Lucky for you, we have an antidote to both forms of apathy. This year’s Zócalo Book Prize shortlist includes five nonfiction books, all published in the past year, that dig deep into the forces that strengthen or undermine social cohesion, human connectedness, and community.

We have awarded the Book Prize annually since 2011. Stay tuned for the announcement of our winner in late March and our event honoring the author(s) in June in downtown Los Angeles. Special thanks to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for returning to sponsor the 2024 prize.

In the meantime, we invite you to join our selection committee in reading and considering these titles, which explore subjects as divisive as guns and migration and things as mundane as finding a parking spot—and how they both bring us together and threaten to tear us apart.

Congratulations, again, to:

• Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, authors of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age

• Myisha Cherry, author of Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better

• Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

• Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, authors of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

• Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

And we thank our selection committee: 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson; Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong; Marquette University historian Sergio González; creative director and Zócalo advisory board member David Lai; infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD; Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker; Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD; LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

The post The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Winner Is Coming Soon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s Zócalo’s 20th birthday, and we hit the two decade milestone running—we hosted 21 events in 2023 to fulfill our mission of connecting people to ideas and to each other.

At our homebase at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, we discussed some of the biggest issues of the day—from artificial intelligence to surveillance. We enjoyed a special homecoming, hosting our first-ever event steps away from our namesake: Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución, otherwise known as the Zócalo, one of the largest public squares in the world. We traversed California, from Sacramento to Riverside, to discuss the needs of workers in low-wage sectors of the state’s economy. We traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, and to Memphis, Tennessee, to consider how sins of the past shape the present, and what might move us forward. We even threw a dance party—shout out to all 700 of you who boogied with us at the Port of L.A. on a Sunday afternoon!

Picking our favorite public programs each year is never easy, but these seven events reflect the variety of our work—and most importantly, kept us talking long after the discussions wrapped. Whether you came in person or watched virtually, you’re what makes our public square so robust. Thanks for being part of Zócalo, and we look forward to continuing the conversation next year.

Do We Need More Food Fights?

This emotional conversation and cooking demonstration brought together photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini, who compiled a cookbook that collects recipes from the families of desaparecidos—the tens of thousands of people who have gone missing in Mexico—and Maite Gomez-Rejón, a culinary historian and co-host of the “Hungry for History” podcast. Livestreamed and in person from LA Cocina de Gloria Molina’s demonstration kitchen in downtown L.A., the women prepared special guest Blanca Soto’s pozole from the cookbook and spoke about the power of a meal. Cooking does not just satisfy our hunger, they noted, but can also unite us, and in this case reunite us, with those who are no longer here. The special event, presented in partnership with LA Cocina de Gloria Molina and California Humanities, was part of our birthday series “What Connects Us?”

The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize: How Does a Community Save Itself? With Michelle Wilde Anderson

For 13 years, Zócalo has honored the author of the best nonfiction book that explores community and social connection, inviting them to visit us to collect their prize—$10,000 and a nifty Zócalo Rubik’s Cube—and deliver a lecture. In June, this year’s honoree Michelle Wilde Anderson arrived at a packed house at the ASU California Center and shared stories of hope from The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, her book looking at the communities of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Detroit, Michigan; and Lawrence, Massachusetts. “We have to invest in people where they live,” she told the evening’s moderator, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition. The program also featured poet Paige Buffington, who joined us virtually to read her 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize-winning submission, “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” And, because this kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, the night ended with cake.

What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?

The gloves were off at the ring (okay, the ASU California Center) as panelists—professional boxer and actress Kali “KO” Mequinonoag Reis, former middleweight champ Sergio “the Latin Snake” Mora, California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster, and sport and ethnic studies scholar Rudy Mondragón—shared candid perspectives on the state of their sport. The discussion, presented in partnership with UCLA College, Division of Social Sciences and ASU Global Sport Institute, called for more protections for athletes and left the audience with a major question: What will be left of professional boxing if it does not do more to protect its athletes’ physical and financial well-being?

What Is a Good Job Now? For Fairness in the Workplace

What better way to get the attention of California politicians than by convening a conversation right on the Capitol steps in Sacramento? As part of the Zócalo Public Square series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, “What Is a Good Job Now?,” we brought together California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, founding member of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United Sara Fee, and California Labor Commissioner assistant chief Daniel Yu for a memorable conversation on wage theft, unpaid overtime, dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and rising employer retaliation, moderated by our own Joe Mathews.

