We hope you found plenty of shade, rest and relaxation over the long holiday weekend. We spent last week in one of our favorite places on earth, Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin, with some of our favorite people on earth, including our two young grandsons. They played and splashed and "surfed" (a paddleboard, not the news) with total strangers all week long. We have no idea how those families voted. Nobody asked. Nobody cared.

Then, this past weekend, we sat on the grass at a Cape Cod League baseball game. College kids playing with wooden bats with a pure love of the game, a whole town spread out on bleachers, blankets and lawn chairs. The best of American traditions.

And like many others, we have also been swept up in a World Cup played in Boston and across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What an amazing spectacle, on the field, in the stands and in cities and towns around the world. We're sports fans, but were never big soccer fans. While we found ourselves rooting for the U.S. team we have always cheered on any post-colonial nations taking on colonizers, sometimes their own. As in politics, we always end up rooting for the underdog.

A Ray of Hope?

Truthfully, each time we hear America – to mean the USA – we skip a beat. The Cup has brought home to us all the Americas, and their joyful representation within the U.S. Don't miss this beautiful NYT piece on the immigrant communities filling stadiums and watch parties across the country. Some of these communities were familiar to us (e.g., Haitians in Miami and Brazilians in Boston), but others were surprises (Argentinians in Utah? Bosnians in St. Louis!).

From our vantage point today, we hear echoes of the waves of immigrants who have rolled in over the past two plus centuries, including our own ancestors from Poland, Germany, France and Ukraine. This weekend, we heard stories from Julia's parents' early years, and their immigrant parents on the Lower East Side, and in Brooklyn and Hoboken. And we discussed Tom's ancestors' 19th century journeys – to Baton Rouge, Columbia City, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

Talk about the best sides of America: generations flourishing, loving, honoring old traditions, and building new ones. And the dream – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – being available to newcomers. May that someday be the reality for all here.

This edition marks our sixth and the U.S.' 250th celebration. We continue, below, to share how we are making sense of the nonsensical, signs of hope and opportunities to maximize impact.

Is Hate Winning?

As we celebrated our families' journeys, the contrast with the treatment of immigrants today by the federal, and many state, governments was stark. There has always been an exploitative, even voracious, side to our country: opportunists exploiting and hating each new wave of immigrants.

A dream of a stable, secure, life for families has driven generations to come here seeking opportunity. Some have found it. And it has been far easier for those who are white, male, straight, gender-conforming or Christian.

A minority of other immigrants – and enslaved peoples' descendants – also overcame entrenched barriers and gatekeeping to build safe, secure, lives here. Against all odds.

But for many people, the struggle continues. The hate and exploitation and hegemony – the always present worst sides of our country – have largely taken control of our federal government.

That pit in our stomachs is the feeling of being at war – the war between the best and worst of our country.

The contrast was on full display this weekend. On the National Mall, our 250th anniversary was marked by what the President promised would, yet again, be "the most spectacular" gathering ever. It was complete with warnings about the "communist menace", and with jingoism and scapegoating masquerading as love of country. (Of course, we know that serving his greed and enriching only the wealthiest, without any restraint, is his ultimate goal, and that of those who fuel his power.)

Meanwhile, in New York, Mayor Mamdani marked the 250th from behind a desk that once belonged to George Washington, flanked by newly naturalized citizens. And the first U.S. Pope, Leo, accepted the Liberty Medal by urging us to recommit to our founding ideals of human dignity and liberty, recalling how the U.S. "opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants."

Two drastically different versions of "patriotism".

In November of the U.S.' 251st year, voters will choose between these two. There are some hopeful signs they will repudiate this administration again (e.g., read NYT opinion writer David Wallace-Wells' recent The Vibe Has Shifted Back). If only, again, because they are angry, and want that same security and safety for themselves and their families. And they are angry with a government that hasn't felt like it cares about their own needs substantively in their lifetime, or since their youth.

Of course, we all have to repeatedly choose. Not only in thought, but in action. As Ohio organizer Prentiss Haney (read on) put it – articulating a vision of patriotism that would have been recognizable in the 1770s – we must "Act free to be free".

The accelerated direction of U.S. patriotism feels dark.

But can we find light?

Justice Jackson Brings the Light

For most of our lives, we have been critical of our country and its politics. There has always been plenty of fuel for our fire. But this year, we believe it is essential to not just fight against the things that animate our activism – injustice, inequality, racism, hate – but to fight for something. For the better sides. For a better country and democracy.

