Angela May and Andy Snyder

[00:01] ANDY SNYDER: Hi, my name is Andy. I'm 47 years old. Today is June 26, 2023. I'm in Wichita, Kansas, and I'm speaking with Angela my one small step partner.

[00:13] ANGELA MAY: Hi, my name is Angela and I'm 52 years old. And today is June 26, 2023. I'm in Wichita, Kansas, and I'm speaking with Andy, my one stop small step.

[00:23] ANDY SNYDER: All right, Angela so you said I am a recovering. Okay, I take that back. What made you want to do this interview today, Angela

[00:36] ANGELA MAY: Well, I have been a NPR storycorps fan for a very long time.

[00:42] ANDY SNYDER: Okay.

[00:43] ANGELA MAY: So when I, when I heard these, I was really excited about it. And then my husband came home and said, I'm gonna do story. Correct. One small step. And I said, oh, no, now I can't do it. I didn't want to steal his thunder. So he did it and he enjoyed it. And we came to the opening where they had the gathering and I talked with quite a few other people and then they encouraged me to do it. And I left with a stack of flyers thinking I was going to encourage everyone I knew to do it. And I did and ended up doing it myself. Here I sit. What made you want to do the interview today?

[01:30] ANDY SNYDER: A friend of mine, Ben Sauceda, told me that I should do this. He recommended that I do it. I have not heard of this, so I don't have the background of being an NPR fan of Storycorp. Excited to learn about it. Ben had given a couple names of some other people that I had known that has done it as well. And so I trust him.

[02:03] ANGELA MAY: Alright, Andy, I'm going to read your information that you gave as a bio. So I grew up in a christian home with neither of my parents being activists by any means. I remember my mother joking that our vote for Mondale canceled out my father's vote for Reagan in 84. In 87, we joined a suburban megachurch who didn't elevate politics but set a foundation for christian principles. I do remember hearing my dad listen to rush and reading his book, which began a journey for me into conservative politics, economics, and they overlap with christian ethics and philosophy. What detail in the bio would you like to know more about?

[02:48] ANDY SNYDER: Would you like to know more about?

[02:51] ANGELA MAY: What detail would I like to know more about? Sorry.

[02:54] ANDY SNYDER: Yeah, it was, it was hard to start getting that whittled down. I would say that that started a process of curiosity. I would say in sometimes what are the wide array of views that are out there? I'm an only child. I didn't have siblings, so I had my mom and dad as polars to kind of look at, what does dad think like? And what is, what are his views? What is my mom? What is her personality, her temperament? What is her background? My mom, military brat, grew up in Germany, my grandmother's german, grew up on military bases, has a sister and a brother. My dad grew up with four sisters in central Nebraska, not diverse at all. Ended up going to college at Bob Jones University, a non integrated college in South Carolina, during the sixties. Afterwards was then in the military, in the army, and really for the first time was around an integrated environment, a pluralistic environment to where there were diverse views, diverse backgrounds, diverse thought, opinion, racial backgrounds, those type of things. And knowing my dad's story then of being the same person that he grew up, the culture that he grew up in was an easy transition from him in central Nebraska, even to a non integrated college, into the military and having diverse friends, having complete comfortability to being around a diverse environment of. Of believer, non believer, different religions, irreligious atheists, those type of things. And so how my dad, then as a child, for me, coalesced those views into a viewpoint that was christian as his background. And also, through the times of the eighties, being involved in conservative politics or starting to listen to conservative talk radio and just the greater conversations around conservative politics and the way that that would influence the culture at that time. So my mom started then after that to start thinking, I would guess, and voting in a more conservative or republican pattern. And I think there's a coalition kind of between church attendance, the importance of church life, the importance of faith, and also with them parenting, being around other parents in a christian environment who were trying to parent their children in a way that maintained those principles and taught those principles and reinforce those principles then in their children. So the idea that it wasn't just practical, there was an outworking of that. And this is how we parent and train and those type of things. And interestingly enough, I feel like in that process, my mother became more and more of the stereotypical suburban republican voter that my dad had just kind of beat her there maybe by a couple of voting cycles, and then my own, then maturity started to just, like I said, curiosity of what do I believe? You know, what of my parents do I want to take? What do I think is different of my own? Is it similar? Is it different? And then that just became a journey, a lifelong journey of the faith experience and also political theory, even studying various viewpoints, libertarianism, the idea of economic outcomes of politics and capitalism or Marxism and communism and different theories of those type of things. So that's just been a journey for me for probably the last 25 plus years. Okay, now I can read it, right? All right. This is Angela I'm a recovering veteran middle school teacher of 23 years. I have worked in both urban and rural school districts, in title schools with students with disabilities and ESOL. I'm a lifelong learner and a passionate advocate for literacy. I spent a semester teaching adult english language learners. This was such a humbling and rewarding career. Until recent political changes, the climate and culture of the US has became a place that isn't safe for many of those students I have served. Okay, so what, in what detail in your bio would you like me to know more about?

