(twangy music) - [Oliver] The Georgia I knew growing up, occupied little space in the national consciousness.

A reference in the classroom as the home of Martin Luther King Jr.

The setting to "Gone with the Wind," or Flannery O'Connor stories.

My Georgia was a still farm pond at sunset, the dense woods in deer season, pollen, coding a car come April, not a place where things happened on a big scale.

Today, a rapidly growing Georgia has been called on and has called on itself to help choose the direction of America.

In each election, hundreds of millions of dollars is spent here, mostly on negative ads, and a reader of the New York Times or the LA Times can't go a day without considering this state.

But democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is the expression of the people.

What do the people of Georgia think about the choice they must make on November 5th?

What are their hopes, fears, and dreams?

In which direction will they help push the most powerful nation in the world?

As a student of history and politics, I felt it was time for me to return to Georgia and ask these questions to the people who will decide.

But where to begin in this state of 11 million, the most sprawling east of the Mississippi?

Where might a fair representation of the people be found?

Everywhere I went, I smelled the smoke-filled air of my youth, billowing out of backyards, church parking lots, and shacks tended by wise pitmasters.

"Barbecue," Lolis Elie wrote, "is a metaphor for American culture."

Barbecue alone encompasses the high and the low brows, the sacred and the profane, the learned and the unlettered, the Blacks, the browns, and the whites.

Barbecue is a fitting barometer for the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the country.

So I visited barbecue restaurants across Georgia to speak to voters about the election, our divisions and the future.

(upbeat music) - One thing is a fact, every self-respecting Georgian knows where to find the barbecue.

- A barbecue place is, like, it bring peoples together.

A barbecue place, you could come meet up and, like, you could throw barbecues in your backyard, it's gonna be a barbecue.

Barbecue is important in Georgia because it's like a family tradition of barbecuing.

- An expression of brotherly and sisterly love through food is about as fundamental as it gets.

You express yourself, if you're like me and you don't have any other talents, you try to express your love to other people through the food, not of the food, but through.

- I mean, there's ladies that are 90 years old I've been, you know, knowing all my life and I know all their kids and their grandkids because, you know, when I was five years old, I was waiting on her.

- But I've been coming here ever since I was a kid.

In fact, my parents dated here.

So I've been enjoying Fincher's BBQ since before I was born, probably.

- Barbecue means to me, fellowship, family, community, good times.

- The people of Macon are family to me.

- Oh, that's the lifeblood of the community.

- Barbecue is, you know, American as baseball and apple pie.

- I think barbecue is America, in my opinion.

And I feel like barbecue is not going nowhere.

I think it's getting better.

- It brings people together.

It's like coming home.

It's like a place where you can relax, enjoy good food, and sit and talk with your family and friends and like what we're talking about, not be out there strife and struggle division.

We can all come in here no matter who we are.

- They don't all vote the same, they don't all think the same, you know, but everybody can come together over really good food and, you know, and have that, where it reminds you that these people aren't your enemies, you know, they're still Americans.

- So Chef Cody, Texas, Tennessee, Chef Jiyeon, Korea, they met here in Georgia, so that's the back of the shirt.

- There was nothing, no state more associated with political barbecues in Georgia.

- If you run for a public office in Georgia, you're going to eat a lot of politics, I mean, a lot of barbecue.

And in fact, I used to say, "Guys, I gotta have some barbecue."

I mean, we hadn't had any in two or three days.

And there was one famous old sort of wool hat Georgia governor made the comment, he got elected one time, and he lost in the second round and they asked him what he thought, I won't call his name, everybody's heard it, "Well, I'll tell you what, a lot of those people who came and ate my barbecue," as he said it, "they didn't vote for me."

- When we were in this restaurant earlier tonight, this is a restaurant, it's in a part of Atlanta that I guarantee you is heavily democratic.

But there was a booth near us where there was a guy wearing a hat that said, "Make America Great Again, 45-47," meaning he wants the 45th president to also be the 47th.

And I don't think he's got a majority opinion in this restaurant, but nobody was trying to throw him out.

- If Donald Trump wins, we have to keep doing business.

If Kamala Harris wins, we've gotta keep doing business.

- I think the state is actually more divided today than in the past, because politics is such a polarizing issue and there's very little folk in the middle.

You're either on one side or the other.

There are some that are undecided.

But I think, given the nature of where we stand today in today's political climate, I think it's even more polarizing.

- What kind of an impact do you see that polarization having on people's lives and their relationships?

I know you're getting at that.

- I'm seeing instances where people are losing long-term friends over where they stand politically, losing or not being in touch with family members that are not necessarily on the same side of the fence.

- I think there is a judgment that impune on people, you know, who do you vote for sort of says a lot about who you are, where in the past it's less judgmental, I would say.

I think it's a lot more binary than ever before, you know, the space for the middle from moderate almost doesn't exist.

- You just don't hear about the other candidates anything but something bad if you're in one camp or another and never watch anything else.

People have gotta quit that.

