social distancing.
Yet, as we view our current landscape, dotted as it is with signs offering booster shots and drive-through testing, the idea that someone might spend their life knee-deep in that has gone from "incredibly dull" to "what, does Acapulco cliff diving not offer enough thrills for you?"
Also, there are boards. Not "bored," boards. Those things they make junior reporters cover and high school students sit through so they can determine for themselves they never, ever want to be part of local government.
Add in a few "courts" and "councils" and you've taken into consideration just about every entity that toils in relative obscurity to make local government, and democracy in general, work.
Now, across the country school boards are becoming MMA events over masks and curriculum and just about anything else folks can fight about, most of which has very little to do with running a school district or trying to figure out how to do even more stuff with even less money.
Out west, water boards (that's boards that help control the flow of water, not what some of us would rather have done to us than attend one of the meetings) are all refereeing fights between ranchers, farmers, sportsmen and developers over who gets access to dwindling supplies of water as a result of rain and snow shortfalls in the mountains.
Which wouldn't be that big a deal to us except just about everything we eat that isn't a chicken is grown on those farms. So, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in droughts, but droughts are interested in you.
So all these boards and commissions and agencies and committees and other well-intentioned-but-not-all-that-exciting civic exercises that were, frankly, kind of, well, yeah, boring are suddenly becoming front and center in whatever pitched battle folks are fighting. Many of which aren't even remotely related to what the board or commission or agency or committee even did.
All of which is enough to recommend that folks pass up involvement in some of these formerly dull things in favor of, say, bomb diffusing.
After all, timely feedback is always good.