[08:16] ANGELA MAY: I think the indicator I used for recording recovering and safe spaces are the most indicative to how I feel right now. When it comes to my past teaching experiences, it is very, very important to me that all of my students feel safe in the environment I'm in for them to be able to learn. So that means physically, that means emotionally, that also means spiritually. They need to feel like it's okay to make mistakes and nobody's going to laugh at them. Being a middle school teacher for as long as I was, that was a different, that's a different realm entirely. I did teach elementary for a while. Yep, there were lots of boogers involved in that. But hugs were sweet and lice was not. So my hair went from waist length to buzzed off on the sides like it is now, very quickly with the life situations. And then I have been a consistent and constant learner myself. Where I see now that in this bio I was rarely referencing myself as my teacher. And that has been my identity for a very long time, up until just recently. And I think I had a bit of an identity crisis when I left K twelve education. I thought I would retire from there. I thought I would, you know, do all the things that everybody plans. When you retire from teaching, you're going to kind of thing. And I started watching everything change around me and I was never the. Not that I don't agree with and think that there's a place for the apple wearing pinterest room teachers, they're perfect, especially in elementary school. They're needed. But I've always been more of a speak truth to authority, protect those that are, that are in need of protecting and dig deeper person and that comes with its own consequences. And so I left K twelve teaching and went into teaching adults. And that model of education for profit was not a good fit for me. And so now I'm looking elsewhere and doing other things, and there's a really cool thing I'd like to talk about later, so I'm gonna hold on to that one.

[10:58] ANDY SNYDER: Okay. All right. Suspense. Alrighty. Tell me about one or two people in your life who have had the biggest influence on you, and what did they teach you?

[11:13] ANGELA MAY: All right. Well, one of them that I'm going to bring up is, I know your bio was very christian based, talked about your faith and how important that was to you. Faith has always been something important to me as well, but elusive in the sense that I was. I moved 42 times in my 52 years.

[11:48] ANDY SNYDER: Wow.

[11:49] ANGELA MAY: I can pack at U Haul, let me tell you. And in doing so, I've met so many different people, so many different places, so many different things, and I sought out what I saw in that old southern gospel. I sought out all of these things, but I was having trouble reconciling the feeling of the old tent revival in the deep south and the baptisms in the river. And when we drove there, passing the shacks and the shanties that literally were dirt floor and holes. And so that has always been complicated for me. So religion is complicated for me. I was baptized into the church of Latter day Saints when I was 15, and by 17, I had asked enough questions that I was not comfortable there anymore. Not that that means anything to anyone who was a latter day saint, outside of the fact that it wasn't for me, but I respect them and their faith. In college, I was aspiring to be a new teacher, and there was an opportunity with the ecumenical ministries. I was always working with them and doing community service and doing all these different things and attending different activities. They asked me to speak to the fact that I was. There were individuals that were actively trying to recruit for what I would call a cult. And I went to the ecumenical ministries and said, are you aware that this is occurring and that they're seeking out people that are, you know, isolated and alone, etcetera? Are you concerned with that? And they were. And so they had me speak to a group of people. It was that individual who then recommended me for a lay ministry position in mission outreach and education as a college student. And I interviewed, and I was chosen, and I worked for the church. It was in that experience working for the church that I found both the most beautiful and the ugliest parts of organized religion. And the individual that I was working under was in a small church that had a declining elderly population who was rather affluent. They were wonderful people for the most part. They really wanted to do a lot. They wanted mission, they wanted outreach, they wanted education. And for many of them, that was, I'll write a check. But there was a group of them that when I said, no, no, no, you got to get your hands dirty. You got to get in here. They came and they saw and they worked, and it was wonderful until it wasn't because the minister. The longer I was there, the more I realized the reason they created the position that they hired me for was because he had said it wasn't in his job description to do mission outreach or education. And the founding members, I'll never forget this. This is it. This is what did it. There was a founding member of the church who was on hospice and was not well. And the minister's day off was Friday, and they called the church and asked for him to please come to the home. And the secretary answered, and she said, you know, what do I do to stay off? I said, give him a call. Oh, my gosh. In my personal thought was, I'm gonna go get stuff. I'll go over there. What do I need to, you know, call him. Call him. And when she called, she put him on speaker, and he said, today's my day off. He'll be dead tomorrow, too. And I lost it. This idealistic, young, compassionate person. I was like, what? And it soured me on church more so than the relationship with a divinity that. That for years. For years and years. And so that was a negative influence that I look back on and wish that I had the maturity I have now to realize that was a single person and a single view versus the church as a whole. But that broke me at that moment. That broke me that he wouldn't do that. And then, of course, more came out. I found out. Wouldn't visit, wouldn't do hospital visits or home visits. It's not in his job description. He doesn't get paid for that. And then it became. I left. It was a year contract, and it became those that were compassionate and caring and loving and wanted to move the church in one direction, those that were very linear and policy based and driven. And it became an us and them within their church. And I could not have any part of that. I didn't want to be. I didn't want to tear a church apart, being the s and no. So I backed out and bowed out gracefully at the end of that and went my own way. That I realize now at 52, how long standing that experience has been affecting me. So there's that. That was long enough for one or two.

