Go Beyond Voting: Sharon McMahon
November 7th, 2024
”If it's worth doing for everybody, it's worth doing for one person.”
We discuss the importance of shifting our mindset to one that is infused with hope. Positive change comes when we choose hope. Though nobody can fix it all, we can all do something and make an impact. Sharon reminds us that if something is worth doing for everyone, it’s worth doing for one person.
Sharon McMahon is the creator of “Sharon Says So” and host of the “Here’s Where it Gets Interesting” podcast. She's also the author of The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement.
Your civic action toolkit recommendations from Sharon are:
Choose hope.
Get involved in an issue that is important to you because your actions do matter.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Sharon McMahon
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Sharon McMahon Transcript
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Mila Atmos: [00:01:11] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm deeply curious about how our society works. So each week, I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to build a brighter future together. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now.
On this show, we celebrate citizen changemakers, people who buy in to community and the public good. So it's a special treat to speak to Sharon McMahon, the creator of Sharon Says So, host of the Here's Where it Gets Interesting podcast and the author of The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History from the founding to the Civil Rights Movement. It's a book about citizen changemakers who contributed to America's civic fabric, and in doing so, made our democracy stronger. Each of them was motivated to make impact. And as Michelle Obama recently reminded us at the Democratic National Convention in America, we do something. So these 12 people did exactly that. I know that in these times, we often feel
like just one of us cannot make a difference. And indeed, none of us can do it all. But we can all do something.
Welcome, Sharon. Thank you for joining us.
Sharon McMahon: [00:02:46] Truly a pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me.Mila Atmos: [00:02:50] Since The Small and the Mighty is a history book, I want to start with some context. Where do we find ourselves in this moment in history? And how does the book you wrote fit into the way America is today?
Sharon McMahon: [00:03:02] Mhm. This is a very pivotal moment in U.S. history. This is a moment that future historians will be examining for centuries, quite frankly, much like we are still dissecting the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl or the Cold War. This is one of those moments that we are living inside of. I recently had a discussion with some high school students about how these four years that we have been living through, beginning with the pandemic and through a tumultuous election cycle, and just a lot of sort of civic unrest. I wouldn't call it civil unrest, but just a general malaise that many people are feeling. An apprehension that many people are feeling. And I told them, this is going to be in the history books. You're going to do an assignment on this in the future, or at least your children are. And y'all are going to be the people who are getting the PhDs in history and are writing about this time period. And we had a really lively discussion about what will this time period be called. Much like we name other time periods, like the Cold War, like the Great Depression, even though they might not call it that in the moment. And the most common answer that people came up with was The Great Dumpster Fire. That, that is what current 18 year olds perceive as this four year time period. Now, they've been teenagers through this entire time period, so they may have a different perspective in 15 years. And the future is still being determined. So we don't know what it will, what it will ultimately be called. But I can tell you that whatever it's called, this is one of those moments that maybe people like me will be writing about in 20 years. It's a time of tremendous change and that time of change also brings about a tremendous amount of opportunity. So many people's lives hinge on moments of great opportunity, and whether we rise to the occasion or not is up to each one of us.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:06] Yeah. Well said. So after years as a government and law teacher, there are many other kinds of books that you could have written. So why was it important for you to tell these stories and why did you write this book? You know, who did you write it for?