We need to see the "good people" of this country take back its unperfected ideals, its unfulfilled potential, a different definition of patriotism. If the vibe has begun to shift, then we need to harness and amplify it.

We know that the Right will do all they can to hold onto power, because they have already done so and are ramping up and weaponizing our own government to do so again.

Sure, we found some ray of hope last week in the survival of birthright citizenship, but the bright light of hope came in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's concurrence. She raised up and celebrated the Second Founding: Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which wrote birthright citizenship and equal protection into the Constitution itself.

In twenty pages, she eviscerates Justice Thomas's revisionist dissent which "bears little relationship to the history of its ratification." She writes:

"The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery."

A reset for the Nation. While the Right glorifies the original founding of our nation, it is this second founding that is under persistent attack today and needs us to join in its defense.

Justice Jackson is the second-youngest member of the Supreme Court. She will be writing – and increasingly defining – the defense of the Second Founding for decades to come. Someday, she might do so as our Chief Justice. It could happen. But only with a lot of people rising up and changing our government.

But the Attack on Democracy Keeps Building

In May's Making Sense; Maximizing Impact (MSMI May) we wrote of learning to surf the waves – not rising and falling with every swell of bad news – to find respite and keep oneself "in the work". But, make no mistake: the direction of the prevailing waves is clear and steady. And the storm is building.

Last month, the FBI was again weaponized, deploying 100+ agents into the field against the Ohio Organizing Collaborative – a key part of the state's progressive infrastructure leading voter registration drives and ballot issue campaigns. Agents raided organizers' offices and confronted staff and volunteers in a clear act of intimidation at their homes, ignoring (relishing?) the presence of their children.

But the legal, organizing and funding community was ready. The coalitions built and lessons learned were clear. We have been impressed and heartened by the unity, organization and resolve on display.

Organizers were back in the field the very next day. Read OOC's open letter. Appreciate – and borrow some of – their resolve.

At a recent funder briefing, we heard the call to action framed this way:

We must make the Right regret doing this, the way we made them regret their over-the-top aggression in Minneapolis.

This is not despair. It is resolve. And resolve is something we can, must, all invest in.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

We are sharing sources of hope, and strategies to avoid drowning in a sea of bad news. But we know flight is not an option. We all must fight.

Too many of us read the latest news, get wound up by the latest outrage, share the article with a despairing note... and then return to our lives. Reacting is not acting. And the wave troughs of despair, like the peaks of euphoria, are poor guides.

As one of our family members likes to say: "Hope is not a strategy."

Those who might help stop right-wing government overreach, including you and us, must be organized and prepared to Stop the (Real) Steal. What is coming – already in progress(!) – will make January 6 look like a dress rehearsal.

Our top priority right now is to help prepare to defend the 2026 election results by supporting the existing and impressive networks of resistance, and the organizing, legal and communications infrastructure that are leading it.

We've written before about other things you can do – groups worthy of your participation – and will again. But, right now – particularly given the urgency, the calendar, and the dearth of funding the most impactful thing many of us can do is donate as generously as possible. (Candidates soak up way too much of the giving with that daily litter of emails and texts.)

In most of our previous editions, we've offered ideas of where to donate and have impact. Here is one key (repeated) priority, as well as one (very current, new) opportunity, that we believe deserves funding and is particularly impactful right now:

1. Safeguard our elections. The Election Safeguards Response Network (note a sample of the many groups involved here) continues to be the key coalition nationwide, ensuring coordination and communication across an array of organizations, the critical infrastructure responding to attacks on our elections now, and the readiness nationwide to turn out, to "be ready in November when it's needed most". (tax-deductible nonpartisan work | critical advocacy work - not tax-deductible)
2. Invest in the Ohio organizers under attack: Support the new Ohio Fund that channels support directly to the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and its partners, under their own state-based control. (Kudos to Movement Voter Fund for creating this targeted fund in the wake of the raids, and waiving any fees.) This is the fastest way to make the weaponization of the FBI in Ohio backfire.

We'll keep trying to hold onto the good stuff: sitting on the dock as grandkids frolic; taking in a Kettleers game from the lawn; and watching a World Cup game with ardent fans.

Here's to a new patriotism for the next 250 years – built on fairness, equality, and opportunity. Politics have a way of swinging as a pendulum. And, of surprising us. The pendulum often needs a lot of nudging, of course. We know all the leverage the other side has, so we'll keep at it.

Thanks for being a part of it too. And for reading. Please continue to foster hope in others, and let us know what is keeping you going and where you are investing your precious time and resources.

Tom & Julia