[18:04] ANDY SNYDER: Right. Was there then as you got involved in education, was there somebody that was like a mentor or somebody that fueled your passion for education and teaching kids?

[18:23] ANGELA MAY: I would love to say yes, but rather than somebody that fueled my passion for teaching kids, I had somebody that accepted me for who I was, which is not the typical teacher. My experience is very different. I'll just try and wrap this up kind of quickly. I was emancipated at the age of 16. I moved out at the age of 16 in LA, did my whole life in fashion and that situation, and then at the age of 19, so I quit school. Okay, so at the age of 19, fashion wasn't as cool anymore. There's only so much so realistically, there's only so many times you can watch the door while the models are throwing up the comped salad that they pushed around in the first place and think that this is cool anymore. So I decided I didn't want to do that anymore and I wanted to go get her just a regular job. Well, guess what? When you don't have a high school diploma, a regular job, this would be the first time I had to fill out, like, an application to get a job where it says, you know, what is your education level, etcetera. And so I went to a what would be considered an alternative high school at the age of 19 and went in and said, I really want to want to do this. They weren't sure they wanted to give me the opportunity, but in the end, they did, and I needed elective credits. It's the elective credits. Okay. So in the end, I did an independent contract. I finished my high school diploma half of my sophomore year, 11th and 12th grade year in a month and a half, and needed elective credits. So they suggested in California, they have something called the regional occupational program. And so they said, well, why don't you do this outdoor recreation thing? I said, okay, I'll take it. So I was taking this outdoor recreation class, and in California, they have a program for 6th graders. In Orange county. They would use the y camps during the school year, and Monday through Friday, the 6th graders would go to what was called science camp, and they would learn in the outdoor classroom. So I ended up doing an internship in that for a weekend, and they hired me. And while I was there teaching Monday through Friday with a bunch of people who are doing maybe college sabbaticals or those types of things, the classroom teachers would come up with those students as well. And they kept saying, man, you, you should be a teacher. You should do this. You should do the real teaching thing, you know? And I'm like, teaching? I didn't even go to high school, right? But in the end, I did. And so they inspired me to look into becoming a teacher and then having people who periodically, just when I was about to give up in college or wherever I was at, that would say no. Yes, there's a place for the people who've always wanted to be teachers and wanted to grow up and be teachers, but there are also places for you, people like you, where you have a totally different experience in education than other people do. And so I I stuck with it.

[22:08] ANDY SNYDER: Does that help? So if I can just continue with that conversation a little bit, if that's all right.

[22:19] ANGELA MAY: I need to ask you the same.

[22:21] ANDY SNYDER: Okay, go ahead.

[22:23] ANGELA MAY: You can go with that. And then I'll come back.

