- Here we are, session two, talking about modeling ways to listen to one another, having discussions about some hard topics, holding our ground while still sharing with others and hopefully enrolling others in a way of thinking, and the openness to say, I never thought of that.

So I asked you a moment ago if you would, to list three of your fundamental values, your core values, that you alluded to having in the first session.

What did you write, Catherine?

- I wrote kindness, respect, and non-judgment.

- How do you define respect?

- Gosh, we're back to the Supreme Court thing again.

Listening, being open to the notion that whatever somebody says or does, they're coming from somewhere and trying to be mindful of that.

As opposed to, well, now I'm moving into non-judgment.

- A form of respect.

- I mean, so, sort of golden rule.

Treat others as you would want to be treated.

Maybe that's a better way of saying it.

- Pilar?

- Okay.

Respect, honesty, and flexibility.

- Flexibility.

Jake?

- I may have misunderstood the assignment, but, because one of them I didn't bring up in the first session, but one, taking care of anybody in need, regardless of where they're from.

Color, religion.

If they need help, help them.

Freedom of speech and honesty, and originally I wrote that one was just because of, it seems like recent times, people have really dubbed down people, other people's freedom of speech.

It just depends on if you're watching liberal media, conservative media, of just blocking out what people's feelings are.

It feels like.

I could be wrong.

And just how important the second amendment is to me.

- And we're gonna get to that a little later in this session.

But I wanna go back to what you just said about freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution.

- Yes, sir.

- But there's no guarantee in the Constitution I have to listen to your speech, so I can walk away from it.

Do I have the right to cancel your speech?

- Or censorship.

- Because I disagree with it.

- I don't think so.

- I'm gonna go with no.

- But slander is also against the law.

- But when a university chooses not, or chooses to uninvite a speaker because students on that campus disagree with the beliefs of that speaker, what does that say of our constitutional right to free speech?

- I think it questions who picked the speaker.

- [Jake] Or how close minded the college is.

- I mean, what's it for?

I mean, is it for the people?

- I mean, is it for the people, or like, do you want to learn other cultures, other aspects of things?

Like how close-minded do you have to be to be like, I don't really wanna listen to what they gotta say because you don't know what they are gonna say.

- Isn't it the college's prerogative to hire who they want to speak when they want?

- If they're receiving tax dollars?

Possibly not.

- That is exactly what I was about to say.

- It depends what type of college, also.

If there could be harm or danger involved, like if they've received multiple threats that are legit threats, it may be in the best interest that that not be their platform.

- Right.

- So I could see possibly canceling.

- If the history of the speaker has got a history of hate, you know, and causing nothing but division, then they should rethink in spite of this freedom of speech.

Because freedom of speech is as long as you can speak, nobody's stopping you.

But if your speech is hurting somebody, I think you have to rethink the value of the speech.

- Are we beyond where we were a generation ago and longer when Dr. King would not have been welcomed on certain college campuses here in North Carolina?

Not because he was inciting hate speech, but he brought a different way of thinking that was bringing change to this state that a lot of people did not want to hear.

- I think there's...

So, I think there's a difference thinking about somebody like Dr. King and the message that he was trying to convey, which was one of equality, of basic fundamental rights for all people, regardless of skin color versus, to Faiz's point, somebody who is going to incite violence or whose message is about exclusion, whose message is about minimizing the rights of others or frankly hatred.

And I feel like in the last 5, 10 years, people in the latter group have become much more empowered to stand up on a platform and speak.

And I do think that while they have a right to speak, I think that organizations have the right to say, no thank you.

- Even when they receive tax dollars?

- If they're inciting, hatred, exclusion, things that honestly violate the inalienable rights of human beings in this country, then I'm gonna go with yes.

- I think back to when the ACLU defended the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and their right to march and protest, and people who supported the ACLU were absolutely devastated and up in arms.

How can you do this?

The response was, the constitution is for everyone in this country, not just for those with whom you agree.

- Yeah, but I think just to counter that just a little bit, and I think that when you have a college, right, the college has a certain tone to it, and you've got entrusted leaders.

And I'm very big on, we've empowered and entrusted specific people to make sound judgmental decisions on who they allow to speak on campus for a very specific reason.

And like you said, if it's going to cause harm, weighing the timing of the speech is important.

Is it going to hurt the people that are on campus by distracting them all?

Because you go to a college campus to learn a trade, right?

And also to grow.

But is it taking away from the learning of that trade because you're inciting argumentative dialogue that's gonna cause more hate and breed more commotion and distract you from the ultimate goal of getting a degree?

- Who ultimately gets to decide what is argumentative?

- University admin.

Currently what we do is, say like a pro-life group comes on campus, we put out a campus warning, hey, there may be some visuals that you don't want to see.

If you don't wanna see it, don't cut through campus this way.

And in some cases they will uninvite people if it's too provocative.

But, did anybody go to college here in the 90s?

In North Carolina?

Anybody remember the Brickyard Preacher from NC State or whatever you called him at your college?

At Charlotte, he was- - The Pitt Preacher.

- Yeah.

At Charlotte, he was the Belk Tower Preacher.

Did they ever warn any of us about that dude?

No.

- What did he do?

- But they also handled things differently.

- It depends on where you were at.

- There's still a Pit Preacher in Chapel Hill.

Yeah.

- So that specific guy for the bigger schools, like State and Carolina, y'all mostly ignored him.

Charlotte, we were like woo, entertainment.

Until he insulted a woman, basically told her she was, you know, headed to the pits of hellfire, and she punched him in the mouth.

Now what can you not do?

That's assault and battery.

So then they had to actually like, give him like police presence when he was on campus, you know, when he was preaching at the tower, because it was just like, listen, you know, and a lot of people were like, well, his right to talk ends where my fist begins.

And I'm like, yeah, but that's a crime.

It's not worth me going to jail.

I'm just gonna ignore the dude.

You know?

And I understood what was happening even, but it was just like, you could choose to ignore him.

You can choose to be antagonized by him.

And if you choose to be antagonized by him so much that you're angered enough to put hands on this man, he's achieved his goal.

- Oh, sorry.

- I was gonna say like, the whole, does someone get to deserve to speak wherever, college, I didn't go to college, like, me and her, we had a great conversation, but like if only Old McDonald came to my high school and preached whatever he was gonna preach.

And I wasn't open to other cultures where I'd know all this stuff and be able to like, open-mindedly be able to like, we had a great conversation, but you wouldn't have known right off the bat last night, I'm super pro Second Amendment.

I'm more middle of the road after sitting here listening to everybody than I realized.

But like, you wouldn't know my wife's story if I wasn't able to speak.

So to turn anybody away, like, whether it's a uprage or not, like, the speech isn't violent, it's our reactions to it.

And if you're not open-minded enough to calm yourself down enough to listen to somebody on what they believe is truth, then how would you know that's what they thought?

And like in all sides of history, whether it's war, whether it's politics, whether it's friends, everyone thinks they're the good guy before they lose.

In their heart.

Just like World War II, somewhere down in that deep psychotic head of Hitler, he thought he was the good guy.

I'm not saying he was.

But like everyone in war, when they go to war, they think they're the good guy.

They think they're doing the right thing.

- Well, and just to be clear, I am certainly not, so everybody absolutely has the right to free speech.

I think, and I remember as a little kid, my dad telling me about the KKK march that happened in Greensboro and he was like, and you know what Catherine, I absolutely support their right to march.

And I mean, I was appalled.

I'm like, but dad, we're Jewish.

You know, my dad was a lawyer and he explained to me, everybody absolutely has the right to free speech and they have the right to march peaceably and demonstrate just like the Nazis did in Skokie.

And so I, well, boy, that's terrifying.

And I'm uncomfortable with it.

I agree.

They do have that right.

I think when speaking, say if the leader of one of those groups was invited to speak at a university or an organization, I think where that gives me pause is it suggests, what does that organization stand for?

And especially as, because it's such an extreme, I mean, you know, extremism on any side is not ideal.

And I think extremism regardless of the side when put forward at a state institution in particular, but at any institution, that says something about what that institution represents.

And that's when I get more nervous and say, well, I don't think the institution should sponsor an extremist whatever side, but that same person absolutely has the right to organize a rally on their own or stand in the Pit at Chapel Hill and say their peace.

I just wanna be clear about that.

- What did you write on your card?

- My three were loyalty, honor and fairness.

I'm a big believer in loyalty over everything.

