Why Are We All Shouting from Separate Islands?

How a people become strangers, and how they might find one another again

“Most of the trouble in the world comes from people listening to themselves instead of each other.”— adapted from Thomas Merton

I’ve been thinking about this country with a kind of heaviness I can’t quite shake. Not the country as a set of institutions or a political scoreboard. I mean the country as a living thing. A shared thing. A place made of people who once believed they belonged to one another in some meaningful way. Lately I find myself wondering if that belief has frayed beyond recognition. I wonder if we’re still a people or if we’ve become something else. Something smaller. Something lonelier.

There’s one question that keeps turning over in my mind like a coin in my hand. If everyone knows something’s wrong, why are so few of us able to make any of it right? The question keeps tapping inside my head like a loose board on the hull of a boat. Persistent. Quiet. Impossible to ignore.

It’s not as if we lack warnings. There are warnings everywhere. Warnings from the left that democracy’s slipping. Warnings from the right that the culture’s collapsing. Warnings from activists who see injustice in every direction and warnings from exhausted citizens who only speak up when they can’t endure the silence anymore. We’ve got no shortage of diagnosis. High inflation. Broken media. Corrupt politics. Captured courts. Collapsing institutions. Poisoned culture. Fractured families. Every faction has its own list and its own dialect for describing the same slow unspooling of the Republic.

And still nothing seems to resolve. The country feels caught between breaths. A strange limbo of noise and paralysis. A place where every voice is raised but almost no voice is heard. The more I think about it, the more a single image comes to mind. It isn’t flattering.

It’s a shipwreck.

Hundreds of survivors scattered across a dark sea, each one clinging to a plank of what used to be the same vessel. Each one calling out that they’re drowning. Each one shouting that help is needed. Each one convinced that if they shout loudly enough, someone will listen. Yet the bodies floating among the broken planks already tell the story. The shouting doesn’t save anyone. It only makes the night louder.

That’s when the uncomfortable question rises. Why are we all shouting from separate islands?

I’m not asking this as a partisan. I’m asking it as a human being. This is a question for Democrats and Republicans. For conservatives and liberals. For the politically devout and the politically homeless. For the weary, the frustrated, the hopeful, the frightened, and even for the ones who’ve stopped caring because caring has become too heavy. It’s a question for anyone who’s ever looked at this country and wondered: how did we become strangers?

How did a nation of more than three hundred million people become a collection of solitary monologues?

Part of the answer is technological. We built tools that promised connection but delivered fragmentation. Platforms designed to amplify the self instead of the collective. A world where every person became a broadcaster and every opinion became a performance. We created an environment where everyone can speak instantly but almost no one is truly heard.

So we talk. And talk. And talk.
But the talking doesn’t gather us.
It scatters us.

The public square used to be a physical location. A place with boundaries and shared air. It used to be the church steps or the union hall or the local newspaper or Walter Cronkite at six in the evening. It used to be a place where people who disagreed still inhabited the same space. A place where opposing views collided and then had to coexist because they were delivered to all of us at the same time.

Today the public square’s been shattered into a thousand private theaters. Each audience sees a different play. Each applauds its own actors. Each forgets that other audiences even exist.

And I keep coming back to the same question. How does a people remain a people when they no longer share a stage?

This isn’t a liberal question. It isn’t a conservative question. It isn’t one more cultural complaint wrapped in philosophical clothing. It’s the question at the heart of any functioning democracy. A country doesn’t collapse only when its buildings burn or its currency fails. A country collapses when its people can no longer hear one another breathe.

And then a second question follows right behind the first. Am I any different?

I write essays. I speak into a microphone. I drop thoughts into the digital sea like stones into a well. Am I reaching anyone beyond my own shoreline? Or am I just adding to the storm of voices speaking past one another? It’s not a comfortable question, but it’s an honest one.

I don’t want to be another person shouting across an empty distance. I want to build a raft. Something that floats. Something that gathers. Something that lets people climb out of the water long enough to see where they are and which direction the shore might be. Something that allows people to breathe again.

Maybe that’s why I keep circling back to a deeper question beneath all the noise. What does it mean to be a people?