Sharon McMahon: [00:05:21] Mhm. Yeah. You know what? The original book that I thought that I was going to sit down to write is not the book that I ended up writing. No matter how many times I started writing this book of like a guide to government or government for grown ups, or as you said, there's a million other ways that I could have put pen to paper. I kept coming back to the audience. I kept coming back to the community of governerds for whom I was writing the book, and and future governerds who don't know me yet. And I kept thinking like, what is it that people need right now? And yes, understanding how government works is very important. It's one reason why the work you do is important. It's very difficult to change something you don't understand. If you're a heart surgeon, you need to know how the heart works before you go hacking around on it with a scalpel. Right. So you need to understand how it works. And that is important. But the thing that I kept coming back to was just how hopeless so many people tell me that they feel that this is a time where they feel like nothing I do matters. Nothing I say matters. Nothing ever changes. We're going hell in a handbasket. And I know you know this, that that's not an uncommon way to feel. And this book was really born out of a desire, first of all, to share stories that I think are incredibly compelling and fascinating. Stories that are not well known. This is not, you know, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, which didn't really happen. But you know what I mean. These are the stories of ordinary people who spent their entire lives developing their character so that when their moment arrived, they would be ready. They'd be ready to have the audacity to rise to that moment. And I really believe that for all of us, we will have a moment in our lives where we have to either press forward with courage or turn back. And for some of us, that moment is right now. That moment is today. For some of us, it's still coming down the road and we don't know when we'll anticipate it, but everything we're going through now will be used. It's forming the character of who we are so that when our moment arrives, we too can rise to it. The people in this book provide us with examples of what that can look like for ordinary people who came from nothing, or who encountered extraordinary circumstances and just kept doing the next needed thing.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:49] Yeah, well, thanks for connecting the dots there between feeling hopelessness and doing something about it, and potentially doing the next needed thing. And I alluded to this, of course, in the intro, that we often feel like we cannot do anything, we can't make a difference. But you've shown through the examples of these individuals that people can do something. So what are the characteristics -- you mentioned this just now as well -- what are the characteristics that the people in your book have in common? Like what is a value that they share that we can all find within ourselves right now?
Sharon McMahon: [00:08:23] I love that question because in order to make any kind of positive change, and every single person listening to this can think of things they would like to change in this country, whether it is governmental or how citizens relate to each other. We can all think of things we'd like to improve. The only way that can happen is if people have hope that it can change. Positive things don't come from a place of hopelessness. And I think one of the important things to realize is that so many of us think that hope is a feeling that we will one day encounter, much like somebody will make me laugh someday. You know, most of us don't sit alone in a room laughing to ourselves unless we're, you know, consuming a something funny, right? That's not something that we just experience alone. And I think many of us liken hope with something that we wait to experience for someone else to bring us, that someday there will be a person who changes everything, that someday we will encounter a situation in which we begin to feel like, oh, I just feel so much hope now, when in reality, hope is a choice. It's a choice that we can make despite evidence to the contrary. All of the people in this book share that. That they believed that what they were doing would matter, even though none of them had any grand designs of like, my five year plan is to get people to do blah blah blah, and I'm going to get the petitions and fix the things. Most of the people in this book had very little political power, had very little ability to actually change structural systems. They thought they didn't, and yet they just kept putting one foot in front of the other with the hope that their small actions, that the collective small actions of everybody would ultimately do more than just the heroic actions of five people. And I think in some cases, people want to see a revolutionary amount of change. We want to see more, more work done on equality or voting rights or whatever it is. We want structural change and we want it now. And it seems like waiting and working is unfair, that there's an inherent unfairness in justice delayed. And if we're being honest, there is there is an inherent unfairness in that. But that doesn't mean that the answer is just to
give up, right? Well, it's unfair, so I'm not doing anything. I think that's often how people view the world today. I can't fix it all. And so I will fix nothing. I can't end income inequality, so forget it. I can't fix global child hunger. Doesn't matter. It's all hopeless. And the people in this book prove over and over and over again that that mindset does not bear fruit, that the mindset of I'm just going to keep doing what I can, where I am with the resources available to me, and all of that will matter. And I think that's something that we can take in, sort of like tuck in our pocket and hold in our hearts today, that what we do really does matter.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:40] Mm. That's so profound. Thank you. So to me, your book reads like a history of everyday citizens who were motivated by justice, by truth, equal rights. And I think today we would describe the characters in your book, these real people, as people who are working towards an inclusive, multicultural democracy. Of course, at the time they would not have described it that way. And one of the stories that was really unexpected to me was how Sears, Roebuck and Company weakened the stranglehold of white supremacy through their catalog business. And of course, in the beginning it was inadvertent, but then they embraced it. But walk us through how they did that.
