Day 21: Why DEI Is Resistance (Or, the Perils of Backsliding)

What groups like the Staples taught us about being a "for all" America. And why standing for it, especially when it's made it illegal, matters more than we can imagine.

Civil rights and Gospel legends, The Staples - Pops, Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis, 1972.

It was in 1972 that the Staples, with legendary Mavis on lead vocals, recorded their most enduring song — I’ll Take You There. “I know a place,” Mavis sang, Ain’t nobody crying, ain’t nobody worried. Ain’t no smiling faces, she continued, No lying to the races… The “smiling faces” reference she was making traced back to the 1971 song recorded by The Undisputed Truth; Smiling Faces Sometimes:

(Beware!) Beware of the handshake that hides the snake! (Can you dig it? Can you dig it?) I’m telling you, beware! Beware of the pat on the back — it just might hold you back.
Jealousy, Misery, Envy, I tell you, you can’t see behind — Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes — they don’t tell the truth. Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies — and I’ve got proof!

Both were reactions to what was happening in the culture, especially the deception occurring as segregationists and supremacists sought to do what professional wrestlers call a “face turn”, rewriting themselves as the heroes of the story, but, in their case, sticking to their old tricks. “Take the sheet off your face, boy,” the Staples sang about Klansmen in Respect Yourself, “It’s a brand new day.”

These songs and so many others, from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On to Elvis’ In the Ghetto, were part of an emerging understanding in the early 1970s, that only a society made for all of us will ultimately work for any of us. They were the antidote to the poison being pushed out over the airwaves by people who believed in a “for some” America then, as well as now. And just a few years ago, it seemed that we’d finally gotten the message and were on our way.

In the wake of the 2020 protests, all kinds of companies rolled out diversity initiatives, making fundamental changes to how America works. But now, those changes have not only evaporated, with entire teams fired, as we saw in Tear it Down, the Trump administration is attempting to rebrand inclusion initiatives “illegal discrimination”. Trump has signed executive orders outlawing DEI and has ordered the Justice Department to find ways to prosecute organizations that engage in it.

And, as we noted in We’re Still Standing, some of the largest companies in the world are falling over themselves to dismantle the same programs they spent the prior four years building, ones that made them more diverse, equitable and inclusive. They’re pulling out of climate consciousness initiatives and dropping support for everything from LGBTQ+ causes to voter registration drives.

McDonald's, on January 6, announced that it was retiring specific goals for achieving diversity at senior leadership levels. The company also ended a program that encouraged suppliers to take diversity seriously. And McDonald’s isn’t alone. Everyone from Walmart and Amazon to Meta and Ford has fallen in line. And it’s not just initiatives based on ancestry.

Tractor Supply Company announced that it would stop sponsoring “nonbusiness activities” like Pride festivals and even support for voter engagement, and would no longer be submitting data to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocacy group for LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. Others, from Ford to Lowe’s have also dropped out of the Human Rights Campaign’s equality survey, which rates companies by whether they’re fair places for LGBTQ+ people to work.

And that’s before getting to the quiet scuttling of efforts to accommodate people with learning differences, the resistance to a living wage, efforts to bust unions, and a host of other ways we’re abandoning inclusion. Which makes the stand that Costco shareholders opted to take all the more courageous.

When the proposal was made that they should do what so many other companies have done – cut and run – Costco’s board unanimously agreed to stand. To resist. Even if that meant they could open themselves up to lawsuits supported by the US Justice Department, upon Trump’s orders, lawsuits brought primarily by people who identify as white, straight, cisgender males.

When the issue was brought before shareholders, an astounding 98% of votes cast were likewise against backing down. In response, 19 attorneys general sent the company a letter saying “Costco should do the right thing by following the law and repealing its DEI policies.”

It’s hard to not see the similarities between this letter and the one eight ministers sent to Martin in 1963, while he sat in jail. That letter, published in the Birmingham News said, “…honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts,” and that decisions handed down by those courts, “Should in the meantime be peacefully obeyed.” In other words, “Do the right thing.”