They've gotta go back to thinking things out and say, "I have responsibility as American citizen."

We all talk about our devotion and our patriotism in the park.

You are not a patriot, in my opinion, if you haven't made a very serious, conscientious effort of your own to decide who you should vote for and how you should vote.

- I would just point the finger at Donald Trump.

I don't think anything to this magnitude has ever happened as far as politician, they may mislead you, but they don't just outright lie to you.

You know, just make up some stuff.

And, then the rest of, I guess the Republicans, then they back this stuff up and, you know, they get in lockstep and so they perpetuate these type of lies too.

- There should be a law that you shouldn't be able to lie to get a presidential seat.

You shouldn't be able to say, "Hey, when I get there, I'm gonna do this."

And then you get there and you don't do it.

To me, that's wrong.

- [Oliver] If your preferred candidate were sitting here in my place, what would you say to him or her about solving some of these problems and making Georgia and America better?

- Well, if my preferred candidate was here, they already did a pretty good job of doing that in the first round.

So you can figure that out real quick.

And I think they just need to keep doing what they were doing before, just be smarter about it.

Because he definitely had some people working for his administration that were not...

They were undermining him to put it mildly.

- If Kamala Harris came out, I would tell her, "You've had four years to work on it, the economy has gotten worse and worse and worse.

Grocery prices are probably double than what we used to pay years ago."

- I want the food prices to be reasonable.

I want housing 'cause I'm getting ready to be a first-time home buyer.

So when I think about what Kamala says about providing us with $25,000 upfront, mm, yeah, I'm loving that policy because it's gonna help us as first-time home buyers.

- It's ridiculous.

And pretty much everything you can name has gone up because of the current regime.

Everything.

It's putting a lot of people out of work.

People are struggling.

In small towns like this, people are struggling.

- Everything is so high.

I remember back in the day, you can go in the store and get a lot of stuff with a dollar, but now a dollar can't get you barely nothing outta the store.

So I think it's getting worse and worse instead of it getting better and better.

- Keep American money here in America, take care of our veterans, that...

I see so much money going to, like I've mentioned already, going overseas, when you've got homeless veterans living underneath the bridge, - Taking care of our veterans first.

I think that's one big thing that bothers me a lot, is that we take care of other countries, but we don't take care of our homeless and our veterans.

- If former President Trump was here, I would tell him to stop saying stupid things.

He has a way of opening up his mouth when he doesn't need to and it causes a lot of friction within his own party.

- I would serve him as a regular customer, but I don't support Donald Trump because of the things that gone on with him recently.

I always have been a diehard democrat, but...

Personally I don't have anything against him.

But the way he's done things and some of the things that he's allowed to go on and the insurrection and all the things, I don't think he should even be on the ballot.

- I would say, we have to be concerned about the everyday man.

And by that I mean the common people, you know.

Most of the people that come in here are working class people that work down the street at Delta, FedEx, whatever the case may be.

Listen to our concerns as people and try to have some compassion for what we go through.

Lend an ear to see what we're going through on a day-to-day basis, whether it's the price of things, you know, whether it's how much we work, how hard we work for our families, 'cause we want the same thing that the next guy wants, to succeed and offer things to our children that we didn't have.

- I've seen it improving in this area.

We've, you know, Georgia has a thriving port system and there are a lot of jobs being made available not far from the Georgia's port area.

There's manufacturing jobs, warehouse jobs.

But I also wanna see some other types of industry come into the state so that everything is not focused on manual labor or manufacturing.

I wanna see some other types of jobs come so that others can have access to higher paying jobs.

- I think the extremes are really divided.

I think there's a radical left and a radical right, but I think the people, you know, especially the people that are working every day, paying taxes, you know, I mean, they want to, you know, they want to keep the money in their pocketbook and they don't give a darn about what goes on in somebody else's bedroom.

- There's things that I maybe like about Trump, but there's more things that I don't like about Trump.

when it comes to his character.

He doesn't have a plan for policies.

So I appreciate the fact that she's being transparent about what she's gonna do, and I just hope that what she says she's gonna do, she does it.

- [Oliver] If you met your preferred candidate here at Fincher's, is there something you'd want to ask him or her?

- I mean, I'd tell them to try the pork chop.

(chuckles) You know, I'd just tell them to think about the little guy, you know.

And, you know, turn your focus on, you know, the average person and do what's right for them and not what's right for special interest groups and... - Trump or Harris, I think they have to reach out to the other side.

And I think that's, you know, I don't think we're that divided.

And I think it's, you know, I think there's a lot of middle ground that, you know, that 80% of the population have.

But I think we need to quit talking about abortion.

I think we need to quit talking about those things and stay out of it.

My wife and I can't agree on a lot of things.

I mean, we're married to each other and, you know, we love each other, we care about each other, but we're not gonna agree on everything.

I mean, nobody is, - And I would ask her if she's elected as the president to be, how would she make America better?

What, what's, what was, What's next, you know, how would you make the economy better?

Groceries, how could you reduce the price on groceries, gas, you know, how would you handle that?

