Ramstad: In a moment that feels chaotic, every American has power

Today and this week are tense.

Minnesotans and Americans are back to work after a scary, tragic weekend. One person died in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, but he survived miraculously and mercifully.

While the moment feels chaotic, we each have power over what we do and say next.

You are not helpless. You have agency. You have influence, even if it’s for a small number of people.

I offer that reminder after a long conversation Saturday morning with a Minnesotan who now influences millions of people: Sharon McMahon, the former teacher and small-business owner in Duluth who is nicknamed “America’s Government Teacher.” She built a media business after attracting followers to her civics lessons on Instagram during the pandemic.

“Humans are not meant to feel like the weight of the world rests on their shoulders alone, and that is how so many people feel today,” McMahon said. “They feel hopeless and so, to me, it’s important to remember that hope is not a feeling that is going to descend upon you from the heavens. Hope is a choice that you can make each day.”

It’s a sentiment that McMahon expressed a bit more poetically Monday morning in an essay on her new Substack website, called the Preamble, which is also sent out via email.

“This, my friends, is a dark night of the soul, one that is entirely devoid of stars,” McMahon wrote, referring to the shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday night. “But there is light to be found. All you have to do is light a candle. And then use your candle to light the candle of another.”

When we talked, McMahon was ending a big week. She attended the NATO summit in Washington at the invitation of the State Department. She was one of about a dozen new-media figures to be invited to interview participants in the summit, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

We spent a lot of our time discussing how her work grew from social media posts to radio and TV appearances, podcasting, writing a book and launching the Substack site and e-newsletter.

After the assassination attempt, I decided to save her business story for later and instead convey her observations about the people who listen, watch and read the humorous, middle-of-the-road way she imparts American history.

First, many of us have forgotten things we learned in junior high or high school about how government and society work. And that’s not surprising, McMahon said.

“If you don’t use it, you lose it, right? And most of our attention was very divided in high school,” she said. “And so it’s not an uncommon sentiment that people express to me, ‘I do not remember learning about this.’”

She had left teaching years before and was running a studio photography business. It was closed, however, due to essential-business and social-distancing mandates at the time. The popularity of her first post about how the Electoral College worked led to many more. By early 2021, it was a full-time job and today she employs eight other people in her business.

As she started building an audience, McMahon began hearing how overwhelmed people felt by the amount of news and the gloom it put them in. She also recognized that, with so much bad news so readily available, people tend to feel like they have no control over their lives.

“The only way anything will change is if each one of us decides to have hope that our collective actions can make a difference,” she told me. “If we all are just like, ‘Screw it, it’s hopeless,’ then everything will be exactly as it is now or potentially worse because we’re giving our power to nefarious actors.”

In his column on Friday, David Brooks of the New York Times described the evolution of political thought in the country that led to this moment in which so many Americans believe “my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors.”

That belief represents a complete diminishing of the power of the individual and the responsibility we each possess for our own lives and for one another.

Unfortunately, it’s a message amplified on both sides of the political spectrum and too often by people in the media.

It’s also completely divorced from what we all know and experience: The country, the world, is always getting better.

We each make it better, or at least we have the power to.

“It’s important to be driven by this idea that I’m just going to do for one person what I wish I could do for everybody,” McMahon said. “Whatever your sphere of influence happens to be. Obviously if you’re the president of the United States, your sphere of influence is different than a nurse in the ER department. That doesn’t make a smaller sphere of influence less valuable.”