Sharon McMahon: [00:12:20] Mm. It's such an interesting story. First of all, the man who sort of seizes the helm of Sears, Sears, Roebuck and Company. His name is Julius Rosenwald, comes into this position by matter of chance and by virtue of proximity. That's how he describes it. He was the son of immigrant peddlers who escaped anti- Semitism in Europe. His father literally went door to door selling things, and they eventually settled in Illinois. They grew up near a future president, Abraham Lincoln, although that has nothing to do with his success later in life. He gets started in the clothing business. He has family in the clothing business. He's selling men's suits and Sears and Roebuck buys men's suits from him. And, you know, so he begins to find a little success in the clothing business. And eventually, when Julius Rosenwald ascends to the leadership of Sears and Roebuck, he finds himself at the helm of an organization that perhaps he would have never envisioned for himself, sort of at a crossroads of what do I do with all of this money a problem most of us would love to have, right? We would love to have that problem of like, I just don't know what to do with all of my success! Sears and Roebuck encounters a situation that it certainly didn't design, but that they soon realize and lean into, which is that a lot of access to goods in the American South was controlled by rural postmasters. Of course, they didn't have big box stores. Of
course they didn't have the ability to shop online. But once train lines connected the entire country and telegraphs made it easy to communicate. People began to mail order things. They began to be able to get this catalog, which were really exciting, to receive the catalogs, and you would keep them for months and months and months until a new catalog came out. They began to have access to things that they previously would not have been able to access. And for the African-American community in the South, this is particularly important because even after the Civil War, when people are emancipated, Jim Crow laws made it so that they could not get service at a huge variety of stores. They were literally denied the right to be able to walk into, say, a furniture store and order something that they needed or to be able to purchase goods at a farm store. So the ability to access what they need, and the retailer has no idea who they are, they can't see that the person ordering this is an African American, that begins to change the structure of society in the South. Well, rural postmasters realized that this is what's happening, and they begin sort of throwing away the order cards that Sears and Roebuck would include in their catalogs. I bet some people remember this time from when they were younger that catalogues had ordering cards inside of them, and then eventually they moved to telephone 800 numbers and you would call. But initially they had a card that was, you know, either a postcard or sometimes it contained a self or a prepaid envelope that you would put it in and you'd fill it out and you'd have the item number and the quantity and the color, and you'd mail it in. And these rural postmasters, who were almost entirely white, realized that they were being circumvented in their ability to procure, you know, goods. Often these postmasters worked inside their own general store. They had multiple jobs. And so Sears and Roebuck began sending instructions in the catalogs that said things like, no need to go to the post office, just give this directly to your letter carrier. In that way, they were circumventing this entire system of keeping African Americans from accessing equality. Even though initially they were doing it from a business perspective of like, it makes way more sense if people can send us their orders. Of course, that's better business if we can get the orders. But Julius Rosenwald eventually befriends Booker T Washington.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:47] Yeah. Tell us more about that, because you mentioned he had all this money. He didn't know what to do with it. And he befriends Booker T Washington. And of course, he gave a lot of money away. He was really motivated by doing that. And among other things, he also was instrumental in the buildings of the YMCAs.
Sharon McMahon: [00:17:03] Yes.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:04] But I feel like his collaboration with Booker T Washington is maybe his deepest legacy in American life. And, how would you describe the magnitude of the impact of the work they did together?
