I got it. Dolly commanded your attention. Sometimes it was the voice. Sometimes the hair. Sometimes the clothes. Sometimes it was simply that there was nobody else quite like her. Whatever it was, when Dolly Parton was on the television, you watched.

I have been watching her for more than 50 years. And when she died Tuesday at 80 years old, I realized that all that time I had missed something about her.

I knew Dolly was a profound entertainer. I don’t think I understood until now what a profound teacher she was.

There will be plenty written about the songs, the movies, the rhinestones and the extraordinary career. There should be. She earned every bit of it. But as I found myself watching old interviews and stories after her death, I began to notice something I had somehow missed despite all those years of watching her.

Dolly was always teaching us something. Not from a podium. Not by telling us how we ought to live. Certainly not by pretending she had figured everything out. She taught by telling the truth about her own life. She taught through stories and jokes, through the choices she made and the way she treated people. Very often, she taught by laughing at herself first.

There was something revealing about the way Dolly told stories. When she was simply Dolly talking about her life, there was very often a lesson tucked inside the story or the joke. She taught with a wink and a smile. She could disarm you with her charm, make you laugh, and somewhere along the way say something that needed to be said. She seemed to understand that people are more willing to hear a hard truth when you don’t make them feel small for needing to hear it.

She once explained her approach to people very simply: “I look at their eyes and their smile and seek out the good first.”

Seek out the good first.

That is different from pretending the bad isn’t there. It means deciding what you’re going to look for before you begin.

And Dolly was nobody’s fool. When Elvis Presley wanted to record I Will Always Love You, she was thrilled. But the night before the recording session, Colonel Tom Parker told her that Elvis didn’t record songs unless they received at least half of the publishing rights. Dolly said no. She cried over it. She wanted Elvis to sing her song. But she also understood what she owned. As she later explained, “This is the most important copyright in my whole publishing company, and I can’t do that.” Years later, Whitney Houston recorded the song and turned it into one of the biggest recordings in history.

Dolly could love Elvis and still tell Elvis no. That distinction seems particularly useful today. Kindness does not require surrender. Listening does not require agreement. Knowing your own value doesn’t require diminishing somebody else’s. Dolly knew when to smile, when to listen and when to walk away.

She also knew that the things that hurt us can become instructions for what we ought to do next. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a farmer and a very smart man. But he couldn’t read or write. Dolly understood the shame he carried because of it. She said that his inability to read “probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”

Think about what she did with that knowledge. She didn’t simply tell the story. She built something.

In 1995, Dolly created the Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she had grown up. Children from birth to age five received a book every month, mailed directly to their homes, regardless of their family’s income. What began in one East Tennessee county eventually spread around the world. Today, the Imagination Library sends more than three million books every month to children.

But the scale isn’t the most interesting part of the story to me. The origin is. Dolly saw something that had caused someone she loved pain and asked, in effect: What can I do with what I have so somebody else doesn’t have to experience this?

Then she went one step further. She involved her father in the program. She wanted the very thing that had embarrassed him to become a source of pride. Children began calling his famous daughter “The Book Lady,” and Dolly said that meant more to her father than her fame ever did. Before he died, he told her the Imagination Library might be the most important thing she had ever done.

There is something profound in that. A daughter took her father’s shame and gave it a different ending. And then she gave that ending away. Millions of times.

That is more than philanthropy. It is a way of thinking about how change actually happens. You notice something. You get curious about why it exists. You understand what it does to people. Then you use what you have to change it. You turn what you have learned into what you do. That is the difference between a story and a practice.

Dolly never really left the place that taught her that. She traveled far beyond it, but East Tennessee never became something she needed to escape from or apologize for. She carried it with her. And eventually she invested back into it. Dollywood created jobs and economic activity in the region that raised her. Her foundation invested in its children. The Imagination Library began there. Even as her reach became global, her starting point remained intensely local.

There is a lesson in that for how we think about community. We tend to think of community as the people immediately around us. But we are shaped by people we may barely remember and some we never knew at all. Teachers. Neighbors. Shopkeepers. Churches. Libraries. The people who built the institutions and traditions we inherited. Even the people who frustrated us taught us something about who we wanted to become.

Place leaves fingerprints on us. East Tennessee’s fingerprints were all over Dolly Parton. Every one of us has fingerprints like those.

The trouble comes when life gets complicated and we forget them. When our neighbor becomes unfamiliar. When politics tells us the person across town is our enemy. When somebody’s beliefs make us uncomfortable. Those are precisely the moments when remembering where we came from—and how many different kinds of people helped make us—matters most.

Dolly once said, “You can be decent, and you can be successful.” It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But maybe we need to hear simple things again. We have somehow allowed ourselves to believe that strength requires hardness. That conviction requires anger. That listening means surrendering. That the only way to win is for somebody else to lose. Dolly’s life makes a pretty good argument against all of that.

She could be kind and still say no. She could laugh at herself and still know exactly who she was. She could leave home without leaving behind the people who made her. And when life taught her something, she did something with the lesson. Her father’s inability to read became books in the hands of children. Her understanding of business became jobs in the community that raised her. Her experience of being judged seems to have made her less interested in judging somebody else.

She turned experience into action.

That seems like a pretty good way to measure a life. Not by whether we were always right or everybody agreed with us, but by whether we paid attention. Whether we stayed curious. Whether we knew when to stand our ground and when to laugh at ourselves. Whether we remembered the people and places that made us. And whether, when life taught us something worth knowing, we did something useful with it.

There is one more Dolly story I keep thinking about.

Two months before my mother died, I had the chance to take her to see Dolly live for the first time. By then, Mom was in a wheelchair, but we got good seats for her. We gave her a pair of binoculars so she could get an even better look.

She put them to her eyes when Dolly came onstage. And she never took them down. Not once. She watched the entire concert through those binoculars.

I think I understand why. All those years earlier, sitting in front of a television, Dolly had appeared in close-up—the hair, the smile, the clothes, that face my mother had studied closely enough to announce that she wanted to look like her. Now, decades later, she had Dolly in close-up again. Only this time Dolly was really there.

My mother wasn’t going to miss a minute of it.

I’ve thought a lot about that since yesterday. About my mother. About that television on Sand Mountain. About more than 50 years of my own fascination with this woman I never knew.

And I think I finally understand something I didn’t understand while she was alive.

We were all looking at Dolly.

Hopefully we have been listening closely, too.

Because underneath all the rhinestones and jokes was a woman who spent a lifetime showing us that kindness didn’t require weakness, curiosity didn’t require uncertainty, and knowing exactly who you were didn’t require judging somebody who was different.

She taught with a wink and a smile. She told the joke on herself first. She knew when to listen and when to say no. And when life taught her something worth knowing, she tried to do something useful with it.

Dolly Parton knew the score, but she never let knowing the score keep her from loving the game.

There are worse ways to live, but I can’t think of many better ones.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone across a line of difference—someone who might not see the world just like you do. That’s where the real work starts.

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That frustration crosses party lines. Republicans are frustrated. Democrats are frustrated. Independents are frustrated. We may disagree about why Congress isn’t working, but there is remarkable agreement that it isn’t working the way it should.

The question is: What do we do about it?

Most of us instinctively blame the other party. If only they would change. If only they would elect different people. If only they would compromise.

But there is one problem with that way of thinking.

You can’t control who someone else votes for.

You can only control your own vote.

Congress doesn’t belong to political parties. It belongs to the American people. Every member of Congress serves because voters put them there, and every election gives us the opportunity to decide whether they should continue serving.

When we choose not to vote, we don’t remove ourselves from the process. We simply hand our voice to those who do.

Across much of the country, elections are decided by surprisingly small numbers of voters. According to recent turnout data, in Texas this year’s primary turnout reached a record 24 percent. A record sounds impressive until you realize it still means nearly three out of every four registered voters stayed home.

When only a fraction of citizens participates, a fraction of citizens determines who represents everyone.

If you’re unhappy with Congress, staying home doesn’t weaken the system you’re frustrated with. It strengthens it. Low participation rewards candidates who appeal to the narrowest slice of the electorate instead of the broadest. Broader participation creates a stronger incentive for leaders to represent more of the people they serve.

But electing people is only part of the equation.

We also have to remember what we are electing them to do.

We are not electing them simply to fight. We are electing them to govern.

Democracy was never designed to produce unanimous agreement. It was designed to produce a government that could keep moving despite disagreement.

That requires something we don’t talk about enough anymore: compromise.

Some hear that word and think it means weakness. Others hear surrender. It is neither.

Compromise does not require abandoning your principles. It requires recognizing that governing is different from campaigning.

Campaigns reward drawing sharp contrasts. Governing requires building coalitions.

A good representative doesn’t stop believing in what they believe. They listen. They ask questions. They look for places where progress is possible. They search for solutions that advance their principles while bringing enough people along to actually solve a problem.

That’s not weakness.

That’s leadership.

Because the purpose of government isn’t to win arguments. It is to solve problems. Problems are rarely solved when one side gets everything it wants. They are solved when people with different ideas decide that making progress matters more than making a point.

None of us can make Congress compromise.

But every one of us can choose the people we send there.

Voting is the one civic act every American is guaranteed. It is the one moment when every citizen possesses exactly the same political power, regardless of wealth, influence, education, race, or party.

It is more than a right.

It is our voice.

The greatest threat to democracy isn’t disagreement. Democracy has always depended on people with different ideas learning how to live, work, and govern together.

The greater threat is believing your voice no longer matters.

Every election is an opportunity to prove that it still does.

If we want Congress to work differently, the first step isn’t waiting for someone else to act.

It’s showing up ourselves.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

Thanks for reading.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone across a line of difference—someone who might not see the world just like you do. That’s where the real work starts.

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Through years of research across Southern communities, we’ve learned that belonging is not only built through institutions or policies. It is built through everyday interactions that help people feel seen, valued, and connected. Those moments become the foundation for stronger communities.

That is why we are excited to partner with Angela McKee-Brown and Joy In Common.

Angela’s work reminds us that joy is not separate from the work of building stronger communities. It is part of the infrastructure that allows communities to thrive. Joy helps us recognize one another’s humanity before we focus on our differences. It creates the conditions where trust can grow and belonging can take root.