Those attorneys general are using newly passed laws to do today what everything from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation did – make living up to our founding principles illegal, while making the deprivation of life, liberty and happiness for certain people, not just legal but required. And, that’s not all.

The climate they’re attempting to stoke is no different from the one Gunnar Sønsteby, whose story we covered in my 2025 MLK Day Letter, stood against. “Resistance is futile,” the Nazis, full of hubris, declared. The resistance would prove them wrong. And these increasingly desperate attempts to rebrand DEI as its opposite? They only show how dangerous supremacists find the concept. That’s because they get that, from the Underground Railroad to women’s suffrage, from the labor movement to the struggle that landed Martin in jail in Birmingham, it’s the same fight.

The incontrovertible fact is that from our Declaration of Independence’s “unalienable rights” to our Pledge of Allegiance’s “liberty and justice for all”, this has always been about embracing diversity, reifying equity and championing inclusion. Right from the beginning, DEI has been about resistance. It still is. It’s a story with five parts.

“Some Gentle People There”

My acute awareness of what’s happening to us stems back to 1997. I was living and working in San Francisco where I, a young, soon-to-be former pastor, was, by that time, a veteran AIDS chaplain. I’d come to realize that I’d traveled as far as I could with a denomination that was becoming increasingly strident and extremist in its declarations, from “women should remain silent” to “AIDS is God’s wrath against gays”. I remember thinking back on how much the world had changed in ten years, since my arrival in that strange new land that, for me, was like coming home.

In Me and Mary, I describe what that homecoming felt like; how I’d long heard people refer to California as “the land of fruits and nuts”, but had no real idea what that meant; that “fruits” was pejorative for gays and that “nuts” was anyone who didn’t agree with them. But, upon arrival, it didn’t take long for both me and the folk who moved out with me, most of whom were native Oklahomans, to get the gist.

We‘d all been accepted into Golden Gate Seminary, the only Southern Baptist divinity school not in the Bible belt, and located in Mill Valley, just on the other side of the bridge. So, there we were, touring San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But it’s so much more than that. It was the people who’d made it such a remarkable place.

Immediately, our sense of smell was overwhelmed by the scent of sage and marijuana, incense and patchouli. The sounds of drumming circles and reggae, gay anthems and Fillmore jazz filled the air. Everywhere we looked was a dizzying array of humanity on display; people of every shape, gender, color and hue; dressed every way imaginable; from tie-dye to business suits, from Birkenstocks to biker leather. I found it exciting and a bit dizzying, in an “opening night at the county fair” kind of way. I recall thinking of that line from San Francisco, “You’re going to meet some gentle people there,” and how true that was.

That tour took us through the Castro, and I remember us being rendered speechless at the sight of this young, 17- or 18-year-old waifish guy walking down the street in nothing but black leather hot pants and a pair of angel wings, his hair cut short, and his features etched by grim determination. Responses from my fellow seminarians ranged from nervous laughter to snickers. But what I felt was a jumble.

On the one hand, I was hit with a profound sense of sadness that, in that moment, throughout the entirety of the United States of America, there were only a handful of tiny neighborhoods, all tucked away in a few of our largest cities, where this young man could even dare express his authentic self. I stood there watching him, his walking down the street dressed as a sexy angel, as much of an affirmation of his right to exist as my grandmother Mary’s defiant visit to a segregated department store café in 1940s Birmingham was hers.

He walked slowly, as if it had taken effort to gather his dignity around him; the rigidity with which he held his head high, the only evidence of the many blows, both metaphorical and physical, he’d endured in order to become the person who could wear those wings. And that was before thinking of all those who’d endured similar things, but who hadn’t survived. I found myself awed by this one person’s courage and commitment to self-affirmation, and inspired by these “gentle people” who’d created this safe harbor, one where anyone and everyone could simply, be.

Fast-forward a decade. The onslaught of AIDS had turned San Francisco into a war zone, a war we were fighting with no ammunition. Nothing held the virus back. The most we chaplains could do was walk with people, affirming the inherent meaning of their lives. With no end in sight, the denomination had had enough. I and others doing this work were issued an ultimatum — “them or us”. They tried to frame the choice as one of obedience. “Do the right thing.”

