Can Celebrating Local Heroes Cure Our Collective Cynicism?
Documenting My Recent Experiences at the 100th National Speech and Debate Tournament
“Day after day, ordinary people become heroes through extraordinary and selfless actions to help their neighbors.”
Sylvia Mathews Burwell - Former US Secretary of Health & Human Services
This is my last post on my effort to be less cynical.
I was drawn to write about cynicism because I fear that highly polarized US politics and our national news industry, which consistently abandons its responsibility to serve as a guardian of our democracy by focusing on the spectacular and sensational rather than investigating and informing, have produced copious disinformation and cultivated debilitating levels of cynicism throughout the country. Like many others, I have found myself increasingly cynical about the state of the country and the prospects for improvement. I am concerned that it’s impacting how I think about local issues and my willingness to invest in collaborative strategies necessary to address the numerous challenges affecting my communities. I felt a need to address my cynicism when I realized that my tripadations about national politics were beginning to shape my thoughts about my local community.
Looking for help, I stumbled onto Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics (2024) and committed to implementing several of his recommendations. One of Zaki’s suggestions is to “savor” the goodness in others and “notice” the contributions they are making. We should acknowledge the local “helpers” around us who are actively making our communities more welcoming, hospitable, and functional places to live, work, and play. My first two posts in this mini-series on cynicism extensively discussed the negativity bias in US politics and news media, as well as its deleterious effect on our thoughts and relationships. This post will focus on how noticing and acknowledging local contributions can serve as a counterweight to that negativity.
Along with reducing our consumption of cable news, we should pay more attention to and be inspired by the charitable, trustworthy, and compassionate acts of local helpers.
Creating a Communal Microtrust
We have normalized conversations about microaggressions, those small, unintentional rhetorical slights that impact our sense of belonging. There is a greater appreciation for how local encounters can negatively affect our overall disposition. I hope this post becomes part of a corollary trend that recognizes the considerate, attentive, and responsive gestures of others, which are aiding in the development of communal microtrusts, containers of local assets and resources that can transform our disagreements into wellsprings of nonjudgmental curiosity and exploration.
The rest of this post is my attempt to contribute to our communal microtrust by acknowledging and thanking some of the local heroes I encountered last week. Reflecting on and writing about the significant contributions they are making to their communities has worked wonders on my cynicism.
Last week, I was at the 100th National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) tournament in Des Moines, Iowa. Six thousand seven hundred middle and high school students from one thousand five hundred schools were competing for the right to claim that they are the best in several speech and debate activities. The competition was fierce. Several hours of weekly practice, a relentless commitment to excellence, and financial support from a school system are just table stakes for being crowned a NSDA champion. All the winners at this Super Bowl of forensics had a dedicated teacher who sacrificed their weekends throughout the year, teammates who were there during the emotional highs and lows, and a little luck.
In other words, no one won without a few “helpers” by their side.
Power of Acknowledging Local Heroes
The tournament is not just about pursuing competitive excellence.
On Wednesday, I learned about “Iowa nice.”
As I entered Trailridge High School at about 6:45 a.m., a volunteer warmly greeted me with a smile and a recommendation to grab a cup of coffee from down the hall in the school library. I'm not a coffee drinker, so I decided to stay near the entryway and have a conversation with her instead. I learned that she was bottle feeding two abandoned calves on her farm, a small pasture about forty-five minutes away from this high school. She drove to the tournament several days to volunteer, even though she didn’t have a kid at the school or competing in the tournament. She volunteered because, as she stated, “that's what neighbors do.” As she walked me to the lunchroom, library, and then the tournament office, I learned more about Iowa homesteading and places besides her farm to get a good burger in the greater Des Moines area. My shock at every sentence she uttered about tending the farm made it clear that farm livin’ was not the life for me. That did not matter. She was hospitable and overly generous to me, a total stranger, because that is what real Iowans do.
While Zaki doesn’t discuss “Iowa nice” in Hope for Cynics, the effort of this volunteer is a quintessential example of the “local helper” we should highlight and attempt to emulate. Her effort demonstrates the transformative potential of microdosing kindness. It can be addictive. I am 100% sold on noticing and trying to display a little “Iowa nice” in my daily life.
I was in Des Moines, Iowa, to present one remarkable high school coach with the Thomas Glenn Pelham Award. This recognition honors the very best in speech and debate, both in competition and in character. The award, named for the legendary Glenn Pelham, the former Director of Emory University’s debate program, seeks to highlight the values he instilled in the program and continues to inspire generations of debaters who have joined the program decades after his departure. For 13 years, Mr. Pelham coached and mentored students at Emory. He did so after serving as a Georgia Congressional representative and state court judge. Judge Pelham personified taking debate “outside itself.” While he was committed to the kinds of competition the NSDA hosted last week, Mr. Pelham primarily saw debate as a vehicle for humanizing strangers and maximizing our collective growth.