[22:25] ANDY SNYDER: All right. So one or two people, and then I'll transition into building a bridge with what you talked about, because you might be surprised, but my story is very, very similar, actually, to that, around that same kind of path of those years, because I think those years are transformational for everybody. Like, I was very awkward middle schooler. My friends were all over the place of temperament, personality, you know, culture, style, whatever. Whatever cliquishness they were involved in. You know, I went from being a preppy to one, to be, you know, like, wearing black rock and roll t shirts to be back being a preppy again, and all over the place, you're trying to find out who you are and what you're doing. So one or two people in my life that have had the biggest influence. I mean, obviously, my home life was the biggest influence on me. You know, nature and nurture. So there's genetics there, but then there's also the culture. There's the dynamics of the home life, the temperament and personality of my mom and my dad. And, you know, my dad worked in retail. My mom worked in oil and gas. And so they're even from diverse backgrounds. You know, from a business standpoint, I had very different cultures. My mom was involved in a very large organization internally. My dad was very customer facing, you know, so of a large organization, but not within internally. And so there's just that difference there. Both of them having military experience, my mom from being a brat, but my dad from being in the service in the army, and the idea that order is expected in the home. So both of them knew that, like, there needed to be order and, you know, responsibility, and you took responsibility and you had accountability for the things you took over. So those are, in a way, those things became even, like, understood, even if they didn't need to be verbalized. So I played in band. I was a musician in high school, played in marching band and jazz band and all those things, and enjoyed just hanging out in the band room quite a bit and didn't know what I wanted to do or be. But, like, my first job was working retail, was working for my dad and then working for my dad's friends and selling men's clothes and working at the mall and stuff like that. And so then I thought, well, you know, what would be even better than working at the mall and work in retail would be working in banking. And so I became a teller and a teller supervisor and got to know the culture of banking a little bit. And then we went a couple years, and I'm not really figuring out college. I was a music major, but I didn't want to be a band director. I didn't want to be a teacher, but I still just wanted to hang around a little bit. I was not really quite sure what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. Started taking business classes and figured that probably be the smart thing to do. Smart thing to do would be transition my major from a music major in college to a business major. It's got to pay the bills. And I had a natural affinity for business and those type of concepts. But what I decided to do was because I was living at home and I had money in the bank, is that I became an intern at the church that I had grown up in. And I had worked for an associate pastor who was responsible over young adults or young professionals, college age, and then also foreign missions. And so he had a lot on his plate. He had adopted kids at home. His wife worked for a ministry that had to do with crisis pregnancy, adoption, those type of things. And so very busy man. And he was more than happy to let go of some responsibilities for somebody who wanted to take them on. And I was an upstart intern who wanted to learn how to teach. I played guitar, piano. I led worship services. I learned retreats. Got to, because of having the flexibility and the people that were coming, we got to go to the lake all the time. People had boats, jet skis. We went skiing in Colorado. Living my best life now, right. And while learning ministry to college and career young professionals, he anticipated moving to Egypt to be a full time foreign missionary and left the position. And because of 911, the missions organization said, let's not send you to Egypt right now. And so he took another role here in town, but not with the church. So there was an opening at the church for a full time staff member. I'm an intern, and I'm thinking, well, this would be the natural progression. Now I've learned on the job of being an intern, of being self supported, living at home with my parents, just having savings, living off of the, you know, what's the old line of the friendship of others and the, you know, the benefit of others and, and worked with the executive pastor and the senior pastor to try and figure out, like, what's the role here? My ideal was I would continue in that role full time, paid, and that they would pay for my education because I had gone a couple years as a music major, I'd gone a couple years as a business major. I didn't have a degree. And I thought, well, this will be good. I'll get a Bible degree, I'll get a ministry degree, and I'll work at this church. And that seems like the best plan going right now. So, you know, and I felt like there's an opportunity there, there's success there. And so, you know, I relied on prayer and just like, okay, let's just keep going this way. Thankfully, there was a staff member there who had taught at the college level and taught ministers, taught youth ministers, and had a long track record. And he was a shepherd. He was not a hireling, to use that terminology. He wanted to shepherd anybody and everybody that was around him. And that meant children, that meant peers, that meant young adults, whoever, pure heart shepherd love people. And he basically put his arm around me and said, you need to get out of here because this place will eat you up. Place is not healthy. And if this is God's plan for your life to continue to do this type of work, he's going to teach you how to do it somewhere else. Because I didn't know this at the time, but he was looking to transition out. He had been brought in to help kind of save some problems that had occurred before his tenure there as a youth pastor. You see the sausage get made, right? I wrote some notes here. If you're around ambitious and selfish or selfish people, if you're around hireling people who are like, it's my day off, that's not my job title, those type of things in a role where the expectation is that you are self sacrificing, you are pure of heart, you are doing this for the least of these. And you see behind the screen a little bit of, I need to make sure the sausage gets made. This is a job. This is my income. This is how most people would think of a for profit job, of pleasing my boss and doing my responsibility so that I get to keep my job or maybe I can ambitiously move to a better opportunity and those type of things. And so my response to that was, I agree this environment is not healthy for not just me, but for other people as well. But I'll continue to serve and look for opportunities outside of that. I was teaching a Sunday school class and had a guy that was, had come to as a come to my Sunday school class that I was teaching, and he's a general manager of a retail store. He said, andy, I know your background. I know that you've been in retail. I know you've been in banking. I know you can do the things that we need you to do. We're opening up a store. I need bookkeeping and potentially some sales. And like, I know that you need a job. And I said, that's perfect timing. That's what I need to do. I need to leave this environment, thankfully, because I know people who have had all different reactions and responses to poor leadership in christian ministry. I didn't take it as an indictment of organized religion or mega churches, of large staffs or of anything other than these are the weaknesses and fallibilities of human beings and that it. But I know that not everybody's reaction or response is the same as mine. I worked for him for eight years, and I became and worked in sales and then have continued to do sales ever since then and have been able, what I feel like to do everything that I desired to do when I was an intern and when I worked for a church, in that I've taught Sunday schools. I get to work with kids. I work as a volunteer with kids ministries. I've got to travel the world. I've gone to Haiti. I've gone to El Salvador, Costa Rica. I've worked with refugees in Central America. I've gotten to meet people from all over the world and got to know how similar we really are as people. Even though the economic environment or political environment that we live in could be dramatically different, it can be all over the place. But at the core, most basic people have the same basic desires and the same basic failures and those types of things. And so it's just been absolutely fantastic. I feel like that I could be in a career that's fulfilling, that's in alignment. Damon Young says this who's a person here in Wichita, there's an alignment of your personal life in your professional life and your proclamation of faith, your profession of faith, and that when you find that alignment, there's fulfillment, there's that meaning and purpose of finding that. And I've been grateful that that's been true for me in that my professional life aligns with my personal life, aligns with my saving of faith, and I feel like I can flourish. And that's, you know, when I think about education and the teachers out there, you know, I think, well, how can we influence kids to follow that meaning, find meaning and purpose and influence in those type of things and kind of wonder, like, is the current structure of education? That really isn't much different than I feel like the structure of education when I grew up in elementary school, middle school, high school, lecture format, we're just using more technological tools now, but really it's the same content presented in the same way, those type of things. I almost wonder, like, okay, is my anecdotal experience. Can it be replicated in how I've been a lifelong learner. We've talked about this a little bit of being inquisitive, being a lifelong learner now with all the tools that. That we have available just in our hand, you know, with a smartphone of, can I learn things in some ways, even outside of the bias of a system? You talked about maybe being a little bit anti establishment and being wary of these large structures and power seeking people and those type of things of like, okay, well, this is, the phone in your hand is a great tool of democracy to be able to learn anything and any. Everything that you want to know from people all over the world. And so maybe that's a transition back to there. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.