It's actually even inscribed over inside my wedding ring.

Honor's, you know, do the right thing.

Honor and integrity are almost interchangeable.

Do the right thing even when nobody's looking because that's the right thing to do.

Fairness, I will tell you, I'm not a legal/illegal kind of person, despite having been a correction officer, despite having been a detention officer.

Slavery was legal, Jim Crow was legal.

So that's not a fair metric.

But I am a right and wrong kind of person.

I am a fair and not fair kind of person.

And those things don't always align with legal and illegal.

- Your card?

- I am a big believer in do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Golden rule.

And then, protect what's sacred to others.

I think one of the biggest things that causes division is because people devalue what's sacred to somebody else.

And if you go and take something that somebody, my children are a perfect example.

If they have, one has a stuffed animal, that they hold onto like it's their life, and the other snatches it away from them and throws it on the floor, you've now taken something sacred and thrown it on the floor and it's gonna cause extreme hurt even though that other child devalues what the first child had.

And I think we do that as human beings to each other in every way possible.

Honor God by praying for your enemies and waiting for your blessing.

I think that it's, one of the things that the Bible says is to pray for your enemies, not to persecute those who have hurt you.

And it's one of the hardest things to do when people have torn down everything that you stand for and everything that you want and have.

And you see it in politics all the time, have defamed you and slandered your name.

And I believe that if we continue to pray, keep our goodness.

- What does it feel like to love your enemy?

- You have to look at them as, everybody has a mom, everybody has a dad.

And if we look at every single person on this table, they're very highly valued.

Like, you could have broken up my entire household, but something caused you to have, something either manipulated you, triggered you, caused you to believe wrong things and caused you to do all that stuff.

And we live a life, right?

And we make mistakes.

And if we can't look the other way and say they were going through something here, as a mother would look at their child saying from birth, you weren't an evil human.

Well, original sin, but you weren't really, you had good intentions.

You never woke up in the morning saying, I'm gonna destroy that person's life today.

And if you look at them as a child saying, hey, you're still loved by God.

God loved, I mean, look at Paul the Apostle.

He murdered Christians before he became one.

And if Jesus entrusted him with the New Testament.

- How do you love the killer of the Pittsburgh synagogue members?

- I don't know.

I mean, I...

Similarly to Nisha, I think about what's happened in that person's life to lead them there.

I mean there's this concept of trauma-informed care where you have to think about what are the experiences that a person had in childhood or leading up to whatever happens that led them to that.

And so, that for me helps.

I don't know if I can love them.

- Do we ever get to the point where we truly can live into loving enemies?

Does it mean that we don't persecute them?

Does it mean that we embrace them?

If someone wanted to take away your firearms, could you love that person?

- Well, I could probably love them, but I'm not gonna give them up that easily.

So I don't have to have hate in my heart for you to disagree with you.

- So, it's either love or hate, I guess, as we're talking about this.

Are they mutually exclusive?

Are they concentric circles?

Are they all about the same thing?

You know, on a much lighter note, I was at the Duke Carolina basketball game last year at Chapel Hill when Duke won.

I assure you there weren't people in Carolina Blue loving their enemy.

Now others would say, that's their tribes.

They have the right to do that.

You mentioned earlier Faiz what sports can do.

It's something to learn about.

But I heard vitriol coming from people that night.

And I'm thinking, it's a ball game.

- So much more then that.

- [David] So, we're talking about real serious things here, but we sort of condone it.

- I guess it would be what kind of level you mean, too.

Like if someone wants to take my guns away versus they are taken away and that would make it exclusive.

- Hold your thought of what's on your cards.

We're gonna get to all of those.

Now that you said that.

- That one over there.

- You got chocolate?

- A bullet?

- Now it's one shell.

Represents a lot.

That was a coffee mug given to me about a year ago.

Gun handle, lots of shells there.

When you see that, what do you think?

- I mean, it's not my taste.

Kind of cheesy but, you know.

- [David] Is that fair?

Is that fair for me to put that on the table?

- I mean, it's an inanimate object to me.

I mean, it could be rainbows and kittens and I wouldn't think twice about that either.

- Is it meant to be offensive?

- [Jake] Now, is it fair to somebody else here?

I don't know.

- No, it's not meant to be offensive.

It was meant to be thought provoking.

- What if you had an experience where you lost a family member to gun violence, then that might be offensive.

- Can a gun ever be fired where it's not violent?

I mean, that's the nature of a gun, right?

Of a firearm?

The bullet powder explodes.

It's violence.

I think we in the media use a bad term when we say gun violence.

I mean if someone's killed, it's violent.

Just like terrorism.

Those students in Chapel Hill were terrorized.

Okay?

But when we look at a conversation around the right to bear arms, we seem to get lost in what we're talking about.

Obviously, a person has a right to own a firearm.

Do we have a right to own a weapon that fires automatically?

I can't buy a bazooka today.

That's a firearm.

I can't buy it legally.

I can't buy a tank with a weapon on it.

We have limits on what we can buy.

Why is it that any talk of any additional limits just seems to drive people nuts?

- I think that part of it is people fear that once you make this rule here, that the limit's gonna be changed later, and it goes further and further and further until where it takes it away from you.

And that's why a lot of people are like, oh no, if they say that we can't have this, then you wait, five more years, they're gonna say we can't have this.

And they worry that where that limit line is.

Is it truly gonna stay there or are we gonna go further?

Is government and people that are officials and in charge that can make some of these decisions, they go beyond where we think they're gonna go?

It's the same thing with laws and bills and all these things that people fancy write up.

You know, they start with something, and there may be one word in a paragraph that's very vague that may get a interest group to say, nope, stop.

Because this word can mean this to this group of people.

This word can mean this to this other group of people.

And it becomes a he-she fight and a battle of where is that line drawn?

And what does that word mean?

Where's the limits?

- Isn't that the same thing with like, any amount of change?

Like any change that you do?

And so us as a society can't- - We don't like change, - Right, we don't like change.

But change brings about disruption.

Anytime you have change, it's gonna be some type of disruption or the analogy of like, anytime you play in a tree and the roots grow, it's disrupting the ground, right?

And any type of change is gonna have that.

So I think that not fearing change, and I know that's difficult to do.

I mean, I'm kind of set in my own ways.

I don't like to change some things, you know, routines and those type of things.

But I think that change is good and like, living and thinking outside of the box, believing that there is no box, right?

So that we can continue to grow as a society, I think is important.

- But growing as a society means you, like, some people think growing their way is correct, whereas other people are like, no, growing their way is more correct.

And what defines growth?

Because like guns, the largest argument is that people, it's not the people that go through the legal process to get the gun are ones that we have to worry about it, it's the people that are getting the guns illegally.

And if we're not allowed to have guns, then we're actually putting ourselves in more danger, because you've got the illegal, the guns that have been illegally acquired out there as criminals and we have no self-defense.

- I wanna go back to the idea about change.

Excuse me, go ahead.

- No, go ahead.

- About change for a moment.

It's not that long ago that if we were having this meeting today, this table would be full of only white men.

There wouldn't be a woman at the table.

There'd be nobody of color.

It took the disruption of those roots disrupting the soil to lead us to where we can have this conversation today.

I find it fascinating that some of us want to embrace change when it works for us and we push back against it when we fear it.

Maybe we fear it for the right reasons.

- I mean, I felt like it's a, if we started doing this to freedom of speech, people would be up for it also.

And you know, two generations ago in Germany, they did a firearms confiscation and then Jews were led to ghettos.

It's like- - All due respect, it was a much more complicated situation with centuries of buildup.

And it was a very long history of structural antisemitism.

I think that correlation does not at all imply causation.

- But it's, what I'm saying is though, like, I feel like when the Second Amendment was put in place, it was for the help of protection.

Just like in World War II, Japanese didn't want to invade us because there'd be a firearm behind ever blade of grass.

Like, we can fight back ourselves.

We're right now as a nation shipping firearms to Ukraine, whether you support it or not, but we're trying to take our firearms away.

It's like, where does it stop at where it's good for this population but it's not good for this population that I can't protect myself if, so happened, something broke out?

I feel like if I'm out having dinner with my family or my girlfriend and something did happen, at least I know I have something, I can at least say I tried.

I could stop something.

- Jake, do you feel like the government is trying to take your firearms away?

- I think they're trying to limit to what kind of firearms I can own.

They wanna say that there's no use for a 30 round mag.

That's okay.

- That's what I was gonna ask you.

