I’m taking a step back today. Instead of me doing political analysis, I’m going to discuss how you do your own political analysis.

Instead of stressing Big Politics like debt ceilings, court decisions and a presidential election that almost nobody seems to want, I’d like you to think about political life as something both broader and smaller. 

Instead of the usual big stuff, view politics as closer to home — as “the micro dramas and minor injustices (forming) the tapestry of our relationships and thereby life itself.”

That’s a quote from a review of the movie “You Hurt My Feelings” by the Tribune News Service, but it easily applies to the way we should think about politics.

Instead of thinking about voting, think about swabbing. Instead of thinking about Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, think about Tom Hanks and honeybees.

Honeybees swab. So does Hanks. Both gather information by picking up pieces in their environment that stick to them with valuable results.

First, bee swabbing. “How’s your city doing? Ask the honeybees.”

That’s the lead-in to recent research reporting that honeybees uniquely carry valuable information about a city’s health. It promises to benefit everything from keeping tabs on pathogens to environmental justice.

Here’s the heart of honeybee methodology. Honeybees are first-rate swabbers. As they make their rounds, microorganisms and other invisible flotsam in the air stick to their body, which these insects shed like a work-only jacket when they return to their hives. 

These micro bits and pieces become data leading to extraordinary profiles with details not possible before.

Humans swab too. Sure, not by things sticking to our furry little bodies, but mechanics aside, human and bee swabbing are very similar.

When Tom Hanks was a child, he used to take a four-hour Greyhound Bus ride alone from his home in Oakland to Red Bluff, California, where his mother lived.

On the way, he spent most of the time staring out the window visualizing and imagining. What were those people I see out there doing? Where were the passengers in the plane overhead going? What were their lives about? 

Sitting alone with no one to talk with, his thoughts would merge with “what was already sloshing around in his mind” until some of them became unified fragments and impressions and others morphed into stories.

How Human Swabbing Works

Hanks thinks that this passive observing and thinking explains something significant and formative about his life.

It made him more sensitive and adept at seeing the link between individuals and the big picture — how in the mind’s eye, what we learn about life is based on a collection of small stories.

It generated the openness, empathy and curiosity that are so much a part of his writing and acting.

OK, no one built profiles from the scrapings on Hanks’ body, but this business of taking snippets of your observations is very much the way humans figure out what’s going on. It’s tapestry building.

A trip to Costco is not just about a shopping list. It’s also about other things you observe and feel while you are in that big box. Call them impressions, whatever, possibly even minor injustices that become part of your social intelligence and even your sense of right and wrong.

Much of this gets filed away into your memory from where it pops up later often in surprising ways.  

So, why is it so important to see the swabbing’s value?

First, because human swabbing is so crucial yet undervalued. It’s the predominant way we make sense of our world, which means it’s an important part of your own political analyzing.

All the rest of the Big Politics-Big Analyst stuff — you know, the things that we normally think of as information about politics, like newspaper reports, pundits punditing and surveys — are generally explicit, direct and didactic. They make up just a small corner of the way you think and feel.

The Importance Of Observation

Second, as anyone who has raised children knows, humans learn so little by being told what to do and believe and so much by observing others and modeling themselves after what they believe is good or important.

Think back to your school days. A big-time political analyst is like your seventh grade civics teacher whose lesson for the day you sort of absorbed knowing that it will be on the test.

But what you really think of that lesson, if anything at all, and what you understand about it have a whole lot to do with how you perceive it through your intermediate school eyes (and hormones) as well as what you hear from the rest of your buddies about it.

Finally, the best reason to bring swabbing out of the shadows is that swabbing is a way to get information that no other methods can get.

Understanding Neighborhoods

The focus on swabbing is the best way to understand neighborhoods. The bee researchers believe that they will be able to use the honeybee data “to better understand healthier neighborhoods.” The same with human swabbing.

Recent research shows how important an influence the neighborhoods a person lived in as a child is to how she does in later life. 

These influences can vary dramatically from block to block even among neighborhoods that on the surface seem similar. The “Opportunity Atlas” map of the U.S. that illustrates this looks like a tapestry. It’s a riot of mixed colors.

These differences have a great deal to do with informal, subtle conversations and interactions that go on in the neighborhood. That’s fodder for swabbing.

I must admit that I find it refreshing and liberating to write about this. It gives me relief from the boisterousness, depression and boredom of Big Politics and Big Political Analysis. I’m pretty much legislative-sessioned out.

At the same time thinking about politics in a different way reminds me how much I live as part of a much smaller world of stories, tapestries, impressions and small talk.

Try a Tom Hanks exercise. Imagine yourself sitting alone, staring out the window of the #67 Waimanalo-Kailua-Ala Moana bus. Better yet actually take the ride.

Sure, a lot of things that happen at this small level can be awful.

They can also be sweeter than honey.