Speak out or work it out: What’s yours to do right now?
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
With political tensions at a new peak, the pressure to take a stand — or keep the peace — can be intense. But how do you know the difference between the move that feels right and the one that is right?
In our first episode after a long break, Mónica, a liberal, talks with her conservative friend and fellow bridge builder April Lawson about what it takes to know what’s truly yours to do at this moment. Drawing on ideas from people who’ve seen the best and worst of humanity, along with their own struggles to navigate what feels like an increasingly scary world, Moni and April explore how to step out of the heat long enough to ask:
• How do I avoid using “peacemaking” as a cover for a lack of courage?
• What’s the line between humanizing someone … and enabling them?
• When it comes to division in my community, my family, and my country: What will I wish I had done when my grandchildren ask what I did?
Credits
Host & Executive Producer: Mónica Guzmán
Senior Producer: Tracy Egbas
Producer: Jessica Jones
Associate Producer & Graphic Designer: Fredo Viola
Contributors: April Lawson & Travis Tripodi
Artist in Residence: Gangstagrass
A production of Reclaim Curiosity
Distribution Partners: KUOW, Braver Angels, and Deseret News
Financial Supporter: M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Key Topics & Quotes
1. The question that won’t leave us alone
Mónica and April open by naming the question they keep hearing from listeners, students, professors, and church members across every political stripe: how do I know that what I’m doing right now is the right thing? April admits she has been “a little bit tortured” by the question the whole time she’s worked in this field — and they agree that discomfort with the question may itself be part of the answer.
April: “I have been a little bit tortured by this question the whole time. Like, the whole time I’ve worked in this field… I have never been comfortable with that question, at peace with my answer to that question.”
Mónica: “I’m realizing as you said that never being comfortable with that question might be part of the answer to that question — that you should keep asking it.”
2. Peacemaking and the wait-and-see trap
They bring two anchor texts to the question. Mónica reads the fifth of the Buddhist Five Remembrances — “my actions are the ground on which I stand” — to zoom the conversation in on what each of them is actually doing. April pairs it with the passage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail on the white moderate, and confesses she is haunted by the suspicion that she, a peacemaker by disposition, would have been a “wait-and-see” person during slavery or Nazi Germany. Together they name the trap: peacemaking can become cover for a lack of courage.
Mónica: “I don’t stand on the world. I don’t stand on somebody else’s perception of the world. I stand on my own actions in the world. So what will those actions be?”
April: “There’s a little voice in me that says, during the era of slavery you would’ve been a slow-change person. Like you would’ve been a ‘let’s wait, and in a couple generations maybe this will be better’ person.”
Mónica: “The lazy way of looking at peacemaking is that you’re always calming things down — and it does just give that peacemaker cover for a lack of courage… for what’s actually necessary sometimes.”
3. Where is your power?
Mónica brings in Angela Davis’s line — “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” — as a deliberate rejoinder to the Serenity Prayer. April widens it: everyone, from CEOs to senators to presidents, tells themselves they’re powerless. They land on a reframe: instead of asking “do I have power?”, ask the scavenger-hunt question — where is my power, and how am I using it?
April: “We all have a story about why we have no power, right? We all think we’re powerless… And the truth is we do have power.”
Mónica: “I love that question, April, because then it becomes a scavenger hunt. It’s a detective story. Where is your power?”
4. Humanizing or enabling?
They reach the moral knot of the episode: where is the line between humanizing someone and enabling them? Mónica offers a mentor’s rule — wait to correct most things, but interrupt immediately when someone dehumanizes a group — because losing the channel of influence forfeits any chance to change anyone. April presses with a tougher version of the question: it’s not just one-on-one; it’s which stories of which humans we choose to tell in public, and where selective humanization quietly does the work of dehumanization.
April: “If you walk out thinking there’s an easy answer, you’ve done it wrong, basically… you have to tell the entire ugliness, you have to speak the entire story of trauma, the entire sin. And you have to humanize the other person.”