Sharon McMahon: [00:17:19] It's really impossible to quantify. Because what Julius Rosenwald ultimately does with his money because of his interaction with Booker T Washington. He, he's given Booker T Washington's book Up from Slavery as a gift, and it has a profound impact on him. And he eventually meets Booker T Washington, and they begin a friendship that would last the rest of Booker T Washington's life. And he does give a lot of money to Tuskegee, which Booker T Washington began. But eventually, after Julius Rosenwald has made this sort of like gift to Booker T Washington, Booker writes him a letter and says, "what would you think if we did this with a little bit of the money that is left over, like a couple thousand dollars?" And Julius Rosenwald is like, "that sounds good to me." And eventually, Booker and Julius collaborate on a program that fundamentally changed the United States. And that program helped build 5000 schools for African Americans in the United States. 5000! At one point, the overwhelming majority of children in the state of Alabama attended a school that was funded by the Rosenwald Foundation, and there were specific requirements for how somebody was going to get the money and they had to be citizen buy-in. But if you think about how a child who is able to become educated then impacts their entire family, they become literate. They gain skills that they can then take into the job market. They impact not just their immediate family, their brothers and sisters, their parents, their grandparents. They impact their own descendants, their own children and grandchildren. So the impact is far more than the many, many hundreds of thousands of children who attended the schools. The impact is in the tens of millions of people. There were famous Americans like John Lewis who attended a Rosenwald funded school. You know, I don't profile him in the book, but John Lewis's impact on America is truly remarkable. So if you think about just the number of people who had access to education, who went on to do incredible things, there's just really not a way to even quantify it.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:40] Yeah. It was such a surprise to find out who Julius Rosenwald is that he had so much impact, and he kind of did it inadvertently in the beginning, but really embraced it and went more than anybody would have ever guessed.
Sharon McMahon: [00:19:55] Yes, he gave away the equivalent of over $1 billion today and left instructions that when he was dead, his money needed to have been given away. He gave away almost all of it during his lifetime, but with whatever was left. You need to get rid of this money. Give it away. Within a certain amount of time after my death, he did not want one of these, like perpetual endowments where they invest the money, and then they keep giving it away in little dribs and drabs. He was like, forget that.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:25] Yeah.
Sharon McMahon: [00:20:25] And then he refuses to put his name on it.Mila Atmos: [00:20:28] Yes, yes. I thought that was very, very powerful. You just don't see that today in 2024.
Sharon McMahon: [00:20:33] No.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:33] Everybody puts their name on it. Sharon McMahon: [00:20:35] They want naming rights. Mila Atmos: [00:20:35] Naming rights!
Sharon McMahon: [00:20:36] They do.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:37] And extra money for naming rights.Sharon McMahon: [00:20:38] That's right. And he did not. He did not want naming rights. He fought people on the naming rights. People tried to put his name on things and he he would fight them on it. And I think that's one reason his story is not well
known. Most people don't know who he is because he refused to attach his name to what he did.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:58] Yeah, yeah, it's very powerful.
We'll be right back with Sharon McMahon, so stay with us. You won't want to miss this episode's civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Sharon McMahon.
So we are, of course, a civic engagement podcast. And so I feel like this conversation would not be complete without discussing Septima Poinsette Clark and the founding of Citizenship School. I feel like we need citizenship schools right now, everywhere across the country. So tell us about how citizenship schools emerged and how they empowered the African American community.
