A little Hope-ium for Easter.
Sharon McMahon is known on social media as “America’s Government Teacher” under the handle @SharonSaysSo, where she replaces “confusion with clarity, cynicism with home, and division with understanding.”
For me, she did that with one phrase in a recent article: “Hope is not a feeling, but a practice.”
🤯 = mind blown.
I’ve long said public service is a practice, similar to the practice of law or medicine. It requires enormous learning and willingness to evolve with that learning, and to keep up with the ever-changing needs of constituents and the policy and cultural landscape. Public service is one way we can practice hope.
Please take a moment to read her article, “The Case for Hope in an Exhausted America”. It’s a great example of her skill – not too long, but provides concise and salient details which drive her point. I want to paraphrase part of it because it’s a perfect parallel to this Serve60Sharp newsletter:
What does it look like to practice hope in 2026?
- Staying in the game.
- Paying attention to the right things.
- Talking to people.
“It is the decision to do work that makes sense regardless of how it turns out, because no work for liberty — no act of citizenship, no conversation held in good faith, no vote cast in an off-year election — is ever truly lost. The Americans who came before us made that choice again and again, in times far darker than our own. We are not too broken, too divided, or too tired to do the same.”
Reboot your hope & get out there to serve someone!
Stephanie Sharp