Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She's actually convicted of multiple crimes as a result of refusing to get off of the bus. Claret Colvin's still alive. It wasn't until recently that her criminal record was expunged, that she filed a request with the state of Alabama. She's like, I did nothing wrong. Your laws were unconstitutional.
And so within the last couple of years, she has had that conviction removed from her criminal record. Yes, yes. Wow.
Yeah. Do you find yourself struggling with choosing to be hopeful? Do you find yourself struggling with cynicism?
Are you naturally cynical? That's a good question. No shade if you are. No, I know. I think it's a very common way to be.
You're not wrong that the level of contempt is very high. I think where it might be helpful to you to think about this is we cannot wait for a person on a white horse to ride in and be the plan. The plan is not a dude with a scroll that arrives with a trumpet and is like, I have arrived and here is the plan.
Yeah, that's right. By the way, if a dude does arrive with a scroll that says the plan, they want to be a dictator. Yeah, exactly. Like the dude with the plan is the dictator. Be scared of the dude with the plan. We cannot sit around waiting for someone to go first, for someone to come save us, for a political figure to be the voice of reason because we're the plan.
The political party is not the plan. And if you are wedded to a political party being the plan, you are going to be disappointed and you are going to be cynical because that political party is going to fail over and over. They're going to fail if they compromise in your eyes. We didn't get everything we wanted. When in reality, compromise is the only way anything gets done.
Anybody who's ever been married will tell you that it can't be all your way and it can't be all their way. Sometimes we have to eat food we don't like. The compromise cannot be viewed as a failure. The change is going to come when we decide that that's how it's going to be. That's a tremendously freeing feeling because I am no longer subject to external forces that I have no control over.
I don't have to wait for the right person to get elected. The world's shittiest human can get elected and I can still do everything I can and I can still impact the world for good and I can still change the course of history despite my external circumstances. And this book is full of people who prove exactly that.
Most of the big and important things that have happened in this country, the lasting change that has been created has come about from people
ordinary people, the pregnant teenagers of history, the people whose parents were enslaved, the wrongfully accused, who just kept doing the next needed thing, the people who just kept trying things nobody else had ever done before, the people who were willing to let other people watch them fail, were afraid to let people watch us fail. But the great Americans of history are
have failed over and over and have set aside the fear of judgment of others and have just decided, I can work with my enemies because my enemies might have a change of heart at any moment. And how will our enemies ever have a change of heart if we are not there to show them the light? How will our enemies ever change if we are not a force for good in their lives?
If we have blocked, deleted, canceled, and unfriended the people who ideologically oppose us? So that orientation of your spirit does not come from a place of everything is going great. It comes from the knowledge that things will improve when I choose to hope that they can.
Yes, and then you can build on that from there.
That's exactly right. And then you can build on something. That is how all long-term change happens. Anybody who is advocating for, like, a revolution. Revolutions have happened infrequently. They are always bloody. They are always highly destructive.
Complete unknown of what is going to happen afterwards. We view the American Revolution as, like, the standard of which to judge all revolutions.
Precisely. That's exactly right. And the British were like, you know what? Fine. They were willing to let it go.
Great. Well, and they tried to come back in the War of 1812. And then they tried to like light the White House on fire and light the Capitol on fire. And eventually they were like, fine, you what? Never mind. We're better off as friends. Let's both hate France.
They let it go. But the idea of a revolution within the confines of your own border is an entirely separate matter. Change in a pluralistic society should not be advocated for in a revolutionary sense. Change is incremental. You have these two forces of like this very progressive force that wants to have a trajectory of change at a rate that the conservative breaks are not willing to tolerate.
And ultimately, the conservative breaks are an important component in this movement. relationship because it's too easy to go quickly too far afield if you have nobody being like, slow down. Yeah.
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