Mónica: “If you don’t keep open a channel and take that risk of humanizing versus enabling, then how do you influence when someone is doing something that is wrong? You lose the chance to influence.”
5. The cost of staying in the room
The conversation widens to what it actually costs to stay engaged with people whose views feel sinful to you. Mónica recalls a recent trip to South Africa and the Tommy Sands lyric she can’t shake — “peace is the prize for those who are daring” — alongside sobbing at the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah over its two-sentence treatment of the Holocaust. April picks up the same thread with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian of grace who eventually joined a plot to assassinate Hitler: when does loving someone require overpowering them? Their shared answer is that you have to be willing to see all the sorrows — and to accept that the sin you hate lives, right now, in the person you’re trying to love.
Mónica: “Somehow the cycle of vengeance keeps turning till each other’s sorrows and songs we start learning. Peace is the prize for those who are daring. Sing me the music of healing.”
April: “If you love someone and you see them driving towards a cliff, eventually you have to go in and wrest the wheel away from that person… So when does loving someone require overpowering them?”
Mónica: “You have to accept that what you think is the sin lives in that person right now… because if you hate that sin in that moment, you won’t stomach being in its presence.”
6. Don’t live the lie
April brings in Václav Havel’s essay about the Czech greengrocer who refuses to put the regime’s sign in his window — Havel’s claim that the most powerful political act is to “live as though the truth is true,” to refuse to live a lie. From there both get personal about their lines. Mónica names free speech as hers; April points to the U.S. military, eroding norms of decency and humility, and what she sees as a quiet form of regime change. Both land on the same instruction: don’t be changed by the way the culture is changing.
April: “The most political thing you can do, and the most powerful thing you can do, is to live as though the truth is true. To refuse to live a lie.”
Mónica: “I do not want to live in a society where people cannot say what they mean… And therefore I will put my life on the line for it.”
April: “I think that the most important thing is to not be changed by the way our culture is changing.”
7. What is yours to do?
They close with practical instruments. Mónica offers the grandmother test — could you explain this to your grandmother, and would she approve? — and admits hers would probably tell her to take care of her family and not try to save the world. April flips it forward to the grandchild test, and adds the Ignatian daily examen of consolation and desolation. Mónica finishes with a framework from Braver Angels co-founder Bill Doherty: every cause needs people who resist, people who replace, and people who repair. Both end on the same invitation: know your strengths, know your capacity, and do what is yours to do.
April: “If you’re having to tell your grandchildren 20, 30, 40 years from now, what did you do when — can you say it? And will you be ashamed?”
April: “At the end of every day… can you feel when you’re doing what is right and when you’re not? You’ll build this like a muscle.”
Mónica (paraphrasing Bill Doherty): “Resist — name and fight against the social problems you see. Replace — work on coming up with new policies, the relationships you’d need, the conversations you’d need… Repair — because in the fights and the ugliness and the frustrations, people will get hurt.”
Mónica (closing): “Onward — figuring out what we’re here to do, what is ours to do.”
Links & References
• The Five Remembrances — Buddhist meditation referenced in the opening (Plum Village)
• Letter from a Birmingham Jail — Martin Luther King Jr. (Stanford King Institute)
• Angela Davis — “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change…” (NMAAHC)
• The Serenity Prayer — Reinhold Niebuhr (Yale Alumni Magazine on authorship)
• The Yasser Arafat Museum — Ramallah, West Bank (official museum site)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Biography from the International Bonhoeffer Society
• “The Power of the Powerless” — Václav Havel
• The Barmen Declaration — 1934, Confessing Church (full text)
• The Benedict Option — Rod Dreher (publisher page)
• Raj Vinnakota — Institute for Citizens & Scholars
• Bill Doherty — Resist, Replace, Repair — Braver Angels (framework explained)
• Pirkei Avot 2:16 — “You are not obligated to complete the work…” (Sefaria)
• I Never Thought of It That Way — by Mónica Guzmán (BenBella Books)
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Transcript
[Cleaned transcript to be appended once the Transcript Cleanup Prompt has been run on the raw transcript.]