- If you met the other candidate, the one you're not voting for, is there something you'd want to ask him or her, or something you'd want to say to try to change their policies?

- I might say, "Well, you know, why do you care more about people that have illegally entered the country than you care about our veterans and our victims of hurricanes, you know?"

I mean, seem like the people coming in that illegal get a better treatment than some of the veterans I know and the people that, you know, that lost their homes and FEMA hadn't showed up yet, and, you know, they're giving them 750 bucks and telling them to, you know, don't spend it all in one place.

- What I would tell the candidate if they walked in here today is to think more about us and less about you.

- I'd say be truthful.

I mean, other than that, I don't know there's a record there that will back up anything that's substantial.

But, like, again, you know, we have a lot of misinformation that we're reading and...

Minds are kind of clouded because of what's out there and yeah, we can't know the real truth because we are not actively involved in all the decisions and everything.

- Help the, and this is my biggest thing right here, help the poor more, get them, like, some opportunities, like, help in the... Like, I see people sleeping up on the bridges, at stores and stuff, I would like to see them getting better help.

- Well, I think my biggest issue was the Afghanistan pullout.

You know, I spent a year in Afghanistan and, you know, we were winning when I left, you know, and I did a lot of fighting for this country to do that diplomacy, you know, with the tip of the spear type of thing, and that was the biggest single embarrassment that I've ever seen in my life.

And the same images of Vietnam, you know, when I was growing up watching Vietnam movies and stuff like that, and it was the same helicopters lifting off of the embassy and, you know, to me, that was disgraceful.

- But right now, America needs all the help we can get because if we don't get it, we're gonna be in a World War III.

- I think when you can learn to appreciate other people's perspective and understand their stories better, it just helps unify things better.

But if you keep honing on the same thing that, you know, this person likes this and that person doesn't like that, and what do you think, and if you keep pounding that, it doesn't help anything, in my opinion.

- Be fair to everybody, you know, treat everybody the same, and that's it.

I mean, you know, that's the thing, you know, you show favoritism, that's where the problem comes in.

- [Patron] That's where the divides create.

- Yeah, and don't divide.

Try to unite everybody, you know, blanket everybody and make everybody be treated the same.

- Would I say something to them?

That's the- - Yeah, but what would you say?

Or would you say something?

- What would you tell them?

- That's what I'm saying.

- Yeah.

- Would I say something?

- Would I?

I don't think I'd say something 'cause what is gonna change?

- Yeah, yeah.

I think that's the issue.

- If I had that chance to say something to them, what my words gonna do to change.

- I don't know how people who are serious about the governings of this country and its future are not looking at this chasm that I'm talking about and understanding that that's either going to leave us on one extreme or the other.

And when everybody gets on one side of the boat, it heals our jaws and it's subject to a rogue wave to knock it over.

- And I feel like politics are more geared towards big city stuff, you know?

People out here in the country, we just do our thing.

- And there's our fresh pork for today and our half smoked chickens.

We cook everything here fresh in-house every day.

We pull all of our pork individually too, in small batches.

And if we wouldn't eat it, we don't serve it.

So that's a pretty high standard.

- Do political divisions become a problem in this place?

- No, no one gives a (beep) who you vote for.

They care about is the pork good, is the brisket good, you know, is your sweet tea sweet enough?

That's more important to the people that come in here than it is who you're voting for.

- I mean, seems like we're pretty divided, but I mean, I saw a political map of Georgia the other day and 90% of it was red.

But you know, of course, you know, the cities were blue, you know, Augusta, Atlanta, Macon, Columbus were blue.

- I think in the recent years it's gotten a lot more divided because, you know, Georgia, I think the underlying demographics have changed, the population's grown with that.

You know, there's the influx of new ideas, new perspectives, and especially in the last two election cycles, I think it's a... You know, given Georgia is a battleground state, it's gotten quite tense and polarized.

- And that's one thing I find that is my hardcore, people like my mother, growing up were Democrats.

And she even told me, she said, "You voted Republican?"

I said, "I did."

And then when she told me, she says, "Your father's rolling over in his grave right now."

It's people like my mother, who unfortunately cannot see past a party, and she believed in that Democratic party so hard that she would condemn her own son.

And so for me, I say we have to come together.

- I just feel at this particular point, the division in this state, in our country, is at a scary point.

I've never seen, in my 67 years, I've never seen us to be this divided.

- How does the partisanship of today compare to what you saw on Capitol Hill 40 years ago?

- Well, let me give you the best example I know of.

I flew in on Air Force 1 with President Bush to land at the federal law enforcement training center to roll out his crime package.

That's where he introduced it.

Marlin Fitzwater, Dick Thornburgh, they were all on the plane.

And at the bottom of the ramp, I had a Republican opponent and the president came out and put his arm around me when we walked off the ramp, and that shook my opponent.

And he literally said in his remarks that day, "Folks, your young congressman, Lindsay Thomas, is just doing you a great job."

That's how far the non-partisanship went.