Like on a practical level, just to help me understand, do we need those?

- It's not for hunting.

It's not for hunting.

For me right now it's just for sporting, going to shoot targets, you don't have to reload as much.

But if they're that bad, but they're that efficient also, so why do I not be able to protect my family if something happened at my house, but a government official can sit there and have the same magazine that I'm been banned from having?

So if it's not good for my family, why is it good for theirs?

- Does anybody need that kind of weapon?

This is a genuine question.

I mean, other than for sport?

- Sporting and protection, if something ever did happen.

Like would you rather be handed a firearm if some giant incident happened you were involved in, or you know, whatever it may be?

Or you own it, you know how to operate it, you respect it, you know what it can do.

- What are the data that say that having a firearm present in a situation ever deescalates the situation?

Does anybody know?

- You mean, like the good guy with the gun scenario?

- Sure.

- I'm not so sure about that, but I've always heard, and this is one of those like, he said, she said moments.

So I will own up to that, that if you have your own firearm during a home invasion, you are more likely to be shot.

Now I don't know if that means with your own weapon or if the invader has a weapon.

Having said that, the good guy with the gun scenario is only, I think it's only really worked out once honestly.

Because if, and I think you can second this.

Let me see.

I see David with a gun.

I see Catherine with a gun.

I see Pilar with a gun.

What do I see?

Three threats.

I don't have time to figure out which one of you is the good guy with the gun.

Because if I see all of you with firearms and I'm the one trying to stop the situation, I'm gonna assume all of you are threats and take all of you down.

So the good guy with the gun situation only really works if the other person's screaming, I'm the good guy with the gun.

And in that case, we have other issues.

- We're looking at core and fundamentals.

So what are we missing at the core of this discussion?

If we look deeply into this, is it about fear of losing something?

Is it about a legitimate concern for protection or sporting?

I mean, there's gotta be something underneath this.

- It's also a tradition.

- I think these "what if" situations is like, how many times for example, are we gonna, I mean I know that in the situation it'd be good to have, but to your point around the data that supports it.

I mean me myself, I mean I was in the military, you know, you were in the military.

I carried around an M16 for like 18 months.

When I got back, I said I want no more of that.

I'm sorry.

I don't want to carry that weapon around with me.

- I had a 249 because look at me, I'm not a small person.

- But my feeling around weapons outside of like, deer hunting because my family does deer hunt, and fully support that and being safe, gun safety's very important, is the practicality of it.

It's such a violent piece for you to possess and have, and the possibility being a lot less of you needing to use it.

The amount of damage and deaths that are happening because so many are out into the United States.

To me it's just, I don't want that to happen in my kids' school and it's not the gun, right?

The gun doesn't pull the trigger.

The people do.

But I think that with better reform around like, who gets one.

Like, the check, the background checks.

Because the ones that I have seen happen, you know, or are reported on, mass gun violence, it is the one that illegally got it, or like the parents got it for, you know, and they gave access to the kids.

So it gets back to this gun safety thing.

But I feel like both balancing that with limiting the amount of rounds that you can pump out in that given time, like isn't worth it for me.

- Faiz, I'm looking at your knuckles, and they're white.

That signals to me you've got something on your mind.

- Not really.

I've been trained to speak only if you have the knowledge of the subject.

I don't, but my observation is, I think it's so much mistrust.

If you do not trust a person, then you suddenly come with the idea that they're going to hurt or harm.

So there are so many community members that do not possess an arm.

Are they constantly a threat?

Probably not.

So it is a mindset between the two, whether this would lead to that.

And I think that's what caused, but Jake, he's used to those arms, and he's independent.

He knows what he's doing.

If I get it I might, like he said, you know, shoot my own foot or something.

- And it's frustrating sometimes like certain people you talk to they go, it's like the scary military style rifle.

It looks military, but, it has similar things, but it's not military.

But there's more violence by pistols than our rifles.

Somebody would have to fact track it on their phone right now, but it's like less than 2% chance you'll be shot with an AR-15 style rifle.

It's a higher chance in the pistols.

There's so much more, easier to conceal.

And regular magazines come fitted with 17 to 18 rounds in some of these pistols.

And then when you get into the gun violence data, they just, if say Nisha, I'm trying to say it right, if Nisha's ex beats her up and she decides to go buy a pistol for protection and he comes back and she shoots and kills him, that goes into gun violence.

If it's a murder suicide which I think it ends up, they'd consider it a mass casualty incident, it's three people.

So that's you two and then me.

Two people get shot, one person commits suicide, it goes into the data.

If it's gang violence, it goes into the mass casualty data.

The true mass casualty incidents that everyone thinks about, the colleges, the movie theaters, the high schools, the mall shootings, they're all grouped with everything.

They don't split the data.

You have to really dig out there to figure out exactly how they do it.

- See, you just listed off this, for what it's worth I'm not against the Second Amendment.

And I genuinely am trying to understand some of the nuances.

But I will say you just listed off a long list of very violent and horrible things.

And I feel like what doesn't come up with this discussion around the Second Amendment is the underlying crisis, which is our mental health crisis, right?

That is what we need to be talking about.

And there our mental healthcare system is virtually non-existent.

And if we could address some of that, I think the gun stuff would probably improve.

- It becomes just a vehicle, like the gun is just kind of a means to an end.

It's the outlet, right?

- I mean you have a lot of kids where their parents cell phones, internet and TV raise them.

They don't check in on them.

Like, you don't know where they're at.

You don't they're being picked on at school.

- And actually while we're on the subject, I just want wanna chime in on something that's really important to me that I think that we need to address more than anything, exactly what you said.

I think we pick on the children that are bullied at school to the point of having a mental health breakdown to go and shoot people.

But once you get to that point of wanting to kill or be killed, somebody's causing these triggers intentionally.

And you know, it may be unintentional, but not checking in with a student when they are crying and screaming and saying something's wrong or don't have the ability to say something out loud that they should be saying out loud.

You know, at what point, it may not be therapy, it may be, hey, let's be a little bit tougher on the bullies.

Let's be a little bit tougher on the people that are causing harm.

And I think that's where your heart comes from because you don't want people to feel alienated.

But we could also look at what's causing them to feel alienated in their own school setting and how do we fix it or maybe shift something just a little bit to make their lives worth living and their anger reduces.

- Yeah, I can agree with that, Nisha, because I think that whenever we, bullying is such a big thing.

Not to get like, off topic, but it's kind of on topic a bit, is that a lot of times whenever kids I feel like are being bullied, they're the ones who we're trying to fix, right?

Instead of going and working with the bully and being, to your point, like tougher on what they're doing.

But like, kids are so convert- Convert.

Covert.

And smart, you know?

They know how to really kind of get at a person.

I mean I was bullied in school, I felt like to a point, and I was like, how to quantify that to your parents?

And like, they said this like, ah, nevermind.

You know, I think that just being more educated and in tune to talking to your kids, which is really kind of getting back to more of a family unit, but also the schools being tougher on bullying and cameras and, you know, teachers being more aware.

- I used to mentor a girl that was being bullied to the point of she could not, she had no self-esteem at all.

- Yes.

Yeah.

So she raised a point.

So what is the underlying reason for this mental health?

Because if when we have a viral infection, then we say, okay, viral is causing the infection, or this or that, we can pinpoint, right?

So after doing major studies, from what I know, the empirical data showed that most of these people are loners.

They are not common people in the community that move around, activity.

But they said terrorists are formed in the living rooms or in their dens, where they go on websites that are constantly bombarding them and then that converts them.

So we need to find the underlying cause, why this 16, 17-year-old would just come up and take lives of so many people.

That's what, you know, there has to be a cause and effect.

We need to find the cause.

What's causing them to get to that?

- I was gonna say that there was way less gun violence before social media.

I feel like.

Like it's easy to sit there and make fun of somebody on social media when you're not looking at their face, and people do it and they make fake pages.

For example, from my understanding, and what I was told in Buncombe County, there was a girl in high school, I think she was in high school, might have been middle school.

She committed suicide and they had a Facebook covert page that made fun of her and then a bunch of kids got kicked out and disciplined.

Because after it happened, they were still making fun of her at school.

- Wow.

- So, we've got all these different things that are happening.

We started this conversation about Second Amendment.

We go to mental health.

- Sorry.

- No, no.

I'm glad you did.

We go to a child, or a young person, being a loner.

We come back to social media.

- Free speech.

- Yes.

