Sowing Unity

Vision and unity are more powerful than fear and hate.

I was giving a speech last night to a group of Tennesseans. We were talking about our shared history, the shared assets our grandparents built. A few of the folks there were transplants from California and New York. It reminded me - we built this nation not as one state or two, but as United States. United in purpose.

When you think about states with deep connections and shared history, Tennessee and California probably aren’t the first two that come to mind. One’s rural and red, the other’s coastal and blue. We’re supposed to be opposites. Enemies, even. That’s what the people profiting off our division want us to think. But we’re countrymen.

And the proof is built into the ground we stand on.

In the 1930s and 40s, this country did something we can barely imagine now. The federal government looked at the wreckage of the Depression and said: we’re going to build our way out of this together. Not just for the rich. Not just for the coasts or the cities. For everyone.

In Tennessee, that meant the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA wasn’t some handout or welfare program. It was construction on a scale that changed everything. Before the TVA, only about three percent of farms in the valley had electricity. The rest lived as their great-grandparents had - no lights, no refrigeration, no way to compete in a modern economy. The TVA strung thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines across the hills. It built dams that stopped floods and generated power. It created jobs that built entire towns. Within a decade, nearly every farm had power. Factories came next. The atomic research at Oak Ridge came next. A whole region that had been left behind became part of the future.

California got the same treatment, just in a different form. The state was a desert with potential, and the New Deal turned that potential into reality. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. The Shasta Dam. The Central Valley Project with its hundreds of miles of canals and aqueducts moving water from the mountains to the valley floor. The All-American Canal. These weren’t just engineering projects - they were a statement of belief. That if we invested in each other, we could turn deserts into farmland. That California’s success was Tennessee’s success. That we rose or fell together.

And it worked. Those projects didn’t just transform two states. They transformed the country. The power, the food, the manufactured goods, the research - all of it came from what we built together, as a nation, for the common good.

That’s what unity actually looks like. Not some speech or slogan. It’s infrastructure. It’s systems. It’s the physical proof that your destiny and my destiny are tied together, whether we like it or not.

But somewhere along the way, we forgot that. We started thinking of ourselves as isolated, self-sufficient, separate. Tennessee doesn’t need California. California doesn’t need Tennessee. States’ rights mean we can do whatever we want on our own.

Except that’s a lie. States’ rights only exist because of what the union makes possible. Just like individual rights only exist because of what the community makes possible. You can’t have freedom without the roads to drive on, the power to keep the lights on, the water to grow your food. Those things were built collectively. They belong to all of us. Or at least, they’re supposed to.

Somewhere along the line, we quit building for everyone and started selling off what we built.

Instead, what’s happened is that a few thousand people - Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the rest of the billionaire class - have taken what our grandparents and great-grandparents built and claimed it for themselves. The infrastructure our ancestors paid for with their taxes and their labor is now being strip-mined for private profit. The electricity grids, the water systems, the roads, the research - all of it built with public money, now being monetized by people who never lifted a hammer or paid their fair share.

I grew up watching that theft happen in real time. Watching my generational inheritance get stolen by the wealthy and well-connected. Watching my neighbors get used and abused, turned into something our grandparents would be embarrassed by. People who work harder than anyone and still can’t afford to live. People who built this country being told they don’t deserve a piece of it.

We’ve been reaping the benefits of unity for too long without sowing any new seeds. We’ve been coasting on what the New Deal generation built, and now it’s crumbling. The roads are falling apart. The power grid is failing. The water systems are ancient. And instead of coming together to fix it, we’re being told to fight each other over the scraps.

That has to end.

How do we do it?

The same way it was done before. One state, one community, one candidate at a time.

We need candidates in California and Michigan and Tennessee and Maine and Nebraska who are running on the same bold ideas. Medicare for All. Public infrastructure. Fair wages. A Green New Deal that builds like the original New Deal built. Dozens of candidates, hundreds eventually, united around common purpose, common prosperity, and the common reclamation of what’s ours.

Not candidates bought and paid for by billionaires. Not politicians who talk about unity while taking corporate money. Real people running to represent real people. In every state, in every district, building a movement that remembers what we’re capable of when we work together.

That’s how we rediscover unity. Not through some national figure promising to save us. Through the ground up. Through local fights that connect to each other. Through candidates in red states and blue states realizing they’re fighting the same fight against the same people who’ve been robbing us blind.

Our destinies are interwoven. We rise or fall together. Tennessee and California, Michigan and Arizona, Florida and Oregon - we’re all in the same boat. And if we want to survive what’s coming, we need to find the common purpose and common value that can drive us to rebuild this nation. Not for the elite. Not for the billionaires who’ve stolen what wasn’t theirs. For us. For the people who actually live here, work here, raise families here.

It’s time to build again - together. The way our grandparents did. The way we know how, if we stop listening to the people trying to divide us.

But let’s be clear: if we want our birthright back, we’re going to have to demand it. And fight for it. From California to the New York Island, all the way to East Tennessee and everywhere in between. This land was built for you and me. It’s time we acted like it.

Corbin