As Father Time prepares to lay waste to another year filled with the tragic, the inspirational and the bizarre, and as we look forward to the optimism and possibility that the New Year will bring, I am once more filled with hope that this will be the year our partisan seas will part and we will begin to look at our neighbors across the aisle (and the street and the social media platforms) with the same eagerness and enthusiasm that our forefathers displayed at the very dawn of this country.

Not that 2018 gave me much confidence in the likelihood, mind you, with political tribalism and intellectual discourse reaching its low water mark during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh and overseen by committee members who have served in our government since just shortly after the start of the American Revolution.

I am, admittedly, down on the state of politics in our nation. Our history is too deep and our country is too great to wallow in the muddy depths of name-calling and finger-pointing that takes place in late night tweets and biased mainstream media reports. Watching this hearing play out over the course of the year, it occurred to me that if Justice Kavanaugh had offered the exact same testimony from an alternative political spectrum, every committee member would take an emotionally impassioned stance diametrically opposite to the one they took in September. And that doesn’t sit well with me.

Nevertheless I keep hoping that one day, we collectively decide to elect a politician or two willing to work as relentlessly and as demandingly for their constituency as Jalandhar Nayak was willing to work for his.

Jalandhar Nayak is a 45-year-old father who lives in the remote and practically inaccessible village of Gumsahi in the eastern India state of Odisha. A village so remote, that access to any kind of education would require traversing mountains and jungles so impossibly arduous that every other villager had long ago left Gumsahi in order to better the lives of their children. Jalandhar Nayak couldn’t afford to do so, which left him with little options for his three young boys but to remain in Gumshai and send them off on a three hour journey to school through the hazardous wilds and pray every day for their safe return.

But here’s the thing. Guys like Jalandhar Nayak don’t necessarily think the way our hyper-partisan politicians do. Rather than align his beliefs with the masses and focus his thoughts and efforts on why he can’t or how he shouldn’t, Jalandhar Nayak spends his time thinking about what would be required of him to move the mountains blocking his way.


For the past two years, working over eight hours every day, and armed with only a hammer, a digging bar and a chisel, Nayak gruelingly chipped away at the mountains preventing the education of his sons and miraculously carved a five mile road from his village to the main road in Phulbani, connecting his sons to a hope that he never knew. Quite literally paving a future for them that he never had.

Nayak gained international attention early last year not simply because of his determination to improve the lives of his family, but because of the revolutionary way he did so. Much like the early colonists of our country, Nayak wouldn’t let such small things as mountains stand in the way of progress for his people.

So as we enter 2019 with a Republican controlled Senate and a Democratically controlled House (virtually assuring that nothing will be accomplished for the next two years), I urge you to put down the selfie cameras, log off of Facebook, turn off The Kardashians (please) and find that one representative willing to work for you the way Jalandhar Nayak was willing to work for his kids. The one representative willing to move mountains. I promise you, we’ll all be better for it.