- There are, you know, to try to attack something like mental health, I mean, however broad that is, it's generational to find solutions, I would think.

And who in our society today wants to wait a generation to see progress but at the same time are afraid to start today knowing you have to start somewhere?

Do you know of any politician that you can think of, whether it's the current president, former presidents, senators, representatives, state lawmakers, county commissioners, who are willing to take that on and stand up and say, we've got to start somewhere?

It's a somewhat of a rhetorical question, but I think it's something for us to think about around this.

Jake, it occurs to me in listening to this conversation, that, and I need to own this.

I hope you don't feel picked on about this.

That wasn't the reason to bring this up.

- No, absolutely not.

- It's your hat.

- [Jake] I walked in with the hat and the T-shirt.

- Yeah, you kind of did it to yourself.

- I knew it was gonna be a subject.

- All right, let's talk about something else.

And I'm using, let me remove this, put this over here, take this.

- Can I say something just for the record?

None of my exes would knock on my door to attack me today.

- Just a hypothetical.

- Yes.

I just wanted to make sure.

- Okay, this.

I'll let the camera take a look at it.

- Covid test?

- A Covid test?

- A Covid test.

For Covid, for SARS, any number of things.

If you take that test today because you're feeling bad, more than likely you won't be as sick as you might have been if you have received vaccines.

I heard a "hmm."

I heard another, I'm hearing reactions around the table.

So, Anna?

- Well, you know I was a former teacher and became a nurse.

I've been a nurse for 25 years.

And I deal with immunologically compromised patients.

And looking at the trends, we had seen some patients who got more ill after they took the vaccine.

- Some, yes.

- And that's because they already had a very compromised immune system that wasn't working properly to begin with is what we feel.

Myself, I've had several health issues, and basically they came about after I got the vaccine.

Now I can't prove that that's what caused it, but in my head I wonder, you know, was it because it revved up my immune system to work a certain way and I got sicker?

Or did it keep me from dying when I did get Covid?

- Here's a question I have about vaccine that was always so hard for me to understand.

We were in elementary school.

We took polio vaccines.

We ate sugar cubes with a little pink dot on it.

My parents had me vaccinated for smallpox and rubella.

Any number of things.

And when we are in a worldwide pandemic where the world has shut down and there was a possibility of a vaccine, it split the country.

It's a phenomenon I can't wrap my head around.

- It's because they came up with vaccinations so quickly that we didn't have years and years of testing.

- Under a president you supported, and I've often thought, had he been reelected, would the Biden supporters have taken the vaccine?

They would've said, how could this have been done under Trump?

It was done under Trump.

It can't be right.

So, that was developed under his leadership.

Because, from what I understand, the science has moved more quickly that years of study were not needed.

And it worked for a lot of people.

- It's not that it, the actual vaccinations didn't split the country, it's the enforcement, of people forcing people to take the vaccinations.

There were parents, I was in the Indian Land Republican Women's Club at the time and we had a speaker.

We were doing everything online because we couldn't meet in person anymore.

We were following procedures.

And there was somebody that was absolutely petrified because one after the other after the other of her children were adversely affected by forced vaccinations and they caused permanent damage.

- Was that widespread in the entire school system?

- It's not widespread.

No, it's just, it was one mother that had that.

So it's just the enforcement of everybody that walks in the door has to be vaccinated.

- But I want go, with all due respect, I want to go back to what I said earlier about polio or smallpox.

Smallpox was also a pandemic, worldwide pandemic.

We were forced to vaccinate children so that wouldn't happen.

- But how many years of research was there done before the official vaccine came out?

- That's a great point, Jake, but we didn't have the medical advancement we have today.

- I'm actually gonna argue that with smallpox especially, we took that to other countries to make sure it worked.

But... Anthrax, I don't even know.

First of all, I'm letting you all know, I'm gonna go green at some point in my old age and I'm okay with that, from all the vaccines I had to endure in the military because I had way more than the average person.

However, in the Covid case, I would almost say it's a follow the money situation.

Because polio was a free vaccine in the end, right?

Like, they released it for no- - Jonas Salk did not want a patent on what he had discovered.

You're exactly right.

- And if I'm not mistaken, I don't think smallpox ended up having any like, it's public domain, is it not?

That's what I wanted to ask you.

I don't know if you know.

- I don't know the answer to that.

I can address a lot of the other things, but I cannot address that.

- And it was like I was telling Ashley earlier when they handed, now the anthrax shots, that was a, you don't have a choice.

Well, you do have a choice.

You can not take it and get kicked out.

So it was like, well, I guess I'm taking this since I'm going to Korea, they're gonna make me take it or not go.

But when they started handing out smallpox vaccines in Kuwait before we went across to Iraq, they actually started checking our medical records.

I'm one of the few people you know from that situation that does not have the smallpox vaccine.

I apparently had eczema at some point and they were like, not for you.

Now I have to rely on herd immunity from a bunch of people I don't even know.

And if I'm not mistaken, cowpox is pretty contagious, too.

- Well, that's how the smallpox vaccine was developed.

- Because it's attenuated to that, right?

- Yeah.

- Was the development of the vaccine in your minds a bad thing?

- I don't think it was bad.

But my question is, where did the money go?

Like, was there any money- - Was there profit from this?

Right.

Right.

- I think you mean, profit from making the vaccine?

- Like, the pharmaceutical companies.

- Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna.

- I think they deserved the profits if there was one.

It takes so much money to have like researchers do research with no product and then you finally get the product and yes, you need to make money, so you can pay the researchers.

That's just my opinion.

But I think the Covid vaccination, some of my friends will absolutely disagree with me, I think it did a lot of great, great things, and I took the vaccination.

I feel like it minimized the damages of me getting Covid.

I think for me it worked.

- You deal with nuclear medicine.

- Yeah, many of the anthropologists, they say instead of saying what is good for Americans is good for the world, let's learn what is good for the world is good for America.

So, you know, I worked with the refugee camps here and there and there has not been that many numbers.

Neither did they have that many vaccinations.

There are poor people.

They can't even afford vaccinations.

So, that's where the complexity occurs.

And now we worked in the medical field, we were forced to have it.

There wasn't, like, either you have a job or you don't have a job.

So we had to take it and then eventually it came up to you have to wear that, you know, just like you are going to extract some honey, a little more than that pump.

I mean all those fancy stuff, it suddenly disappeared.

How did it disappear?

Where did it come from?

There are so many questions that the scientists themselves are still struggling.

So, that's where it leads to.

And certainly there's a factor of money involved.

Like very eloquently said that in the past it was not.

Now if you want to send the CEO of the company on a vacation on a cruiser for two months, then yeah, you have to make that money.

But otherwise.

- So, I heard that the vaccine was not the enemy.

It was the being forced to take it was what people recoiled against.

- We had people lose their job over it because they refused to test or do the vaccination at the city.

- We did also.

We had several, and we also had several coworkers that had adverse effects afterwards.

You know, one of them that ended up with a heart attack and in the hospital, one with a stroke, you know.

So there were several things that they were linking towards the vaccine.

- And one last question about that to help me understand.

Any of us that watch TV, we see medicine prescription commercials all the time.

- Ask your doctor.

- And the side effects listed are this long.

The side effects go, if this happens, if this happens, if this happens, if this happens, if this happens.

When I pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, there's four pages of CYA happening with the pharmaceutical company of potential side effects.

And we take that medicine and don't question it because the doctor said here's what you need to help you.

But when it came to this vaccine, well, we don't know about this, we don't know about this.

It felt, as you mentioned in our previous session, the political undercurrent around vaccine was remarkable.

- It might be our generation, too.

The generation of leaders has changed.

The generation of people have changed.

We're very, with all this internet and media available to our fingertips, everyone's questioning everything.

And so our children are not naive and they, our children are gonna be worse than we are.

You know, they're gonna, we're the most skeptical generation there has been, I think.

- But they're learning also like, from the leaders, because I felt like the leaders of the country, like at that time in different areas were like, take the vaccination.

And so whenever you put someone in office, and whatever office that is, you entrust that they probably have a little bit more knowledge about things then what you do.

And so I think that there's some trust there, or should be, right, to trust what the leaders of the country are saying around the vaccination.

And so for myself, like, going through the pandemic, it never seemed consistent, and for rightfully so.

I mean sometimes they would say like, you know, we're still learning, right?

Just like anything else happening so quickly.

So I think that that also breeded some skepticism because some of the guidance continued to change.