[34:08] ANGELA MAY: There's the power structure. Well, it's not just one. It's just one of many, but there's a power structure, and that is my passion, is that literacy is just. And I only need to get to this other question, but could you briefly describe, in your own words, your personal political values?

[34:28] ANDY SNYDER: Do you want to take that one? Sure, because I went. So you go. And I think that's a natural transition to what we were talking about.

[34:34] ANGELA MAY: I think you're right. All right, so most of my childhood was in the deep south. Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, those types of places, multiple movings around, and then California and then Kansas. And they're the South. I have a love hate relationship with.

[35:04] ANDY SNYDER: The south.

[35:08] ANGELA MAY: But I will say, say that because of the things that I experienced and saw and know to be true for more than just this person on the street and this person on the street. But the actual teachings in the schools in the south and the statues in the parks and the flags flying over the buildings and the belief systems and the words that are used, that changed me. And having been the person always being the new child changes you.

[35:43] ANDY SNYDER: Yep.

[35:43] ANGELA MAY: Always being the new kid. So one of the things I did was find the library. Always find the library. But experiencing. I was in second grade. I think it was second grade, Jackson, Mississippi. When I was living in Jackson, Mississippi, in early elementary school, roots came out and was being shown. Are you familiar with the show roots?

[36:06] ANDY SNYDER: Sure.

