History doesn't lie—but sometimes we stop listening.
The greatest achievements of our past weren’t forged by strongmen. They weren’t born in the minds of tyrants or shouted into existence by singular voices clawing for supremacy.
They were crafted in collaboration.
Fueled by imagination, courage, and cooperation.
Shaped by teams of individuals who believed that the work they were doing mattered.
NASA didn’t put a man on the moon because one man dreamed it. It succeeded because thousands worked together—engineers, scientists, janitors, typists, visionaries, doers, and dreamers. They tackled the impossible with slide rules and chalkboards and sleepless nights. Many were women. Many were people of color. Some, like Katherine Johnson, had to fight just to get into the room.
The internet wasn’t conjured in a boardroom. It was built in labs and universities, forged through years of collaboration between government researchers and academics across continents. Never the product of a lone genius—it was the result of connected minds.
The Marshall Plan didn’t emerge from dominance. It was born from compassion—a post-war understanding that stability requires generosity. That rebuilding the world requires extending a hand, not planting a flag atop rubble.
Abolition wasn’t the work of one person. It was a movement. Preachers, politicians, mothers, writers, escapees, and allies—risking everything. Speaking truth. Demanding humanity.
These were not the products of autocracy.
These were not the spoils of domination.
They are the legacy of shared purpose.
The evidence of what happens when power is distributed, not hoarded.
Evidence of true greatness linked arm in arm with humanity—united in common cause to better ourselves.
Not scattered like dry leaves in a storm, wildly clapping as the wrecking ball levels what we once cherished.
So yes, when we hear the chant that one man can “make America great again,” we should laugh.
But too often, some clap wildly. Others flinch.
Because somewhere along the way, we stopped celebrating the power of us.
We watched as institutions of care—built through careful contemplation—were torn down without a second thought.
Programs built with care, erased in 280 characters.
When I lament, this is what I mourn:
Not the loss of power, but the erosion of purpose.
Trump mocks birthright citizenship—a principle enshrined after the Civil War to declare a simple, radical truth:
If you are born here, you belong here.
Now, in this strange era of purity tests and exclusion, we are told that being American is no longer about ideas, but about blood. As if we could become great by becoming less. As if we can amputate parts of our story and still stand.
But what made America great was never fear.
Never isolation.
Never purity.
It was contradiction.
It was struggle.
It was shared grit.
It was Harriet Tubman and Dwight Eisenhower.
It was George Marshall and Katherine Johnson.
It was all of us—together.
The power of us is not nostalgia.
Our power together is the only path forward.
And if we forget it—if we surrender it to strongmen and slogans—we will deserve what comes next.
But the tragedy is this:
Our descendants surely do not deserve our collective neglect.
But if we remember it…
If we reclaim it…
Then as always, we build again.
This is us.
Builders, not breakers.
And we have work to do.
Coming Next:
Episode 7 – This Is Us: Building Forward
A rallying cry. Shared vision. Shared work. And the reminder: We are stewards, not owners—of each other, our future, and this fragile beauty we’ve inherited.
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