Sharon McMahon: [00:23:33] I love Septima Clark. She's such a special, special lady, and she has a very tragic set of life circumstances that no one would ever want to trade places with. You would never look at her set of circumstances and be like, I'd love to have her life. Ultimately, she is fired from her job as a school teacher because she refuses to revoke her membership to the NAACP. She knows that the work that they're doing on the front of civil rights is incredibly important, and she refuses to give it up, refuses to pretend she's not a member. Charleston Public Schools fired every teacher who was a member or refused to renounce their membership. And so she leaves her job as a teacher and she goes to Highlander, which is a civil rights education center in Tennessee. And while she is there, she begins to conceive of something called a Citizenship School. One thing that I think is important to note about Septima before she begins Citizenship School, though, is that Septima's education at Highlander, the education she was providing, she was providing it to people like Rosa Parks. And we all know that Rosa Parks, of course, changed the course of history. She's a fantastic example of somebody who changed the course of history. And Rosa Parks is a student of Septima Clark's. So she eventually decides what we're doing here at Highlander is great, but most people would never have access to it. Most people don't have the ability to come here and live here for a week or two and take the classes and go home. But the people really need this education. So she collaborates with a small handful of people, including her cousin, and they decide that they are going to take some of the education that they were providing to this at the sort of residential, short term residential program at Highlander Folk School. And they are going to take that to the African American community wherever it is needed. And they begin in a small community in South Carolina. Her cousin is one of the teachers, and her cousin is like, "I am a hairdresser. I am not a teacher. I don't know how to be a teacher. Like, why would I do this?" And Septima convinces her cousin, "because you're not a teacher. That is why you need to do this. As a hairdresser, you have the soft skills of being able to just talk to strangers all day long and to just chit chat with them, make them feel valued, make them feel special, make them feel heard." And her cousin is like, "okay, I guess I'll do what I can. And she says, on the first day of citizenship school, I'm not a teacher, and we're going to learn together." And the purpose of Citizenship School was to help African Americans who had been systematically disenfranchised, to help them have access to full participation in what it meant to be an American. And for some people, that meant learning to read. For many adult African Americans, that meant learning to read. It meant doing things like learning how to fill out a voter registration card, how to write a
letter to your elected official, how to figure out who the mayor is, who represents you in Congress, how does a bill become a law? These sort of basic ideas of government, but customized for people who had never had the opportunity to receive that kind of education, but who very much wanted it. I think there's sometimes this notion, especially in, you know, mainstream educational settings that the African American community was not interested in participating. And that is the furthest thing from the truth. There's no community, perhaps, that believed in democracy more than the African American community who had been enslaved by people who systematically tried to exclude them and never gave up hope in participating fully in democracy. They believed wholeheartedly in participating. So Citizenship Schools eventually spread all over the South. They moved many thousands of African Americans onto the voter rolls. They gave them education on how to participate. And again, the impact of citizenship schools can't be understated because so many people who would later go on to be the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement received their initial education in a citizenship school.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:05] Yeah, it's really a powerful story and I had no idea. So thank you for bringing that into the book. Now that you have written this book about these small and mighty American citizens, how did they go about accomplishing their vision? Like, what does it take to change the course of history? And if you were channeling Septima, what would she say?
Sharon McMahon: [00:28:27] Well, first of all, Septima never set out to change the course of history. And what she set out to do was to impact people one at a time. And one of the things that I think is worth remembering that if something is worth doing in society, say, making sure kids have food to eat, it's worth doing for one person. And we so often get hung up on, well, we can't end childhood poverty by voting in November, or voting for such and such, and none of it matters. If it's worth doing for everybody, it's worth doing for one person. And she perfectly embodied that. Her very first teaching job was at a, in a one room schoolhouse on an island off the coast of South Carolina, after she'd been denied the right to teach in Charleston, where she was from. The school doesn't even have windows. In order to keep the bugs out, they have to close the shutters and the children. Basically no books. They're learning in the dark. And she's making, you know, comparatively tiny, tiny, tiny amount of money, even compared to African American male teachers. She's making a tiny amount of money, and the school
is called Promise Land School. And I can assure you that at no time in her life did she walk in that school and think, "well, this really is the promised land." She did not think that. And yet she she kept showing up, believing that what she was doing would make a difference. But one of the things that I love about her is at the end of her life, somebody asked her, you know, what did you learn? And she says, I have learned that I can work with my enemies because they might have a change of heart at any moment. And I think that's such a profound thing to think about. Today we think of somebody as our political enemy. They're on the other side of the aisle. They don't vote the same way that we do. They oppose efforts that we think are important and we think essentially, unfollow! Block!
Mila Atmos: [00:30:28] Yes, yes.