[36:07] ANGELA MAY: And there was a riot that broke out of the middle in the high school. And my two sisters were at those schools, and they had locked the gates, so they had jumped the fences. And the members of the KKK didn't show up at the high school where the true violence was going down. They went to the elementary school, and they were walking through the elementary school in their robes. And my best friend at the time was a black girl, and I remember she had all the twists in her hair. And at the time, they had the little bitty plastic shaped like animal shaped and bow shaped barrettes. And now young girls wore beads, so it still has that same thing. But the reality of it was, when she would shake her head when she was happy, you would hear the. Right. And when they came. Burst through the door at the end of the hall, and they came into the building, my teacher was african american teacher hid, hid under her desk. She was so fearful, and we were very young, and they grabbed my best friend by her hair and that yanking of her. And that changed that whole feeling of. The feeling for me. And of course, I attacked him, hitting him, screaming, stranger danger. Stranger danger. Stranger danger. And you know what stranger danger taught me was, you got to get a look at their face. You got to know what they look like. You got to get their license plate number, etcetera. So I worked off his hood, and I'm looking at him, getting a look out of him. And let's just say this all culminates in a phone call to my father saying, I want you. Are you going to be in a safe environment? Do you know where your two middle, your middle and high school children are? Your daughter disrobed the chamber of commerce president today. This could be bad. And that was my first experience with the men in the robes, outside of the fact that they used to collect money in the robes with the hoods off on the street corners in the early seventies. And I'd be like, you know, like the firemen boots and I'd be like, can you give money, mama? And she'd go, no, we don't give money to them. Okay? So I knew them coming in, that wasn't great. But then that solidified for me at the age of probably seven. It's not the same for everybody. The driving through, moving from town to town to town, state to state, and seeing the abject poverty, the way people were treated, and the fact that the people that would befriend me first were always the most impoverished, the outcasts, the shunned. And as I grew older, I began to. I would seek them out and be their friend, because I knew I wasn't going to be there very long anyway. Six, seven months, maybe a year and a half, tops, is when we were there. Because when my father got out of the air force, he went into medical sales, and so we were moving the region. And then I got to a point where I was angry. I was very angry, because it wasn't just one school, it wasn't just one city. It wasn't just one state. It was people. People do this. People shun people everywhere. People shun people for their, you know, for disabilities. People shun people for the amount of money they have or the religion. I was. I was kind of shocked when I first moved to Kansas and met an elderly couple that, you know, were. When we were going to go, you know, church sailing, garage, Salem church sailing, we couldn't go to that one because they're Catholics. And I had never heard Catholics as a bad thing. You know, I was like, what are you talking about? Because in. In the deep south, in Louisiana, they were Catholic. And I. And I thought, God, it's still happening. It's still happening. So those types of things formed my political beliefs. And my political beliefs have been primarily based in what I believe is human, what is humane, what is empathy, and my desire, like I mentioned, the deep south revivals, to be christlike. What did that mean, to be christlike? And that anger started to come out probably 6th grade, right? On fifth or 6th grade, I tried to fit in, you know, with a small group of people, and I just had enough. So then my mission became defending those that were not defended until I could leave. But I also knew and had to tell them up front, I'll be leaving soon. I'm not gonna be here for long. So I didn't want them to get too attached to me because it hurts when you leave. So that has formed. Most of my political beliefs have always been around the. Digging deeper as to why does that exist? Why? I have. I'm a very inquisitive. Why? Why? Why? And let me just say that the daughters of the Confederacy have a lot more pull in textbook writing and rewriting of history than people really believe. And I would encourage anyone listening to this to dig deeper. And in Texas, this was probably nothing. Maybe my freshman year, I came in this time. I didn't get to move at the beginning or the end. I never got to move at the beginning. At the end of the school year. So you just plopped into something. And I remember sitting in us history. Maybe it doesn't matter if it was my freshman year or not, but sitting there in us history, and I'm reading the textbook, this is in the eighties. And I'm thinking, man, I've done a lot of reading, and I have never heard of the war of the northern aggression. When would he have? The war of the northern aggression? What was. What's the. And I was like, two weeks into this when she talks about the Gettysburg Address. And I raised my hand and I said, whoa. Are we talking about the civil war here? The civil war? She looked at me with disdain and said, honey, there was nothing civil about that war. It was the war of the northern aggression. At which point I spoke to my father that night and said, so when exactly are we leaving here? And realistically, that's been my life. So I take textbooks as, like, a superficial and then dig deeper. Kind of like, I tell people to use Wikipedia, look at it at the top, but then go down to those sources at the bottom. Dig deeper, keep going, dig deeper. And so that has been the driving force. And I began to learn and look at myself and say, no matter what you do, you have to be the one. When you look at yourself in the mirror and say, did I do the right thing? Was this the best I could do? Was it. The most I could do? Was it? And that has driven me to be the person I am today. Political, personally, all of my values.

