When We Stop Fighting and Start Dancing: A Letter to a Divided Nation

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We.  Are.  All.  That.  Kid.

We.  Are.  All.  That.  Father.

We have dreams.

We all think we know the best way to live life.  And some of us are not shy about telling others.

There's a moment in the movie “Billy Elliot” that breaks you open if you let it. A working-class father stands at his window, watching his young son dance with ferocious abandon in the street below. The boy isn't performing. He's erupting. Every leap, every spin, every desperate movement screams this is who I am—and for the first time, his father isn't looking away. He's seeing his son. Really seeing him. Not the son he expected, not the son he thought he needed, but the son who actually exists. And in that witnessing, everything changes.

We are that father right now. All of us. Standing at our windows, looking out at each other across an impossible distance, trying to decide whether to keep fighting or finally start seeing.

Billy's father had every reason to reject what he saw. In his world—a world of coal mines and strikes, of rigid gender roles and survival—boys didn't dance. To accept Billy's dream meant betraying everything he thought he knew about strength, about masculinity, about how to protect his son from a cruel world. Sound familiar? We too cling to our certainties like life rafts. We've built entire identities around being right, around defending our tribe, around proving the other side is not just wrong but dangerous. We're so busy protecting our version of the world that we've stopped asking what we might be protecting ourselves from.

What if it's not danger we're protecting ourselves from, but grief? The grief of admitting we don't have all the answers. The grief of discovering that people we've demonized might be just as scared and confused as we are. The grief of letting go of the comfortable story where we're the heroes and they're the villains.

Billy's father had to face that grief. He had to break. And when he did—when he sold his dead wife's jewelry and crossed a picket line to give his son a chance—he didn't just save Billy. He saved himself. He chose love over loyalty to an old story. He chose possibility over pride.

Fast forward to the end of the film. Billy is no longer a child dancing in the street. He's a man, powerful and transformed, leaping across a stage in Swan Lake. His father and brother sit in the audience, tears streaming down their faces, watching the boy they almost crushed now soaring beyond anything they could have imagined. This is the moment that asks us the question we most need to answer: What are we willing to let go of so that we—all of us—can finally leap?

Because here's the truth that cuts through every political talking point, every cable news argument, every Thanksgiving dinner fight: We are stopping each other from dancing. The left stops the right. The right stops the left. We've become so good at identifying what we're against that we've forgotten what we're for. We've weaponized our fear and called it principle. We've chosen being right over being whole.

Billy's father didn't stop being working-class when he supported his son's dream. He didn't betray his values. He expanded them. He discovered that strength isn't about rigid control—it's about making space for what wants to emerge. That's what we need now. Not compromise that leaves everyone diminished, but expansion that lets everyone breathe.

What would it take for us to stand at that window and really see each other? Not as threats to be neutralized, but as people trying to dance their own desperate, beautiful dance? What would it take to sit in that audience, tears in our eyes, marveling at what becomes possible when we stop crushing and start celebrating?

The answer is simpler and harder than we want it to be: We have to break. We have to grieve our certainties. We have to cross our own picket lines. We have to choose each other's flourishing over our own righteousness.

Billy Elliot didn't wait for permission to dance. But he needed someone to witness him, to make space for him, to sacrifice for him. We are all Billy. We are all the father. We are all waiting in the wings, ready to soar—if only we'd stop blocking the stage.

The music is playing. The question is: Will we finally let each other dance?

By Democracy Is Us Council Member, Joe Castagliola