“While We Wait for the Audit, History Keeps Talking.”

After finishing Bret Baier’s new book on Teddy Roosevelt, I’ve turned next to a biography of Alice Roosevelt, TR’s first child, born into history and into loss when her mother died shortly after her birth.

I will admit that the early chapters, filled with the spectacle of “the President’s daughter,” bored me no end. Yet her sharp intellect and lifelong passion for politics keeps me turning the pages, waiting for the deeper story to emerge.

I paused over a passage that felt less like history and more like a mirror.

During the Harding and Coolidge years of the 1920s, as Republicans struggled to settle on a vice-presidential nominee, The Literary Digest observed:

“One can not talk with any group of Americans, whatever their situation in life, without finding how disgusted with current politics they are and how happy they would be to break away from their past allegiance.”

A century later, the words land with surprising familiarity. Replace The Literary Digest with the Rocky Mount Telegram, and many readers would assume the quote described our own moment.

Across kitchen tables, on Main Street sidewalks, and now in the growing conversation about how Rocky Mount chooses its leaders, I hear the same sentiment.

People are not disengaged, they are weary. They are not indifferent, they are searching for a way to believe their voice still carries weight.

History reminds us that frustration with politics is not new. What matters is what a community does with that frustration.

In Rocky Mount, that question now turns toward a practical step, how we vote, and whether a city-wide system might finally align leadership with the common good rather than narrow boundaries.