It's like, what guidance are we following?

The country's guidance, the state's guidance, you know, the hospital's guidance?

Who are we listening to?

Who's kind of riding the ship?

- Very pertinent, I'm sorry though, very pertinent the comparison is with oxycodone and OxyContin.

It was greed that ate away, and yes, that medication was very good for those who need it.

But, you know, people have written books.

Actually physicians have written books, drug dealers in white coats, because they pushed it to the point that they claimed, you know, the company Purdue Pharma, now they paid $60 billion, and the understanding was, you will not come after us after that because in the meantime they have already made that much money.

But what it has caused for the young people is they got so addicted.

That's where the suicides are coming from or overdose is coming from.

Most of them is out of legal drugs.

That's where it started.

So initially it does start out with good, but the greed takes over, and it turns into something very horrendous.

- Can I weigh in?

- Please.

- I would love to come back to that topic because there's a really sorted tale of data collection that drove their marketing.

So I wouldn't align the oxycodone and OxyContin story with the vaccine, the Covid vaccine story.

I am not gonna sit here and defend pharma.

I will however defend science and the science behind the vaccine was it did seem fast because the technology had already been developed.

And so the vaccinologists were able to apply the existing technology to the new pathogen.

I understand, and so, I'm an infectious disease doctor.

I ran one of our Covid units in the hospital.

I watched people die.

I watched people get better.

I literally skipped to the hospital the day that I knew I was gonna get my vaccine.

It's a little bit of a hot button issue for me.

I understand people's concerns and objections around being "forced" to take the vaccine.

As a society, one of the tenets that I think that we have lost is the notion that we have to take care of each other.

And part of that is, pardon my French, sucking it up and getting the shot so that you can give herd immunity to those folks who are compromised and won't be able to mount a good response to the vaccine no matter how many doses.

It is the story of eradicating polio from our country.

It is the story of eradicating smallpox.

We are so spoiled in this country because we don't have loved ones who have struggled with vaccine preventable diseases.

Talk to anybody who is from a place where they don't have that widespread vaccination.

And you will take to heart how fortunate we are to have access to these vaccines.

The Covid vaccine, no doubt, has saved millions of lives.

And it's not just my life.

It is Pilar's life.

It is Jake's life.

And one of the fundamentals of infectious diseases is, you know, one of my mentors said, if you have high blood pressure and I treat you, it has no impact on your neighbor.

If you have an infection and I treat you, it has a marked impact on your neighbor.

And so it is the selfless, it is the community thing to do to get the vaccine.

It is an entirely different world in the medical community now that we have the vaccine.

And it's heartbreaking to me, and I have shed many tears over this, that our country's leadership undermined the science behind masking and the science behind vaccination.

Yes, the messaging from the CDC changed and that was incredibly frustrating and confusing for the public.

And I get that.

It is hard because we were learning on the fly, you know, we didn't know, were we gonna have enough masks, so public, don't mask, so the healthcare providers can have masks.

And then that messaging changed.

And so I get where that bred distrust, but when we have somebody in our White House who ripped off his mask after getting every state-of-the-art therapy available and said, eh, that's not a big deal.

And I've got 18 patients in isolation on 6-12 liters of oxygen that we're trying to keep outta the intensive care unit.

That's devastating for those of us in the healthcare field.

But it absolutely undermines everything that objective science was telling us.

And that was a major, and continues to be a major factor, in how we are addressing prevention of Covid or any other pandemic.

- Can I ask a different question?

[panel members speaking over each other] - I'm curious also to hear all of this and I totally agree with Catherine because in our organization we took the lead in a big part of the state to work with our community.

We were heated the most, the Latinos, because we are first line workers.

Our community couldn't miss work to get tested because they didn't get paid.

They couldn't isolate because they live in many families in one apartment.

They don't have healthcare, so they were afraid they couldn't get to the test before when it started coming out.

And also fear of sharing the information if they were undocumented.

So, we took the lead to talk to stakeholders, healthcare professionals, the state, everybody to say we really need to protect our community.

So we were the ones telling everybody, you need to get the vaccine.

You need to get the vaccine.

And convince them.

And as an organization, we hired a lot of community health workers who were people from the community, even people who were using our services, so they can talk to their comadre, to their aunt, so it wasn't us trying to convince somebody to get the vaccine, but they were the family members.

So we could get the community safe as you were saying because it was a public health issue.

So we were ones that said, everybody who works here needs to get the vaccine.

If you don't get it, you can't work here, because how can you convince somebody to take the vaccine if you don't get it?

So, it's interesting to see other sides.

But I am totally with Catherine on that one.

- Just think of the energy around this table talking about this and talking about Second Amendment.

So is all of this part of a larger conflict about rights and liberties and the role of government?

Don't touch my gun.

You can't force me to get this vaccine.

You can't make my child read this book.

Is it about liberties?

Is it about the role of government?

- I think it was also, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to go backwards here, but I just had a clarifying question for you.

And maybe I'm ignorant about this, but like, if you get a vaccine, it doesn't mean you don't carry the virus and it doesn't mean I'm protecting her.

I might just be protecting myself from ultimate death or having worse symptoms.

- So, no, that's a great question.

So, it depends on the vaccine and the pathogen.

But with the Covid vaccine, what the data showed is that your viral load, so the amount of virus that you spewed out of said orifice was lower.

So then therefore your risk of contagion was lower.

- Gotcha.

- And then from a larger health system standpoint, if you aren't so sick that you need to get into the hospital, that frees up a bed for Anna if Anna needs the bed.

So in a situation where we were overloaded, and we were lucky here, but you think about places like New York where they didn't have beds, it was also important for that.

So if we could decrease the amount of people requiring hospitalization and turn Covid into an annoying cold, that also helped from a larger health system.

I mean, we couldn't take care of people with other hospital, like people with other non-Covid things didn't come to the hospital, and then later had bad health effects of delaying their care.

So there's sort of layers to it.

- But this was not explained in that way.

- And that is a very fair point.

- And with all due respect, as we mentioned earlier, the country was building the plane while flying it.

We as society wanted answers, we wanted them right now, they have to be correct.

And it's like, are you kidding me?

Science changes, truth changes, some truths expire.

- Credit to the Trump administration, record this, get me on camera, credit to the Trump administration though, for putting their weight behind the money to enact a lot of the positive work that led to vaccines and some of the therapeutics.

I mean, that is a positive.

- I know some of the people I was interacting with that was like, we're not gonna be Guinea pigs.

Worried about our bodies for our career, because we're like, what's the side effects?

And they're like, we don't know.

It's like, who's gonna back the bill if something does happen and they're like, not us.

And we're like, then I'm not gonna take it.

Like I drove risk because I'd already had it once and I had a sniffle and I worked in a garage every day for the two weeks I had to be off.

And then, and I'm not trying to take away from the severity of other people.

- I hear you.

- I caught it again.

It's the same thing.

I just stayed in the river fishing the next two weeks.

But like, I was just like, okay.

- And I mean the amount of miss and disinformation, it was legion, certainly, messaging and information dissemination could have been, should have been a lot better.

And I know a lot of people have lost a lot of sleep over that.

Like the misinformation about, you know, people, I got the vaccine and then I had a heart attack and like, you know, things like that.

I mean, that the vaccine- - Did it really, or did it, you just had it at the same time?

- Yes.

- So, I renew the question.

Is this about the role of government?

Is the anger and the division that happened over a vaccine or the government saying you need to take this vaccine?

In some cases, you must to keep your job?

Is that the role of government?

Does that infringe on my liberty?

Your liberty?

Your liberty?

Is there are a greater good that we look for?

And some of us along the way are gonna make a sacrifice in that that may benefit my grandchild.

So, what is that role of government?

Should it be more limited regarding our liberties?

- Yes.

Yes.

But again- - And what would that look like?

- Messaging needs to be correct.

If it's the greater good and you're being requested to take something because it's actually lessening your contagion levels, that's a whole different thing than you need to take this for your own good.

Because we're telling you to.

- We didn't have all of that information up front.

We just knew it prevents severe disease.

[panel members speaking over each other] - I was reading headlines because I can't stand watching news because of the polarization.

- How you were getting your information in, I think during Covid was sometimes like, was I getting all of it?

And so there was like, you could tell some bias opinions one way or the other depending on like, where you were getting your information from about what was going on with Covid.

So I felt like it was a little bit like they didn't say all that on this here other news channel and then this here didn't have all this information.

