To Begin at The Beginning

2 min readMar 13, 2026

The news is always on. And almost always awful. It is built to hold us and our attention — Alert. Agitated, Divided.

At times, I want to engage with that. There are moments where engagement matters: Where our collective voices still ship a rudder, even when our leaders are unwilling to steer.

But we also need to breathe. And there are better voices than mine addressing the daily headlines.

So at other times I’ve been wondering how we — friends here, sharing neighborhoods, pews, and voting lines — stay engaged. How we continue to communicate, without exhausting ourselves.

And what I’d like to do instead is something slower and, I hope, more durable.

Instead of reaction to each day’s crisis, I have the idea we can spend our time together deliberately examining the fault lines in our 250 year-old union. We are told that the fracture runs neatly along a single political aisle. That explanation seems simplistically incomplete.

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My instinct is usually to ask “How?” — how systems form, how loyalties harden, how neighbors drift apart — especially when “Why?” feels too charged to hold. Operational clarity can sometimes reveal what sheer volume obscures.

Maybe this could be a series, if we can keep it. Each post brief, as the topic allows. Together, exploring the underlying dimensions of our national identity — the complex spectra most often flattened into monochromes of red or blue.

If we do this carefully, perhaps we will come away with a clearer understanding: of how we differ, certainly. But more hopefully, of what we yet share.

And, I’d like to think: of who we united still are.

Indivisible. For all. Together.