Sharon McMahon: [00:30:30] Unfriend! That's sort of our knee jerk reaction. And that is the opposite of what Septima Clark did. She says, I learned that I can work with my enemies because they might have a change of heart at any moment. What she's saying is never give up on somebody. And also, how would your enemies ever have a change of heart if they are never around someone to show them the way, to show them the light. They're just going to keep working with your enemies. If your enemy you can't work with them, who are they going to work with? Other people that are your enemy. They're going to keep on doing what they're doing. They need to have access to a better way of thinking. And Septima refused to give up. Even when she's an elderly woman, she's still living under a system of tremendous discrimination, even as an elderly woman, and she refuses to give up. I have seen people change around in ways you don't even think are possible, she said. And to me, that's a story that I think we should all tuck into our pockets. I can work with my enemies because they might have a change of heart at any moment for sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:44] I totally agree. That was really also a fantastic nugget of wisdom in your book. So speaking of changing the course of history, season 17 of Here Is Where it Gets Interesting is all about the life of Joseph Stalin. I was honestly surprised, but how did everything you learned from that season inform your work on this book?
Sharon McMahon: [00:32:06] Joseph Stalin is also a great example of somebody who changed the course of history, just in a really different way. If you don't think one person makes a difference, take a look at Stalin's life. Right? Like Stalin killed more people, was responsible for the death of more people than perhaps anyone in world history. He's up there, at least. And an examination of Stalin's life is certainly not a glorification of his life in any way. But it is a strong illustration of how our small choices make a difference. He certainly did not set out to become what many people would describe him as today, as a madman. Some people would call him a monster. You know, he certainly did not set out that way. But unlike the people in this book who chose to have hope that their small actions would make a difference, Stalin believed that if he could control everybody, that he could force them to do what it was that he believed was the quote unquote right thing, and what the right thing in his mind was, was very self-serving. It was not designed to enrich others or lift other people up. It was designed to lift himself up. He did not take the perspective of any of the people in this book. Obviously, he he has access to a tremendous amount of power, but he could have been one of the people in this book, and his own choices led him down a very different path. You know, Stalin starts out as this... He goes to seminary, he's going to become a priest. He's going to, you know, be a man of the cloth, so to speak. He was a, you know, obviously very charismatic leader in many ways. People wanted to follow him, but his choices led him down a very different path. And I think it's really illustrative of how much an individual's choices matter. And you can now see the divergence of these two very different paths, where one's choices can lead you over here, or where one's choices can lead you to a very, very bad place.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:23] Right. Well, we're always living history at every moment. And you mentioned earlier, and you remind the reader frequently in the book that we are perhaps ourselves, going to be an active participant and do the next needed thing. So what do you think is the next needed thing right now.
Sharon McMahon: [00:34:43] That is going to depend on where you are and who you are, and what your skills are and what you feel drawn to or called to do. And I think that's actually really important that so often we feel disempowered by the fact that I can't do everything. I don't have money. I'm not a billionaire. I can't speak on a stage. I don't know how to do heart surgery. We look at this through a lens of lack, of all of the areas that we cannot make a difference in, instead of embracing where we are, what our
sphere of influence is, what our unique skills are, and also, you know, the the issues that are sort of laid on our hearts. You care a lot about civic engagement, and you have figured out a way to impact people on that front. You are not a neurosurgeon, right? And that is actually great. Let other people who are good at that thing be good at that thing. And it is, it's not just okay, it's needed for each person to bring what it is that they're passionate about and skilled in, to the table. I have a much larger platform than many preschool teachers, for example. That doesn't mean that what I'm doing is more important than what they're doing on a daily basis. If it's worth doing for everybody, it's worth doing for one person. It's worth caring for one child. So if there's a topic that I think people feel especially drawn to, whether that is environmental action, criminal justice reform, child poverty, whatever it is that you feel really drawn to, I firmly believe that that thing is given to you for a reason and that you are supposed to do something about that thing. Nobody can fix it all, but all of us can do something, as you mentioned, and it might as well be the next needed thing in your own sphere of influence on a topic that you feel drawn to, and trust that that is what you're supposed to be doing. Just like the people in this book did not look around and think to themselves, well, I can't end international conflict, so never mind. It didn't mean that they didn't keep working for women's equality in the United States, because they couldn't end a war in Europe. Just because you can't fix it all doesn't mean you can't impact something.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:17] Yeah. Well said. Well, this might almost seem redundant, but every week on Future Hindsight, I ask my guest to share a civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. What's a good way to turn the insights you've shared with us into action?