What Is the Value of Art?

Nobody called the fire department on us, but so many people showed up for this powerhouse night of arts and culture that we had to open a separate screening room. In anticipation of the international art fair Frieze Los Angeles, we curated a conversation on the state of the art world, inviting LAXART director Hamza Walker, artist and activist Andrea Bowers, writer and curator Helen Molesworth, and artist, cultural organizer, and co-founder of Meztli Projects Joel Garcia to break down some of artists’ greatest aesthetic, moral, and financial challenges, as well as their biggest opportunities for social change and community building.

How Does a Community Move With Music? A Diaspora Dance Party

We came. We shared our songs and stories of L.A. And we danced. We danced a lot. Zócalo’s first-ever dance party (another birthday series event), held at the Wilmington Waterfront Park at the Port of Los Angeles, was a smashing success. Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, the inaugural contributor to our ongoing “Diaspora Jukebox” playlist series, emceed. KCRW DJ Raul Campos and local Wilmington DJ Mario “Dred” Lopez kept the music flowing. Curation from Levitt Pavilion and performances by Pacifico Dance Company and Korean Classical Music and Dance Company wowed the crowd. If you needed a break from the dancing, we had food vendors, an art activation by LA Commons, and a pop-up Wilmington Art Walk at the ready. And glow sticks. So many glow sticks.

How Do We Hear America? A Special Evening of Music by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Raven Chacon

We thought our final program of 2023 was pretty special, and you did, too: Zócalo’s audience voted “How Do We Hear America?” as the fan favorite event of the year. This night of music, co-presented with L.A.-based music collective wasteLAnd, ASU Gammage, and GRoW Annenberg, brought us together at the ASU California Center to watch and listen as the ensemble brought a selection of composer and musician Raven Chacon’s works to life. With our senses activated by the music and our bellies warm with tamales from Mama’s Tamales, and Tacos, Too, we think we ended the year on a high note.

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What do incremental change, forgiveness, parking, guns, and race have in common? They are all forces that strengthen and/or undermine human connectedness, social cohesion, and community—and the subjects of the five books shortlisted for the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize.

Each year since 2011, Zócalo has honored the authors of nonfiction books on this broad topic, which has been central to our mission since our founding 20 years ago. This fall, publishers and authors submitted 180 books for consideration; our staff selected five shortlist titles to advance to our selection committee. We are delighted to recognize:

• Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, authors of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age

• Myisha Cherry, author of Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better

• Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

• Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, authors of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

• Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

Zócalo is grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for his support of our literary prize program, which includes the 2024 Zócalo Poetry Prize (accepting submissions for original poems through January 22, 2024). We also thank this year’s selection committee: 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson, Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong, Marquette University historian Sergio González, creative director and Zócalo Advisory Board member David Lai, infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD, Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker, Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD, and LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the 2024 winner of the Zócalo Book Prize in March. The winning author(s) will receive $10,000, deliver a lecture on their book, and take part in a live interview in the spring at the ASU California Center in Los Angeles. They’ll also join a distinguished group of our previous winners:

• Michelle Wilde Anderson, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (Penguin Random House)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post Announcing the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Shortlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes since 2011. Our annual award ceremony—which includes a lecture, interview, and reception—is a highlight of our year. It simultaneously captures the zeitgeist, honors a brilliant thinker, and allows Zócalo’s audiences to both create and investigate human connection.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes, from writers of many disciplines and professions.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson, Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong, Marquette University historian Sergio González, creative director and Zócalo Advisory Board member David Lai, infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD, Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker, Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD, and LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and participate in a public program in Los Angeles in spring 2024. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit is October 20, 2023, at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They have studied specific times and places—from a single street in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, to Jim Crow-era Hattiesburg, Mississippi—as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality. They are:

• Michelle Wilde Anderson for The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Nonfiction on Connectedness and Social Cohesion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since 2011, Zócalo has honored the author of the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. This year, the Zócalo staff selected our shortlist from 183 titles submitted by publishers and authors on a broad range of subjects, including biographies (of a diverse group of people, as well as of the city of Jerusalem and of the U.S. national anthem), personal histories (that journeyed from antebellum Tennessee to 21st-century Los Angeles), and explorations of meteorites, the banjo, clothing, and reality TV.

