I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country’s greed.

In fact, we are a nation of essentially similar people shaped by vastly different circumstances of place, wealth, education, and culture. Those best able to document our socioeconomic divide with humility and accuracy typically have occupied more than one class, remain connected to the one they left, and attribute any upward mobility to good

In recent years many have questioned a degree’s value and chastised those who take out big loans to buy one. Most of those critics, I’d wager, never worked a wheat field. Debt burden and being overeducated in an employer’s market is psychologically and financially crushing, yes, but an assured lifetime sentence to manual labor can be more

feeling the very edge of a thought and needing to stay in the feeling to reach the thought.

I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling White Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.

Through their actions, these women modeled a strength that they might not have called “feminism,” but that’s for damn sure what it was.

The people lonely at the top by way of its sparse population were probably lonely at the bottom for different reasons.

While we long to be understood and loved, and as we seek a just world in which all beings might be so appreciated, our first task is to see ourselves—a process, inevitably, of casting off the false descriptions that a deranged world provides.

What would I do for the most precious thing on earth? What would I do for myself? You will know your own integrity when the answers are the same.