Flyover country. The world beyond the bubble. A red corner of a purple state. Those are the kinds of labels that offer simple answers.

I found people, not stereotypes, in Montrose, an isolated small town that I first visited in 2012. I was on a Stars & Stripes assignment to write about this western Colorado community's grassroots effort to help war vets reintegrate into civilian life. Montrose later became the setting for my book, "Home of the Brave."

Montrose gave me glimpses of what collaboration can accomplish even in times of bruising rancor and division. I went there with questions and returned with evidence of the human capacity for generosity, resilience and healing.

When I’d asked my 13-year-old daughter whether she wanted to join us for “Appropriate” at Denver’s Curious Theatre, she said yes immediately. I started to tell her more about the play, but she stopped me, saying, “I trust Curious.”

Curious, which is celebrating its 20th season this year on Denver’s version of Off Broadway, traffics in the ambitious and the complex, which is certainly what you would expect of a play about race a black artist wrote for an all-white cast.

“Appropriate” was hard to watch, but worth watching. We trusted Curious to challenge itself as a company and its audiences. It delivered.

Americans are taking another look at the Vietnam War. It has, for example, attracted the gaze of acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns. A 10-part, 18-hour documentary series directed by Burns and Lynn Novick airs in September on PBS stations nationwide.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, ending the war. The 2008 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the Secretary of Defense to mark that 50th anniversary with commemorations that began across the country in 2012 and are to culminate on Veterans Day in 2025.

All this talk of Vietnam has me thinking of the veterans of that conflict I had the privilege to meet as I worked on a book that I initially thought would be only about our current war, the one set into motion by the 9/11 attacks. 

In 2008, Natalie Wilson, who works in public relations in Washington, and her sister-in-law Derrica Wilson, a veteran law-enforcement officer, founded the Black and Missing Foundation to help African-American families in DC and across the country find missing loved ones. The Wilsons, who are black, were inspired by a 2004 case in South Carolina in which a family struggled to draw attention to the disappearance of a young black woman whose boyfriend later confessed to murdering her.

National crime statistics show that in 2016, African-Americans made up 38 per cent of missing Americans under the age of 18, despite only making up about 15 per cent of the nation’s youth population. So, black children go missing at a disproportionate rate, while the media focuses on missing whites.

Not all the images in his retrospective at the Denver Art Museum are by American photographer Fazal Sheikh. But all the stories are his.

Among the photographs he did take is a portrait of a woman he met in Vrindavan, a town south of Delhi where Indian widows have traditionally settled. The woman was not a widow herself. She told Sheikh she had never wanted to marry after a friend was murdered by her husband because her family did not pay dowry.  Instead, Sheikh’s subject became a traveler who eventually chose to stay in Vrindavan because she felt at home among the widows.

What inspires people to share their stories with Sheikh? When I look at his portraits, I see women especially looking comfortably and confidently at the camera, as if they are at home in his listening gaze.

Since 2007, a Colorado-based nonprofit called Project Sanctuary has provided therapy and Rocky Mountain recreational retreats to help military families reconnect.

In 2016, Brian Walton, a combat veteran from Illinois who had participated in a Project Sanctuary retreat, died by suicide. That prompted Project Sanctuary to develop something new: a peer mentorship program known as Walton’s Warriors that focuses on preventing suicide among veterans.

With 20 vets a day dying by suicide, it’s extraordinary that Walton’s was her first suicide.  But Project Sanctuary founder and chief executive Heather Ehle did not rest on her accomplishments. 

White supremacists and Neo Nazis marched in Charlottesville to fan racist flames.

Those marchers did not care about Confederate statues. They cared about spreading fear.

Because of that moral reality, I'm troubled when the conversation about Charlottesville detours into a debate over what to do about statues.