We’re delighted to recognize the authors of these shortlist titles, who come at our central concern from different fields and perspectives:

• Saladin Ambar, Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama

• Michelle Wilde Anderson, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America

• Stephanie Cacioppo, Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection

• Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

• Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee will read and evaluate our shortlisted books to determine our 13th annual winner. This year’s committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

Zócalo will announce the winner of the Zócalo Book Prize in February 2023. This year’s winner will receive $10,000, deliver a lecture on their book, and take part in a live interview in the spring at the ASU California Center in Los Angeles. (And they’ll be in very good company; see our previous winners here.)

Zócalo is grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for his continuing sponsorship of our annual literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Poetry Prize, which is accepting submissions for original poems through January 23, 2023.

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (Penguin Random House)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post Announcing the 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Shortlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These are the questions that animate the four books shortlisted for the 2022 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize. Since 2011, we have awarded this prize annually to the author of the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion.

Congratulations to the authors of this year’s shortlist:
• Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
• Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
• Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
• Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown.

We’ll announce our winner in February 2022. They will receive $10,000, deliver a lecture on their book, and take part in a live interview in the spring at the ASU California Center in Los Angeles. (And they’ll be in very good company; see our previous winners here.)

Our shortlist was selected from nearly 200 submissions. The Zócalo staff narrowed this broad, deep field down to just a handful of candidates, considering books written by poets, philosophers, podcasters, evolutionary biologists, visual artists, and urbanists on a wide array of subjects ranging from today’s Los Angeles Latino rockabilly scene to the fall of ancient Angkor, Cambodia.

Now, the task of picking our winning entry is in the hands of this year’s selection committee: Autry Museum of the American West president and CEO Stephen Aron, California State University chancellor Joseph I. Castro, Zócalo trustee Bryan Bowles, The Music Center Arts executive vice president Josephine Ramirez, philanthropist Regina Annenberg Weingarten, and New York Times national editor Jia Lynn Yang, winner of the 2021 Zócalo Book Prize for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide.

Zócalo is a unit of Arizona State University. We are grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for his continuing sponsorship of our literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Poetry Prize. The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Prize, which recognizes the U.S. writer of a poem that best evokes a connection to place, is January 22, 2022.

The post Announcing the Zócalo 2022 Book Prize Shortlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was embedded as a reporter with their unit when they died, and I watched as the men who served with them rallied.

They reached out to the mothers and fathers and wives, offering and seeking comfort, but also saying what they believed needed to be heard:

It was quick.
We were with them at the end.
We will never forget.

The families often reach back too, spreading wide wings over the men and women left behind in return for stories of their sons and daughters and wives and husbands.

“You can call me ‘mom,’ because he can’t.”
“Tell me again about the time she …. ”

A service member’s bond with a Gold Star family feels profound because it squares so many different contradictions. The relationship is about both loss and presence, about courage and fear, and about a link with the loved one with whom we no longer can connect.

But, as the families and veterans wrap around each other, these tight bonds can exclude those in our communities who haven’t served in the military themselves or who don’t know anyone who serves now. Such exclusion may seem a small point in the immediate context of soldiers and families grieving those they loved. And letting a wider group of people into a tragedy may seem like too much for people who already carry a heavy burden of loss.

But exclusion has real-world consequences for families, communities, and the country as a whole.

How can we grieve for service members we don’t know, but who so completely represent us? How can we support families who don’t convey their grief and experiences beyond those tight bonds? And how, without paying attention to more than just headlines, can we feel the weight of a particular family member’s words, while fully understanding the diversity of that community?

If civilians don’t know about, understand, or feel comfortable reaching out to service members’ families, that can lead to those in the military, and their families, feeling isolated, abandoned, and afraid to speak.

We send people to war, but the contract shouldn’t end with their lives.

Renee Wood-Vincent, whose son Sgt. Ryan Wood died that day in Iraq, said she feels that fallen soldiers can be forgotten, and that there’s a lack of respect and knowledge in the public for what families and members of the military experience. But that also creates an obligation to reach out.

“There’s such a focus on what’s happening to us—it’s all about our sorrow, our problems, our military families—and we aren’t letting people in,” she said.

Letting people in can’t be done alone. It requires civilian leaders who can bridge and connect people. And in the United States, the highest bridge is embodied in one office, the presidency.

That’s why it’s so important that the person occupying that office be able to connect with soldiers and their families.