So I think it got a little bit, you know- - It was frightening.

- Different.

And whenever you're talking about your own health and your family's health and you're just trying to get facts out, sometimes they will leave out parts of it, right?

About like what she was just talking about, about some of the benefits of getting vaccinated.

Not just for yourself, but like, how it can minimize that for others.

- I mean, I will say though, I have lots of conversations with people, with patients, where I would say just those things and they're like, nope.

Nope.

Not getting it.

- It's also the party, the political party that was, and I think that democratic party tended to cause more of a scene because they didn't like Trump.

And Trump was one of the first people to get the vaccine.

He announced that he got it.

You know, everybody, I think his whole family got it.

And while the democratic party was calling Republican people, regardless of whether, I got the vaccine, I was for the vaccine, and others may not have been, you know, but generalizing the Republican party, while a lot of people, small business owners, were losing their livelihoods, their businesses, they were committing suicide.

They weren't able to put food on their table for children.

So that added to the anti-vaccination thing because it got politicized.

- Politics impacted health.

Politics still impacts health.

Politics, we allow it to do those things.

I go back to the question again.

The role of government.

Is it impacting our liberties by saying, you must do this, you can't do this, I want this from you?

I mean, some people would say that about paying taxes.

- I mean, America is such an individualistic society.

I think that's where we struggle is that, you know, you look at places like Sweden, you know, and it's a much more communal...

I don't know, I'm at a loss for the right word, but there's more consideration for the community.

Whereas in the United States it's, I want my house, my yard, my car, and I don't want to have to worry about, you know, Joe down the street.

And I think that plays into how we feel about, how we feel differently about, then what is the role of government?

- But we have different causes.

So we can't say government needs to dictate where our taxes, like if you increase taxes you put taxes into places that nobody really has an idea of where they're going.

And so there are nonprofit organizations that help people.

There are, you know, and I think and and I believe very strongly, I was on the board of [mumbles] and we had a regular outreach program every month.

And it would've been nice to have those outreaches filled with people.

So there was the element of, people need to start showing up a little bit more for the community.

But I think it was the Duke of York, actually in Yorkshire, he had created this thing called community initiative where he created a competitive, almost capitalistic system, where you would fight for an award by creating the most good in the community.

You don't have to use taxpayer dollars to implement good for the community.

- Depends on the community you're living in.

You might go to some of the counties in this state without the business support, that does not have any other way to take care of those things for the good of the community other than that.

But I wanna move on.

I wanna move on.

Another area where government's been involved, or we think government's been involved, in book banning, or parents wanting books banned.

I hold up this one, "Gender Queer."

It's on a list in many school districts to be removed or to not allowed in.

This one I read as a teenager, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I know many attorneys that ended up being an attorney because of Atticus Fitch.

The way Harper Lee told this story in the south.

It is now on some lists to not be allowed.

And then this by Nikole Hannah-Jones, "The 1619 Project."

We know has created incredible controversy in North Carolina and beyond.

Why do you think that's the case?

- It's fear, again.

It's fear.

- Fear.

A lot of you have read this or seen the movie.

It's an amazing story.

Is this a threat to children?

- It doesn't need to be taught in schools, but I don't see why it should be... - So you would allow it to be taught in schools or you don't want it taught in schools?

- No.

- Okay.

- Can I ask why?

- Because I'm fundamentally against teaching things that are not related to the education of children.

Like, teach literature, yes.

Like, teach the classics.

Teach, you know, history as in history.

We can talk about stuff in history class, but I- - I mean, all due respect, what are the classics?

Because in every generation that changes.

- It probably does.

You're probably right.

- But also I think earlier, there was discussion that we need to address the underlying causes of bullying.

And part of that is fostering understanding across differences.

And having a book like this is a way to foster understanding across differences, so that the kid who doesn't quite fit in, who may ultimately identify as gender queer, may actually get a little bit more understanding and grace from their colleagues.

- But God forbid we brought the Bible in and said let's teach biblical- - That's not really true.

In Wake County as an example, the Bible can be used in a history or religion class, and in a theological class, in public schools.

Not to promote one religion over another, but to inform everybody in the class.

Same way with the Quran.

It can be used, so I- - My point was she was talking about it in the context of bullying.

And I'm saying if you use biblical principles, you could defeat that idea of bullying by saying loving people that are not, don't look, act and talk like you.

I mean, that's what the apostles did all the time.

They're going out into different places trying to love people.

The Bible says that we're not supposed to judge non-believers.

We're supposed to judge each other.

Not nonbelievers.

That would be... - Jake has something.

- I have something to say.

Can we define what gender queer is?

- Thank you.

- That's a great question.

- Yeah.

Watching out for you, bud.

- Lee is somebody who identifies as, I don't wanna put the- - No, no, you're good.

You're good.

- The minority tax on you.

But I would feel bad taking- - It depends on the person.

To me, gender queer and non-binary are not interchangeable.

My wife from time to time does identify as gender queer.

Someday she'll show up in a dress in heels and in a necklace.

And some days she'll show up in like, khakis and a button down, and she's the same person.

Nothing's changed about her personality.

It's just how she presents.

- Let me read what it says, if I may.

In "Gender Queer," Maia Kobabe has crafted an intensely cathartic autobiography about her path to identifying as non-binary and asexual and coming out to her family and society by addressing questions about gender identity, what it means, and how to think about it.

The story also doubles as a much needed, useful and touching guide.

- Non-binary means not necessarily male or female.

So that's the gender binary, or masculine, feminine, sorry.

Male/female is biological sex.

See, yeah.

I still mess this up a lot, too.

I'm definitely still.

- Obviously not in the mainstream right now.

But as we were reminded in our earlier discussions, things a generation or two generations ago that weren't in the mainstream were fought and pushed aside and cast aside.

It took the roots disturbing.

To many people, this book is disturbing.

To many people, "The 1619 Project" is disturbing.

- What is that one?

- This is Nikole Hannah-Jones.

She was a reporter with the New York Times.

This is a major years long project about how the first African Americans were brought to this country, what happened in their transport, what happened after they arrived.

It's basically the 400 years of slavery and race relations in this country.

And it became very controversial and very much of a bestseller.

- And if I'm not mistaken, led to issues with her getting tenure at UNC Chapel Hill.

- Yes.

- And ultimately not getting tenure.

- Yes, ultimately, first not getting it then voting to get it.

And then she said, no, I'll go to Howard University and teach there.

So, it was an explosive conversation with some people.

It was a very hard conversation to talk about these things.

- I think we need to implement, and I'm sorry for saying this, because I understand those topics are interesting to a lot of people and are very important.

Like, not knowing anything about Native American culture at all was such a shock.

Because we had a side conversation at lunch, and I didn't know half of it, but like, when I think that, what makes America different than other countries is that we're such a blended mix of cultures.

That we don't have a cultural identity.

The only heritage we have is revolution and that sort of thing.

And you know, we've got Spain, we've got France, we have England, and then all the other migrants that came over, immigrants that came over.

And when you go to other countries and you talk to, like, I worked for an international company and they had such pride in their own country.

They had their kings or they had their leadership.

France is completely like, they are French, and they have an identity.

And while they have all these subdivisions and a lot of hatred and lots of other stuff about what they won't teach at school because there's violence associated with it.

But like they have, they are French and they own it.

And you go to England, they are British, they are English, they own it.

But you go to America, we're wailing about this book.

We're wailing about that book.

We look like a bunch of saps who don't have any pride in American culture.

And we don't teach patriotism anymore.

- Do you think it's that simple?

- It is, but can we spin it in a way that we're proud of ourselves instead of killing ourselves over mistakes that were made in the past?

- Those mistakes are still impacting people still to this day.

- But why don't we talk about something good?

Why don't we talk about how we are- - Unfortunately, America is founded in a lot of bad.

- All countries are.

Did you hear about what happened in France with Marie Antoinette?

- Right, and for you to move on and heal as a country, you have to understand and address what has happened in the past.

It's difficult for me as a Native person to move forward and heal without at least addressing the trauma that's happened in tribal communities throughout the state of North Carolina.

And it's still happening today.

So like for myself, digging in, reading the book, you know, understanding, I think we all need to, as we were talking earlier, understand more about what makes each other, what impacts each other, so that we can move forward and heal.

But we can't turn a blind eye to what has happened because then you start where you're not even, you know, knowing how to even address, or have right relationship with any other group because you refuse to address or understand what they've gone through.

