Why Melissa Dalton-Bradford thinks you should be more political

Melissa Dalton-Bradford traces her civic awakening to walking the streets of Salzburg, Austria, as a teenager in the 1970s. She remembers seeing old women in dark green army coats wearing black bands around their arms. “It was everywhere I went,” she recalled on a September morning over avocado toast at a restaurant in Lehi, Utah. She later learned that the bands commemorated loved ones who had died in World War II, a visible reminder of the difficult history carried by a generation that had lived through the Nazi era and devastation of war. I first met Dalton-Bradford and her family on a beach during my honeymoon more than a decade ago. I’d followed her work from afar ever since, but this was the first time we’d sat down together for a conversation. For much of Dalton-Bradford’s life, her sense of civic responsibility to her home country had unfolded away from it.

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