We agreed with them. We just differed radically on what the “right thing” was. For us, that wasn’t falling in line or slinking back across the Golden Gate. It was being where we were most needed and doing what needed doing. That was my first encounter with an institution determined to prevent us from becoming the people we were becoming. It wouldn’t be my last.

Still, it felt like the city couldn’t catch a break. Just as we were beginning to turn the corner on the AIDS crisis, the dotcom craze, this era’s version of the gold rush, kicked off. Seemed like everyone was trying some kind of idea they hoped would make them instantly rich. I saw what was happening to the city and to its inhabitants, including those who’d held on long enough for drugs that turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic illness to arrive. Rents skyrocketed with people flocking to live in SF, then commute by air-conditioned Google bus to Silicon Valley each day.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic morphed into a homelessness epidemic; one that still plagues the city today. Almost overnight, the incredible solidarity and communal caring that had sustained San Francisco through such a horrific time was replaced by economic destitution; the kind that led to people stepping over children sleeping on the sidewalk to purchase $20 espresso shots, and that resulted in the displacement of the same “gentle people” who’d made it such a great place to live. This is always the result when we determine certain lives don’t matter; when we allow anyone to replace “all” with “some”.

Backsliding

This administration’s current (desperate) gambit to return us to the America we used to be, back when some of us were favored at the expense of the rest of us, isn’t all that different from the direction the SBC chose during the AIDS epidemic. But, both Christian nationalists today and my old denomination back then made the same fatal error we covered in Right-sizing Changes Everything – using “majority” tactics when they’re one no longer.

Back during segregation’s heyday, this faction could run roughshod over those who had little say in where society was headed. “Those who matter, don’t mind,” they’d say. “And those who mind, don’t matter.” But we’re not those people anymore. In 20 years, we’ll be a minority-majority nation. And, in that diverse democracy, those who’ve always minded being exploited will soon be the ones with the political power.

This emergent majority holds the key to every company’s success in the future, not to mention who will be elected to office, and even which religious groups will survive. Getting this right, renovating our institutions to align with the people we’re becoming, is our only way forward. Which is why it’s so confounding that over and again, we take steps that undo the progress we make almost as quickly as we make it.

In We’re Still Standing, we saw how, because we’ve wrongly attributed the outcome of the 2024 election to a conservative resurgence (despite the fact that Trump got roughly the same number of votes in both 2020 and 2024), people are jumping on the “injustice isn’t real” bandwagon, jettisoning the same DEI initiatives they were touting as evidence of their commitment to justice just last year. They’ve not only deleted commitments to inclusion but terminated the same people they’d hired to make their companies more inclusive in the first place.

Back in my Southern Baptist days, they called this behavior “backsliding” — lapsing back into “pre-conversion” habits. I can’t think of a better definition of what these companies are doing today. The rhetoric the “Trump whisperers” (my name for the ideological clan that dominates this administration) have come up with isn’t new. It’s a re-tread of old segregationist lingo, with a bit of word-weighting thrown in: instead of declaring equal rights for Negroes “special rights”, they’re calling equal access to employment, housing and education, “illegal discrimination”.

Which, every time I think about it, does something to my head. It’s like my brain glitches. Essentially, they’re claiming that efforts to end discrimination are inherently discriminatory; and that efforts to end oppression are unfair to would-be oppressors. They did the same thing with slavery, asserting that the institution should be preserved because ending it would be an economic hardship for slave owners.

That narrative flip brings to mind so many things; from religious leaders in the ‘90s who claimed that by not putting Americans with AIDS in concentration camps, their right to protection was being violated, to the NYPD officers who first assaulted an African American man, only to later charge him with assault for hurting one of the officer’s fist with his head. “The Asians are running our car makers out of business.” “The niggers are taking our women.” “The women are taking our jobs. “The gays are grooming our children.” “The illegals are eating our pets.”

From charges of everything from bestiality to cannibalism, the same accusations are repackaged and reapplied. Der Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper, reported that Jews kidnapped small German children before Passover because “Jews need the blood of a Christian child, maybe, to mix in with their Matzah,” recycling outlandish “blood libel” claims. But, in all fairness, Nazis didn’t create that Really Big Lie. The English did, 800 years prior.