- But I, and I understand that, but you look at the Jewish community, right?

And you see what happened in Nazi Germany, but, and how Israel's been attacked year after year after year after year by all different people.

But Jewish people don't hang on it.

They are resilient - I was just there and saw tens of thousands of people protesting in downtown Tel Aviv.

So, it depends on maybe the lens of where you are at any given time.

- If you look at Anne Frank and you read that book, you look at resilience, you look at, like for instance, my family, we did very badly after Gandhi decided to free the country.

You know, like, taxes went sky high.

It hurt our family, it hurt our lifestyles, it hurt everything.

- Did it not benefit others?

- I don't care about anybody else because this is my culture and this is what everybody else is saying.

Well, how does it impact me, me personally, right?

How does it impact you?

Yes, you're Native American.

Yes, your people have been completely eliminated from history books other than little pieces.

But you're only caring about your lens and you're not caring about the patriotism of the entire country to say we should be proud.

- We are patriots.

I mean Native Americans served this country and military more than any other race in the United States.

We have sacrificed ourselves for land that was taken from us.

So for you to say that is just, it's not to me like, that's not, that's because you don't understand about the history.

And that's what I think going back to understanding like the book, the 1619 book, can help have a deeper understanding and appreciation about what's gone on.

And it is hard and it is difficult and it's hard for my own self to even sit and listen, and listen and learn about my own culture because it is so devastating and heartbreaking because our people were slaughtered, they were burned at the stake, the men were burned alive, the babies were fed to dogs.

I mean, it is horrific.

I think that- - It happened in every country, though.

In India, there were wars- - We're talking about, we're talking about in America.

And it doesn't mean that, in India, I'm sure it's bad there, too.

I mean just because it happened doesn't- [panel members speaking over each other] - The first book that you picked up, it raised more questions.

And in spite of, you know, your forum and quorum here being educated, people are all lost.

And then, you know, democracy.

And we elect our government with the idea that they're better for us.

So you can't argue with, every individual cannot say, well, this is what I like, this is what I like.

I think the governments do the best for the people to the best of their ability.

They cannot please everybody at the same time.

And then with with the issue of, even Lee could not express.

So for me, I'm lost again.

Even though you read what this book meant for, but this is the first time we are coming across this.

So how does that, what percentage of the students in the class need to know about that percent of people?

And how is that benefiting?

And if that is not taught, for example, I'm just trying to grow up with the idea because I'm trying, this is something completely new to me.

I've not come across such, I've come across diversity and other things.

But this is something new to me.

And with this book, of course, it is the history.

You cannot progress without knowing the history.

You have learned the other part of the history.

This is the hidden part of the history, which makes sense I think.

But the other things is, is trying to grow with the idea that without a proper definition, how are you going to teach the children what it defines?

- And I would just add that I think what's wonderful about the United States is that we are all of these things and maybe we can be the nation that's willing to face our sins of the past and grow from them, that's willing to embrace that America is not one language, one skin color.

And I will tell you in France, it is very, very divisive what is French, because I guarantee you the North African immigrants there do not feel like they're accepted as French.

- I think that's a conclusion speech, actually.

- Think about these eight words.

Just came to me.

In order to form a more perfect union.

In order to form a more perfect union.

Not to find perfection.

Always striving.

Democracy will never hit a threshold and say, we got it.

We're there, we're there.

It's always evolving, right?

So in in those eight words, in order to form a more perfect union, what word is the most important to you?

- More.

- Union.

- Union.

More.

Union.

- Probably union.

- Perfect?

- No, union?

- Sacrifice.

- I'm a union person.

- Union.

- I would say form, because we're forming, we're actively working towards.

- But we seem to want perfection right now.

- See, I'm going for more, because we're identifying that it's not, we're identifying that it will never be.

We've already identified what we're going to do, but we already know that it's never going to be perfect.

We can only do more to make it better.

- And think about this country, as big as it is.

All right, we're southerners, right?

If you live in New England, you live in New York, you're not a southerner.

If you live in the northwest, you're of a different culture.

If you live in the southwest, you're of a different culture.

If you live in LA, it's a different culture.

Yet it's same government, same currency, same basic languages.

We look at small European countries and think, well, look what they do.

They're not nearly as diverse and large and unwieldy and... - They're hundreds of years older.

- And hundreds of years older - The only point I was trying to make was I have two children, right?

And I'm a divorced woman, right?

And they get their identity from their parents.

Am I gonna sit there, because I have a laundry list of things that I could say about my ex-husband.

My ex-husband has a laundry list of things that he could say about me, our families, our pasts.

We have a million different things.

Am I going to raise them in a way that they're going to be proud of their identity?

Because that is their identity, right?

Am I going to speak highly of my ex-husband?

Do I expect him to speak highly of me to them?

We're all children growing up in this country.

Can we spin it in a way that's palatable?

Can we say, hey, we hurt this entire generation of people and we've redeemed it a little bit and now we're all kind of coming together to work together to find something better.

But it doesn't necessarily mean we have to sow seeds that are going to hurt the students, ultimately.

- I don't think you can, because that's denying and whitewashing the fact that these things happened.

- Yeah, but let's whitewash it.

There are a lot of things that happened to me that I'm not gonna tell my children.

- Well, I'll give you a good example.

I was one of the first people in Iraq.

I've seen things that nobody should need to see.

And I guarantee you only a tenth of it was shown on TV, even with the embedded reporters, because they probably had to go through public affairs and everything to show that.

Now, does that mean that this was a good and solid activity that we participated in?

Which side of history are we on?

It depends on who you ask.

Are we the good guys or the bad guys?

It depends on who you ask.

Did we believe in the mission that we were given?

It depends on who you ask.

We were told we were going for weapons of mass destruction.

I can tell you I saw no WMDs in the entirety of the five months I was in Iraq to include Baghdad and Fallujah.

So again, this is back to who determines who's the arbiter of history at this point?

If we whitewash the things that we've done in the past, that gives us room to do these things again in the future.

- No, but it doesn't.

I mean, if we can acknowledge that this stuff was wrong.

Okay, so, another analogy.

I'm driving down the street, I might have had the worst day in the world.

I may have been crying all night long and my life doesn't look good on that particular day.

What do I look for?

I look for God's trees, his flowers, something beautiful.

I want to see people that are dressed up for the day that are gonna come up and show a side to them that, you know, I don't need to know the trauma on the inside unless we're closely connected.

- I'll say this.

I think that just kind of, I'm gonna circle back to mental health, because I think that what you're talking about of not, I heard you say knowledge, but not addressing the history, and you pushing all that down.

Like, you gave the analogy about your family and all the things maybe you've gone through.

If you continue to push that down it's gonna come out in some way.

And I think that just as an example, like even with tribal things or really anything that's traumatic.

addressing it, talking about it, we go to a therapist.

You know, you go to therapy to talk about these things so that you can really address the generational trauma that these things have happened and have carried through.

Like, maybe that's why my mom hasn't hugged me.

Maybe now that I understand generational trauma and things that she's gone through, I can better understand the action.

So what I guess I'm saying is, is that if you don't address those things in your own personal life and in the country, they're gonna come out in one way or another.

And so I think just being healthy, a healthy person mentally, and being able to not have to carry that weight doesn't mean that you push it down and maybe don't talk about it or maybe not share it, but you can say, hey, you know, we've gone through these things, we've made improvements, and we're in a better place than what we were before.

But it doesn't mean those things may not still come up or impact us.

- That's exactly what I'm saying, though.

- Addressing doesn't mean condemnation.

It means understanding, therefore maybe you understand why a protest happened about something that makes no sense to you until you've read, oh, there's an entire community who's been living with this history.

So therefore, a response comes.

Doesn't justify it, but it explains it.

- Yes, but the books, having a book written by a specific author is going to put it in the lens of that author.

And if we're trying to shift- - We have an author right here who wrote a book with a specific lens.

- I wrote a book too, a children's book, too.

- But the the point is- - It's just, what are you trying to spin in the books that you're pushing on our children?

That's all I'm saying.

- I would encourage the use of a different word than spin.

- That's all it is.

- History is spin?

- No, it's those types of books.

I'm not saying, I don't remember "To Kill A Mockingbird" being anything.

It's just, what are you feeding our children and is it angled?

Because everything's angled these days.

It's not, hey, this happened, because in our history books, this happened.

That's fine.

- If I may give an example, and I've been coached about not making this about me, but I need to say this.

