Choosing Forward

Americans love solitary heroes.

We prefer them solitary, uncompromised, standing against the dark with no one to answer to and no one to negotiate with. Lone wolves. Clean narratives. Clear villains. Clear victories.

But history—real history—never moves that way.

Standing at a marker that remembers the Marquis de Lafayette, it’s tempting to linger on the romance of the story: a nineteen-year-old aristocrat crossing an ocean to fight for a cause not his own, earning the admiration of George Washington, charming a town, winning a place in the American imagination.

It’s a great story.

It’s just not the point.

The point is what Lafayette represents: the uncomfortable truth that nothing important gets done alone.

America loves the myth of the self-made man. We tell it to ourselves constantly—on screens, in speeches, in sermons, in business lore. We celebrate the individual who muscles through adversity by sheer force of will. And sometimes, yes, grit matters. But most of the time, grit without help stalls.

Conviction without cooperation collapses.

Vision without alliance dies young.

George Washington understood this, even if we prefer to forget it.

He did not win a war by personal brilliance alone. In fact, Washington was not a brilliant field general. He won it by building a team—slowly, imperfectly, and often uncomfortably. He trusted young men before they were proven. He listened to advisors he did not always agree with. He coordinated personalities that clashed. And eventually, he accepted help from a people—the French—who had once been bitter enemies.

That last part matters more than we like to admit.

Barely a dozen years before the French became America’s allies, they had been locked in brutal conflict with the British. Those wars were bloody, personal, and unresolved. Suspicion ran deep. History gave them every reason not to trust one another.

And yet, they stood together on the same battlefield. Why?

Because the threat of a common enemy was greater than their differences.

This is the lesson Americans need to learn anew.

We are not stuck because people are malicious.

We are stuck because people are constricted.

We live in an age of entrenched opinions. Opinions that were once held with curiosity have hardened into unalterable identities. To question them is made to feel like betrayal. To examine them feels dangerous. So we dig in.

Closely guarded opinions feel like strength.

In truth, they are often fear in disguise.

Fear of being wrong.

Fear of losing belonging.

Fear of standing without a tribe.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of formation.

Human beings are shaped by proximity. When we only stand next to people who see the world exactly as we do, our capacity for important conversations is compromised. Our capacity for complexity atrophies. Certitude replaces wisdom, and outrage replaces leadership.

But it feels good.

It feels righteous.

It feels safe.

But certitudes never built a future.

History moves forward because people are willing to stand in tension—long enough to see more than one side of a problem at the same time. That is what choosing forward requires.

Choosing forward does not mean abandoning conviction. It means refusing paralysis. It means loosening our grip—not on values, but on the illusion that our current understanding is complete.

This is why alliances feel threatening.

Alliances demand exposure. They place our thinking in proximity to other ways of seeing. They force us to distinguish between what is essential and what is merely familiar. And for those whose opinions are closely guarded, that exposure feels like loss.

But it is not loss.

It is expansion.

Washington could not have won the war by surrounding himself only with people who confirmed his opinions. The Continental Army could not have secured independence by waiting for unanimity. France did not help America because it suddenly agreed with everything America stood for; it helped because political reality required cooperation.

They chose forward.

Our moment demands the same maturity.

The challenges before us—community safety, education, government dysfunction, cultural exhaustion—do not fit neatly inside ideological closets. They do not yield to slogans. They do not respond to outrage. They require shared effort across difference.

That effort will only happen if we stop confusing loyalty with isolation.

Defending personal opinions cannot solve shared problems.

Only shared responsibility can.

And shared responsibility begins when we decide that the future matters more than the comfort

of being right.

So when we ask what might be possible in our country today if we learned to work with people we don’t particularly like, or don’t fully agree with, we’re really asking something deeper. We’re asking whether we still believe the future is worth the discomfort of cooperation. Whether we are willing to loosen our grip on closely guarded opinions long enough to face challenges that are bigger than any one faction, philosophy, or fear. History suggests this much is true: progress doesn’t wait for consensus. It waits for courage—the courage to choose forward.

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