Today, there are many reasons why organizations are backsliding; everything from fear of boycotts by conservatives to the 2023 Supreme Court ruling gutting affirmative action to the Trump executive orders, to greed. But, the gravest of the errors we’re making is this: what we think is supremacy’s resurgence is, in reality, the ideology’s last stand.

In a classic case of myopia, by fixating on the threat in front of them (backlashes from a shrinking minority) they’re facilitating the one that’s most likely to end them (a growing majority that’s been betrayed by them). And that’s the thing — though they don’t realize it, by abandoning inclusion, they’re showing us who they are, where they stand and who they believe has the power.

When we’re the ones at the top of the pyramid, we think of inclusion as being about “those people”, requiring accommodations that will cost us something. In our minds, we’re the ones being put upon, being asked to give them our jobs and economic opportunities, to share our water fountains, diner stools and seats at the front of the bus. We’re being asked to let them play in our sports leagues, serve in our military, attend our schools, and participate in our political process. We might even be genuinely happy that women are now in the C-suite, gays can get married and Muslims are in Congress.

But, with each concession, it gets harder to shake the mounting resentment at being constantly asked to give up even more of what’s considered to be rightfully ours. And that’s exactly where this entire train of thought goes off the rails. Because while the historic majority’s ownership of those assets might once have been the way our society worked, America itself is a different place today.

A Society of Minorities

I’ve written lots about our nation’s GSS (great sociological shift). In fact, it might be the most important societal concept we can grasp today. That’s because, like the melting icecaps that are producing more hurricanes, or the collapsing biosphere which is depleting our food supply, it’s another change that’s nonobvious, but that’s already altered our lives. We’re living in a time when, in every way we currently measure, we’re transforming, becoming something new.

In 2012, non-Anglo births, for the first time, surpassed Anglo births, and in 2045, we’ll be a nation with no ethnic majority. 2017 was the year non-churchgoers, again, for the first time, surpassed churchgoers in the United States, a gap that’s grown ever wider since. And people openly identifying as LGBTQ+ have grown from 2.5% among Generation X to 25% among Millennials, to 37% among Gen Z, and is projected to be even higher for Generation Alpha, already our nation’s first non-majority cohort. No amount of conservative boycotts can reverse this.

And this isn’t just here: It’s happening all over the world. The Alphas aren’t just diverse in ways we don’t have categories for; they’re interconnected, by everything from social media to a global economy, from culture blending to global travel, in ways we can scarcely imagine. The seismic sociocultural shift they represent is half the equation. The other half is socioeconomic, how poverty’s breadth and depth has spread steadily since the 1950s, and how this is affecting everyone, including an increasing number of people who identify as white.

The flags of the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Young Lords Party.

It’s why the original Rainbow Coalition, founded on April 4, 1969, on the first anniversary of Martin’s death, and the approach they took was so important. "We'll work with anybody, or form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind," was how Fred Hampton, Vice Chairman of the national Black Panther Party put it. And they did, including partnering with the Confederate flag-waving Young Patriot Organization, along with the Latinx Young Lords Party, to found the extraordinary initiative.

Likewise, the Young Patriots broke with the race ideology they’d long been taught; that simply being designated “white”, even if they were poor, should be enough for them, and that they should prove their loyalty by not working with the spics, niggers, chinks, and so forth. (“They’re closing down the textile mills across the railroad tracks,” Bruce Springsteen sang in My Hometown. “Foreman says ‘These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back.’”)

The coalition, an unprecedented show of what e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) looks like, unified and galvanized social change organizations across the nation, ones who’d long been told they were each other’s enemies. Virtually overnight, they quit seeing their fellow oppressed Americans as competition for the crumbs of society and started seeing them for what they were — their most powerful allies.

Together, these two huge changes reveal how, this election notwithstanding, the society we once were is not who we are any longer. Every historic majority is smaller today than they were yesterday, and they’ll be even smaller tomorrow. The social pyramid is flattening exactly at a time when the people who’ve been most exploited are now the new political power. All of which, means that though former majorities have been told that inclusion is about creating a place for others, it isn’t. It’s about securing one for themselves.