When the president reaches out to Gold Star families, he speaks for the civilians who made the decision with their votes to send service members to war. Even if a letter or phone call does not bring comfort, it is an acknowledgment of sacrifice for country. It’s why scrutiny of President Trump’s calls with Gold Star families is warranted.

Private First Class Ryan Hill and his mother Shawna Fenison. Photo courtesy of Kelly Kennedy.

But whatever the nature of the president’s words, the most important thing to know is that his words aren’t enough. A president should serve only as a starting point for civilians to reach out. “If I rely on politicians to memorialize Ryan and understand his sacrifice, I’m going to be sorely disappointed,” Wood-Vincent said. “They can empathize, but it’s still a number.”

Wood-Vincent received a letter from President George W. Bush, which she said was enough in a time of war, when the commander-in-chief should be dealing with national issues. So did Shawna Fenison, whose son, Private First Class Ryan Hill, served with Wood in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 26th Infantry Regiment. Hill died on January 20, 2007, in Iraq, when a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee.

But the letter wasn’t enough. “I don’t think the country cares about us and would rather we just go away,” she said.

That feeling represents a failure, and a historic shift. The concept of the Gold Star family began as an invitation for conversation and caring between civilians and military.

During World War I, a family could hang the red-bordered flag with two blue stars in the front window to alert the neighborhood that two sons served overseas.

The neighbors could say, “Heard from your boy?” or “Where’s he fighting?”

If one of those stars turned to gold, the conversation changed.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you for your sacrifice.”

But as wars turned more political and became less of a community effort—during World Wars I and II, most families had relatives or friends serving—the conversation changed again. Some families folded their flags when they felt they brought unwanted attention during the Vietnam War. In recent wars, the rarity of the flags offered reminders of just how few people served. About 7 percent of Americans have served in the military, and less than 1 percent serve now in our all-volunteer armed forces.

Both Fenison and Wood-Vincent were initially showered with gifts: flags. Artwork anonymously sent in the mail. Letters from strangers. “I have a large, supportive family,” Wood-Vincent said. “My neighborhood happens to be very military.” At work, people knew her son and offered condolences. People told her they fly the American flag for her son.

“We had a neighbor who came down every night for two years and prayed over our home,” she said. “I had never met her. I would see her out there in the summertime, in the wintertime, standing in the rain with her little dog.”

People still leave things on her porch.

“It may be the part of the country I’m in, or the neighborhood,” she said. “But part of it is the people I’ve surrounded myself with.”

Fenison had a similar experience, at first. But then, as people moved on with their lives or grew disenchanted with the wars, they encouraged her to stop talking about her son, to take down the “shrine” she’d assembled in her home that included her son’s pictures and the flag from his coffin.

“When I talk about Ryan, many will change the subject or give me the look of ‘Here she goes again,’ so I find myself withdrawing more and more,” she said. “Communities are good about honoring on Memorial Day with their token events, but it pretty much stops there.

“While my world has stopped, the rest has moved on.”

The families ache for the engagement—for someone to care. For someone to mourn their losses. For someone to look up Niger on a map and not only think about what it might have felt like to be doing what you, yes, signed up for and loved—but also to contemplate the terror and heartbreak for service members, friends, and families.

Those flags should serve as a call to action: This family’s sacrifice represents you. Gather them up. Listen to their stories.

“It’s much more complicated than people know,” Wood-Vincent said.

“On one hand, I’m a mother who lost a child no matter how he was taken from the world. I’m not thinking of him as a soldier.”

But then she explains to strangers how he died.

“People will say, ‘Oh, what a shame. What a waste,’” she said. “Don’t assume I feel the same.”

Sometimes, she said, she gets angry and wants to walk away. Other times, she reminds herself that she can’t be mad about people’s ignorance about proper responses or “Gold Star” moms if she’s not helping to educate them.

“I’ll think, ‘That person just made me so angry,’” she said. “Why? Well, my son’s loss was not a waste. Give me 10 seconds in the parking lot to tell you why. If someone sees your Gold Star plate and says, ‘What is that?’, you don’t say, ‘Hey. You’re an idiot. You should know.’”

She sees her personal call to action as part of that big conversation. Every summer, she invites her son’s brothers in arms to a reunion. Her family created a scholarship to celebrate his art—punk-rock drawings that expressed convictions about being different and doing your part to save the world—through the university. And she told his story at several events.

She makes sure people know and remember him, and through that, she closes the divide.