Sharon McMahon: [00:37:35] I think it's a mindset shift from nothing I do matters to I will have hope that what I do will matter. That's a choice that we can make. And if we move forward with the hope that what we do will matter, even if we can't see it today. Even if the Earth doesn't change its rotation around the sun because we sent an email, um, what we do can and does matter, and positive change comes when we choose to have that hope. So more than a prescription for take this one action, send this one email, go to this one event, contact this one person, we would all feel far more empowered to make positive contributions if we choose to have hope, that even if we can't see it, that what we're doing will matter.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:31] Hear, hear. So as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Sharon McMahon: [00:38:39] I have hope in this sort of citizen awakening, so to speak. The citizen uprising that certainly was not present amongst mainstream... Moms is the wrong word. But, you know, like I look back at my mother's generation, my mother's generation, aside from protesting, say, the Vietnam War, they didn't particularly feel empowered to make a difference in the way government worked. They maybe watched the Watergate hearings and were like, oh, no, that's terrible. You know, like they they felt in many ways disempowered and were not civically engaged, other than maybe voting. My mom voted, but she has never. Until now. My mom is in her 60s now. My mom feels like "there is stuff I can do. There are things I can do." My mom doesn't feel like she needs to lead every protest and go to every march and do all the things, but she knows that, like, yeah, I could, I could do that thing. I could attend that thing, I could help her out. I could go to her event. I think this sort of awakening to this idea that, in fact, what we do does make a difference, and I am capable of impacting somebody. That gives me a tremendous amount of hope that there are shows like this that people are listening to. There are shows like mine that people are listening to, that people now understand, you know, with all the information in the world at their fingertips, we can now understand how do I contact Congressman Bob? You know, I want to send him an email. I'm going to give him a call. We feel far more empowered to do those things today than at any time in the past. And that can be a blessing and a curse. But it is power that we can harness for good.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:21] Yeah, I totally agree. I really feel that so many people feel powerless and hopeless. And what you do and what I do, I hope, really does make it clear to people we do have power. And that we should exercise it and use it. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Sharon McMahon: [00:40:40] My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:42] Sharon McMahon is the creator of “Sharon Says So” and the author of The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans who Changed the Course of History from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. Remember, civic
action doesn't have to be complicated. It's about small steps that spark progress. Like sharing this episode with a friend. Let's recap this week's civic spark and fire up our collective power. First, change your mindset to one that is infused with hope and know that what you do matters. You might not be able to change the world in an afternoon, so don't put that pressure on yourself. Find what you care about, make a plan to do something about it, and take the small steps. You can be sure that those small steps will add up.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Dr C. Nicole Mason. She's the founder and president of Future Forward Women, a project at the New York Women's Foundation. It's a legislative exchange and policy network that advances progressive public policies at the state and federal levels.
Dr. C. Nicole Mason: [00:42:02] You know, the freedom to make your own choices, pursue your own good and your own way, and then the freedom from harm, the freedom from coercion, right. That's classic liberalism. And when we think about abortion bans, it is not democratic in that way. It is really trying to restrict somebody's freedom and disallowing them from being who they are and pursuing their own good in their own way. Full stop. And so these bans are anti-democratic.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:32] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please consider supporting us on Patreon. We're really passionate about bringing pro-democracy values into your headphones. As you heard at the beginning of the show, we are an independent podcast and every dollar counts. Please support us by joining the Civics Club on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/futurehindsight. That's Patreon.com/futurehindsight.
Thank you so much for your support and thanks for tuning in. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, see clearly, act boldly, and spark the change you want to see.
Democracy Group: [00:43:26] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.