Now that was with him.

So the contrast today is just not comparable.

I talked to some good friends and they say, "Oh, I've got friends on the other side of the aisle."

But that division today is so deep.

This is the problem.

It's not the fact that there's division there, it always was there, but it runs so deep because of the partisanism in the parties and the rhetoric of today that it's hard to get through there to do what you have to do in Washington and what our whole system is based on.

Come up with a compromise that fits federal policy across the country.

- [Oliver] Everyone agrees that we are divided, but what does division look like in Georgia's communities?

- Greensboro, I think, is divided because the leaders don't look out for us, they only look out for their self or their family members.

- Are people around here, the people you know, who are more conservative, resentful of the fact that land is driving Georgia further blue?

- I can't really say we're resentful.

Like, most of us are busy, you know, living our lives and doing the things we need to do.

So it's not something that we, you know, get all down about or something.

It's more of a, oh, we discuss it and we're like, "Yeah, those guys are, you know, potentially ruining the state," but you know, people can move where they wanna move, right?

And nothing you can about it.

- Would that be the sentiment, a word like ruin, ruining the state.

- Oh yeah, definitely ruin, it's definitely bringing it down because leftist policies, they don't create anything.

They just destroy wherever they go.

Whether it's, you know, destroying the two of marriage or destroying, you know, the family.

Whether it's, you know, making up new words or making up new definitions for existing words that, you know, don't exist, right?

You know, we can't even agree on language right now, so there's no way we're gonna even have a discussion.

- There's just so much division amongst everyone.

But I think it's being kind of put on us to try to divide and I think we just gotta look bigger than what you believe in politics.

I mean, we're all human, we all bleed the same blood.

Like, it's, you know, we don't catch a lot of that down here in Macon.

We had a guy that came through town, was like the Goyim Defense League, I think, it was something like that, and he was having a protest in front of the synagogue and like, you know, putting all these nasty letters about the Jews, you know, all the bad things they've done in people's yard and went to the synagogue in town and had, like, tried to like have a little riot kind of thing going on.

And the whole town went down there and we're like, "Hell, no."

Like, "You're not doing this here."

- Man, you got violent issues, spiritual issues.

It's a lot of divisions, man, it's a lot of issues, economical issues.

We still- - Racists.

- Exactly, racial issues.

We still, as far as we came, it still feels like we're still set back as America, to be honest, - For one, we can't let it divide by our skin color.

We gotta stop racism.

- Back in the days we had people that would come by and be disrespectful because we was Black in business.

Certain people wouldn't stop by because of our race.

But now, you hardly ever see any of that, you know, if it is, it's just something that was innate in them, that was born and, you know, breeded in them.

But today we don't have that problem.

- It's very striking how people on both sides of the civil rights movement who were just absolutely in this pitched battle for what they thought the South was and what they thought America was.

They used a barbecue to their purposes.

One of the landmark court challenges of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was basically outlawing public segregation, was filed by Ollie's Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama.

- When I was a child, you would never even conceive of an interracial church.

And now almost every church in Lafayette is interracial.

I mean, it's normal now.

And it needs to be that way.

- I think, deep in all of us, there is a certain level of racism and bias, but I think it's just at this particular time, more and more people are feeling emboldened to say and do things that we might have normally held more inside and try to control ourselves in that way.

- Like, I would be honest, I don't think I have two white friends.

I don't even think I have two white friends.

I'm not anti-white, but I don't even have...

So, you know, we don't come in contact with each other.

You know, I got maybe three whites in my phone, you know, in my phone, this thing.

So, you know, I think, you know, people would exchange ideas and meet and talk to people, talk to each other.

That would go a long way in improving life instead of pointing the finger at each other.

- At what point do we say enough is enough and we really sit down and really solve the issues?

You know what I mean?

I'm not talking about the BS or the stuff to get elected.

I'm not talking about the things you need to say to look good on television.

At what point do we fix the medical issues?

When do we fix the poverty issues?

When do we fix the schooling?

When do we, you know, when do we really focus on fixing America?

You know what I mean?

- But a farmer or a logger, or anybody else who operates heavy equipment or runs any kind of machinery is going to use diesel fuel.

And that's the biggest difference because when the price of fuel goes up, our way of living starts declining quickly.

- Most of Georgia's agriculture is done by big machines, big corporate entities, and I don't mean corporation farmers, there's a lot of that, but even the individual farmer is like a corporation.

He's owned computers, he's owned big equipment, and when you buy a piece of equipment that costs half million bucks, you've gotta turn a lot of ground to make it pay for itself.

So the small farmer just can't afford that kind of equipment and can't compete.

- How does a rural voter, a rural white voter, feel about these demographic shifts?

It's a broad question, but in your observation.

- Yeah, well a lot of them, particularly the older ones, don't like it.

You know, they see the world they grew up with, the world they knew and were comfortable with, it's changing, you know, for example, again, not necessarily in their home community, but what they're seeing is they look around the state.

Well, the people are far less involved with their churches.