“It left no doubt.”

In Tear it Down, we saw how the Trump administration is now trying to brand this as being about “merit”, with Trump himself claiming that this is about getting back to “merit-based hiring”. But, that’s nonsense. “Merit-based hiring”, like how pink went from masculine to feminine and blue went from feminine to masculine, is a term that’s already been word-weighted – turned into its opposite.

“Merit”, according to them, was why Tuskegee Airmen applicants needed to clear an extraordinarily high bar, and why African American troops, believed to be of inferior intellect and discipline, had to remain segregated from the rest of the military.

It was apparently why so many Negro servicemen warranted blue discharges, which weren’t dishonorable (dishonorable discharges required cause; blue discharges didn’t), and was why it made sense that recipients of blue discharges were disqualified from receiving the massive range of benefits afforded by the G.I. Bill; from loans to buy homes and funds to start businesses and farms to coverage of expenses while completing high school or college.

“Merit” was ostensibly at work when Mildred Hemmons Carter, one of the few Negro women to apply to become a WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots), and who was a far more experienced pilot than most women applying for the program was rejected. Despite the personal letter from Jackie Cochran, founder of the program stating it was due to her ancestry. “It left no doubt," Mildred would recall, years later.

We’re asserting that merit is at work when we claim that SAT scores and the like are indicators of a person’s intellectual capabilities when they aren’t. An entire industry has been built around helping people with money to knock the top off those tests. Or, that GPA does the same, despite all the exclusive schools that never give bad grades. Ever.

Their brand of merit is at work when we come up with arbitrary metrics like, “You need a Master’s degree to be considered for this job” (the reason so few social workers are from communities those programs serve – who can afford to get a Master’s degree, then survive on a social worker’s salary?). Or, when we require that people secure expensive licenses. Or, when we make the completion of extensive unpaid hours, the kind of thing only a person of means can do, a job prerequisite.

Or, when we run background checks, despite the unfairness of arrest rates and the litany of charges leveled against certain people upon arrest. This was the case when two US Capitol Police officers came upon a sleeping, homeless, African American high school student. They pulled their weapons and, by all indications, were a hair’s breadth away from executing him – until Grace McKinnon, an African American, formerly homeless social worker showed up and started filming.

The officers claimed that Anthony, the teenager, came at them with a knife, which clearly didn’t happen, seeing he was still alive. Then, Anthony, hiding behind Grace, says to her, “You saw me sleeping, right?” “I did,” is all Grace says. It was she who talked Anthony down, getting him on the ground so that the officers could cuff him. And, in doing so, she probably saved his life.

But Anthony would be charged with Assault on a Police Officer While Armed; Carrying a Dangerous Weapon; and Possession of a Prohibited Weapon. Though he’s a minor whose only crime was not having a place to sleep, those charges are now forever part of his criminal record.

The thing is, the same people trying to convince us that DEI is discrimination, are part of the same faction that, in Martin’s day, was running around shouting, “Save the pure white race”. They want to yell “All Lives Matter” as if it’s a counterpoint to “Black Lives Matter” when they know it isn’t. When they know that the latter was an attempt to counter the message they’d been sending without explicitly stating for more than 60 years – that certain lives don’t matter.

They want to frame society as a zero-sum game – that gains for some require losses for others. They want to tell us that it’s life and death, them or us, now or never, so that nothing like the Rainbow Coalition can happen again. But, DEI has never been about just some of us. It’s been about recognizing that only a society that works for all of us will work for any of us. Because, like democracy, inclusion is an all-or-none proposition — we can’t be for it just some of the time or for just some of the people.

How a Nation Shapes Its Fate

Today, the work admittedly looks different than it did even a year ago, when we were a people committed to righting longstanding wrongs, and before the many moves to make doing so illegal. But, that’s okay. We still know what’s required of us – the same thing that’s required when any authority attempts to make something good, illegal, or to pass unjust laws, then, demand that we obey them. That we “do the right thing.”

