Friends,

Hiatus over. And boys and girls the first conversation out of the gate was a wonderful discussion with my The Democracy Group colleague Corey Nathan.

We explored the importance of curiosity, nuance, and persistent dialogue in bridging political and cultural divides and discussed how small, relational interactions can influence societal change. We talked a lot about the value of staying in community despite differences.

This conversation touched on the really important stuff: the importance of nuance in all of our important discussions with each other, staying in community while we discuss hard stuff, touching people individually and changing the nature of the discourse, one person at a time (listen for the salt and the soup). And of course, that hope is an action verb, which I can really verify, given my hiatus and the toll that took on my outlook.

Of course, selling a house, moving states, launching kid into college, trying to make new friends, and getting used to a completely new environment had nothing to do with my increasing cynicism and decreasing feeling of contribution to the discourse. (that’s sarcasm, friends).

So what’s next?

I’m going to keep talking to folks who can help us understand dissidence, history, memory, a free press, political strategy, the dynamics of power and how to build change from the bottom up.

We are going to need to approach the coming period (decade? generation?) with audacious solutions to the country’s significant, growing, systemic problems, because we can’t go back to a politics and society that got us here in the first place. And a whole new generation of political players know nothing but the chaos that this regime started bringing to politics more than a decade ago.

There are only a few national level politicians talking about this kind of change, Pete Buttigieg chief among them. We need to keep talking about those kids of strategic transitions from here in the grassroots and support those who favor big systemic solutions rather than a return, regression, recapitulation of the way things were.

Thanks for being here. I’ll have an audio version that I’ll publish immediately after this so you can download it for later listening.

I know better than most how hard it is to pay for subscriptions to all the content we want to access. That’s why I’m keeping my content free and asking for your free subscriptions. If by chance you can afford a paid sub, I really appreciate it b/c I’m here on my own trying to keep asking hard questions and make a little money while I’m doing it.

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