That's like, if you go to church, spend time in church, that bothers them.

They see attitudes changing on things like LGBT rights, which again, something they didn't grow up with and which are again, less likely to be found in a rural than an urban area.

They see within their rural community what was probably the major important, may have been a textile mill, it's not closed.

They also see that, you know, the school maybe in their town has been consolidated with one in the county seat.

So the world is changing around them in ways they don't like, you know, they would like to go back to the way their community was a generation or so ago.

Now, again, that's not gonna happen, but that's what a lot of rural folks would like to see, particularly say the older ones.

- Our world has changed so much.

I'm 71 years old, sorry y'all, I'm 71 years old and I have seen so many different things in my life.

My mother lived and never locked her door, never locked her door.

Now the first thing you do when you walk in the door is lock your house up.

That's not life.

That's being a prisoner in your own home.

We need to go back in time.

- What has been shall once again be.

I mean, let boys be boys and girls be girls, and let's just follow the rules that are laid out in the Bible.

But if you can't do that, then don't force your madness on us.

That's all we're asking as rural Georgians.

- One thing that we need to do is put God back in our country.

- Amen there.

- We've got to get God back in our country, into our schools.

There's generations of children out there now, that have no idea what a church is.

And that's a shame.

- For people watching this in Atlanta or Savannah or New York City, who don't get out of the city much, what do they not understand about the life of a rural farmer, a rural citizen in a town like yours?

- Well, there is a gap here.

And what they don't understand, I think, is just how the system works anymore.

Everybody, they've lost touch with where their food comes from, how it's done, and so that great respect for the rural communities... Look, everybody's working hard to make their own living, their own livelihood.

It's the same in the city it is out there in the countryside.

So it's just a matter of mostly of just not intentional animosity towards either one, it's just drifted away from the connections.

- I think, when we talk about the agriculture.

I grew up on a farm.

I grew up being pretty involved in that and I don't currently, I would love to get back to that, but right now it's so economically difficult.

I mean, taxes don't incentivize, you know, it's so expensive to have animals and grow crops and it's making food more expensive.

But a lot of people in the cities don't realize how difficult it is for these farmers.

- Well, I mean, so we have to acknowledge kind of the rural urban divide in the state, or the Atlanta versus the rest of the state divide in the state.

And so I think for people who live in Atlanta who see this metro region as largely a blue bubble, they have to remember that Atlanta makes up roughly half the state.

And so there's another half of the state that you have to be mindful of, right, and another half of the state that contributes a lot.

If we think about, despite the sort of importance of lots of businesses here around metro Atlanta, agriculture is the top business in the state, and so you can't have one without the other.

You need both to coexist.

- When a man on a small farm grew what they ate in the house and cured the meats and put up vegetables and plowed, even behind a mule, they were in touch with the dirt.

Even the small tractors, they smell the land.

There was a connection to it that is kind of hard to explain.

It's when you ride by a field, and this is true on a good warm summer night when things are, you hear the corn growing.

And that's an old a joke to some people.

It's not, corn grows in joints.

All of these things that you see, whether it was tobacco, whether you were picking up a candral, you were close to it.

Today it's all highly mechanized.

It is a business.

So that sector of the farming community and the rural community, then it is one strata, they're business people just like the folks in the city, but the folks who live out there live a totally different lifestyle.

- We can't eat without these farmers in rural Georgia.

And so whether we're talking about peaches or other more prevalent crops like blueberries and onions in the state, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who live and work in these industries because they are helping to feed the nation and they're certainly helping to feed Georgia.

- When I started doing this, pork was 86 cents a pound.

It's about $1.70 a pound now.

Brisket's gone up.

Insurance has doubled.

I get taxed to give someone a job.

I gotta pay employee, you know, I gotta pay taxes on taxes and everything has gone up.

Milk is gone up, cheese is up, I mean, noodles or anything I buy has gone up two to four times, sometimes five times.

So that makes it very difficult for me to sell an affordable product.

- What you gonna have tonight, brother?

- May I do the brisket sandwich?

- Right away.

- Y'all have beef ribs today?

- Yeah.

- Alright.

That's gonna be my choice.

(patrons chattering) - Thank y'all for coming in.

- Thank you.

- Absolutely, thank you.

- Name's the world (indistinct), thank you.

- [Patron] Absolutely.

- Do you want bread, Hank?

- [Oliver] Barbecue is Mr. Wardlaw's passion, but do Georgia voters use their heads or their hearts at the ballot box?

- At the end of the day, this should not be an emotional decision, right?

Who you vote for in theory is not an emotional thing.

It's a logical thing that I'm not innately going to choose something that's going to impact me for years down the road is based on an emotion.

- Yes, it's important to vote, but the most important thing is that you make an intellectual vote, that you have thought it out, that you have used your own feelings and your own values and you've decided on your own, not following somebody else because they said something on social media or whatever, that you literally truly are a vested citizen and you feel that responsibility, "Hey, I've got good mind up here, I've got good values."

- What's the point of me going out there to vote for Trump?