She believes that communities can, too. Local organizations can invite in Gold Star family members. They can form community partnerships—Boy Scouts who adopt families, or Junior Leaguers who organize lunches, or schools that bring Gold Star alumni in as speakers. Communities can organize town halls about what families need—even if that need is simply relaying kind questions to ask. Leaders can ensure families are remembered beyond Memorial Day.

And Gold Star families have to be willing to accept those invitations.

“You’ve got to open yourself,” Wood-Vincent said. “They’ll never completely understand, and thank God for that. But they will never understand if we don’t invite them in.”

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That might sound odd to people who’ve never been in the military. Getting chewed out for not having your shoes shined hardly seems “supportive” to most people. But that’s just one part of the military experience. In the Army, it mattered to someone else whether or not my boots fit properly. It mattered to someone else whether I had been to the dentist recently. It mattered to someone else if I wasn’t where I was supposed to be at the right time. (Believe me, I’d hear about it if I wasn’t.)

To be sure, all of this attention paid to my performance was in the interests of team performance, but it also meant someone was always there for me. Checking on me. Making sure I was good to go. All of us were doing this for one another. If I was on a road march and a member of my squad was struggling, I would help share his load. If I was on crutches and couldn’t carry my tray in the dining hall, a fellow soldier would be right there to help me. That’s just how it was. We learned to think of others first.

And then you exit the service. No more intrusive surprise health and welfare inspections. No more grueling runs and setting your speed to the slowest member of your group. No more morning formations. No more of the countless bureaucratic irritations of military life. Paradise, right?

Actually, for many of us, no. Gone, suddenly, is the cohesive structure that existed to take care of you. Gone is that strong sense of social security. Gone is the sense that, wherever you go, you know where you fit. Gone are the familiar cultural norms. Gone are your friends from your ready-made peer group, who are just as invested in your success as you are in theirs.

News reports carry a lot of disheartening statistics about U.S. Veterans. (Like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, I capitalize the word “Veterans” to be respectful.) Nearly a fifth of Veterans between the ages of 18 and 24 are jobless. Veterans suffer a 33 percent higher rate of narcotics overdoses than the rest of the population, and their suicide rate is slightly higher, too. People often react to this with pity, assuming that the cause is tied to trauma suffered while in the service.

But I suspect that the main contributor to troubled adjustment to civilian life is something else entirely, and rarely is it because of battle trauma. Rather, when Veterans leave military service, many of them, like me, are leaving the most cohesive and helpful social network they’ve ever experienced. And that hurts. Most recent Veterans aren’t suffering because they remember what was bad. They’re suffering because they miss what was good.

Of course, many Veterans just power through and do fine. Veterans on average have better health and earn more money than the average American. But others fall short of their potential, simply because they’re missing something, and they can’t tell what it is.

One friend of mine went from being a combat medic in the Army to a transfer student in the health field at a major university. He got perfectly good grades, but none of his efforts to connect with his new peers and replace the social cohesion that he was missing worked. He nearly wound up dropping out of school. Simply put, he felt isolated and adrift.

For this reason, I think that the social prescription for most Veterans facing challenges in civilian life—whether those challenges are PTSD or a lost limb or simply an inability to maintain steady employment—should be the same: find them a social network to replace the one they lost.

This helped another friend of mine, a smart, capable Marine who was discharged from the service right around the time of her divorce. At first, she floundered, and for a short stretch she was even homeless. What rescued her was a stint with AmeriCorps, the federal community service organization, which gave her a job that led to full-time employment with a national nonprofit. AmeriCorps offered my friend three crucial things: a new mission, a new purpose, and a strong, supportive social network in which people were actually invested in one another’s well-being and success. That allowed her to get back on her feet. (That—and perhaps the fact that Marines are stubborn and tenacious. Not all stereotypes are bad.)

I am inspired to see that other Veteran service organizations have recognized the importance of a sense of community and renewed purpose. Look at The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that focuses on community service work for Veterans. They get it. They know that those who have served in the military are resilient and capable leaders. All that most Veterans need is a new mission, a new purpose, and a supportive community of peers.

Veterans aren’t looking for a handout, and they certainly don’t want to be pitied. If civilian life could offer Veterans more of the virtues of military life—accountability, cohesion, and a sense of purpose—I suspect you’d hear much less about the “problems” Veterans face and much more about the achievements that come from harnessing such vast energy, discipline, and public spirit.

