Call it fruitless. Or maybe call it fascinating. Covering a budget hearing Thursday night I watched taxpayer after taxpayer get up, more than a dozen or so, shuffle to the lectern and address the city council from the small suburb of Newport, Minn., about their tax bills.

Now, make no mistake: it was mundane stuff. Unexciting. Painfully so. I, your humble reporter, may have, at times, let his attention ebb for portions of this three-and-a-half hour meeting and, perhaps, drew a great forest of interlocking triangles on a yellow legal pad that I’m tempted to frame.

What went on was fruitless because, well, the city needs to pay for road maintenance. And police. And parks. And water, and sewers, and slides, and baseball diamonds and blah blah blah blah blah. Living in a society isn’t free, folks. No amount of complaining was going to stop this political body from passing a budget that was pounded out months ago to keep this small municipality of 3,500 functioning the way a good, decent Minnesota municipality is supposed to function. Meaning: have the damn roads plowed by the time I leave for work.

And, still, it was fascinating in a… tear-out-your-fingernails boring kind of way. These residents, these pissed off taxpayers knew it was fruitless. But they showed up anyway. Waited their turn. Spoke their piece. Usually, true to Upper Midwestern form, politely.

If you’ve taken a little poli sci, you’ve probably heard about political culture. Daniel Elazar (a Minneapolis native! This just gets better and better!) hypothesized there are three kinds; Minnesota falls under the moral political culture category. Basically, he said, we here in the far northern climes believe it is our moral goddamn obligation to care, to show up, to raise a little hell, maybe cast a vote. (Unless it’s one of those waaaaacky odd-year elections where even a politics-obsessed journalist can’t bother to get to his polling place on Franklin Ave.)

It was a little inspiring, anyway, maybe just irresistibly Upper Middle Western (I’m getting a little Allen Iverson choked up here) to watch people take part in government on the most local level. Until they’re arguing over a fishing pier again. That’s just dumb.