Our Burn It All Down Moment
I recently attended a talk by David Brooks, whom I first knew as the conservative voice on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and more recently as a writer for The New York Times and The Atlantic. He was speaking at a local university, and I didn’t want to miss it.
Unsurprisingly, he had a lot to say. But one idea has stuck with me and keeps resurfacing in conversation: life as a series of rupture and repair. Things come together, then fall apart, over and over again. He cited Samuel P. Huntington, who argued that roughly every 60 years, the United States experiences a kind of moral convulsion, a “burn it all down” moment. Brooks pointed to the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1890s, the 1960s, and now, the 2020s.
That’s the bad news. The good news, Brooks said, is what comes after. Out of these periods of upheaval, we rediscover something essential about ourselves that we are a people who long, who yearn, who rebuild with energy and purpose.
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Rucking Through Rupture to Repair
I saw that firsthand this March. I had the honor of rucking alongside members of The Give Team on their annual journey from Selma to Montgomery. The Give Team is the only endurance group made up of underserved youth and their mentors, and they are extraordinary.
Back in 2021, in the middle of our own national reckoning, I reached out to one of their leaders, Brad Mason, about donating proceeds from a 54-mile Selma-to-Montgomery rucking challenge. Our community would complete the distance over a month, in honor of those who marched it in 1965 for the Voting Rights Act.
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Brad likes to tell the story that he said, “Sure, do the fundraiser twice,” with a wink and a grin. GORUCK Nation showed up, as we do. But that was just the beginning. One of the athletes, Smit, suggested they should ruck the actual route themselves, following in the footsteps of John Lewis, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and the hundreds of others who marched in 1965. Ideas are only as powerful as they are contagious. |
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So Brad and Smit did it, 54 miles, to prove it could be done. The following year, more joined. This year, I made the pilgrimage to Selma to join 15 members of The Give Team and retrace that history.
Thank you all who joined the 54 mile Selma to Montgomery Challenge. If you would like to support The Give Team you can find out how here.
Emily McCarthy
Co-founder & Chief Community Officer
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