The post Why Veterans Hurt (It’s Not What You Think) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“It’s a hell of a challenge to create a cohesive community that has ideological diversity,” said Jonathan Haidt, winner of the 2013 Zócalo Book Prize for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. “Race is easy. Ideology is hard.” After accepting his award in front of a full house at MOCA Grand Avenue, Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, asked why it’s so hard for us to live together in and govern today’s America—a country he thinks is divided most deeply not by race or economics or geography but by ideology.

Haidt said that talking and getting people used to one another is often a good way to bridge divides and help people realize their shared values. But when it comes to ideology, the opposite is true. People on the right and left “see the world in fundamentally different ways.” According to the philosopher Thomas Sowell, if you see the ideal world as “unconstrained,” you think human nature is malleable and can be improved and even perfected. If you see the ideal world as “constrained,” you think that people need limits in order to cooperate well and thrive. The left sees the ideal world as unconstrained; the right sees the ideal world as constrained.

These are very different views of human nature, said Haidt—and it means people’s visions of the ideal community are diametrically opposed. So how does this play out in our democracy? Haidt drew on three principles of moral psychology to explain.

The first principle is that “intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.” Haidt explained that when we’re presented with a fact we want to believe in, we ask ourselves, “‘Can I believe it?’” If the answer is yes, we find just one piece of evidence to support it, and we believe. If, on the other hand, we don’t want to believe in that fact, we ask ourselves, “‘Must I believe it?’” Then, we find just one piece of evidence against it, and we disbelieve. If people see what they want to see, and work to reach the conclusion they want to reach, asked Haidt, is it any wonder that scientific studies rarely change people’s minds? Technology has made it even more difficult for scientists to make their case in the court of public opinion, said Haidt: “Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will take you to the study you need.” Pointing to a contentious contemporary question, he asked, “Can gun control end shootings?” There’s no conclusive proof on either side, so both sides see what they want to see.

The second principle is that “there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.” Our morality is a balancing act among a number of different foundations, including care versus harm, liberty versus oppression, and authority versus subversion. People on both the right and left want fairness and liberty, said Haidt—but they want it in different balances. Parsing the immigration reform debate in the Senate, he quoted Democrat Patrick Leahy saying, “‘We need an immigration system that lives up to American values, one that allows families to be reunited and safe.’” Then he quoted Republican Chuck Grassley saying, “‘We have a duty to protect the borders and the sovereignty of this country.’”

Liberals want to knock down barriers in order to help people get along, said Haidt, while conservatives are more parochial—they’re trying to increase moral capital within a community in order to get it to cooperate well.

The third and final principle is that “morality binds and blinds.” Humans are the only species that has evolved to live in cooperative communities, with the exception of creatures like bees, who don’t reproduce except for their queen. How did we go, in a couple thousand years, from being hunter-gatherers to living in sophisticated communities? “We’re really good at making something sacred and circling around it,” said Haidt. “This is why flags are so important in war. It’s not just a piece of cloth. It’s the sacred emblem that allows people to risk their lives for each other.” We separate the world into good and evil, which allows us to come together around a common cause—and which also is how polarization happens. And polarization is increasing in America, nowhere more radically than in Congress, where for the first time in history, the liberals are all in one party and the conservatives are in another. We’ve lost coalitions based on other affinities, like jobs or geography, and as a result we’ve lost cooperation across party lines.

That’s why projects like Zócalo, which brings people together to hash out tough questions, are important, said Haidt, although he averred that hashing out is not in itself conducive bridging divides (often the opposite). “We need to figure out how to deal with this kind of diversity, which is very different from other kinds of diversity,” he said. “It’s a difficult problem, and we haven’t found good ways to solve it.”

The best solution is to find a common enemy, but that’s difficult to do when you’re so fundamentally divided. The left is rallying around global warming, so the right is rejecting it; the right is rallying around the sociological decline of America—especially the decline of marriage—so the left is rejecting it.

What, asked Haidt, would happen if both sides said, “‘I’m going to stick with my cause, but I’m willing to consider yours’”?

It just might be a start. So while diverse communities might never be as cohesive as uniform groups, they might be able to figure out a way to work together and move toward truth.

The post Race Is Easy. Ideology Is Hard. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty-three people were killed and more than 7,000 buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live; news cameras tracked the action from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.

King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catchphrase more often said for laughs than as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.

The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.

*

I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).

The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

The post Why Is It So Hard For Us To Get Along? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.