When Angela first shared two recent reflections on the Joy In Common Substack, I found myself returning to them again and again. One begins in an unexpected place: a policy conversation about school meals. The other begins at bedtime, reading an alphabet book with her two-year-old daughter. On the surface, they couldn’t seem more different. But together, they ask the same question: What happens when we become more intentional about noticing joy?

In her essay “Joy In Common”, Angela recalls participating in a conversation about the future of California’s school meal system. As ideas were shared and decisions began to take shape, she paused the discussion with a simple question: Could we center joy in the design process? Instead of asking only how to eliminate hunger, she invited the group to also ask, “Will this bring a kid joy?”

As she writes,

“Often, in these conversations, hunger is at the center of decision making. How will we alleviate and eliminate hunger in our communities? This is a necessary and urgent question and one that should be prioritized and never ignored. And we have the capacity to ask, in addition, what will enable our children to be nourished and thrive? By holding both answers, we have more solutions. Not only do we solve for the sorrow hunger causes, but we also build the solutions that make space for the joy that nourishment provides.”

It’s a remarkably simple shift in perspective, but one that expands what becomes possible. We still address the challenges in front of us, but we also begin imagining what it looks like for people to truly thrive.

Angela captures that beautifully when she writes,

“When we make space for joy, we transform our communities. Joy is what freedom, safety, and ease feel like.”

That idea resonates deeply with our work at EPU. We spend a great deal of time studying what communities need to overcome division, strengthen trust, and create greater belonging. Those questions matter. But Angela’s reflection reminds us that there is another equally important question to ask: What helps communities flourish?

The answer isn’t found only in policy or programs. It’s found in the everyday experiences that help people feel safe, connected, hopeful, and valued.

What I appreciate most about Joy In Common is that it doesn’t ask us to ignore hardship in pursuit of optimism. In fact, Angela writes,

“Joy In Common isn’t meant to eliminate sorrow in our lives, and it can’t force you to be joyful... Joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin. In fact, by being aware of your sorrow, you can actually use it as a wayfinder to your joy.”

That perspective feels especially important today. We can acknowledge grief, frustration, and division while still creating space to notice what gives us life. In many ways, those two practices belong together.

Angela explores that idea further in “Finding More Words”, a reflection that begins not in a policy meeting, but in the quiet routine of reading bedtime stories with her daughter.

Every night they read an alphabet book about feelings, working through words like bravery, confusion, jealousy, determination, and nervousness. As Angela explains each emotion, she realizes she is also expanding her own understanding of what those words mean. She writes,

“Once we give a word meaning, we have the opportunity to not only be more aware of when we are experiencing it, but also how to share what we are experiencing with each other.”

That realization led her to ask a question that has become central to Joy In Common:

What’s been bringing you joy lately?

Angela observes that many people pause before answering, not because they aren’t experiencing joy, but because they haven’t often been invited to describe it. That simple question creates space for reflection, curiosity, and conversation in ways that the familiar “How are you?” often cannot.

She tells the story of a woman who always assumed her colleague was miserable while spending long afternoons weeding a garden in the summer heat. Only after asking him what brought him joy did she discover that gardening wasn’t a chore at all. It was quiet time. It was working with his hands. It was being outside. It was peace.

Angela reflects that this new understanding transformed the way the woman saw her colleague.

“She could see his ease, versus assuming his sorrow.”

I keep coming back to that line.

How often do we mistake someone else’s experience because we never ask the question? How many opportunities for connection do we miss because we assume we already know someone else’s story?

Our research consistently tells us that people want stronger relationships with their neighbors. They want communities where they feel known, valued, and connected. Those relationships rarely begin with agreement on every issue. They begin with curiosity.

That’s what I love about Joy In Common. It offers an incredibly accessible practice for cultivating that curiosity: Reflect. Share. Ask.

Reflect on what has brought you joy.

Share that story with someone else.

Ask them what has been bringing them joy.

These are small actions, but small actions repeated over time shape culture. They help us notice one another differently. They expand our understanding of what freedom, safety, and ease look like in someone else’s life. They remind us that belonging is built not only through the systems we create, but through the conversations we choose to have every day.

Angela closes her reflection with a hopeful reminder:

“Every day is a chance to practice joy. And as we practice, we find more words to describe joy. And with more words, and more stories, and more shared conversations, we begin to normalize talking about joy, which can only open up a world of opportunity.”

I couldn’t agree more.

That’s why we’re so excited to partner with Joy In Common.

Throughout this month, we’ll be bringing this practice to life through Small Action. Big Shift., EPU’s monthly social campaign. At its heart is a simple idea: meaningful change doesn’t always begin with sweeping solutions. More often, it begins with small, intentional actions that strengthen our relationships, expand our understanding of one another, and remind us of what we share.

This month, that small action is joy.

Together with Joy In Common, we’ll be practicing Angela’s three simple steps:

Reflect. Share. Ask.

Reflect on what’s been bringing you joy.

Share that story with your community.

Ask someone else the same simple question:

What’s been bringing you joy lately?

If these stories resonate with you, I encourage you to read Angela’s full reflections—“Joy In Common” and “Finding More Words”—on the Joy In Common Substack. I also hope you’ll visit JoyInCommon.org to learn more about the movement, order a free set of Joy In Common pocket cards, and begin practicing Joy In Common in your own community.

Because belonging isn’t built only in our biggest moments.

It’s built through the small actions that shift how we see one another.

And sometimes, all it takes to begin is one simple question:

What’s been bringing you joy lately?

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

Thanks for reading.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone across a line of difference—someone who might not see the world just like you do. That’s where the real work starts.

📬 Subscribe to get more reflections, analysis, and calls to action around building a more just and united America.

💬 Have thoughts? Hit reply. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Subscribe now

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of essays written by E Pluribus Unum’s Summer Interns. We asked each of them a simple but important question: What do you want older generations to understand about yours? Their answers explore what civic engagement looks like today, what motivates young people to get involved, and how they imagine the future of the South and our country over the next two decades.

These reflections aren’t meant to speak for an entire generation. They’re personal perspectives shaped by lived experience, hope, and a deep investment in the places they call home. As we think about the future of democracy, belonging, and opportunity in the South, we believe it’s worth listening closely to the people who will inherit and help shape that future.

We invite you to read with curiosity, reflect on what resonates, and consider what becomes possible when we make space for younger voices in conversations about where we’re headed together.

You’ve probably said it before, maybe casually, out of frustration, or even with genuine concern: “This generation is just too sensitive.” By you, I mean those from older generations, particularly Gen X and Baby Boomers, who were often raised to value emotional restraint, resilience, and pushing through discomfort without much discussion. As someone writing from within Gen Z, a generation shaped by constant connectivity, social awareness, and open conversations about identity and mental health I understand why it might look like oversensitivity from your perspective. The strong reactions, the willingness to challenge long-standing norms, and the visibility of emotions can feel overwhelming or unfamiliar. But what if what you’re seeing isn’t oversensitivity at all, what if it’s simply visibility?

You grew up in a world where many things were understood but rarely said out loud. Strength often meant endurance. It meant pushing through discomfort, staying quiet, and adapting to systems as they were. That kind of resilience built foundations that still hold weight today. But the world you helped build is also the one we inherited and we’re experiencing it differently. You don’t just hear about issues anymore. You see them in real time, constantly, without pause. News isn’t something you check, it’s something that follows you. Climate reports, economic uncertainty, social movements, public tragedies they’re not distant ideas. They’re immediate, personal, and persistent. So when you see us reacting, speaking, or organizing, it’s not because we’re looking for something to be upset about. It’s because it’s harder for us not to notice.

Research shows that one in seven young people globally lives with a mental health condition, and anxiety and depression make up a significant portion of those experiences. That reality isn’t new. What’s new is the willingness to talk about it. Where silence was once a form of strength, expression is becoming one now. You were taught to carry things. We’re trying to understand them. And that difference can feel uncomfortable—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s unfamiliar. When we talk about mental health, it’s not because we’re fragile. It’s because we have the language and the awareness to name what’s happening. Studies show that Gen Z is significantly more likely to report experiencing anxiety or depression than older generations, with over 80% more likely to acknowledge those struggles. That doesn’t mean we are weaker. It means we are more willing to be honest. And honesty changes how things move forward. The same is true when it comes to how we engage with the world around us. You might see us questioning systems education, work, institutions and wonder why we don’t just adapt. But from where we stand, adaptation without reflection can look like acceptance of things that don’t work. So we ask questions. Not to tear things down but to understand if they still hold up. It might also seem like we care about too many things at once.

Climate, housing, education, equity, mental health can feel scattered. But what we’re responding to is how connected these issues actually are. A report following global youth perspectives shows that many young people feel overwhelmed not by one issue, but by the accumulation of them all. So when it feels like we’re talking about everything, it’s often because everything feels connected. And in many ways, it is.There’s also a quieter truth that doesn’t always get acknowledged: many of us feel alone in ways that are hard to explain. Even with constant connection online, there’s a gap between being seen and being understood. That’s part of why we create language around identity, experience, and emotion—not to divide, but to find each other. To make sense of where we fit. To feel less alone in it.

As I often say, “Don’t just change to shape our future, do it to render one’s past.”.This idea sits at the center of how we approach change. It’s not just about building something new, it’s about understanding what already exists, what it’s built on, and who it has or hasn’t worked for. It’s a reflection as much as it is progress. And reflection can be uncomfortable. But discomfort isn’t always something to avoid. Sometimes, it’s a sign that something is being reconsidered in a meaningful way. What I hope you can see is that this generation isn’t rooted in opposition, we’re rooted in awareness. We’re not rejecting the resilience you had to build. In many ways, we admire it. But we’re also asking whether resilience always has to look like endurance, or if it can also look like change. Because enduring something and improving it are not the same thing. And maybe both matter.

