I Can Do All Things Through Change.Org That Strengthens Me
What are petitions, if not hope persevering?
The premise of Bridgerton is that each novel (and now, each season) focuses on a different member of the titular family and their romantic exploits. In other words: enjoy each couple’s screen time while it lasts, because the next time we return to Lady Whistledown’s ton, they’ll be relegated to the B plot. I was prepared for this eventuality by virtue of my romance reading proclivities, but I was so bowled over by Regé-Jean Page’s swooniness and eyebrows and voice that I found myself a little bereft at the thought of only seeing him once or twice over the course of the next season.
Then Netflix and Shondaland announced that Page’s character will not appear in the second season of Bridgerton at all, and the prospect of fresh Duke of Hastings content disappeared entirely. Any number of factors could’ve contributed to Page’s exit from the show, but I’d bet that getting signed to a slew of upcoming projects and the difficulty of traveling between filming sets in different countries, each with their own COVID protocols, had a lot to do with it. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be on the show anymore. If I were a Netflix breakout star who got the opportunity to level up to a whole new realm of stardom, I would take it and run. In any case, why he exited the show is not really my business and also not the focus of this edition of Homebody – it’s how people reacted when they found out, which was with (you may have guessed) shock and dismay. In an unexpected crossover event, Kim Kardashian was among those blindsided by the reveal:
Then came the logical next step in the Getting Riled Up About Something Online playbook: starting a petition on Change.org to "Get Regé-Jean Page back on Bridgerton.” Four days after it was created, over 300 people had signed it. In the interest of full disclosure, I absolutely did roll my eyes when I first saw the link. But it’s obvious from the description of the petition itself and the creator’s tweets that she’s in on the joke and doesn’t actually expect anything to come of it. I like to think that most of the people signing it are doing so in the tongue-in-cheek spirit that the creator intended, mostly so I don’t have to deal with the possibility that some people might take Bridgerton this seriously.
The impulse that the creator is parodying is one we’re all too familiar with – creating and signing Change.org petitions as a form of online activism that requires just enough effort to make you feel like you’re taking a stance, but not so much that you have to really put anything on the line. The past few years saw Change.org petitions become ubiquitous to the point of memedom. What started out as a space for mostly genuine consciousness raising efforts turned into a free-for-all, where the ironic regularly bumps up against the earnest with little to distinguish them other than topic tags like “funny,” “meme,” and “lol.” In their most sincere form, they help satisfy our desire to signal moral righteousness, to turn guilt/anger/sadness into some kind of action, and to make those with more power listen to those with less for once. Becoming part of a larger collective can be validating and, in the best-case scenario, effective in producing the intended change, but ultimately the onus of making a petition successful is with the party or parties being petitioned – not the petitioners themselves. The stakes aren’t particularly dramatic when it’s a few hundred people complaining to Shondaland about not being able to see Regé-Jean Page in a cravat sometime in the near future, but not all the entities that Change.org petitions attempt to hold accountable are so benign. People have called directly on elected officials, attorney generals, police chiefs, Congress, and corporations with requests for change – entities that have a greater responsibility to the public than a TV production company – but it often takes signatures on a single petition reaching into the hundreds of thousands to get them to even pay attention. As far as incentives go, the masses yelling online about something just isn’t as persuasive as we like to think it is.
Once you manage to accrue enough attention and outrage to get a powerful institution to take notice, leveraging this abstract currency in return for tangible change still has its limits. Because a petition’s goals have to be actionable and somewhat realistic (i.e. stop photoshopping models on magazine covers, let gay Boy Scouts lead troops, arrest and prosecute racist police officers who murder Black people), you can’t just demand the eradication of unrealistic beauty standards or homophobia or white supremacy or whatever societal ill you want to dismantle. A petition’s purview is often narrowed down to one perpetrator of a much larger problem, and the fulfillment of such a petition means achieving incremental measures that treat the symptoms without changing the root cause. Change.org’s “confirmed victory” badges are a disorienting and hollow consolation prize, but therein lies the issue with asking a broken system to fix an outcome it was programmed to produce.
Of course, not all petitions are created with the intent of provoking concrete change. They can also be symbolic, simply letting the record show that an objection was lodged without any expectations of further action. The Regé-Jean Page crusaders fall into this category – they know (or at least I hope they do) that he won’t return to their screens in the second season of Bridgerton, but that isn’t stopping them from making their indignation heard, loud and clear. In that sense, Change.org is as close you can get to prayer without involving the divine. Supplication to some higher power – even if it’s just Shondaland – takes faith, after all.
Things I Would Petition for If I Thought It Would Actually Work
Another season of American Vandal with 100% less toilet humor @ Netflix
A Teddy Pendergrass biopic starring Trevante Rhodes @ Barry Jenkins
The deletion of the Subtle Asian Traits Facebook group and any subsequent copycats @ Mark Zuckerberg
Rina Sawayama becoming the main pop diva we deserve @ the locals who are still sleeping on her
An immediate withdrawal of $100 from your bank account any time you utter the words “cancel culture” @ the IRS
A new album or just any new music please I’m begging @ Lorde
The end of Mark Wahlberg’s career @ karma
A promise to stop threatening us with a Call Me By Your Name sequel @ Luca Guadagnino
More adaptations of the Meg Cabot Literary Universe, starting with All-American Girl @ the streaming platform powers that be
Steven Yeun in a romcom where his love interest isn’t white @ Steven Yeun/Steven Yeun’s agent/casting directors at large