Our Unified — Yes, Unified — American Mission

In the documentary, The Way I See It, featuring the work of photographer Pete Souza, there is a point where he acknowledges he can no longer work as a photojournalist because he has expressed political opinions on Instagram.

To the average person, that may have just floated by in a sea of moving visual images of the Barack Obama presidency in all its joyful and wrenching moments.

But not to me. It stopped me cold. Just the way it did when Steve Schmidt, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, said on a 60 Minutes segment last week that he and the others there could never work as Republican strategists again.

Hold up.

If you’ve never been employed in a profession that requires you to walk this kind of line, it may be difficult to understand what the line is or why it matters. Sometimes it’s not even that clear to those of us who have had to walk it.

Last month I wrestled with a decision about doing anything remotely activist like phone banking to help the Biden/Harris campaign. The ambivalence had nothing to do with a lack of passion for the Democratic ticket. It had everything to do with taking a step that would basically announce that I had crossed over to a place I couldn’t return from.