Ever since the Metro Nashville Airport Authority Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a rule change that would allow the renaming of Nashville's airport to honor Dolly Parton, I can’t stop thinking about how good it felt to watch the government just… work.
Ask most Americans what they think of Washington right now and you'll get some version of the same answer: It's stuck. Congress can't agree on a budget. Statehouses split along predictable lines. Every headline seems to end in a fight.
And then, this month, something almost nobody predicted happened in Nashville. A Republican governor proposed it. A Democratic mayor backed it. A city council passed it unanimously. An airport authority board voted 6-0 in favor.
It sounds small. It isn't.
The birth of a petition
The Change.org petition behind the renaming of Nashville International Airport after Dolly Partonstarted in January 2025, by two Tennessee residents who simply thought their state's most beloved daughter deserved the honor. When a reporter asked Dolly about it herself, she laughed it off as "probably more of a joke than anything."
Then, on Aug. 25, she passed awayand America grieved a woman who represented the best of American values: kindness, generosity, a strong work ethic and fierce pride for where you came from. And that’s when the petition became a movement.
Tens of thousands of people from across the country, who had never met each other and who almost certainly disagree on most things, signed in the days that followed. The petition crossed 175,000 signatures. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, called it fitting that the state's airport "bear the name of our state's favorite daughter." Nashville's Democratic mayor Freddie O'Connell agreed before the governor even finished the sentence.
By the time the airport authority's board took its official vote on the matter, there wasn't a single "no" in the room.
This is something we don’t hear about often: People from different backgrounds coming together on shared issues. There was no task force. No consultant ran a messaging campaign to bridge the partisan divide. People just showed up, one signature at a time, because shared values united them.
Change.org petition advocating for the renaming of the Nashville International Airport in honor of Dolly Parton. " id="91774227007">
Different people coming together with shared values
This kind of thing doesn't make headlines, but it happens constantly. Every day on Change.org, people who vote differently and worship differently find themselves signing the same petition, standing together on the local issues that actually shape their everyday lives.
There's a lesson in that, and it's bigger than the Dolly Parton Airport: American civic life has quietly split into two tracks. One is the track we watch on cable news. It's gridlocked, performative, allergic to compromise. The other is the one that actually moves things, town by town, cause by cause, almost entirely off camera. It doesn't ask anyone to change their politics. It just asks them to show up for something they care about, next to whoever else happens to care about it too.
Dolly Parton spent her career singing to everybody, never picking a side and somehow ending up beloved by all of them anyway. It's fitting that the last thing she'd unite the country around, without even trying, was an airport terminal in Nashville. It's also a pretty good preview of what's still possible when people are given a place to just say yes together.
Nashville International Airport hasn't officially changed its name yet. But here’s what did change: the assumption that Americans can't agree on anything.
Kajal Odedra is the Vice President of Communications at Change.org, the world's largest platform for social change. She leads the global communications team and is also the author of "Do Something: Activism for Everyone."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How the airport's Dolly Parton name change unified a city | Opinion
