In a Divided World, We Choose Connection
August 26, 2025
Division is everywhere. Neighbors pitted against each other over politics. Entire groups reduced to labels. Online spaces flooded with outrage. It can feel as if mistrust and polarization are permanent, leaving many to wonder whether we can ever find our way back to each other.
The Wassmuth Center is here to meet this moment. When division weighs heavily, we provide spaces where our community can come together to connect, learn, and create. At the Center, we endeavor to practice what human rights require: choosing connection over isolation, learning over indifference, and creation over despair.
Connection begins with story. In our programs, we support people to set aside labels and encounter one another as human beings. Hearing a Holocaust survivor describe how prejudice became law, listening to a refugee share what it means to rebuild their life in Idaho, or reading the memoir of someone experiencing homelessness transforms our understanding. Each story becomes a thread, weaving us closer together and reminding us that dignity is defended not in theory, but in relationship.
And these connections open us up to learning. At the Wassmuth Center we use the Spiral of Injustice to learn how dehumanization begins with stereotypes and escalates into exclusion, discrimination, and violence. We see these same patterns play out today in rhetoric that normalizes “us versus them,” in policies that blindly target entire groups, and in the casual dismissal of people’s humanity. Learning this history equips us with the tools to recognize warning signs and the courage to act before harm deepens.
And once we experience connection and engage in learning, we are prepared to effectively create. Creation starts with imagination: What could our world look like if human rights were a lived reality for everyone? It requires the courage to picture a world that looks different from the one we see now. At the Center, imagination is sustained through deep listening and collective visioning: young people identifying ways to make our community more equitable, teachers reimagining classrooms as places of belonging, and neighbors finding common ground across difference. Each act of imagination pushes back against despair and brings us closer to the future we long for.
The Wassmuth Center is not just a building and a memorial; we are a community and a living invitation to connect, learn, and create together. At a time when divisions are pulling people apart across our nation, we are determined to build a counter-story here in Idaho and beyond: one where human rights are a lived reality for everyone.
But this vision is only possible if we work together. Every person who joins in – by connecting with a neighbor who has a different perspective, slowing down to learn and deepen their understanding, or engaging in the hard work of creating places and policies that honor everyone’s dignity – becomes part of the fabric of hope we are weaving.
The choice before us is urgent and clear. We can resign ourselves to a world where division hardens into hate, or we can insist on another way. At the Wassmuth Center, we choose connection. We choose learning. We choose creating a world for all of us.