What Do You Know about Civic Grit?

Attending a weekend workshop to focus on starting a business, I dug deeper into something Congressman John Lewis calls “good trouble.” The question presented asked for a story about grit. Not all grit aims to serve our political community but there’s a category that does. We should all work to understand it so we can do our part.

Let’s call it civic grit.

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John Lewis confronted a sickness that no science could prove, the dissonance between the principles we revere and our practices. He worked to enroll and guide the like-minded in hard work. They had to confront the opposition and make it possible for them to see failure where they had claimed to see no problem at all. Lewis persisted in believing we all wanted to do better by one another despite all evidence against it. He confronted who we were and challenged our behavior with the ideas of who we said we wanted to be.

There’s more to how I discovered civic grit in John Lewis’s example. Read the rest of the story here.