Growing up in Tennessee, Tennessee history, I had one tiny chapter on the Trail of Tears.

One tiny chapter.

It was until I worked in Colorado, where I met a man named Charles Cambridge, who was the first Indigenous American to go to the University of Colorado.

You can imagine how he received the name.

And he schooled me on Andrew Jackson, who I grew up revering in Nashville as a president, of what he did to the Cherokees.

It took me being an adult, because I wasn't taught the history as a child, to understand, oh my God, look what happened.

Because it was withheld from us and whitewashed.

That's why I say it's important that history is told.

I experienced it firsthand.

If it's not told here or here or here, where are we going to learn it?

- Our schoolbooks, or textbooks.

- It may not be this generation, or even three generations or four generations, but if we don't continue to teach history of what the failures of the past or triumphs of the past, like, it's gonna end up repeating itself.

Like, Hitler was a failed artist.

Like, I'm sure he wasn't painting demonic pictures.

Like, he was looking for the happy pictures.

He was a failed artist.

And that's where, and it turned into what it was.

Like, if you don't, like I think every culture, every country, has had land took, has had people killed, had slaves.

It's not a white thing, it's not a black thing.

It's not a, it's nothing.

Like, it's everybody.

It's the world history.

Like Genghis Khan.

Like, I forgot the percentage, but there is like, 1 out of 10, or 1 out 15, or a higher number than that, all have relations all the way back to him in the Ming, is it Ming Dynasty that he was in?

I can't remember.

- Mongolian.

- Mongolian dynasty.

Like, you can track everybody's history.

Doesn't matter if it's from where he's from, or you're from, like somewhere in that group of people, you can track it back.

But like we know the atrocities that this man committed.

- Yeah, no, and I think also, probably not for everybody, but for a lot of us, the history still changes all the structures and it's affecting, continuing affecting, the people's life right now.

So if we were talking about understanding each other, about union, about all of that, and if we don't understand what is happening to the other communities we wouldn't get there.

We won't get there because we don't understand.

Like, when I came to this country, I knew nothing about the struggles of the immigrant Latino community because I lived in Colombia my whole life.

So I didn't know.

So when I got here and started hearing all the stories and looking at really, I never thought the quality of life of our Latino community was no good here.

You never thought.

You always idolize all the United States.

I wanna go and live in there.

And when I got here I was like, this is it?

It's terrible.

Yes?

This is the "American Dream?"

It's bad.

But then I had to understand, what is all of this?

And then when I started working in other areas, looking at how we were struggling to have good relationship with African Americans because we were fighting for the same, or still fighting for the same resources, the same pie is not getting bigger.

The pie is the same pie and how government and everything is making us fight for it.

But then when you hear everything, I was like, why are they so attached to this and that?

And then when I started learning all of what happened and why they feel that way, oh, now we can understand each other.

And also for them, why are they, you know, scared of seeing the police?

Something simple, yes?

Why is it a big deal, this thing?

And then when you talk to people and explain what happened, people are like, okay.

And then you can find more things in common than differences and then you can really come together and understand each other.

And we can still disagree in some things, but if we don't understand, and this is part of it, yes?

Understanding others.

If we don't acknowledge, don't teach our kids, or we don't get to learn that it's going to be difficult, even here, yes, we are learning about each other.

So, how we can relate.

- [Nisha] We need to adjust our textbooks.

- [David] Okay, go ahead.

- Well, I was just curious about Anna's thoughts as a former teacher.

- Personally, I enjoyed when the students went into the library and they would choose different books and we'd discuss them.

I like to hear different viewpoints of it because every so often we would actually choose a book that we would all read together.

And then they all had to give their own book reports.

You know, you've had your book reports to do.

And they picked up on different points of view, different things.

And that's just the interesting part about it is I could read that book and go through it.

I'm like, oh, and I hone in on one thing, whereas Lee maybe be honing in on something different, and to at least expose them to different things, to educate them so that they could make an informed decision of things, that's great.

Whereas it came to the history stuff that we were reading about.

I really enjoyed the fact that we could, like Jake was saying that, you know, if you don't know what your history had been, the theory is is about every 20 years, history repeats its cycle.

So if you take down all the statues in one area that resembled something and meant something and that obviously the statue went up there for a reason.

If you try to take that down, it's kinda like taking a light and hiding it by the bushel.

You can't see it.

But if you take that bushel away, you can see the light and you can see further into the distance of what it has meant.

So, it does bring a different meaning to some people, but it also brings a commonality of understanding where you had been.

And I appreciated that the libraries were full with books.

I appreciated that it had diversity in those books.

And you know, that's one of the things that we really, as an educator, you look for that teachable moment.

You're like, what are you gonna come away with?

It's gonna be different than what you came away with, but it's still very important.

So to take that and censor it and remove it, yes, there's some things that really shouldn't be out there for the kids, that is harmful to the betterment of them, to the betterment of society, that maybe it's not appropriate to put it in one type of library, but it could be in a public library, or somewhere else where the parents can help screen some of those choices.

But I feel the censorship portion is taking it a little bit too far because what may be offensive to one is not offensive to another, but offensive to another in a different light than the other person.

- I wanna go back to where we started this conversation on the core and fundamentals.

I said I'd get to everyone's three.

So, Ashley?

- Okay, let me find my card here.

So I had wrote down God, family and relationships.

That's my three.

- [David] Which one means the most?

- I believe God does pretty strongly.

I have a really spiritual connection, and allow that to, that guides me, and my decisions that guide me on the way up here, you know, kind of this morning, and really is where I'm led by is my faith is really important for me.

Yeah, I think that's it.

- Fiaz?

- Do I remember?

No, it's because of working with Habitat for Humanity for so long we had a T-shirt, you know, because we started working incidentally with that incident.

We built a home in their name, in their memory, on our three winners we called it.

And at that point we were, the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, built the house and then came in the Hindus and said, what about us?

Said okay, you're welcome to come.

Then the next build, the Buddhist said, we are here too, said okay, you come.

Then the Bahá<í came.

Okay.

So the religious coordinator said, why don't you give each one from your faith tradition something which is common, golden rule was across.

So we built that T-shirt with 12 different, you know, saying the same thing.

Love your brother as you would love yourself is the Islamic principle and the so forth.

So that really is very helpful to come to the common, at least get to that commonality first, and put that into action, makes it much helpful, right?

Rather than sitting on the table and speaking to each other.

So we used to go, dig in, this day they were going to bring the food, and they know Jewish day do not work on Saturday, Muslims don't work on Friday.

So, all of those things we learn from each other.

And then respect and understanding, of course faith also plays a part.

In terms of, let me be the advocate for the young mothers that I worked with, you know, southern mothers.

So they are saying what about their rights?

They also have a right to choose what their children want to study.

So why are you putting it on the table and making everybody to read?

They say this is not right.

So perhaps they can do is to give them the right for and get them, I think there was some system they wanted to adopt voucher.

If you want to take your kid and go to that, your own school, you're welcome to do so.

Maybe that could be a solution.

So that's where the friction arises because again, when we talk about the rights, every parent had their rights.

And they, in their own heart, had the best interest of their children.

You can't deny that.

Just as somebody else would.

And so you give them the right, make them comfortable, perhaps.

And of course the history, you know, history is a part of learning, so you just cannot say, well, you cannot compare that troubled, terrible thing happened over there, so let's just forget about the entire history now.

Every world had that terrible history.

So, we learn from the mistakes and the hope is that we will not commit that again.

- Anna?

- I put first is my relationship with God, and that becomes what helps develop me and my heart and drives me to behave with others a certain way.

And then respect for others and having manners is important.

And then value of life.

And I feel like that has actually been one of the things we've noticed within this society is that there has been a loss for the value of life.

I'm talking about the life for a dog, a cat, a person.

They don't value what it means.

- What do you think it would look like if that changed?

And we did see value for life, as you said?

- It would be kinda like what you were saying about do unto others as you would want to have done to you because you value them so much, you put their interest and their wellbeing ahead potentially of yours.

And you are showing them that you value them in not necessarily believing what they believe, but at least showing value that they have beliefs in things, too.

- So around the table we heard respect four or five times?

Heard value five or six times.

That's what we aim for, right?

So at this core and the fundamentals we're talking about, we're trying to get at where we are, why we're there, and a better way to discuss it very open.

I thank each of you for having an incredibly valued, open conversation for this past almost two hours.

This was hard work.

Meaningful work.

And I thank you.

I thank you.