What Concerns You Most About Our Country’s Future?

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These are difficult times with wide-ranging national (and international) challenges including:

• Inflation and economic disparities

• High costs of health care, childcare, and housing

• The growing national debt

• Climate change

• Immigration issues

• Racism and antisemitism

• The urban-rural divide

• Distrust of government and other institutions

• Uncertainty about the impact of artificial intelligence

• War and political unrest in the Middle East, Ukraine, and other parts of the world.

If that list was not enough, there is also:

• Growing distrust of fellow citizens

• Declines in kindness, respect, humility, and how we treat others

• Political polarization.

This is a lot to be worried about, and it can sometimes feel pretty overwhelming! Is there anything we can realistically do to make things better?

I believe positive change is possible, starting by focusing on the shorter second list. We can begin with ourself and how we engage with people who might have different ideas. We can resist making assumptions and putting people in boxes. People think and vote the way they do for any number of reasons, and every person is an individual with their own needs and aspirations.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “No one cares what you know until they know that you care!”

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin offers this hopeful perspective reflecting on her book An Unfinished Love Story, A Personal History of the 1960s: “America has been at odds with itself before. I’ve been drawn to such turbulent times -- the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, World War II. . . . ‘The end of our country has loomed many times before,’ my husband often reminded me, ‘America is not as fragile as it seems.’”

America is not as fragile as it seems. I believe that, too, but it is up to us to live and embrace it. If we don’t like what we see, we can act with a hopeful spirit. Author Thomas Friedman has written: “Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.”

But hope is possible without being optimistic. Yuval Levin, the author of American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again explains: “Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity. Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worthy of it happening. It does not deny the obvious potential for calamity that always casts a shadow over our future, but it holds out the possibility of light and grace.”

Finding ways to connect with others can create light and grace, helping to build more hope. “Once you choose hope, anything’s possible,” adds actor Christopher Reeve. People are hungry for something better, and we can each demonstrate a more hopeful way. Embracing positive change is fundamental to growing as a person, and you can make our country better, too. Yes, there is hope, but we need to think and act in new ways.

Our book, Beyond the Politics of Contempt Practical Steps to Build Positive Relationships in Divided Times, to be published this summer, offers concrete hopeful ideas to better our lives and country. We cannot quickly solve the long list of challenges in the long list above, but we each can act in ways that build a nation with more trust, kindness, respect, and humility.

Embracing this hopeful spirit can create an environment for addressing the longer list.

I hope you will join us in this effort to better our great nation!