There’s an opportunity here not for one generation to correct another, but for both to understand each other more fully. When you approach what we’re doing with curiosity instead of assumption, something shifts. Conversations feel less like disagreements and more like exchanges. And that’s where progress lives. Because the truth is, we’re not trying to fight everything. We’re trying to align things. We’re trying to build a world that feels sustainable—not just physically, but emotionally, socially, and structurally. And yes, that requires feeling things deeply. It requires noticing what’s off. It requires speaking when something doesn’t sit right. That’s not sensitivity in the way it’s often used. That’s awareness in action. So the next time it feels like we’re reacting too strongly, pause for a moment. Ask what we might be responding to. Ask what we’re seeing that might not have been visible before. Ask what this shift is trying to show not just about us, but about the world itself. Because the future isn’t something one generation builds alone. It’s something shaped in conversation in the space between experience and awareness, between what was and what could be. And that space only works if we’re willing to meet each other in it.

Works Cited

“Adolescent Mental Health.” World Health Organization, 2025.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health

“Adolescent Mental Health Data.” UNICEF Data, 2025.
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/mental-health/

“Generation Z and Mental Health.” Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2021.
https://www.aecf.org/resources/generation-z-and-mental-health

“Mental Health Study Shows Gen Z Overwhelmed but Undeterred by Global Crises.” UNICEF, 2025.
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/mental-health-study-gen-z

“Gen Z Mental Health and Global Events.” World Economic Forum, 2025.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2025/01/gen-z-mental-health-global-events/

“WHO and UNICEF Launch Guidance to Improve Access to Mental Health Care.” World Health Organization, 2024.
https://www.who.int/news/item/2024-10-10-who-unicef-mental-health-guidance

By Lena Blondell

Lena Blondell is a rising junior at Howard University, where she is studying Film with a minor in Graphic Design. Originally from New Orleans, LA, she joined E Pluribus Unum this summer as an Executive Office Intern. Lena is passionate about storytelling that centers community voices and plans to pursue a career in creative direction and visual media. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new visual inspiration, curating playlists, and rewatching films she swears she’s “studying,” not just enjoying.

Subscribe now

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of essays written by E Pluribus Unum’s Summer Interns. We asked each of them a simple but important question: What do you want older generations to understand about yours? Their answers explore what civic engagement looks like today, what motivates young people to get involved, and how they imagine the future of the South and our country over the next two decades.

These reflections aren’t meant to speak for an entire generation. They’re personal perspectives shaped by lived experience, hope, and a deep investment in the places they call home. As we think about the future of democracy, belonging, and opportunity in the South, we believe it’s worth listening closely to the people who will inherit and help shape that future.

We invite you to read with curiosity, reflect on what resonates, and consider what becomes possible when we make space for younger voices in conversations about where we’re headed together.

As Gen Z enters the workforce, we are inheriting a world that feels harder to fix than the one handed to generations before us. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard some version of “It’s up to you young folks now.” It’s always been said like a compliment, but feels more like an abdication, a handing over of a crisis-ridden baton. I want to push back on this idea of inheriting the responsibility of solving society’s most complex and longstanding issues. Not because I believe the older generations are to blame, but because I believe none of us get to hand off these problems and step away from them.

Every generation before us inherited something broken, facing a crisis it did not create and couldn’t opt out of. Boomers came of age during 1970s stagflation, when unemployment neared 11% and inflation topped 14%. Gen X walked into the early-1990s recession, when unemployment climbed steadily and peaked near 7.8% by mid-1992 representing a downturn so slow to add jobs back that it gave rise to the phrase “jobless recovery“. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data that shows Millennials hit adulthood in the worst downturn since the Depression: youth unemployment hit a record 19.5% in April 2010, and student debt tripled in the years that followed. Now Gen Z is stepping into a job market being reshaped by AI in real time, with a Stanford study finding a 13% relative decline in employment for young workers in the most AI-exposed occupations all while carrying the weight of climate change as the first generation to grow up fully aware of it.

Recall the time you transitioned into adulthood, someone handed you a world with its own impairment, injustice, and unfinished business. Do you remember how heavy the problems felt, maybe even who you blamed for them? The question I keep coming back to is not whose fault it is, but where does the cycle end? And I believe the answer lies in this truth: the cycle ends when, instead of passing the baton, we all carry it together.

So where does inheritance of the problems end and our own responsibility begin? There’s a difference between being complicit in a system you did not design and being blameless within it. At some point we have to acknowledge the role we’ve played in worsening what we’ve inherited, realizing that we participate daily by feeding into algorithms that promote rage over understanding, fueling fast fashion industries despite the climate consequences we’re aware of, and limiting our civic engagement to reposting on Instagram when we’ve never been to a town hall meeting and can’t name our locally elected representatives. While some of this behavior is individual, some of it reflects our society as a whole, we live in a culture that reinforces systems of disengagement. Re-engaging might mean more than just caring about an issue, it might mean analyzing how the issue shows up in our own habits first, or challenging our cynicism and detachment.

Saying “I’ve done my part” or “That’s the next generation’s problem now” is not only unhelpful, but irresponsible, because it wastes knowledge, leverage and experiences that took decades to cultivate. Stepping back is not inherently the problem. I think handing off a fight while staying reachable and showing up when it counts demonstrates support. My dad described it as his generation running alongside Generation Z while we carry the baton, sharing past mistakes so we don’t repeat them.

I want the older generations to know that I think we need your insight; you inherited a broken world and did what you could with it, some of it worked, some of it didn’t, and now it’s ours to carry forward. Not to hand-off, but to relay. And a relay only works if the person ahead of you keeps running alongside you for a stretch, not just passing the baton and walking off the track, not washing your hands of it, but still being right beside the next generation, helping to clean up the mess.

However, there is real mistrust between Generation Z and those before us. Some are thinking: don’t run with us, you had your chance, and things got worse on your watch. I understand that anger. But I don’t think it gets us anywhere on its own. If every generation responds to inheriting a mess by writing off the one before it, the cycle doesn’t end, it just repeats, with more distance between us each time.

Where do we go from here? I think we start with empathy and re-engagement in community; seeing people across race, class, gender, and generation, as neighbors not opponents. It’s easy to say “this is not my problem” until it affects someone you care about. Community is what makes a problem that doesn’t directly touch you start to matter. I think progress stalls once we start caring more about winning individually than moving forward together. Too many voices are silenced because people are chasing supermajorities and pushing their own agendas instead of caring about the country as a whole. If we keep operating in a way that only concerns ourselves with people just like us, we don’t move forward. Solving these problems takes everyone, including the lived experience of people who’ve witnessed severities and hardships the rest of us haven’t.

While collective empathy is the ideal, it is harder to practice across power divides. Expecting the poor to empathize with the wealthy, or the marginalized to relate to their oppressors, misplaces moral responsibility. The burden of understanding belongs to those who hold the power to change things. They must be willing to step back, set aside their privilege and listen first. The same is true across generations. Progress in the South, and in society as a whole, depends on bridging the gap between Gen Z and the generations before it, and establishing trust between generations. Every generation must stop blaming the last for the problems we’re all inheriting, and recognize that the responsibility for solving these problems is one we all should carry.

What I want older generations to understand is this: Gen Z isn’t looking to sit this one out. We’re not passive, and we’re not interested in pretending we have no part in the problems faced today. We want to acknowledge our own complicity, and we want to work alongside every generation before us to actually solve the issues in front of us, eventually creating an environment where we see each other, across every line that divides us, as equals working toward the same thing: a more perfect union, built together rather than handed down.

By Lauryn Bone

Lauryn Bone is a rising senior at Tuskegee University, where she studies Public Health and Psychology. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she joined EPU this summer as a Policy and Government Relations Intern. After graduation, Lauryn plans to pursue a Master of Public Health to continue building a career at the intersection of public policy and community health. Outside of work, she enjoys reading and has spent her summer exploring New Orleans in search of its best coffee shops and bookstores.

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Over the next four weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of essays written by E Pluribus Unum’s Summer Interns. We asked each of them a simple but important question: What do you want older generations to understand about yours? Their answers explore what civic engagement looks like today, what motivates young people to get involved, and how they imagine the future of the South and our country over the next two decades.

These reflections aren’t meant to speak for an entire generation. They’re personal perspectives shaped by lived experience, hope, and a deep investment in the places they call home. As we think about the future of democracy, belonging, and opportunity in the South, we believe it’s worth listening closely to the people who will inherit and help shape that future.

We invite you to read with curiosity, reflect on what resonates, and consider what becomes possible when we make space for younger voices in conversations about where we’re headed together.

How do you distinguish between ideology and habit?

An ideology requires regular upkeep. You must continue to poke and prod at it to make sure it even still applies. A habit, by contrast, looks like nothing at all. Where I find that the two come into close contact is in the business of political labels. A decision an individual makes in their youth to be left- or right-leaning, then becomes enmeshed with their own identity. Speaking as a member of Gen-Z, the part that worries me is that both major parties in America have shifted on the political spectrum in the past decade or two¹, meaning that the party that won older voters’ loyalty 30 years ago is not running on the same platform today. As a result, longtime voters, particularly older generations who have voted a straight ticket for 30 or 40 years, are now disadvantaged by the strict adherence to their political label.

And this makes for a useful reminder ahead of November. Take the story coming out of Georgia this summer, for example. Governor Brian Kemp, the popular two-term conservative, spent the last year endorsing and vigorously campaigning the political newcomer, Derek Dooley, for the U.S. Senate nomination. In the eleventh hour, President Trump publicly backed Rep. Mike Collins extolling him as “a WARRIOR and WINNER”². Collins then defeated Kemp’s choice, Dooley, in the primary runoff to advance against Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff.

This GOP race came down to two diverging flavors of conservatism. The bottom line here is that the candidate’s party alone tells you far less than it used to. Similarly, I argue the ideological label people use to identify themselves on the political spectrum fails to capture their full beliefs in practice.

Political scientists Ellis and Stimson dub this the symbolic-operational ideology problem in their book Ideology in America. Say that five times fast. What they mean is that people don’t always vote for what they say they believe in. They found that more Americans, in general, align with liberal views and support a robust federal government. At the same time, more Americans position themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. And when asked to describe their own politics without forcing this binary, a large share reach for “moderate” or reply “don’t know”³. What this reflects is the shortcomings of an either/or system trying to describe something with more dimensions than two. Fortunately, this information should come as a relief to anyone who has voted a straight ticket for years. Your ballot can — and should — hold flexibility for new perspectives and the variability of a unique individual.