When that happens, no matter the particulars, how a nation responds is how it shapes its fate. Its members either capitulate, and society becomes something less, or they resist. That’s the choice facing us, you and me, right now. Take Nazism. Imagine if every European had attached the yellow star to their clothing – it would have made enforcement by the Gestapo impossible.

But resisting isn’t easy. It requires immense courage, and means undertaking great risk; just as Gunnar and his fellow members of the Norwegian resistance did, as so many civil rights activists did, and as companies like Costco are doing. That’s also what we do. We recognize that this, a more perfect union, is where our nation, despite those intent on making us into something else, has always been headed.

We recognize that DEI is about a lot more than just the specific programs this administration is trying to vilify and eliminate. It’s about the virtues themselves – diversity, equity and inclusion – ones that are at the heart of who we are and what our nation is about. Because being the “United” States is impossible without standing for DEI and what it represents; without becoming a place where everyone who doesn’t have enough, has enough. Which, is probably why it’s under such vigorous attack.

Sure, DEI is about creating employment protocols that work for everyone and that impede or impair no one. But that’s not all. It’s paying people enough to live on, and giving every worker an ownership stake in the companies they’re building. It’s making their retirement possible and making homeownership accessible. To everyone. It’s eliminating opportunistic business models, and abandoning tactics that result in the poor paying more.

It’s not dumping our toxic waste in poor neighborhoods, not depriving them of their water, and not underfunding their schools. It’s replacing a legal system that only works for some of us with one that works for all of us, debt-free public colleges that allow everyone who wants to study there to study there, and congregations that bar neither women nor LGBTQ+ people from doing anything straight, cis-gendered males can do.

It’s nonprofit boards that don’t require you to be wealthy to join, nonprofit exec roles that don’t require you to have wealthy contacts to qualify, jobs that allow you to earn certifications as you go, companies that eliminate background checks, AND companies that find ways to help economic refugees (I refuse to call them “illegals”) make a decent living. Even if that means breaking the law. It means us standing with everyone who needs us to stand with them.

So, when Trump issues executive orders that make trans identity illegal, we stand with trans-Americans by refusing to pick a gender on those same forms the federal government is, right now, recalling and restricting. It’s all of us using our economic leverage to create the world we want; patronizing companies that do right by all of us and both outing and refusing to support those that don’t. And it’s each of us refusing to allow our diversity to be stripped from us or weaponized against us.

DEI is resistance. It always has been. Because, when we get down to it, embracing diversity and defending democracy are flip sides of the same coin. And, by holding the line, standing for a “for all” society, we not only ensure that we’re on the right side of history; we do the same thing for our country.

“I know a place,” Mavis sang. “I have a dream,” Martin declared. They were both talking about the same thing.

Today marks Day 21 of the fight to make us into a society that works for all of us. There are 1,364 days between today and the 2028 presidential election, and 1,439 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.

I have two closing songs for you. The first is a live duet between two of my favorite artists — Tracy Chapman and Bruce Springsteen singing the latter’s My Hometown. The video quality is imperfect. The performance, with so many facets of DEI both woven into the lyrics and embodied by Bruce and Tracy standing side-by-side – everything from our racial and gender history to civil rights, from the working-class struggle to survive to the love we still hold in our hearts for the land that birthed us – is exactly what you’d expect with these two amazing individuals on stage.

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand, into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man. I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town. He'd tousle my hair and say "Son, take a good look around" – "This is your hometown, this is your hometown. This is your hometown, this is your hometown."

In '65, tension was running high at my school. There was a lot of fights 'tween the black and white, there was nothing you could do. Two cars at a light on a Saturday night, in the back seat there was a gun. Words were passed, a shotgun blast, troubled times had come –
To my hometown, to my hometown. My hometown, to my hometown.

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores. Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more. They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks. Foreman says "These jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back" – "To your hometown, to your hometown. To your hometown, to your hometown."

Last night me and Kate, we laid in bed, talkin' about getting out. Packing up our bags, maybe heading south. I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now. Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said, "Son, take a good look around. This is your hometown."

The second is The Staples singing I’ll Take You There. Every time I hear it, it strengthens my hope for what’s possible. I hope it does the same for you.