Rise Up, Speak Out

I grew up in a bipartisan home.

My father was a Democrat — elected County Attorney, served sixteen years in a rural farming and ranching community not so different from Madras. My father believed public service was a sacred trust; that the law and law enforcement exist to protect the most vulnerable. That you showed up — for everyone. My mother was raised a Republican and remained one. My parents canceled each other’s vote in every single election. And yet — they loved each other. And they loved us. And my siblings and I grew up learning something that seems almost radical today: you can love someone completely and still disagree with them completely.

We debated at the dinner table. We competed in speech and debate in high school. We learned to listen to the other side — not to defeat it — but to understand it. We learned that the person across the table from you is not your enemy, even when you think they are dangerously wrong.

I spent 25 years in accounting, commercial lending, and small-business development. I became a CPA, Certified Financial Planner, and an Economic Development Finance Professional. I worked with ranchers, shop owners, and people trying to build something from nothing. I know what it means when a local economy is fragile.

But something else was happening in this country during those years. Something that called me away from the balance sheet and into the seminary.

White Christian Nationalism was rising. And I don’t use that term lightly. It is a political movement that claims the name of Jesus Christ while wielding power to exclude, to dominate, to punish. I watched it happen. And I could not stay silent.

So I left Montana to attend Pacific School of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I earned my Master of Divinity and was ordained — in the tradition of the German Church Within a Church Movement, the prophetic lineage inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who looked at the church in Nazi Germany and said: “Not in my name.”

For years, I served as a hospice chaplain. Rural folks. Every background. Every faith tradition. Every political stripe. People at the edge of their lives, stripped of every pretense. And what I learned in those rooms — at the bedsides of farmers and politicians and veterans and grandmothers — is that at the end, none of it is about power or wealth. It’s about love. It’s about connection. It’s about whether you mattered to someone and whether someone mattered to you.

I am now an Earth Chaplain. I create regenerative outdoor spaces. For twenty years, I have been building small habitats for people, pollinators, and birds. I have learned from the mycelium in the soil what the economists haven’t figured out yet: everything is connected. Nothing thrives in isolation. The health of the whole depends on the health of every part.

That is what brought me here today.

What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of the democratic institutions that protect every one of us — regardless of how we voted.

The Courts are undermined. Oversight bodies gutted. The corporate media is afraid of, or controlled by, the regime. Federal workers purged without process. Fired for their refusal to submit to dictatorial power, rather than any incompetence. We live under the rule of one deeply broken and mentally defective man, one family, and one minority movement holds power without limit and without accountability.

No Kings. That is not a slogan. That is the founding covenant of this republic, the United States of America. We could be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but instead, we are living through the death of the promises it contained.

We are living through a chrysalis time. Governments and institutions are disintegrating. The social safety net is under attack. It is a dark, messy, and sometimes painful process… but the earth or Mother Nature can handle all of this – composting is how we build soil. Seeds disintegrate as they push towards the light. The natural world is not static. We must respect and honor the natural world as the source that sustains life. Our lives and the lives of our great-grandchildren depend on us.

But here is what I need to say to you, and I need you to hear it:

The gravest danger we face is not in Washington, D.C. The danger is when we let what is happening there divide us from each other — right here — in Jefferson County — in Madras.

I have watched partisan politics tear communities apart at the local level. City councils paralyzed. School boards weaponized. Planning commissions gridlocked. And while we fight each other along party lines about national issues, we cannot control from a county seat — the potholes don’t get fixed, the water system deteriorates, the young families leave, and the people who need good local government the most get nothing.

The authoritarians count on that. Division is their oxygen. The tactic of “divide and rule” is their most important strategy. They want us to blame each other rather than “looking up” the wealth and powerful pyramid. They profit from our division, and the mega billionaires do not care if people suffer or perish.

Today, the Madras city government is a mess. Significant turnover. Institutional knowledge walking out the door. Leadership instability at the moment when this community needs steady, competent, locally-rooted governance more than ever.

Although I have only lived here three years, I know what people are like out here. When the fire comes roaring down the hillside, nobody asks whether your neighbor is a Democrat before you help put it out. We don’t check voter rolls before we form the bucket brigade. When water is getting scarce and the irrigation ditches leak, we know we need to invest in upgrades to conserve water. When someone’s barn burns, this community shows up.

These are not political acts. These are human acts. That is who We are.

We carry something here that is increasingly rare in this country — a lived memory of what it means to depend on each other. Not on a party platform. Not on a social media algorithm.

We depend on our neighbors. On a handshake. On a shared investment in a shared place.

That is the beloved community. Not an abstraction. Not a slogan. It is what happens when human beings remember that their fate is woven together.

The beloved community is not a place where everyone agrees.

The beloved community is a place where everyone belongs — where difference does not become the excuse for abandonment or domination.

We can build that here.

Not by ignoring our differences. Not by pretending partisan politics don’t exist. But by refusing to let them be the ceiling of what we can accomplish together as neighbors.

So here is what I am asking you. Here is the call.

Run for office. As a citizen of Jefferson County. As someone who knows this valley, loves this town, and has skills to offer.

Run for mayor, City council, Planning commission. School board. Water district.

Run… for your neighbors, for our community, not for personal power.

These are not glamorous positions. There is no cable news coverage. There is no national audience. There is just the unglamorous, essential, democracy-sustaining work of showing up — every month — and making decisions that actually affect people’s lives.

This is where the authoritarians cannot reach us — if we fill those seats with people who serve the community and not a national political party.

I spent twenty-five years in finance and community economic development. I know that the most resilient systems are not the ones controlled from the top — they are the ones rooted at the base. The strongest economies are local economies. The healthiest democracies are local democracies. The most resilient food systems are local agricultural producers.

Building the beloved community does not start in Salem or Washington. It starts right here — in our most immediate connections. In our small town. In our rural county. Where partisan politics need not divide and undermine a united community.

Where we can look at each other — across every difference in race, religion, and economic class — and say:

You matter. This place matters. And we are going to take care of it together.

No kings. No lords. No masters.

Just neighbors. Just citizens. Just us.

Thank you.

Robyn Morrison