A salient point to address here is the common misconception that my generation is more impressionable and emotionally suspect than older generations ever were. In defense of the youth, I want to push back on this phenomenon. This same argument has been used against every generation’s youth by the one before it. The pattern reveals that intergenerational friction might be the result of one group growing up as products of contemporary society. We are operating in a relatively more progressive age that pushes us to evaluate and re-evaluate issues in real time. It allows us to take on a clear-eyed approach before we ultimately realize our own politics. This phase is its own kind of privilege because I’m not so sure this critical examination lasts forever. And that’s what concerns me.

In time, my own generation will harden in their beliefs and begin to lean on ideals or labels that are ill-suited to a new age. This is what I believe has already begun to happen among older generations. The rigid practice of voting what once represented a community identity and value does not translate over to today’s political climate.

But there’s a large reason that keeps me from being cynical about this. Growing up in South Mississippi, I quickly learned the strategic turn of phrase and coded language that made up talking politics. You never outright asked someone, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” You asked around it. Nonetheless, coded conversations like these oddly excelled on one very key metric: common ground. Suggesting improving our public schools or increasing teacher pay received approval across almost every kind of household. Evidently, there was a version of Southern politics where most of us could still agree on the fundamentals — even if only because it stayed vague enough.

This is what I want to return to. It is an easy task to notice everywhere we disagree, but it is just as important to prioritize all of the agreement we share.

The generations before mine carry the rich practices of the South which I would never want to abandon. In the same way my generation asks for a new standard from theirs, I imagine one day we will be made to reckon with the ideas we adopted at twenty-five. But old habits don’t have to die hard. The most meaningful changes to make can start by redefining what voting looks like for us. Reading the platform before the party, normalizing splitting the ticket on election day, and having issues-based discussions that remind us of the bigger picture will always matter.

Underneath all of the disconnect, there is the truth that people are the same everywhere. I deeply care for the same Southern traditions and way of life as those before me. Twenty years from now, affordability, healthcare, and housing will still make up the substance in debates. What should change come election time is how accountable we hold each other for the kind of place we want to live in.

Because I agree with you. That’s the part I don’t think gets said enough.

¹ Ojer, Jaume et al. “Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA.” Nature human behaviour vol. 9,10 (2025): 2027-2037. doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02251-0

² Vakil, Caroline. “Trump Endorses Collins in Georgia Republican Senate Runoff.” The Hill, 14 June 2026, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5922416-trump-kemp-collins-dooley-georgia-senate/.

³ Claassen, C., Tucker, P. & Smith, S.S. Ideological Labels in America. Polit Behav 37, 253–278 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9272-6

By Anushka Singh

Anushka Singh is a rising junior at UPenn where she is studying Political Science and Urban Studies. Originally from Hattiesburg, MS, she has joined EPU this summer as an Executive Office Intern. Anushka plans on attending law school after graduation and is determined to catch a Phillies game before then. She has spent her free time this summer finally making a dent in her TBR and losing money at New Orleans flea markets.

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Over the next four weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of essays written by E Pluribus Unum’s Summer Interns. We asked each of them a simple but important question: What do you want older generations to understand about yours? Their answers explore what civic engagement looks like today, what motivates young people to get involved, and how they imagine the future of the South and our country over the next two decades.

These reflections aren’t meant to speak for an entire generation. They’re personal perspectives shaped by lived experience, hope, and a deep investment in the places they call home. As we think about the future of democracy, belonging, and opportunity in the South, we believe it’s worth listening closely to the people who will inherit and help shape that future.

We invite you to read with curiosity, reflect on what resonates, and consider what becomes possible when we make space for younger voices in conversations about where we’re headed together.

The younger generations are getting older, and it is time for everyone to start listening to them.

Our country has always been built to support those who already hold power. Today, most of those powerful positions are held by older generations who have struggled to navigate the effects of digital media on their opinions. Older generations are not out of touch or selfish. They represent the parents and grandparents who raised us and cared for us when we were young. The real issue lies in the fact that our system of government and the social realities on the ground no longer allow wisdom in age to be the most important factor in creating good governance.

Older generations, since the dawn of time, really, have criticized their younger counterparts for their lack of understanding and dismissed their opinions as naive assumptions of a world they don’t yet understand. This pattern remains true today as baby boomers are still the largest and

most influential age group in the country. They created the America we know today and continue to shape it. The resulting turmoil doesn’t reflect a lack of love, or care, or intelligence for the future, but rather a failure of design. A system can still be run by good people who mean well, but still pour everything into present issues, leaving the future to figure things out on their own. The disconnect between the generations who built this country and the young people who will inherit it continues to grow by the year, and the issue is structural.

Roughly two in five members of Congress are baby boomers, which makes sense given who has historically held power and who has the financial influence to shape elections. That imbalance affects national priorities. Taxpayer dollars often flow toward programs older generations rely on most, such as Medicare and Social Security, while long-term investments in housing, education, climate resilience, and economic mobility are left for younger generations to fight for later. Sure, it’s easy to blame the people in our legislatures and positions of power, but we also have to consider how social media and 24 hour news influence their beliefs, their political instincts, and the voters who keep putting them in office.

Gen Z, those who are now 14 to 29 years old, is the only generation to have fully grown up surrounded by screens. I don’t remember much of my own childhood without them. In sharp contrast to older generations, growing up online came with a sort of training that I still rely on. In middle and high school, teachers drilled into us that not everything can be trusted online. We were taught to be wary of .com sources and lean on .org and .edu instead. It was a rudimentary way of thinking, and it doesn’t fully apply to the short-form media we consume now, but we were taught early on to meet the internet with deep skepticism.

Many of our grandparents were not. They are some of the most loving people in my life, but they are also remarkably vulnerable to whatever their algorithm places in front of them. I have watched caring people get slowly consumed by ideas built to provoke fear and turn that fear into decisions. It’s increasingly clear how that shows up in our politics.

Tommy Tuberville, now the Republican nominee for Alabama’s next governor, has called Islam “a cult,” said it is “not a religion,” pushed to deport Muslims, and publicly celebrated an Alabama Islamic school being denied a place to build. His rhetoric was extreme enough that the Council on American-Islamic Relations named him the first sitting U.S. senator it has ever labeled an anti-Muslim extremist.¹ None of this language surfaced until about a month after he launched his campaign for governor. That kind of language only finds an audience because the outrage and fear it provokes is exactly what the feeds for older users are designed to reward.

This phenomenon isn’t confined to older people or those on the right. After Luigi Mangione was accused of killing a health insurance CEO in late 2024, feeds full of people my age turned a murder accusation into a folk hero of the non-elite almost overnight. Researchers at Rutgers tracked the memes and viral AI-edited tributes culminating in a movement that lionized killing as a legitimate answer to a broken system.² This followed the same pattern perpetrated by the same machinery of outrage, but it was just a different target.

The pull of digital media isn’t a liberal fault, a conservative fault, or even a young or old fault. The problem affects all of us, but not equally. The people most susceptible to this radicalizing machinery are disproportionately the people holding power, and that is what’s worrying.

When an algorithm successfully radicalizes a 20-year-old, they might post something regrettable or lash out at family dinner. But when a senator, chasing what he believes his base wants, is shaped by the same method of radicalization, he writes laws that govern the entire country. We can’t blame individual grandparents for what shows up on their feed. The system is built to feed outrage to everyone, and then it hands ballot boxes, mainly, to the generation least equipped to question what they’re being shown.

So why are young people still written off as naive, when the present crisis is hitting the hardest several generations above us?

Gen Z does not have superior judgment. But what we do have is fluency, or a set of reflexes built by growing up inside the systems now reshaping everyone else’s politics. That fluency is important because it means we’re in a position to see something and name a problem in real time before it hardens into law.

Having a listening ear for young people is only a start. Imagine a country run on the combined knowledge and instincts of every generation within it. The people in power continue to govern through their hard-earned knowledge of what has and hasn’t worked. Young people, fluent in the pull of online radicalization, are trusted enough to speak plainly when the country is being steered toward hatred and the scapegoating of whoever counts as “them” this year. It also means giving young people a seat at the table because they take the work of building a real, sustainable future seriously. The people in power need to start thinking in decades instead of worrying about the next election cycle.

There is no blueprint for fixing the country, so I definitely don’t have one. But the gap between generations doesn’t have to be one more divide we let calcify. It’s actually one of the easier

ones to close, considering that the trust between young and old has been a part of human nature for millennia. It just takes the people in power choosing to listen as the rest of us speak up and help them build what comes next.

¹ Council on American-Islamic Relations, “CAIR Designates Sen. Tuberville as Anti-Muslim Extremist” (Dec. 15, 2025). Tuberville’s specific remarks — calling Islam “a cult” and “not a religion,” calling for deportation, and applauding an Islamic school being denied a site in Hoover — are documented in Alabama Reflector (”Tommy Tuberville’s anti-Muslim attacks land senator on a civil rights group’s extremist list,” Dec. 16, 2025) and Alabama Daily News (”Tuberville’s anti-Muslim rhetoric catches on among Alabama Republicans in campaign year,” Apr. 6, 2026).

² Network Contagion Research Institute (Rutgers), “Killing With Applause: Emergent Permission Structures” (Dec. 2024), documenting the online lionization of Luigi Mangione following the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; see also reporting on pro-Mangione content and platform moderation (NBC News/Yahoo News, Jan. 2025).

By Fletcher Neely

Fletcher Neely is a rising Junior at Tulane University where he is studying history and environmental studies. Originally from Birmingham, he has joined EPU this Summer as a policy and government relations intern. Fletcher plans on attending law school after graduation and has spent his free time this summer working out and exploring New Orleans. He’s excited to spend the fall of 2026 studying abroad in Prague.

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We often think about the strength of a community only after it has been tested. A natural disaster strikes. A tragedy unfolds. A public conflict erupts. Suddenly, neighbors organize, institutions collaborate, and people find one another in ways they hadn’t before.

But durable communities aren’t built in the middle of challenges. They’re built long before they’re needed.

Across the country, we see growing evidence that loneliness, declining trust, and social fragmentation are making it harder for communities to solve problems together. We have become increasingly disconnected—not simply from institutions, but from one another. When relationships weaken, so does our collective capacity to navigate disagreement, respond to change, and shape a shared future.