And they gonna choose Kim, Camilla, whatever her name.

- Kamala.

- Yeah, Kamala.

What's the point?

- [Oliver] You mean literally your vote doesn't count.

- It don't count.

And I've been saying that for years.

Our vote don't count.

- [Oliver] Do your friends and family have similar mistrust about the vote?

- I don't know what they feel, that's just my vote.

Do I vote?

Nope.

My vote don't count.

Your vote don't count and nobody vote count.

That's how I feel.

And I say that every year.

Everybody ask me, yeah, my vote Nope.

For what?

- We can't just get in our heads and say, "Hey, nothing's gonna happen.

Our vote doesn't count.

It just doesn't show up."

I mean, if you don't show up, then of course your vote won't count.

- So the odds of your vote making all the difference in the world, not likely.

Although one of my former students who went off and served several terms in the Virginia legislature, his final victory was decided by one vote.

So- - You're kidding me.

- No.

- [Ken] That's the thing, everybody's gotta realize, you know, we're all in it together, you know.

You know, it's only gonna be better if we all try.

- We gotta get rid of the us versus them.

- Yeah, how do we do that?

- Educate people.

Educate people, let them know the truth.

If they can be, if the truth can be told.

Nobody knows what the real truth is because like you said, the media's bombarded with all kind of misinformation, supposedly.

And we just, you know, hoping that, like I said, with common sense people will prevail, that the people that know what's happening will step up and do whatever they gotta do to make things right.

- Yeah, I would challenge people to do their own research, you know, you're only as good as the knowledge you have, right?

So if you're making your decisions based on bad knowledge, you're gonna end up getting bad results.

- [Ken] Stupid games, stupid prizes.

- That's exactly right.

So I just say that, you know, if you see something, you know, trust but verify.

- [Oliver] As much as Georgians feel the media might divide, barbecue could still bring us together.

- We have them from Democrats, Republican, Independent, they all come here.

But, you know, we try not to let politics overtake our business.

You know, we treat everybody fair in the way we want to be treated.

- We're all human.

We all have the same fights and battles that are just slightly different, but we have to be able to sit down and talk.

And nothing's ever gonna resolve until people lay down their own pride on both sides and be able to talk about that.

So we are divided, but I think it's less scary when you sit down and talk to people.

- To me it's, you know, there's a lot of distrust and lack of trust, misinformation, disinformation that they're all doing.

The lies coming out of all their mouths is pretty disgusting and a lot of people believe it.

And, you know, that's what's dividing us, saying people are just so evil and democracy's going to die.

You know, in the military they dehumanize people so when you go to war, it's not so bad when you're taking their life.

But when you start dehumanizing us as humans, Americans, it puts it out there and that's where you get your civil wars.

- [Oliver] Do you think people are being dehumanized?

by, By whom, by the media, by- - Yeah, the media, by the the talking heads, the repeating things.

- He's got a very good point and that's what they do is it's divide you into this group, divide you into this group and point this other group that's oppressing you or doing these things to you.

Instead of people going, sitting down and eating barbecue and going, "Oh, you want the same thing as I do?

You wanna have a good life, you wanna safe place to have your kids go to school, raise your family.

- The thing, media is really dividing us.

I think it's the politicians specifically are dividing us along with media.

- I do have a concern about that because of what happened in January four years ago.

And should it go one way, I'm hoping that once again, that we as a country can see that God is still in control and we don't fight one another 'cause this can get ugly.

That is a fear of mine.

- Yes, political discussions are toxic when a person insists on being right, that's when a discussion can be toxic.

If a person is not willing to listen or respect another opinion, that's when things get toxic.

- It's the same thing.

But the biggest law says is that the public discourse is gone.

If you're not in the camp where your loyalty lies, you're not talking with people and the other party.

It's that because it's no longer just a matter of arguments, it's total deep disagreement and anger.

And I don't see how our system of democracy works when you've got that kind of situation, the public discourse where people talk about things in places where they meet and discuss things and consider the other side of the equation.

And then it brings back an old country saying that my father had, "It's a thin slice of ham that has only one side."

So they never see the other side.

- And I think that's the biggest thing.

People get entrenched in ideological positions and view anyone outside of their ideological position, they view them as an enemy, some.

And if you think about how short a time we have on this earth, and you know, to your own ideas of why we were created to begin with.

I have mine, you have yours.

And part of mine is I was not placed here to be at odds with other human beings.

- It's important for society to spend time to think about what sets us together, what makes us united, what are the common grounds and the values we all believe in.

I think it's important for us to spend some time thinking about that.

You know, especially in a moment like the election year when there's natural forces pulling us apart.

- You know, everybody around the whole world wants the same thing except for a few that wanna manipulate for this power and a few that, you know, wanted me to play for this kind of power.

Everybody else in the middle, we're all really the damn same.

- [Oliver] How can the values of our favorite barbecue spots become accepted in society more broadly?

- Build the trust, build the respect.

And when you go to bring it up to go, "Hey, I'm here for a conversation.