[44:18] ANDY SNYDER: There it is. So I would consider myself a conservative. And I have this conversation all the time with people about what is a conservative. People have all kinds of different ideas about what that really means. And to me, it just means to conserve in my understanding of history, like you said, in my understanding of what I know to be true and have history, how can we conserve the good, the true, and the beautiful? We now talk about what is truth, your truth, my truth, what is the truth? But that question has gone on for thousands of years. Pilate asked Jesus, what is truth? So what is beautiful. Even as a musician, artist, there are definitely different ways to define beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder. But also you can go get an arts degree, and they'll tell you exactly what the theory is behind artistic beauty and those type of things and golden ratios and all this stuff. Right? And so what is good, what is true, what is beautiful? I think there are things that we can see through society that have led towards flourishing, economic flourishing, social flourishing, relational flourishing, healthy homes, healthy families, healthy communities, physical health, emotional health, mental health, spiritual health. We can go all through those. And I think there are, you know, overarching principles that have been there throughout human history that are kind of common grace to show that these things are the good, the true, and the beautiful. And as a conservative, I would say that I want to conserve those things. And so it even irks me sometimes when I talk to friends who, you know, would consider themselves to be conservative, yet they don't believe the same things are true. They don't believe the same things are good, and they don't believe the same things are beautiful. And so I feel like, well, I'm trying to conserve what I believe are those things and you're not. And so who's the conservative in those type of things? But one of the things you talked about is just the social structure of the south and the legacy of racism and what was being taught. And, you know, we have those ideas now about what should we be allowed to teach? Where are the guardrails on things that we should teach? In public education, we have a separation of church and state. What does that mean in a pluralistic society where we have people of different faith backgrounds? And if no faith backgrounds, how can we all learn in this environment? And I think it was Horace Mann that started the, you know, non segmented, non sectarian idea of public education, because public, I mean, education was really of the control of the churches, you know, and if it's done well, that's a good thing, that the churches provide a great education. They teach people how to read. Right. Literacy. The church should be teaching literacy because if your most sacred text is the scriptures, you should want your people to read it. Unless you want to control them, you want to. Again, we go back to cults and other things, and, you know, you want to pick apart little things. But a well educated people, you know, the Bereans are, by Paul in the New Testament, are commended because they go and they search the scriptures to see if the things that I'm saying are really true. And so we should be encouraging those things, you know? And so we should say the church leads in the area of healthcare. You can't go to a hospital that isn't named after a saint. St. Francis, St. Thomas, St. Francis, St. Joseph, sorry, Wesleyan tradition with Wesley Hospital, those type of things. So the church has been known in the past as being a great good within the community of providing healthcare, of providing food, of providing education, those type of things like that. And so before the progressive era, I feel like you, there was these extremes. There was the negative aspect of some of that thing because of human nature. And so there was a greater need and a greater ability then to provide public education through the state health care that's provided not necessarily by the benevolence of somebody, but by the legal requirement of somebody providing all of the greater welfare state of housing is. There are subsidies for housing, there are subsidies for food, there are subsidies for healthcare and these type of things, which is interesting that we talk about education, because there really isn't a subsidy for education. There's a lot of debate about that. There's a lot of desire for some parties to want that subsidy for education, to be able to be taken to the provider of your choice. And that's a huge argument right now. But I definitely see that in the realm of health care, the hospital, it's paid for by third party. Your food is paid for potentially, if you have great need, if you're in poverty, you can have WIC. There's all sorts of regulations around all these other things, but not education. And so those type of things help define my political beliefs as what I believe is the good, the true and the beautiful. What are some things that take into account human failures, human reasoning, and say, what is the best that we can do as a society? Racism is real. The civil war is real. The need to free slaves in America was real, but we did it. We as a society decided that we were going to put blood, sweat and tears in a battlefield to try and. And do the right thing. We had a civil war over racism in our country. I don't know of any other country. I'm not a historical expert, but I know that there are probably times here and there where there has been different political activities that has gotten rid of evils like chattel slavery. But we have a history in our country that's not perfect, but we have a history of progressing towards fairness. Martin Luther King. Right. It's a long journey, but it ends towards justice. Right? And so that's what I see in our country. And so sometimes when I feel politically that people think that we're still under chattel slavery or that they're still the Klan and there's still these type of things, you start to go, okay, that's a personal experience, and you can't take that away from somebody. But it's sometimes choosing to focus, focus on the worst rather than the potential or the best. And maybe that's just the optimist in me and a little bit of seeing different cultures around the world and how they deal with their societal evils. I'm a conservative because in some ways, and I'm a patriotic american in a lot of ways because I see, not that America was perfect, but that America had a process for writing and that I would encourage kids who are in public education or private education or homeschooling all those type of things to be shown, those images that are uncomfortable in the south, you know, the Civil War era, you know, horsemen up on, you know, and the flags. And I hate to say that, unfortunately, the Klan, to see them, not that we, like, bury that and create ignorance, then would again cause that cycle to repeat itself. I would love to see those images as terrible as they are to be shown so that we don't do that again, like the Holocaust. And so I know we have a culture in our society now where we want to cancel things and we want to bury them and we want to get a. And move past some of these things. But I fear in some ways that we would begin, then again, the problem of ignorance that would cause those things to continue to cycle and come about. So do we risk it, you know, of, like, allowing things to be said and to be done so that we know who the bad people are. Right? And that's, I think, part of my political philosophy of, like, understanding that maybe human nature isn't altogether good, that there is that human nature as a christian conservative, that human nature is flawed. Right? We're sinful. They use those spiritual terms, that there's depravity. And how do we structure society in the best, most powerful way to account for those things? Not assuming that people are generally good, but knowing that they're not.

[53:17] ANGELA MAY: So I'm going to go with that. One of the most conservative arguments I hear is that I didn't own a slave, I didn't do this, I didn't do that. And you're right, but you did gain wealth that was not afforded to minority individuals. We talk about we ended slavery, and that's a great thing. Then we turned around in reconstruction time and had Jim Crow we are having people going back towards that in policies today. So those are very alarming policies that are coming out. We currently talk about cancel culture, etcetera. And the idea of removing the statues is put inside. I want them to see it. I want them to see it, too, but I want them to see it in a museum. I want them to see it in a location, not in the city park where they can go and have a picnic under the guise of that, because they weren't there, because of the battles that were fought by these wonderful generals, etcetera, like the renaming of the forts. If you can learn anything from Germany and the way that they handled the Holocaust, you learn that those places are there to be seen, but they're there in the places they were not, in a memorial and honoring of the individuals. They don't have statues of Adolf Hitler, so nobody forgets who Adolf Hitler is. Those kinds of things. I think we, and I'm just going to say it because we're both white, we have a duty, and I'm going to go there. We have a duty to look into the experience of people different than our own, and not just through the lens of a mission, although mission work is very solid. But understanding that people don't understand that black soldiers returning from World War Two didn't have GI Bill. They weren't. It wasn't. They weren't able to access it. That redlining is real and that it prevented people from being able to get homes in certain areas. They were unable to get loans to upkeep and maintain their homes, that we are now in a part of gentrification where they're, you know, pushing people out, pricing them out of their long term home. So it's not. Racism wasn't ended with the civil war. It wasn't ended with the civil Rights act. And I think that our education system has left out the deeper, darker spaces. The fact that people don't understand that we had a native american boarding school right here in the state of Kansas that has granted, turned into a native college, high school, university, the understanding and awareness of native policies and what we did during World War two to japanese internment camps and the chinese exclusion acts. And they could. I could go on and on and on, but these aren't taught outside of a single paragraph. And learning and hearing from the people who actually experienced it can truly, hopefully open a sense of compassion and empathy and individuals to learn and dig deeper and understand why. Why was it that you were afforded a life with two parents in a wonderful neighborhood, with solid faith, values, etcetera. That someone else who has two parents in this neighborhood with solid face values don't have the opportunity for college or to figure out what they want to do with their life and find their identity. Why is that? And if you go digging deeper, it almost always comes out to follow the money. And until we as humans are willing to look at it all, every bit of it in the United States, in the city of Wichita, which is what I'd like to start just in this community, what can we do if we look around and we see our homeless population? What can we do to change that homeless population? Rather than assigning lack of value or worth to those individuals because they didn't, that was a choice they made, or they this or they that. And all the excuses that we hear for people who dismiss that, we got to start here, right here at home with our community and begin to reach out and help each other. And whether that's through church or whether that's through community, citizen, grassroots. But I think, honestly, it's not going to happen until these types of conversations go on. And it can't be just 150 minutes conversation, but a little deeper and with others that are there. Yeah, I'm going to. What are your hopes for our future?