The encouraging news is that this trend isn’t inevitable.

In communities large and small, people are intentionally strengthening the relationships that make places durable. They are creating spaces where residents, civic leaders, faith communities, nonprofits, educators, and local officials can work alongside one another—not because they agree on everything, but because they recognize that belonging is the foundation that allows communities to adapt, solve problems, and endure.

One example of this work is explored in the above episode of Reimagining Us, where Nichole Argo and Scott Hutcheson examine how communities can intentionally design for belonging rather than simply hope it emerges on its own.

The conversation begins with Kristen Scott Kennedy of the Council on Foundations, who discusses the unique role philanthropy can play in helping communities build lasting civic capacity. Foundations are uniquely positioned to convene unlikely partners, model collaboration across sectors, and invest in the long-term work of relationship-building—work that rarely fits neatly into traditional funding cycles but is essential to durable communities.

The episode then turns to the Needham Resilience Network (NRN), a community-led initiative in Needham, Massachusetts, created after demographic shifts, rising hate incidents, and growing distrust challenged the town’s social fabric.

What emerged wasn’t simply a response to those challenges.

It became an investment in the community’s long-term durability.

Town officials, educators, faith leaders, residents, and community organizations came together to build relationships, strengthen communication across differences, and co-create solutions to local challenges. Through conversations grounded in belonging and shared responsibility, the network demonstrates what becomes possible when communities invest in one another before problems become crises.

As you’ll hear from Bala Venkat, John Schlittler, Rabbi Jay Perlman, Marcus Nelson, Dan Gutekanst, and Beth Pinals, the greatest transformation wasn’t simply in the initiatives they launched—it was in how people began to relate to one another.

Their experience offers lessons that extend well beyond one Massachusetts town.

Whether you’re a resident looking to strengthen your neighborhood, a nonprofit leader seeking deeper partnerships, a local official navigating community tensions, or a philanthropic organization considering where to invest, the conversation offers practical guidance rooted in lived experience.

These ideas reflect something we’ve explored throughout Reimagining Us: democracy is experienced locally. Before people can solve shared challenges together, they must first experience themselves as belonging—as people whose voices matter and whose communities are stronger because they are part of them.

Durability doesn’t happen by accident. It is built through relationships, shared purpose, and the steady work of creating a broader sense of “we.”

That’s why stories like the Needham Resilience Network matter.

They remind us that the future isn’t determined only by our biggest national debates. It’s also shaped by what happens in school board meetings, faith communities, neighborhood gatherings, local foundations, and town halls—where relationships are formed, trust is strengthened, and communities build the capacity to face whatever comes next.

These are the bright spots worth paying attention to.

Because they show us that durable communities don’t simply withstand change—they grow stronger through the relationships they’ve built together.

The explanation is almost always the same: voter apathy. People don’t care. They’re checked out. They’ve tuned politics out.

But what if we’re calling it the wrong thing?

At E Pluribus Unum, our latest survey set out to understand something different. Instead of simply asking people what they think about candidates or issues, we wanted to understand the conditions that shape how people experience civic life. Do they trust the institutions around them? Do they believe they’re treated fairly? Do they feel connected to their neighbors? Do they believe their voice matters? Do they think the people making decisions are listening?

Those aren’t just political questions. They’re human questions. They help explain why some communities thrive while others struggle.

One of the strongest findings from our survey has to do with voting. What we found is that many people who don’t participate aren’t apathetic at all. They feel disregarded.

There’s an important difference.

An apathetic person doesn’t care. A disregarded person cares deeply but has concluded that no one else does. That their concerns won’t be heard. That their vote won’t change anything. That no matter who is elected, people like them will still be ignored.

Those are two very different problems, and they require two very different responses.

Here’s the paradox. When people feel disregarded, many withdraw. They stop voting. They stop attending meetings. They stop speaking up because they don’t believe it will make a difference.

But by stepping away, they also surrender one of the few ways they can influence the systems that shape their lives. The cycle feeds itself. Leaders hear fewer voices. Communities become less representative. Trust declines even further.

None of this means people simply need to try harder to vote, or that leaders just need to campaign harder. It means the relationship between people and the institutions that serve them has to change.

Our survey found something encouraging. When people believe they are being heard—when communication is specific to their concerns, when leaders acknowledge what people are experiencing, explain what they’re going to do, and follow through—people respond.

People respond when they believe they matter.

Notice what I didn’t say. I didn’t say leaders have to agree with everyone. I didn’t say every problem can be solved. People know better than that. But they do want to know someone is listening.

Too much public communication is built around attacking the other side, repeating talking points, or delivering polished promises. That may win headlines. It doesn’t always build trust.

So here’s a thought for every candidate preparing a campaign ad, writing a stump speech, or standing behind a podium this year.

Before you ask people for their vote, ask yourself a different question.

Have I shown people that I hear them?

Not, ‘Have I made my case?’ Not, ‘Have I attacked my opponent?’ Not even, ‘Have I explained my platform?’

Have I shown people that I understand what they’re carrying? Have I acknowledged what they’re worried about? Have I told them what I’m going to do about it? Have I shown them that they matter?

Our survey suggests that this may be where trust begins.

And for the rest of us, there’s a challenge too. Feeling disregarded is painful. Withdrawing is understandable. But when we stop participating, we also surrender one of the few ways we have to shape the future. Silence may protect us from disappointment, but it rarely produces change.

Maybe we’ve spent too much time trying to convince people to vote and not enough time convincing them that they matter.

That’s a different conversation.

And it just might produce a different result.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

Thanks for reading.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone across a line of difference—someone who might not see the world just like you do. That’s where the real work starts.

📬 Subscribe to get more reflections, analysis, and calls to action around building a more just and united America.

💬 Have thoughts? Hit reply. Let’s keep the conversation going.

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I’ve learned that those conversations really begin long before anyone walks onto a stage.

This week, our annual convening brought together Unum Fellows and Unum Academy members from across the South. One of our featured guests was political philosopher Brandon Terry, whose new book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope, explores the unfinished work of American democracy.

As I prepared for our conversation, I did what I always do. I read. I took notes. I looked for themes and questions that might lead to a thoughtful discussion.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I had stopped preparing for the interview.

I had started interrogating my own assumptions.

That’s the mark of a really good book. It doesn’t simply tell you what the author thinks. It quietly asks whether you’ve been asking the right questions yourself.

Brandon never told me I was wrong. He simply led me to questions I hadn’t fully considered.

I found myself thinking less about politics and more about people. Less about participation and more about what comes before participation. Less about whether people are engaged and more about whether they believe someone like them still matters.

I’ve spent much of my career believing that good questions are often more valuable than quick answers. Maybe that’s why his work stayed with me. It didn’t give me another framework to memorize. It gave me a better lens through which to examine my own.

I won’t try to summarize Brandon’s argument here. His book deserves to be read on its own terms. What I can say is that it reminded me how easy it is to mistake certainty for understanding, and how important it is to remain curious enough to let someone else’s thinking sharpen your own.

One of the reasons I treasure our annual convening isn’t simply the speakers we invite. It’s the permission it gives all of us to keep learning.

In a culture that often rewards certainty, there is something quietly radical about changing your mind—or even just refining it.

I walked into my conversation with Brandon Terry hoping to better understand his book.

I walked away understanding my own work a little better.

That’s a conversation I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

Thanks for reading.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone across a line of difference—someone who might not see the world just like you do. That’s where the real work starts.

📬 Subscribe to get more reflections, analysis, and calls to action around building a more just and united America.

💬 Have thoughts? Hit reply. Let’s keep the conversation going.

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We’ve explored the growing sense of loneliness and isolation many people feel, even when surrounded by others. We’ve examined the choices we make when faced with division, and the consequences of staying silent when our communities need us most. Again and again, we’ve returned to a common theme: healthy communities don’t happen by accident. They require people willing to show up, stay curious, and invest in one another.

But there is another question we have to ask.

What happens when people are ready to connect, but there aren’t enough opportunities to do so? What happens when neighbors want to know one another, but there are few shared spaces, traditions, or institutions that bring them together? What happens when we ask individuals to carry the entire burden of rebuilding community without giving them the support structures that make connection possible?

These are the questions at the center of the latest episode of Reimagining Us, “Transforming Our Communities.”

Throughout this season, we’ve focused on the mindsets and skills that help people navigate differences with openness and empathy. We’ve talked about the importance of seeing one another as fully human, even amid disagreement. But lasting change requires more than individual transformation. It also requires environments that help those values take root. Connection needs places to live. Belonging needs structures that support it. Communities need what some have called civic infrastructure: the spaces, relationships, policies, and traditions that make it easier for people to come together and harder for them to drift apart.

In this episode, hosts Nichole Argo and Scott Hutcheson explore what it would look like if we treated connection as something worth investing in, not as a byproduct of community life, but as one of its primary goals.

Guest Sam Pressler challenges us to think differently about what makes a community thrive. While local governments often focus on economic development, housing, transportation, or public safety, Sam argues that relationships themselves deserve attention. After all, strong communities are built not only on services and systems but also on trust, belonging, and the feeling that we are connected to the people around us. Through his Connective Tissue framework, he highlights practical ways communities can strengthen those bonds, from neighborhood events and welcome programs for newcomers to community led projects that help residents work alongside one another. The examples are often simple, but their impact can be profound. A block party. A community cleanup. A local tradition that encourages people to gather. These moments may seem small, yet they create the conditions where relationships can grow.

The conversation also explores what it means to build connection into the way organizations operate. Layla Zaidane, President and CEO of Future Caucus, shares lessons from her work bringing together young elected officials from different political backgrounds. At a time when polarization often dominates the headlines, her experience offers a reminder that relationships can change the way people approach disagreement. Future Caucus creates opportunities for lawmakers to learn together, collaborate, and build trust before conflict arises. Over time, those relationships make it easier to engage across differences and find common ground when challenges emerge. Layla describes this as “institutionalizing relationships across differences,” a phrase that captures a powerful idea. If relationships matter, we shouldn’t leave them to chance. We should create systems and cultures that help them flourish.

