This Project might pull in more readers if this writer stopped using the pronouns  “we” and “us” and started pointing fingers.  I think the current approach may be frustrating to some friends both liberal and conservative.  There are reasons for this deliberate avoidance of using the names of the usual suspects. Anymore there are some safety concerns now that free speech is randomly currently censored from the highest levels, regardless of the speech’s content relationship  to true or false.  Speaking out carries more risk than ever before in this country’s history.  But that is true for any form of activism.  My broader approach of ‘we’ is to track the trail of ‘wily culpability’.

Right now it feels like we have a nation of “innocents” assaulting the “guilty” both verbally as well as occasionally physically.  It feels like everyone is innocent believing all who are different are by definition guilty. Culpability gets lost in a dense information web of artificial intelligence and denial designed to instill perpetual conflict.  The conflict  assures only the continued deterioration of the American community.  Culpability means:” responsibility for wrongdoing or failure”.   In a democracy, culpability is not some wily, furry, little creature hiding behind a tree, or ducking into a hole like a prairie dog.  Culpability in a democracy always spreads like good peanut butter across the entire population of citizens, liberal and conservative.  Somehow we all deserve what we get and the art of democracy is figuring out how we got what we have and making the corrections.

Here is this Project’s four step recipe for finding a majority of good for the Next Democracy.  Every citizen must:

1. Genuinely discover and own how your personal positions may have contributed to the national suffering of the moment.
2. Be careful about all media subject to the manipulations of AI, deception, or simple human denial.
3. Enter relationship with strangers who, different as they may be, show even the subtlest desire to rebuild community.
4. Build personal relationship around good questions while avoiding the certainties contained in false innocence. 

Thus begins the American rebuild from the ground up building a productive partnership with culpability.   mea culpa.