How do we encourage critical thought around stories that may have once seemed heroic, but are actually harmful? How do we build new stories, new ways of living, together?

It’s much easier to vilify people than it is to see that they could have both dark and light in them, but is there a point at which giving others the benefit of the doubt does more harm than good?

The reality is that everyone’s just trying to get by — the difference is in what each individual, each collective, and each nation is willing to give up in order to survive.

Power is a prism through which we can view an array of social issues, be it power and politics, power and gender, power and youth, power and privacy, power and abuse, or power and privilege.

While conflict can be necessary, we’re wondering what to do when opposition becomes extreme and how we should operate within that complexity. How do we listen to and learn from opposition?

How does the body you’re in relate to your own sense of safety and other people’s ideas of danger? And why do we reject bodies in danger?

Tell us where your beliefs take root, what you build your activism upon, and how you form your own narrative in the wilderness of technology, media, politics, and religion.

It is not a time for us to look away from ourselves. It is not a time for us to cave in to disillusionment; to opt out as if it is a matter of convenience; or to avoid discussion with those we disagree with.

If we break down the larger social constructs of a nation’s political rhetoric, we can understand that this is the question that is at the root of all our debates about health care, immigration, gender equality, international relations, and so much more.

We have all wronged each other in understanding. For this issue, let us confront the labels and the friction — within us first — and then between us.

What would it take to shift the narrative, to close the gap between what you know to be truth and what someone else dismisses as opinion? Might the plasticity of our language be responsible for the gaps between us?