We live in a loud, fractured moment, with never-ending temptation to meet it with more volume. But division is rarely a failure of argument; it is a failure of attention, which is what empathy actually asks of us, less a feeling than a way of looking. Connection begins where we stop persuading and start understanding: what someone actually carries, what would hold beneath them, what our convictions look like when they take physical form in a community. That labor has no terminus. Utopia was never a place to arrive at. It is the discipline of building as though we might.

~Peter Kerre