In 2024, I founded the Indiana Rural Summit, a coalition organizing Indiana House candidates, connecting 30 counties, to give rural and small-town Hoosiers a voice. There was a reason I wanted to use “E Pluribus Unum” for the Indiana Rural Summit slogan—it is the core truth that is coming to full bloom amidst the weeds trying to choke it out. “Out of Many, One!”
Now, in 2025, I feel like we are in two timelines. One is a continuation from 2024 - building our electoral base towards the 2026 Midterm election and beyond. But the other timeline, the one that feels significantly more urgent, is the fight for our Democracy and a country “Of the People, By the People and For the People”.
What gives me hope is that our nation’s strength is in its Diversity, its belief in Equity and its Inclusion of all. That the far right’s unholy trinity of MAGA, Christian Nationalism and Oligarchy are naming DEI as their target only reinforces that they see it as the threat to their power, and they are correct.
I actually choose to see DEI in the Latin phrase for Image of God…Imago Dei!
We talk about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as core to our national identity. Three strands, once woven, are not easily broken. Just like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We are at a crossroads. Do we determine to follow the dream voiced by Martin Luther King Jr. or return to the time of Robber Barons and Jim Crow?
The stewardship of the Indigenous (Life), the fight for freedom by the descendants of the enslaved (Liberty), and the greater imagining for life of the immigrant (the Pursuit of Happiness), are the truths hidden within our stories.
We must resolve to remember who we are. We do not whitewash our painful history. As so many of us have begun chanting in protests across the nation, “We Won’t Go Back!”, we won’t go back to the times that divided us. We won’t return to scapegoating. We won’t reject the parts of who we are that give us strength. We must move forward in the truth that we are indeed a nation of three unique strands, and we are choosing to braid them together, weaving a story that is uniquely our own.
It is in this act of communal weaving that we are united.
We have a long way to go, but we are moving forward, together. We won’t go back!
