Copenhaver, a former mayor of Augusta, Ga., is founding Partner of Starts With Us and author of “ The Changemaker: the Art of Building Better Leaders.”
During a recent healing service at my church, I was asked by the two priests officiating what I would like for them to pray for before they anointed my head with oil. I almost couldn’t believe what I was asking for when I simply replied, “Please pray that our nation gets through the midterm elections with no political violence.”
In the wake of the senseless attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, I now pray that political violence (across the ideological spectrum) hasn’t sadly and sickeningly become our “new normal.”
Having served nine years as mayor of Augusta, Ga., I can attest firsthand to the fact that politics are not for the faint of heart and have always involved negative rhetoric. During my time in office, there was a seemingly endless stream of issues our local government dealt with that became heated, but never turned truly dangerous. Even in the midst of our most controversial issues, I continued to intentionally interact with people at the grassroots level in all areas of our city in order to keep my finger on the pulse of our community. I was always aware that I had vocal detractors but at no time did I fear for my safety. When I exited office nearly eight years ago, I would have never imagined the dangerous state our nation finds itself in during a critical juncture in history at a national and global scale.
I must admit that as an American citizen and a former public servant, I’m extremely concerned with the state of our democracy, and I know I’m not alone. A recent Starts With Us and YouGov poll found that 87 percent of Americans are tired of how divided we are politically, and a CBS News poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe democracy and the rule of law are under threat. Today, bipartisan agreement on any major issue seems to be extraordinarily difficult to come by. Though our two major parties are split over just what it is that’s threatening our democracy they are able to agree that it is in fact under threat: According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans believe America’s democracy is on the brink of collapse.
So, what is the greatest threat to our democracy? When posed this question by Anderson Cooper in a recent “60 Minutes” interview, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates answered by saying, “extreme polarization.” He went on to say, “The greatest threat is found within the two square miles that encompass the White House and the Capitol Building.” Whether or not you align with Gates politically, we should all find the words of a Washington insider sobering.
While serving in office, one of my primary objectives was to act as a bridge builder in bringing our city together on common ground. I kept at the forefront of my mind the fact that I served 200,000 citizens, some who voted for me, some who voted against me and some who didn’t vote at all but all of whose needs I needed to value equally. I also had a diligent focus on consensus building and recognizing the differences of my elected colleagues while treating them with dignity and respect. During our time working together we were able to attract over $1 billion in economic investment creating thousands of jobs, build many new public buildings, and create an award-winning revitalization initiative in the historic African American neighborhood of Laney-Walker/Bethlehem. It wasn’t always pretty – government never is – but I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish by working together across any perceived lines of difference, political or otherwise.
It’s encouraging to see bridge-building organizations following a similar ethos to the one I championed in office, and to see them working to mend our frayed society. One of these, Starts With Us, is working to help Americans understand their agency by fostering what they affectionately call “The Three C’s” – curiosity, compassion, and courage – as daily habits to overcome the polarization, blind tribalism and dehumanization threatening our democracy.
I recently joined Starts With Us for “man on the street” interviews here in Augusta. I spent hours talking to a diverse group of locals to get their take on what’s causing the divides in our nation and what we can all individually do about them. We approached each person and conversation with the Three C’s, and the experience was eye-opening. We’re constantly told how divided we are, how dire the state of affairs is (which is true to a certain extent), but we are actually more aligned than we think. Some of the common themes to come out of the interviews in each city were: People are upset about our divides, they feel we need to listen to each other with respect for opposing views, they think it’s important we treat each other with civility and people are simply tired of polarization in general.
This experience reinforced for me that it is not politicians, or one political party, that will heal our divides. And I say this as a former politician. It literally starts with us – every single one of us – to recognize our agency and step into it. That might look like thinking twice before commenting on social media, taking a deep breath before engaging in a political conversation, taking a step back before making assumptions about someone because of a campaign sign in their yard. It might seem small, but these everyday actions can have a tremendous ripple effect – from our homes to our communities, to our cities, institutions, politics, our nation.
If we can each take on the personal responsibility to treat our fellow citizens with curiosity and compassion while having the courage to have difficult conversations we can, and we will, change the dangerous course extreme polarization has set our nation upon. I still believe in our United States of America, but in the meantime I’ll keep on praying.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.