Note: This is the third and for now final position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our final position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. We are entirely serious.

We affirm karaoke as one of the last remaining civic rituals in which strangers meet without preconditions and leave with fewer barriers than they arrived with. A microphone passed between an office worker, an American traveler, an Indian engineer, an older Japanese gentleman, a young woman finding her voice again — this is not entertainment alone. It is a brief suspension of hierarchy, suspicion, and self-protection. In these small rooms people remember how easy it is to be together.

Karaoke is not mandatory, nor do we idealize it. We simply encourage every citizen — once in a while, or for the first time — to step into a space where age, gender, profession, and political commitments dissolve for the length of a verse. It is a civic practice hiding in plain sight: a low-cost, low-risk release valve healthier than most vices and far more generous in its returns.

Society is fraying at the edges. But give people one Tom Petty track, one “What’s Up” howl, one chance to sing badly but sincerely, and cohesion begins again — not through policy, but through the ordinary bravery of shared song. The Splinter Fraction supports public encouragement and, where possible, public subsidy of these communal singing rooms, as engines of ease and democratic belonging.

Karaoke will not fix the world. But it will bring us back into easy congress with one another, which is more than most programs can claim.