A population isn’t a people. A party isn’t a people. A demographic isn’t a people. A people is something else entirely. It’s a shared memory. A shared struggle. A shared set of stories and a shared sense of future. A people can disagree bitterly without abandoning one another. A people can argue about the path forward knowing they still stand on the same ground. A people have a sense of belonging that doesn’t vanish after a lost election.

Right now, I’m not sure we remember that.

Yet I don’t believe it’s gone. Not entirely. I’ve seen too much of this country to give up on it. I’ve served it in uniform. I’ve worked in its bureaucracies. I’ve taught its students. I’ve walked its streets and sat beside its grieving families. I’ve seen the quiet goodness that never makes headlines. The unphotographed acts of grace. The character that reveals itself only when someone else is in danger. There’s a stubborn hope here. A hope that refuses to die, even when it has every reason to.

So the question becomes the one I can’t escape. How do we find one another again?

I don’t have a master plan. I don’t have a twelve point path that’ll turn strangers back into neighbors. But I know a few things that’ve always worked because they reach something older and deeper than politics.

Storytelling works.
It bypasses ideology and goes straight to the heart.
It reminds people they’re human before they’re anything else.

Listening works.
Not the kind where you wait for your turn to speak.
The kind where you lower your guard.
The kind where you allow yourself to be changed by what you hear.

I learned that lesson late. There was a time when I believed I listened well. Then life corrected me. I spent years with people who never fit neatly into society’s tidy little boxes. People on the spectrum. People who spoke from angles instead of straight lines. People who felt too much or too quietly. People who communicated in ways that didn’t match the world’s expectations.

I failed them at first. I listened only for what I already understood. I missed the truth behind their words because I was too busy waiting for familiar shapes. Once I learned to listen for what they were actually trying to say, everything changed. Conversations deepened instead of derailed. Trust grew where confusion once lived. That experience taught me something I should’ve known earlier. People don’t open when you speak well. They open when you create enough space for them to breathe.

The country needs that kind of listening again. The kind that softens the shoulders. The kind that slows the room. The kind that recognizes the humanity of someone who sees the world differently. The kind that leaves judgment outside long enough for truth to surface.

Small gatherings work.
Not mass movements.
Not viral campaigns.
Small circles of people who choose to sit together, not to perform certainty but to wrestle with confusion in good faith.

Most of what saves a society happens in rooms too small to photograph.

Moral language works.
Not the punitive kind.
Not the sanctimonious kind.
The kind that lifts people upward rather than pushes them down.
The kind that invites instead of condemns.

Service works.
A meal delivered.
A hand offered.
A shoulder lent.
Service reduces the ego.
It dissolves tribal fear.
It reminds us that character isn’t partisan.

And courage works.
Even a small amount.
Courage is contagious.
It spreads across silos the same way light spreads across a dark room.

But none of this matters if we don’t create a place where people can gather again. A place that feels safe enough for honesty and brave enough for disagreement. A place where we don’t filter one another through screens but sit in the same air long enough to see the face behind the argument.

We need a common clearing.
A shared theater.
A raft that floats long enough for a chorus to form where monologues used to be.

That’s the absence at the core of this moment.
It’s not the absence of warnings.
It’s the absence of a place where the warnings can land.

So I ask myself again. Am I helping build that place or am I just adding more noise? I never enjoy this question, but I think it’s the only one that matters. I don’t want my work to become another shout lost in the wind. I want it to be a raft. Something that floats. Something that gathers. Something that lets people breathe again.

A nation isn’t saved by being told it’s drowning.
A nation is saved when someone builds the first raft and calls to others, not with panic but with clarity, saying: there’s room here. Come aboard.

I want my work to be that raft.
Not a tower of shouting.
Not an alarm bell that leaves people more afraid than they were before.
A raft.
A place that floats.
A place that gathers.
A place where anyone, from any party or persuasion, can step out of the water long enough to feel human again.

Because drowning isn’t our destiny.
Not if we learn to hear one another through the noise.
Not if we choose gathering over shouting.
Not if we decide that being a people is worth the effort.

I’ll keep asking these questions.
I’ll keep writing toward the center.
I’ll keep listening to whoever arrives.
I’ll keep building this raft one plank at a time.

Because I refuse to believe that separate islands are the end of the American story.
They can be the beginning of something else.
Something better.
Something that floats.
Something we can row together if we ever find the courage to reach across the water and take hold of one another again.

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