Unfortunately, Thursday evening’s award assembly, where Kate Hamm from Ransom Everglades High School was to be announced as the 2025 Thomas Glenn Pelham Award recipient, was cancelled after a disruption in the Iowa Event Center forced an evacuation of the building and an extensive delay of the tournament. I was particularly excited about honoring Hamm’s work in Florida and beyond because it consistently contributes to the communal microtrust that I described above. I so looked forward to thanking her for being the considerate and responsive local hero that Zaki lauds. I wanted to personally thank her because researching and writing the speech had gone a long way in helping to reduce my cynicism. Below is a short excerpt from the speech I wrote. While the size of this audience pales in comparison to the one that would have heard the speech, I hope you are just as inspired by her contribution.
Almost every coach remembers the first time they heard Kate Hamm’s booming voice at a tournament. Whether she’s empowering new judges, sharing her love of frisbee, or simply being present for every student, Kate has been a force to be reckoned with wherever she has coached - from Iowa City West High School to Millard West, and now at Ransom Everglades High School… Kate is a mentor to young coaches, a pillar of support for her peers, and a living example of what it means to give your all - not for recognition, but because you believe in the value of every voice and the potential of every student. Like Judge Pelham, Kate Hamm does this work because she loves this community and believes it deserves her best. She is a pillar of strength, stability, and inspiration - a person who listens, acts, and leads by example.
When I was not writing and practicing the delivery of the Pelham Award speech, I supported the NSDA’s Belonging and Inclusion Advocates (BIA). This is a collection of dedicated and remarkable teachers driven by a desire to ensure that the tournament remains a rewarding experience for all the participants. The BIAs are committed to listening to all student concerns and helping them envision a path forward that is empowering and responsive to each student’s unique needs and concerns. This tournament is a high-stakes and emotionally charged event where graduating students deliver their final competitive speeches, and the majority of students fall short of accomplishing their ultimate goals. The highest highs and lowest lows of national competition derive from the same source.
There is only one winner.
The BIAs help students and others as they reconsider those inartful displays of disappointment and manage those moments when their pursuit of competitive excellence results in conduct that is incommensurate with the tournament’s values. Additionally, they assist with numerous other interactions that impact a student’s sense of belonging and, potentially, call into question the community’s willingness to engage and respond to their concerns. On Tuesday, I watched two teachers from South Dakota and Idaho masterfully engage with four women from central California who were devastated after several judges failed to signal that they had given the students’ arguments a fair reading. That team left the meeting feeling engaged and thinking about proactive strategies they could take in the future.
That is the power of attentive and responsive listening.
I wrote about high school debate and the significant impact my high school coach, Ms. Betty Maddox, had on shaping my life in my initial Substack post on March 3, 2025. In many ways, this Substack is driven by my relentless need to express gratitude for her ability to consistently listen with empathy, while also challenging me to take greater responsibility for achieving the academic and competitive outcomes I was pursuing. At its best, high school speech and debate is a laboratory for testing ideas and pushing against the boundaries that limit what’s possible. I am thankful that it did that for me. I see the BIAs as caretakers of that monumentally important laboratory. They signal to students that, regardless of the competitive outcome, the NSDA is driven by a relentless commitment to listen and empower them to be change agents.
I wanted to write about the BIAs, Kate Hamm, and the extraordinary volunteer at Trailridge High School because Zaki implored me to “try some positive gossip, “catching” people’s best and sharing it in conversations” the next time I witnessed an act of kindness (p. 212). It is my attempt to “notice the helpers all around” and “help other people notice them as well” (p. 212). Like Zaki, I believe that there is power in the act of noticing and documenting local brilliance.
A small act of seeing and acknowledging can be the fuel others need to continue giving, even when the impact of their sacrifice is not readily apparent. Noticing can be the start of a new partnership that amplifies the message beyond its initial audience. Finally, it can serve as an invitation to what Dolly Clough identifies as the “moveable middle” in The Person You Mean To Be: How Good People Fight Bias (2018). She forwards that in the early phases of every public disagreement, approximately 60% of people remain noncommittal. They are reading the room to gauge the issue's salience and how a commitment one way or the other will impact their standing. Our public acknowledgement and support could be the deciding factor.
My primary goal is to use these weekly musings to remind myself that I can do better and we can be better together if we are willing to notice and honor the tremendous work occurring in our local communities. It is a project designed to help me reassess my contributions to my local community. Most importantly, it serves as a reminder that the most impactful individuals and acts often come from the local community.
I am writing on Substack because I want to participate in conversations that will help me be an engaged, responsive, and accountable community member. A crucial aspect of this project is examining what and how we communicate and how those choices impact our community-building efforts.
Please don't hesitate to use this space to thank local helpers/heroes who are positively impacting your life.
Thanks for reading.