I want you to challenge me, but I also want you to respect what I believe as well.

It's not a yelling battle, we want conversation."

- My dad was in Pearl Harbor when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

He was in Korea and was stationed to go to Vietnam and 20 years of service, he was at three wars.

Thank God he came out.

But it's a matter of, I think everybody should come up to their country and fight for the country.

But you don't have to fight with a gun and a battle.

You can fight for your country by providing a home, being a good citizen, being a good steward of this United States.

- If I were an adversary for this country, if I were going to attack this country, the time I would attack is when we're the most divided.

That would be my thought.

When they're divided, they can't even stand, we can't even fight together against a common enemy because we're so much separated in fighting one another or standing apart from one another, you know what I'm saying?

I need to care about you and where you are and where you live, what happens to you.

'Cause ultimately, what happens to you will trickle to happen to me at some point.

- Because if it wasn't so divided, we could have more, we could do more.

And one is multiple brains are always smarter than one brain.

Like, I don't know y'all from a can of paint, but if we wasn't so divided, I still supposed to be able to help you with a helping hand if you in need of help.

- We just got to get our communities to realize that if we'd stop the hating and start the loving, that we'd be in a lot better shape.

I know when I grew up, I grew up in South Georgia, everybody took care of everybody else.

Your neighbors took care of you and it was a... And now it's like everybody's out for themselves.

And I think that's a major problem right now.

- I have family literally that differ from me on my views.

And all I've ever tried to do is to never let them think that because I served in Congress that I know more than they do, I don't, but I know how the process works and that what is broken in my opinion, and I cannot understand why.

The true leaders in our country today don't see it their way that...

I'd like to see a president, one that somebody runs office that comes out there, and we had one independent candidate, but I'm talking about a viable candidate finally says, "We can't operate this way.

It's not good for the country and I'm gonna go up there if you help elect me and I'm gonna work across party lines and we are truly going to do what's best for the country."

- What concerns me is people who are in positions of power or who aspire to positions of power, saying irresponsible things that clearly have the potential to incite people.

But I think what irritates me more about this is people knowingly engaging in this type of insightful behavior because they think it's gonna bring short-term political gain.

That's what is exacerbating some of these divisions.

And unfortunately it could lead to situations, as we have seen happen, where people decide that they wanna try to take matters into their own hands.

And that's when people get hurt.

So if you're the source of the misinformation, it's a problem.

But also if you are a transmitter of the misinformation and you're in a reasonable position to know better, voters should be taking this into account and paying attention to it.

- [Interviewee] Everybody respects hard work and they understand if it's done correctly, the person who cooked it put a lot of time and effort into it to make it the absolute best that it possibly can be.

So that within itself brings people together.

- Do you all have hope for things to get better, both in terms of division, in terms of the direction of the country?

- I'll let you go first.

- [Oliver] Real hope, I mean, we always have hope.

- I mean, I have hope, sure.

I don't know.

I don't know, about four more years of this trajectory that we're on.

You know, if all these policies were supposed to work, why didn't they work, you know, three and a half years ago and what's making it so awesome that you're gonna change now that is gonna make it to where we're so much better off?

'Cause I don't see us being so much better off if we continue this.

That's just my opinion.

- I of course have hope, I got hope, I got prayers, I got kids.

You know what I mean, so?

If I didn't have any of those things, then what am I teaching my kids?

What am I showing my kids?

You know, I just gotta stay bright, stay focused and leave it to the people who, you know, making these decisions and hope they make good decisions.

But also trust in America.

You know, we always stand up, we always stand strong.

We always eventually come back.

Sometimes we do make stupid ass decisions, you know, Afghanistan, inflation, immigration, but we always come back and we always show up.

So things will get better, there's no doubt about it.

- You mentioned values and you mentioned that you're a father.

Do you have hope for your child's future and America's future to be better than its past?

- I think the answer has to be yes, is yes.

And I'm very hopeful that it's yes for everyone else too.

- I wanna see people come together and I just hope it get better for my kids' sake in the future.

- I understand people have had different experiences.

- Yes.

- And were raised differently, but there's some commonalities that are everlasting, I believe.

- God has brought me to where I'm at today.

That God is gonna bring my children and grandchildren and our country to where we need to be.

- We've been through, you know, the Great Depression.

We've been through the desegregation in Macon.

We've been through... - COVID?

- Yeah, COVID.

I've been through COVID.

So we've been through these crises in American political life and we've made through it.

And you just gotta keep, you know, going forward.

- Listen and respect each other.

Politics, we need to talk about it, we need more talk.

I think that's part of the issue.

I mean, it's as if we're almost afraid to talk to our neighbor about, you know, the affairs going on in this nation.

- [Oliver] How do you see that division playing out?

- At this point, I see it playing out, we have to wait and see how this election turns out and no matter which side wins, we have to respect that and we have to respect each other.

'Cause if we don't, this would be the time.

There are people that are afraid of a civil type of war, we're kind of ripe for that.