[58:41] ANDY SNYDER: So I'm going to just transition your conversation there. To answer this, my wife is hispanic and grew up on every policy that you can think of come from a home with all types of abuse, addiction. And early on, unfortunately, she had to make a decision to whether she was going to continue the cycle or she was going to break the cycle. She was given every opportunity from a state, federal, local, again, neighbors, church, anything and everything was given to her because of her need. She did not have the benefit of being white like Yena. She had not the benefit of being male, if that gives you the benefit, at least it did years ago. Maybe there's something inherent there that she decided, I'm not going to just fulfill this low expectation of my greater family to continue this cycle of poverty, addiction, anger, brokenness. I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure that that doesn't happen to me. Her wider family has unfortunately continued that cycle of anger, addiction, broken relationships, chemical addictions, you name it. I'm probably repeating myself. There's something personal that the individual decides. Yes, there are things that are unfair, yes, there are things that are unjust. Yes, there are things outside of my control. But as far as it goes for me, I have at least an understanding that I want it better than I had it and took advantage of public education took advantage of friends who got her out of that environment just physically so that she could have experiences with different types of families to where anger and abuse and addiction wasn't prevalent, and saw potential then of what her life could be like outside of that cycle. It wasn't until she got to college and had a biology profession professor take an interest and say, you're really good at this. Just a word of affirmation of, like, you know, you're pretty good at chemistry. You're pretty good at this. Like, I could help you get to University of Kansas, and you can get a doctorate in pharmacy, and you can have a great life for yourself that. That more put hands and feet or defined what her mentality was to break that cycle. So that's all she needed. Hispanic woman with a mother with no high school education, father who was physically abusive, alcoholic, drug addict. Nature, you want to go. Nature, nurture. She could have just sat there and said, life isn't fair. Life sucks. I just don't want to be that person. Goes and becomes a doctor of pharmacy from the University of Kansas and ends up in Wichita in a local hospital, making a salary that 95% of Wichitans don't make. Highly educated, makes a good income, and was basically just the reaping of what she sowed from an early childhood. And so when I think of, like, okay, I have that anecdotal example of my wife, I think, how can I tell? And how can my wife tell? How can I tell other people who have influence to tell these kids who have the same, unfortunately, the same type of background that my wife has, that you can make it, that you can do or be what you want to be, and you are not shackled and bound to the cycles of addiction and poverty and hatred and violence and all of those things that seem to surround your life, that seem like you cannot break out of that it is possible here in Wichita, Kansas, and America even greater than it is anywhere else in this world? My wife is proof of that. There are millions of others that are proof of that. How can, like that chemistry professor who told my wife, you're good at this. You can do this. How can we get more people in their lives to say, there are innate gifts and abilities and talents that you have that will. Will allow you to flourish? How can we get you out of a bureaucracy or this negative environment.

[01:04:09] ANGELA MAY: All.

[01:04:09] ANDY SNYDER: Of these things that are working against you, how can we get you through that, to set you up for the greatest success in life? And that's my hope for the future.

[01:04:23] ANGELA MAY: Can I say, I have one last thing, and my hope for the future is that well meaning individuals like yourself can go beyond the how can we tell apart and create the policies and put in the time and the effort to dig deeper and determine that it's not just to pick yourself up by your bootstrap thing, and that it's wonderful that your wife had it within her and the people that were around her, but that we really have to provide that for all of them, for them to actually be able to get out of that cycle so that they're not creating it and then it can eventually get better.