There is a tendency to think of connection as something deeply personal. And it is. But this episode invites us to see it as something larger as well. The health of our communities is shaped not only by individual choices but also by the structures that surround us. We can encourage people to be more engaged, more empathetic, and more invested in one another, but if there are no gathering places, no shared traditions, and few opportunities for meaningful interaction, those efforts will always face an uphill battle.

That insight feels especially relevant right now. Across the country, many people are searching for ways to rebuild trust, strengthen their communities, and create a greater sense of belonging. The solutions are often discussed in personal terms: be kinder, listen more, reach out to a neighbor. Those actions matter. But they become far more powerful when communities intentionally create opportunities for them to happen.

Perhaps that is the most hopeful takeaway from this conversation. Belonging is not merely something we stumble upon. It can be cultivated. Communities can make deliberate choices that bring people together. Organizations can create environments where relationships develop across lines of difference. Leaders can design policies that strengthen the social fabric rather than assume it will maintain itself.

The work of Reimagining Us has always been about more than changing minds. It is about creating the conditions where connection can thrive. In this episode, we explore what happens when communities take that challenge seriously and what becomes possible when we build not just roads and buildings, but the relationships that help us find our way to one another.

As we near the end of Season 1, we’re also looking ahead. The conversations we’ve had this year about belonging, trust, pluralism, and civic life have laid the foundation for what’s next. Without giving too much away, we’re already preparing for Season 2, which we expect to launch this September. The next chapter will continue exploring how Americans can navigate difference, strengthen community, and create a shared future in an increasingly fragmented world. We can’t wait to share more in the weeks ahead.

For now, we hope you’ll join us for Episode 7 of Reimagining Us: Transforming Our Communities and continue this journey with us.

Reimagining Us is produced by Next Chapter Podcasts.

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I’ve been watching the primaries come in this spring. The turnout numbers, mostly. And they’re low — almost everywhere, race after race. A governor’s contest in the biggest state in the country barely cleared a third of its voters.

That’s what got me. Not who won. How few people decided it.

New Orleans is a city that knows how to show up. People will hold a parade spot at dawn. They’ll stand in the Jazz Fest mud for a band they’ve already seen five times. They’ll wait forty-five minutes for a plate of food they could’ve made at home.

But when it comes to the elections that decide who really runs things, most people stay home.

At first that looks like laziness, or just busy lives. It’s neither. It’s something stranger. Most people are showing up to the wrong election.

Let me explain, because once you see it you can’t unsee it.

In most of the country, one party wins a given area every single time. The place leans so far one way that November isn’t really a contest — it’s a formality. Everybody already knows who’ll win.

So where does the real decision get made? Earlier. In the primary — the round where each party picks its candidate. If your area always votes one way, then whoever wins that party’s primary wins the seat, period. The primary is the election. November just makes it official.

About 9 out of every 10 congressional districts work like this. Safe. Decided before the fall even starts.

Now here’s the part that stuck with me.

Almost nobody votes in primaries. They feel small. They’re easy to skip. So in 2024, about 7 out of every 100 eligible voters ended up choosing the winner in nearly 9 out of 10 House races. Seven percent, picking for everybody. Close to 40% of the country had no real say at all.

And the handful who do vote in primaries aren’t a cross section of America. People in the middle — folks who don’t love either side — are about half the country. In these primaries, they’re about 1 in 10. The ones who show up are the most fired-up and the most certain. So that’s who the candidates listen to. Not because anyone’s evil. Because that’s who’s in the room.

That’s the whole problem, and it’s a behavior problem before it’s a political one. A small, loud slice decides. A big, quieter middle skips the decision and then feels unheard. And the gap between those two things keeps growing.

I want to be careful here, because there’s an easy, smug version of this: if you don’t vote, don’t complain. I don’t buy it.

A lot of people aren’t skipping — they’re locked out. In sixteen states, if you’re registered as an independent, you’re not even allowed into the primary, even though your taxes help pay for it. That’s more than sixteen million people. And in plenty of races, only one person runs, so there’s nothing to show up for. You can’t blame someone for missing a door that was never open.

And right now, the problem is being made worse on purpose.

In a lot of places, the maps that draw these districts are being redrawn — not around people, but around parties. The lines get bent to guarantee outcomes and make safe seats safer. Every new safe seat hands a little more of the deciding to that small primary crowd, and leaves a few less real elections standing.

Some of this cuts deeper than party. Across parts of the South, the people losing ground are communities that were kept from the ballot box for generations — that organized, marched, and in some cases died to win the right to be represented. They won it. And now the lines are being redrawn to take it back. That isn’t an accident of geography. It’s a choice somebody made with a pen.

Which is exactly why this isn’t a small thing to skip. The fewer real elections there are, the more each remaining one decides.

So that’s the problem. Here’s why I haven’t given up on it.

It’s fixable. Not all of it — but the behavior part, which is most of it.

You don’t have to win an argument with anybody. You just have to be in the room. More people in the room doesn’t decide who’s right. It makes it a fair fight again. Right now it isn’t lopsided because one side is smarter. It’s lopsided because one side shows up and the other one doesn’t.

And people will show up — when it’s made to make sense to them. Somebody tried this in Tennessee. They reached out to people who reliably vote in November but skip the primaries, and explained what was at stake. Turnout in that group jumped by double digits in a single year. These weren’t new, passionate believers. They were regular people who’d just never been told the real game was happening without them.

That’s the whole fix. Not converting anyone. Not winning a culture war. Just closing the gap between how people show up for everything else and how they show up for this.

So here’s the one thing I’d say, now that this season’s nearly run its course.

Don’t save it for November, and don’t save it only for the races that make the news. Show up for the small ones, the local ones, the spring ones — the quiet elections almost nobody watches, which keep turning out to be the ones that decide the most.

A vote is a voice. For most people, it’s the most direct one they’ll ever have. And the midterm this fall is one of the elections that shapes years, not months — who draws the next maps, and who answers for the last ones.

People will wait in the heat for hours for a show that’s over by sundown.

This is worth at least that. Show up for all of it. Use the voice you’ve got.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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Then they cut to a clip of a high-ranking conservative official giving a commencement address. And he was saying it. The same language. Common ground. Shared values. The things that bind us together. Almost word for word what the panel had just been mourning the loss of.

Then they came back from the clip and started in on him. His politics. His record. What he stands for. And they just kept going. Nobody stopped to say, hey, wait — he used the exact words you were just saying we’ve lost.

I was mostly listening, not really watching, and that’s probably why it caught me. The phrase had been said three or four different ways in the span of a minute, by people who would never sit at the same table, and none of them noticed they were reaching for the same vocabulary.

That’s when I started thinking about this.

Not because I don’t want to believe in shared values. The opposite. My whole work depends on believing people can still build something together. Solve problems together. Make a future where more people get to thrive. I believe in shared prosperity. I believe most people want dignity and safety and a decent shot for the people they love.

But I’ve gotten suspicious of how easily we say “shared values” without ever stopping to ask what those values actually are. Or what they’re supposed to ask of us.

Because if our shared values are so obvious and so enduring, why does public life feel this cruel?

Why are people so quick to humiliate each other online? When did meanness start passing for strength? Why do we assume the worst about people we’ve never met? Why is it so easy to treat someone as disposable the second they become inconvenient, or different, or poor, or politically useful?

Politicians invoke shared values. Preachers invoke shared values. Officials at commencement podiums. Panelists on cable news. We’re all reaching for the same words, especially when things feel like they’re coming apart.

I’m starting to wonder if we share the vocabulary but not the practice.

We all still know the words. Fairness. Freedom. Faith. Family. Hard work. Responsibility. Grace. Dignity.

Almost nobody rejects any of that outright. But push a little, and the agreement falls apart fast.

Take fairness. Is it equal opportunity? Equal outcomes? Rewarding effort? Protecting people who can’t protect themselves? Second chances? Consequences? Making sure nobody gets left behind?

Most people would tell you they believe in fairness. They just mean wildly different things when they say it.

Same with freedom. One person hears freedom and thinks the government should stay out of their business. Don’t tread on me. Don’t tell me what to do. Another person hears freedom and thinks about whether they get to make their own choices about their body, who they love, who they are. Don’t tread on me either.

I hear people invoke “Judeo-Christian values” like the phrase itself is supposed to settle it. But I almost never hear anyone say what they actually mean by it. Does it mean mercy? Hospitality? Humility? Caring for the poor? Forgiving people? Welcoming a stranger? Treating every person like they carry something sacred?

Or does it just mean, right now in Louisiana, putting the Ten Commandments up in schools?

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Maybe values are just the things we admire. Principles are the things we hold to when it costs us something.

It’s easy to value kindness when life feels stable. Harder when you’re scared, or embarrassed, or angry, or feel like you’re losing ground. Easy to believe in dignity in the abstract. Harder when extending dignity means giving something up. Patience. Comfort. A little bit of power.

That might be the real test. Not whether we can list our values. Whether they still hold when we’re under stress.

And maybe we stay divided not because we don’t share values, but because values by themselves are too thin to stand up to fear, and grievance, and the habit of sorting people into us and them, and a whole economy built on convincing us our neighbor is the enemy.

I still believe there’s more good in people than our politics tends to show. I still believe most folks want a decent life, work that means something, a safe place to live, and a better shot for their kids than they had.

I just don’t believe the slogans anymore.

Because values only become real when they actually shape how we act. How institutions run. How a community works. Who gets heard. Who gets protected. Who gets forgiven. Who gets written off.

Maybe the measure of our values isn’t what we say we believe.

Maybe it’s who benefits when we act on them.

And maybe the real question isn’t whether America has shared values.

Maybe it’s whether we’re willing to live like other people deserve them too.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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And yet within seconds, I had built an entire person around him. Not consciously at first. Instantly. Automatically. I decided what kind of politics he probably had. What television he watched. How he likely felt about cities, universities, maybe even people like me. I imagined what kind of truck he drove. I assigned him a temperament. A worldview. Probably even a voting history.

All from three words on the back of a stranger’s shirt.

That realization has stayed with me.