But if we can just respect and love one another as human beings, I think we can avoid that.

- [Oliver] How do we get back to togetherness?

- Just stop thinking about yourself and put others first.

- And when they're in line, I love when they meet people they didn't know, strike up a conversation and they just keep each other company all the way through the line and they'll get up here and you'll hear one of them say, "Hey, it was really good to meet you, you know, enjoyed hearing about," whatever stories they were sharing.

- [Robert] And they share tables in here.

I don't know if you saw that.

- They do, but- - People... Total strangers share tables.

"Oh, here, well, there's only three of us.

There's room for three more, sit down."

And they're, "Oh, sure."

And you walk, every table will be full and it's not the same parties.

- And I think that's part of what builds community.

But one of the other quick things that I was gonna share is sometimes they get to the register and they will buy the meal of the people they kept company with in line without telling- - Oh, really?

How nice.

- Without telling them.

- I didn't know that.

- And then these people will get up to the register and I'll be like, "Oh, this has already been paid for."

- How nice.

- And it just a sweet- - I didn't even know that.

- Friendship.

- I mean, just like this past week with these storms all over the southeast, I mean, just bringing people back together and what the values and the worlds really, what really stands and what's really important, you know, breaking all of that down and just as humans, what the basic needs of survival and what we really need and what's really important in the long run.

- It's almost like we only ever get along when there's this huge national disaster where we all kind of get together and we stop seeing, you know, the evil in each other and we have something else to focus on where it's just like, you know, life's too short, you know, let's just all get along and there's nothing, especially sitting down to a nice plate of food.

I mean, there's a reason they say breaking bread with someone.

'Cause it's been going on since the beginning of time.

- Y'all are down here at a time when our state has been hammered and we're not the only one that's been hit.

We hearing all of this tragedy.

But when I rode through some of the small towns today coming here, Nancy and I did, and I've never seen such devastation in these small towns.

It had their big old trees and their big magnolias and their big pines down all over the place.

This event is gonna change people's attitudes in a lot of ways.

It's gonna make us fearful of what's going on with the weather.

It's gonna make us fearful from now on having a big shade tree in my front yard that the South is famous for, sitting on the front porch in the shade.

There'll be some...

I mean, I could elaborate on that all day because that's what's personal to me.

But the one thing that I have seen that I think is important are people talking about helping each other in the communities again.

And so, as I said earlier, that proves that this chasm doesn't go on forever.

There's still hope there.

There's still good in people.

And as long as that goodness comes out, there's still a chance that this thing will come around somewhere.

- There's gotta be more, frankly, speaking of love and you know, the values that we as Americans all believe it, you know, rather than focusing on what sets us apart and what's different.

- I work with a lady that I admire greatly.

She is a Cambodian refugee from the Cambodian War back, I guess, was it in the '60s?

We're about the age, yes.

She will tell me stories about being in a rice field and having to eat snails to survive.

That's communism.

They escaped communism.

She's here, she's a professional woman.

Her husband's a professional.

Her children are in medical school, one's in residency.

She is an example of what all Americans should be as far as being proud of this country, proud of the opportunities in this country and the system that's set up to make that possible.

- I don't care what side of the alley you're on, you want to be able to afford your groceries and be able to purchase a home and be able to have the American dream that, you know, has been kind of like falling off, you know, toward lately.

So, like, everyone wants that.

So, like, we need to figure out a way that we can just, you know, all enjoy the American dream no matter what your beliefs are.

- Do you have kids?

- I got three kids.

- What do you teach them to try to make them people who are gonna help make society better and not these people who you're seeing aren't helping other people?

What kind of values are most important to you?

- That I try to teach my kids?

- Yeah, that you live by and that you wanna teach your kids.

- It always best to give than receive.

Help, go out, talk to people.

Get to know people no matter what your skin color is.

We all brothers and sisters up under God eyes.

That's how I raise my kids.

- [Oliver] What hopes do you have for their future?

- What hopes, I hope my son be the president one day.

- I seen the Statue of Liberty and cried.

It was so beautiful to me.

I don't think people realize it anymore.

You don't see the patriotism there that we had or I had growing up.

- There's one great quote that I've used many times is Alexis de Tocqueville.

You remember the French historian - [Oliver] Democracy in America?

- He came over here and the French were very intrigued with this country's rise to its greatness.

De Tocqueville said, "I came to America, and I searched for her greatness," and this is a paraphrase, "in her mighty armadas and I did not find it there.

I searched for greatness, even in her teaming agricultural lands.

I did not find it there.

I did not find America's greatness in her industrial might or her matchless constitution.

It was not until I went into the heartlands and into the churches and the communities of this country and saw what it was that makes America great.

She's great because she's good and if she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."

Everybody ought to think about it in that way.

- [Oliver] I saw evidence of America's goodness everywhere I went and in everyone I met.

As Kevin Houck told me, we have to trust in America.

We always stand up.

We always stand strong.

Sometimes we do make stupid decisions, but we always come back.

There's no doubt about it.

(upbeat music)