Kerem Durdag is a business executive, poet, essayist, librettist and participant in conversations across Maine. He lives in Scarborough. 

Who are we? This runs deeper than partisan fights, deeper than economic graphs or polls. It’s about our collective identity — what binds us together when so much seems intent on pulling us apart.

Today a single headline becomes a battlefield of suspicion and outrage. It’s tempting to believe that we’ve become too divided to imagine a shared future. But beneath the noise remains a stubborn truth: most people still want the same fundamental things. We want dignity in our work, roofs we can afford, health care that doesn’t bankrupt us and a community that still feels like home.

That yearning is universal. What differs is how we express our fears — and how easily those fears are turned against one another. The single mother is working two jobs. The worker worried about how far the paycheck will go. The immigrant family wondering if they’ll ever belong. The young graduate staring down a lifetime of rent and debt. These are not opposing stories but parallel ones, woven through the same anxiety: that the promise of belonging might be slipping away.

Our politics too often amplifies grievance instead of addressing it. We shout across screens rather than speak across tables. But we need to sustain the fragile belief that “we owe something to each other” remembering that identity is not only personal; it is communal. To know who I am, I must still know who we are.

The “we” is where the work begins. Shared values are the scaffolding of democratic life. Empathy, honesty, hard work, fairness — these are principles that make communal conversations possible. They let us disagree on policy while refusing to compromise on dignity.

Rebuilding that space of grace starts small: a town meeting that chooses active listening; a workplace that pays a sustainable living wage; the simple act of knocking on a neighbor’s door after a storm. These are the quiet acts through which a society remembers itself — acts of ordinary dignity.

I say this because I am you; you are me. I am a citizen of this society, and if you are hurting, I hurt. I am a Turkish-Pakistani-American who once wore the same pair of shoes for years, soles held together with duct tape, because that was all I could afford. I am here because you helped, held me, sustained me.

Of course, compassion alone doesn’t pay the bills. The crises of housing, health care and economic security are not abstract moral tests; they are lived realities. But policy without empathy is arithmetic without meaning. Budgets are moral documents. Economic growth that leaves people behind is not progress; it is quiet decay.

So how do we get there? By choosing curiosity over contempt. By asking more of those in power — and just as much of ourselves. By stopping the habit of treating compromise as surrender. We must recover the ability to say, “I may disagree with you, but I still see you.” That is not naïveté; it is courage. Democracy has always depended on the hard discipline of staying in conversation even when it hurts.

My hand is out; hold it, and I want to hold yours.

Our identity is to be a fellowship, not a collection of private ambitions. It is a shared commitment to each other. History shows that societies fracture when empathy becomes optional, when cynicism replaces trust. We will patiently rebuild the small bridges between our daily lives — the ones that remind us the person across from us wants to feed their family too.

We can keep shouting, or we can start listening. The future is written not by the loudest voices, but by the quiet persistence of those who still believe in the power of grace.

We can be the people who remember how to care for each other — not because it is easy, but because it is who we have always hoped to be. Onward we go together. All together.