Over the past few weeks, I have traveled through New Orleans, Boston, St. Louis, and Washington. Airports have a way of turning people into observers of one another. There is not much else to do while waiting at a gate for another delayed flight except study strangers and quietly narrate their lives.

And I realized I do this constantly. The really tall guy looking for his phone. The stylish older woman at the coffee stand. The young conservative guy. The anxious mom. The wealthy couple. The loud businessman.

At first, I thought those details simply made stories more colorful when I repeated them later. But somewhere over Missouri, I started wondering whether I was doing something else entirely.

The tall man was not important to the story. Neither was the woman’s style. Most of the adjectives I used had nothing to do with what actually happened. What they did do was make me feel like I understood people quickly.

That, I think, is the temptation.

We no longer meet people. We process them.

Every detail becomes evidence. Every symbol becomes a conclusion. A shirt, an accent, a yard sign, a podcast mention, a tattoo, a tone of voice — we gather fragments and rush toward certainty as if human beings are puzzles that need solving immediately. And once we decide who someone is, curiosity quietly exits the room.

The uncomfortable truth is that I have no idea who the man in that T-shirt actually was. He could have been exactly who I imagined. Or not remotely close.

Maybe he had a daughter he adored. Maybe he volunteered somewhere on weekends. Maybe he was kind. Maybe he was obnoxious. Maybe he was thoughtful. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he had just buried someone he loved. Maybe he was the funniest person at Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe he was difficult to live with.

I do not know.

I never saw his face. I never heard his voice. I never spoke to him.

But my brain did not enjoy not knowing.

That struck me.

Not because I think noticing differences is wrong. Human beings notice things. We always will. But somewhere along the way, many of us started confusing observation with understanding. We have become remarkably confident interpreters of people we have never actually met.

Politics encourages it. Social media rewards it. The internet practically runs on it. Everybody is sorted instantly now. Everybody categorized. Everybody flattened into something legible and predictable. And after a while, you stop noticing how unnatural that is. You stop noticing that you are talking about human beings as though they are brands.

The more I thought about it afterward, the more I realized my brain was behaving a lot like the internet.

See a fragment. Assign a category. Predict the rest. Move on.

Social media algorithms work by feeding us certainty as quickly as possible. They learn what we already suspect, reinforce what we already believe, and train us to make faster and faster conclusions with less and less information.

What unsettled me sitting on that plane was wondering how much those systems are now shaping us in return. Not just what we think. How we think.

How quickly we decide who people are. How little evidence we require. How uncomfortable we have become with simply not knowing.

The man in the airport never spoke. I never saw his face. All I saw were three words on the back of a T-shirt.

And somehow my mind still rushed to complete the story.

That feels worth paying attention to.

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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This week, we’re recording Season 2 of Reimagining Us inside the historic WGBH studios, a place built for public conversation at a moment when meaningful public conversation feels increasingly rare. Outside these walls, the country is exhausted by outrage cycles, fractured trust, and a culture that rewards certainty over curiosity. Inside them, we’ve been asking a different question:

What would it take to truly hear each other again?

Episode 6, Parts 1 and 2, explores that question through conversations with John Sarrouf of Essential Partners and journalist and author Monica Guzmán, two people working from different angles toward the same urgent challenge: helping us stay in relationship across deep disagreement.

The timing could not be more important.

In recent months, we’ve written on this Substack about the growing consequences of disconnection, from High Conflict, Cloud Problems, and the Work of Reimagining Us to The Question We’re Not Asking and Belonging: A North Star for Our Communities. Again and again, we return to the same tension: we are surrounded by communication, yet starving for understanding.

We debate constantly. We perform opinions professionally. We react instantly.

But dialogue, real dialogue, is something else entirely.

John Sarrouf, co-Executive Director of Essential Partners, makes that distinction powerfully in Part 1 of Episode 6. Dialogue, he explains, is not about winning, persuading, or cornering someone into agreement. It is designed differently from the start. It slows us down enough to move beyond defensive reflexes and instead invites us to explore the complexity beneath people’s positions.

That shift matters because the deepest divisions in America today are not merely ideological. They are relational.

When we lose the ability to remain curious about one another, every disagreement becomes existential. Every difference becomes evidence of threat. Every conversation becomes a referendum on identity.

Monica Guzmán pushes this even further in Part 2.

Her book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, asks something deceptively simple but profoundly difficult of us: Can we remain genuinely curious about people whose conclusions alarm us?

Not performatively curious. Not strategically curious.

Actually curious.

In a culture increasingly organized around sorting, labeling, and dismissing, Guzmán argues that curiosity is not weakness. It is civic courage.

That idea echoes much of what we’ve been exploring across this season of Reimagining Us: pluralism is not the absence of disagreement. It is the capacity to stay connected through disagreement.

The current landscape rewards speed over reflection, certainty over nuance, and spectacle over understanding. Social platforms flatten human beings into opposing camps. Political incentives deepen division because outrage mobilizes faster than empathy. Institutions struggle to hold public trust.

But beneath all of that noise, another reality still exists.

People continue searching for belonging, dignity, fairness, and voice. EPU’s ongoing work continues to show that even amid deep disagreement, people share concerns about stability, opportunity, community, and whether the future will be better for the next generation.

The challenge is not whether common ground exists.

The challenge is whether we can create conditions where people are able to rediscover one another as human beings before reducing each other to political abstractions.

That is the work underneath these conversations.

It’s also why recording this season at WGBH feels meaningful. Public media, at its best, was built around the belief that democracy depends on an informed and connected public, not simply a loud one. These conversations with John Sarrouf and Monica Guzmán feel part of that tradition: not offering easy answers, but helping us practice a different posture toward one another.

One rooted in humility.

One rooted in listening.

One rooted in the possibility that understanding another person does not require abandoning your convictions, only your certainty that you already know everything worth knowing about them.

As we continue building Reimagining Us, we keep returning to a simple idea:

The future of democracy may depend less on whether we agree and more on whether we can remain in relationship long enough to imagine a future together.

Episode 6 asks us to consider what that actually requires of us.

Not someday.

Now.

Reimagining Us is produced by Next Chapter Podcasts.

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What the Supreme Court did last week in Louisiana v. Callais is serious. This isn’t inside baseball. This isn’t just about maps and districts and legal frameworks that only lawyers can parse. This is about whether every single American has an equal voice in their own democracy as our founding documents once promised.

Right now, this Court has said that some of us matter less.

I grew up in Louisiana. I was raised by a family active in civil rights. I was first elected to the state legislature in 1987, and I have been through some ugly redistricting battles at the State Capitol. I know this terrain. I know what the fights look like, what the tactics smell like, and I know what it costs people to earn the right to vote in the first place. People marched. People bled. People died on bridges for this.

The Voting Rights Act wasn’t just legislation — it was a covenant. It was a promise this country made to its own people that everyone, regardless of their race, deserves to be represented in office.

Last Tuesday, this Trump-Roberts Court — in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito — tore that covenant up.

Here is what the ruling actually did, in plain English. The Voting Rights Act has many parts. The part this ruling went after — Section 2 — has for sixty years made one thing illegal: drawing district maps that weaken the voting power of Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American communities. The Court did not get rid of that law. The Court created a new workaround. Never mind that in the American South, race and partisanship have been deliberately intertwined since Reconstruction.

Now, when somebody sues a state for drawing a map that hurts minority voters, the legislature only has to say one thing: this was partisan, not racial. They can say it out loud. They can say: “We redrew this district to make sure our party — the majority party right now — keeps winning.” That’s all it takes.

And it cuts both ways. A Republican majority can redraw maps to keep Democrats out of office. A Democratic majority can do the very same thing to keep Republicans out. An endless partisan ping pong — with our representation. This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a fairness problem. When a handful of legislators sit in a back room and decide which voters go in which district, you don’t pick your representative anymore. They pick you. That’s not fair. That’s not democracy.

Justice Elena Kagan captured it clearly in her dissent: this decision renders Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” It’s not the first blow this Court has landed on voting rights. But it may be the most devastating.

And the consequences are already here, right now, in Louisiana.

At the end of last week, the state suspended Congressional primaries to redistrict again— in the middle of an election cycle. Ballots had already been mailed. Early voting was already underway And now Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and the Louisiana Legislature have cancelled only the U.S. House primary races to redraw the maps to take advantage of this ruling. That’s not democracy. That’s manipulation.

They’re not just moving the goalposts — they’re picking up the whole field and hauling it somewhere else. It has created utter chaos. And that is ultimately what they want. Because chaos and confusion mean fewer people vote, and fewer of us trust in this democracy. They will do anything to preserve their own power. And this is just the beginning.

Florida’s legislature passed a new congressional map within hours of the ruling — a map that could hand Republicans up to four additional seats. Tennessee’s senior senator called on state lawmakers to redraw their maps immediately. Mississippi Republicans said the same.

We are watching a coordinated, rapid-fire assault on representation across the South, and it is moving fast like a western wild fire.

What’s at stake nationally could be nearly 200 state legislative districts according to our friends at Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund— including close to half of all Black-majority districts in the South.

That’s not a technicality. That’s locking an entire generation of Americans out of power.

Put bluntly, this is a decision about who gets to serve on a school board, who gets to serve on a city council, who gets representation in the judiciary. It reaches all the way down the ballot.

Here’s what people need to understand: this is not abstract. When communities lose representation in government, they lose power over schools, healthcare, and economic futures. The issues you care about —gas and grocery prices, housing, opportunity for your kids — all of it flows through whether your voice is heard in government. And right now, this Court has said some voices, particularly Black ones, can be quieted.

Make no mistake about how we got here. Donald Trump made this happen. He appointed three of the justices in the Callais majority. His Justice Department explicitly asked the Supreme Court to allow Republican legislators to weaken — and in some cases eliminate — the electoral power of voters of color. This was a deliberate strategy, executed over years, with precision.

Congress has renewed the Voting Rights Act on a bipartisan basis repeatedly, most recently in 2006. It was an extraordinary overreach for this Court to decide that law no longer means what Congress said it means.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: this ruling is a real setback. But hard is not the same as hopeless. We have been here before — in this country, in this region — and the people who love democracy have always, eventually, won. But we have to fight back.

Here’s what comes next.

Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to modernize and revitalize the Voting Rights Act and prohibit partisan gerrymandering. That is the clearest, most direct answer to what this Court has done. States that believe in fair representation should pass their own state Voting Rights Acts. And in every state where new maps are being rushed through, we fight back — in the legislatures, in the courts, and above all, at the ballot box — in numbers so large that no version of a gerrymandered map can contain you.

They can move the lines. They cannot move the people.

Every one of us has to act like democracy depends on it. Because right now, it does.

Mitch Landrieu
Founder and President, E Pluribus Unum

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Most weeks I try to understand people before reducing them to their worst ideas. I look for the bridge before the fracture line. I believe most people are more complicated than the slogans they repeat or the politicians they cheer for.

I still believe that. But last week I have to say it plainly: Ron DeSantis signed a law that lets the state of Florida strip locally elected officials from office for spending public money on equity work, and then stood at a podium and told the country that white men are the most “disfavored group” in America. The law and the lie arrived together. They were meant to.

I’m a white man. One of the quieter privileges I have carried in this country is that I have rarely had to think about my race or my gender as barriers to anything I wanted. That absence of burden is itself a privilege — earned by no one, granted by history, and systematically denied to almost everyone else for most of the time this country has existed. Saying so out loud is not a confession. It is the floor. It is where any honest conversation about American power has to begin.

These were not misunderstandings of the times. They were laws. Voting laws, housing laws, marriage laws, school laws, employment laws, citizenship laws — written deliberately to keep power in the hands of white men. That isn’t an interpretation. It’s the record.

DeSantis knows this. Anyone with a high school education knows this. So when the governor of Florida stands at a podium and tells the country that white men are the most discriminated-against group in America, he is not making a mistake. He is making a choice.

The choice has a purpose. Grievance is useful in politics. If you can convince people who have historically held power that they are actually the victims, you can keep them angry, mobilize them, and keep them voting for you. It works whether or not it’s true. And once people commit to defending a lie, they need the person who told it to them to stay in power.

This is how division survives. Not through hatred alone, but through leaders who understand that resentment is a renewable resource and decide to weaponize it. Neighbors stop seeing neighbors as neighbors. Shared reality breaks down. Shared prosperity stops feeling possible. Public trust collapses into team loyalty. And the leaders who profit from the division have no incentive to repair it. The division is the business model.

A governor is supposed to govern the whole state. Every citizen. Not just the people who flatter his ambitions or fuel his next campaign. But the law DeSantis signed last week does the opposite of governing — it punishes communities that disagree with him. Any resident can sue their city or county for funding equity work. Locally elected officials can be removed from office for it. The voters who put those officials in place don’t get a say. The state does.

Look at what just happened. A governor told white men they are the most discriminated-against group in America, then signed a law moving more power into a state government and a court system that look mostly like the people he claims to be defending — older, whiter, more male, more removed from the lives of everyday Floridians. The fear was the bait. The consolidation was the point.

This is the oldest move in American politics. Take a group that has power. Tell them the pie is shrinking. Point them at the neighbors they share schools and streets and weekends with — and at immigrants, Black families, women, LGBTQ kids — and tell them those neighbors are the reason their lives feel hard. Tell them the only way to be safe is to support whoever promises to push those neighbors back. It works because scarcity feels true even when it isn’t. It works because resentment doesn’t ask for evidence. It works because the people running this play don’t actually want voters who feel free. They want voters who feel under siege.

There is a different story available. One where the pie can grow. One where your neighbors are not your enemies. One where the people you share schools and streets and weekends with are the people you could build something better with — if you stopped being told to fear them.

DeSantis needs white men not to hear that story.

What would it take for them to hear it anyway?

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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“Well, we’re different here.”

Everybody thinks they’re different. And of course we are, in the particulars. Geography. History. Culture. Politics. Personality. But underneath it, people are remarkably similar. We want safety. Dignity. Opportunity. Connection. Hope that tomorrow can be better than today. The details vary. The desire does not.

The problem wasn’t that people had concerns. Concerns matter. Skepticism matters. Some ideas deserve hard questions. The problem was that the conversation never moved past the objections. No pathways. No alternatives. No attempt to figure out what could work.

I’ve started noticing how often people fall into one of two postures. Some identify problems. Some build paths through them. Problem identifiers can sound smart. They can give you endless reasons something will fail and, if it succeeds anyway, reasons it won’t last. Spend enough time around that energy and cynicism starts to sound like wisdom. It isn’t. It’s just cheaper. It costs nothing to explain why something can’t be done.

The people who build paths ask a different kind of question. Instead of Why won’t this work? they ask, What would make this possible? Instead of People will never change, they ask, What helps people change? Instead of That would never work here, they ask, What can we learn from places that made progress?

Path-making isn’t a personality. It’s a practice. And one of the places you practice it most is in the conversations that feel hardest to have. Many people avoid those conversations not because they don’t care, but because they fear conflict, embarrassment, or being misunderstood. One of the most useful things I’ve ever learned came from a conversation on our podcast, Reimagining Us, with John Sarrouf of Essential Partners. He talked about keeping a question in your pocket. A real question. Not a trap disguised as curiosity. Not a performance. A genuine attempt to understand. Why do you feel that way? What experiences led you there? What worries you most about this? A good question opens a path where an argument would close one.

We once asked people in a focus group what they wanted from someone who disagreed with them. I assumed they’d say tolerance. Almost all of them said some version of this instead: “I wish they wanted to understand why I think that.” Not agreement. Understanding. Questions create movement. They keep people from retreating into fixed positions. They leave room for something new to emerge — an idea, a relationship, even a disagreement you can keep having without it ending you.

Every real change I’ve watched happen — in a neighborhood, a city, a country — started with someone who kept asking what would make this possible long after the room had moved on to why it wouldn’t. Those people are rarely the loudest. They’re rarely certain. They’ve just decided that the cost of giving up on a better outcome is higher than the cost of looking foolish trying to build toward one. What our neighborhoods, our cities, our country look like five or ten years from now — what gets built, what gets repaired, what gets possible — isn’t decided somewhere else, by someone else. It’s decided by how many of us refuse to stop asking the path-maker’s question when the room goes cynical.

So here’s the one I’ve been carrying lately, and I’ll offer it to you: when the conversation takes that familiar turn — into all the reasons nothing can work — what’s the question you want to have in your pocket?

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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In this conversation, john a. powell helps us name a dynamic many of us sense but struggle to articulate: othering. It is the quiet (and sometimes loud) process by which differences—of race, place, belief, or experience—are turned into distance, and then into threat. Othering shapes how we see one another, how we organize our communities, and how we define who “we” are.

But if othering is something we have learned and reinforced, belonging is something we can choose to build.

powell offers belonging as a kind of North Star—not a fixed destination, but a guiding principle for how we live together. It does not ask us to erase what makes us distinct. Instead, it calls us to hold our individual and group identities with openness, recognizing that they are evolving, relational, and deeply shaped by the stories we tell.

At the heart of this work is bridging: the intentional practice of reaching across lines of difference with curiosity and care. Bridging asks more of us than tolerance. It asks for listening that is patient and compassionate, for connection that is rooted in dignity, and for a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

This episode is both reflective and practical. Through personal stories and lived experience, powell illuminates how identities are formed—and how they can be expanded. He also offers tangible ways to cultivate belonging in our everyday lives, reminding us that communities are shaped not only by structures, but by how we show up for one another.

If othering narrows the circle of “us,” belonging expands it. Episode 5 is an invitation to take that expansion seriously—to see it not as abstract idealism, but as necessary work for anyone invested in the future of our shared life.

Reimagining Us is produced by Next Chapter Podcasts.

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There’s a line from Project Runway that was never meant to describe how a country is governed: “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.” On television, it works. That’s the point. The stakes are heightened, the turns are abrupt, and the instability keeps you watching.

But this isn’t entertainment. It’s government—and the real question is why we’ve been willing to accept it as if it were.

Think about it. The sudden dismissal of Pam Bondi doesn’t feel like a deliberate transition or a strategic recalibration. It feels like an elimination. A moment designed for impact more than continuity. One day you’re in. The next day, you’re out. And the show moves on.

Except not everyone leaves. Some are simply… recast.

Remember when they replaced Darren on Bewitched? Same character, different actor, no explanation. The audience was expected to go along with it, to accept the continuity even when it no longer made sense. That’s what this feels like.

Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kristi Noem haven’t simply exited the show. They’ve been rewritten in place—shifting roles, shifting narratives, sometimes from central character to something else entirely, without any real acknowledgment that the story has changed.

This isn’t leadership. It’s a production.

And what makes it more unsettling is this: the cast keeps changing like it’s a show—but the stakes are not. Wars, immigration enforcement, decisions that shape people’s lives don’t pause for rewrites or recasting. The storyline keeps moving, even when the people telling it don’t.

And that’s where it crosses from instability into something else entirely: the outrageousness—the moments that are plainly absurd, the kind of thing you’d expect from a show trying to top last week’s episode. But instead of calling it what it is, we debate it, analyze it, and treat it as though it belongs in the normal spectrum of political disagreement. And in doing so, we normalize it—giving spectacle the weight of legitimacy while allowing chaos to stand in for direction.

Over time, that normalization takes a toll. A country can’t find its footing when everything feels like the next episode—complete with a far-fetched cliffhanger. Institutions can’t build credibility when roles are interchangeable and narratives shift without warning. People can’t trust what they’re seeing when yesterday’s ally becomes today’s enemy—or tomorrow’s redemption arc.

We start to lose the thread—not just of who’s in or out, but of what actually matters—and worse, we’ve started to treat it as normal while pretending it all still makes sense.

At some point, the question isn’t who’s in or out—it’s why we’re still pretending this is a coherent story. And more than that: at what point do we stop treating this like politics and start calling it what it is? At what point do we recognize that spectacle and outrageousness are not substitutes for leadership? At what point do we admit that what we are being asked to accept—and what we have started to normalize—are not the same things as governing?

Even people who enjoy reality television know exactly what they’re watching—and why. It’s entertainment. It’s outrageousness. They don’t pretend it’s anything else.

So the real question is: how long are we going to keep watching—before we decide to change the channel?

Scott Hutcheson
Executive Director, E Pluribus Unum

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