Jimmy Carter’s Legacy and the Tough Choice of Service in a Divided Nation

When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, I was 10 years old. The political and economic turmoil of the time, the energy crisis, and the fallout from the Vietnam War, and the disillusionment of Watergate. All this was far beyond my understanding. I didn’t know what it meant for Carter, a peanut farmer and political outsider, to step into the presidency during such a fragile moment in American history.

Now, with Carter’s recent passing and as I’ve taken the time to reflect on his life and writings, I see how significant his leadership was not just for what he accomplished, but for how he chose to lead. He believed in a type of leadership that feels increasingly rare today: one rooted in humility, humanity, and service. But as I look at the political fractures deepening around us, I wonder if we’ve misunderstood what service really demands.

It’s easy to think of service as something soft or passive, like a moral ideal that seems out of place in a time when the stakes feel existential. The truth is, service is anything but easy. It requires making tough decisions, often at great personal and political cost. Carter understood that. He once said, “America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, human rights invented America.” Those words challenge us to think about what kind of nation we want to be, especially when the choices are hard.

Today, the choices we face are no less daunting. People talk about a "civil war" in the United States, but it’s not the kind of war I imagined as a child learning about Gettysburg and Lincoln. This isn’t North versus South, or even colonizers versus the colonized. What we’re witnessing now is a war between the old colonizers and the new colonizers. Two factions fighting for control over systems that have always exploited and excluded others.

The old colonizers, with their slogans and nostalgia for a mythologized past, want to maintain a version of America built on imaginary meritocracy, economic inequality, and rigid hierarchies. They don’t want change; they want to preserve the systems that benefit them, even as those systems crumble under their own weight.

On the other side are the tech titans, globalists, and elites who promise a shiny new version of progress. They talk about diversity, inclusion, and innovation, but their vision often consolidates power and wealth at the top, leaving everyone else scrambling for the same meager scraps. Their systems may look different, but the logic of exploitation remains the same.

These battles for control remind me of the original Civil War fought under the guise of states' rights, but in reality, a war for humanity. Abraham Lincoln’s biting observation, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally,” underscores that the Civil War was ultimately about justice and dignity. Today, the stakes feel just as significant, as we grapple with systems that continue to exploit and exclude in new ways. The fight is no longer just about which faction holds power but whether we’ll finally confront the systems themselves.

I know the word “colonizer” carries weight. It’s not a word that sits easily with most people, and it shouldn’t. It’s a term that forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about how power is built, maintained, and wielded. Acknowledging this tension is important because it’s precisely that discomfort that calls us to examine the systems we live in and ask the hard questions: Who benefits? Who suffers? And who is left out of the conversation entirely?

And here we are, watching this war between colonizers and their co-conspirators play out. Marginalized communities, select immigrants, descendants of enslaved people, and Indigenous nations are not part of their vision. We’re not in the room where decisions are made, but we’ll inherit the fallout nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the 48.4% of Americans who have voted in ways that reject these systems or the 92% of Black women who seemed clear about what was at stake on November 5th, are grappling with what to do next. Honestly, I don’t have the answer. But I do know that it has to start with seeing what’s happening. Not sugarcoating it, not turning away, but naming the problem for what it is. And then, holding our country accountable to its promises of equality and justice for everyone.

Carter’s words feel especially urgent in this moment. He once said, “The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.” It’s a hopeful sentiment, but it also carries a challenge: How do we strengthen that bond when the systems around us are designed to keep us divided?

Service, as Carter embodied it, offers one answer. But it’s not the lightweight version of service we often imagine. It’s not just about helping others; it’s about confronting power, taking risks, and choosing humanity over convenience. Carter showed us what this looks like. As president, he made decisions that weren’t politically expedient, but ones that reflected his commitment to doing what was right. He believed in putting people above politics, even when it hurt.

That’s the kind of service we need now. Not the performative kind that props up systems of exploitation, but the hard, active, and intentional kind that refuses to settle for injustice. In the face of what feels like a modern civil war, service isn’t about finding middle ground between factions fighting for control. It’s about rejecting both models of colonization altogether and building something that centers humanity instead of power.

As Carter once said, “The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears.” The question now is whether we have the courage to act like it. Because service isn’t just a moral ideal. It's the hard, necessary work of choosing justice, even when the path forward is unclear. It’s the work of building a nation where humanity, not power, takes center stage.

Garden Art: Bobbe Wright

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