The world is undergoing profound change. For many Americans, this change is intense, overwhelming, and confusing. Many don’t recognize it’s happening due to the pro-US hegemony and empire propaganda blitz they’re fed everyday coupled with the economic and social alienation of material reality in the “USA.” Yet it’s still happening.

China, a formerly oppressed and over-exploited semi-colony, is now the most advanced and important economy in the world. Russia and Iran have destroyed the illusion of US-NATO military supremacy. It won’t be too long before the shrinking US capitalist economy and its tendency to plunge into crisis reaches a breaking point. What that breaking point is, no one knows. The scary part is that short of a revolution in the US, it will be a nuclear-armed Epstein class of sociopathic reacting to this breaking point.

Humanity faces burning existential questions which are really “choices” one must make when confronting a declining US empire. These include but aren’t limited to: barbarism or collective prosperity, endless war or world peace, revolution or nuclear/global catastrophe. By themselves, these questions are so overwhelming that they whither away in abstraction. They must be as personal as they are geopolitical to become truly relevant.

Let’s zoom in on relationships. Relationships are the basis of geopolitics and political economy. Relationships to national development, economic class, and political power quite literally shape the world we live in. US empire’s parasitic relationship to the planet wreaks havoc on the majority of people who inhabit it. Working class people, for example, sell their labor in exchange for the means to (barely, not really) survive, enriching the capitalist who buys it. Israel’s genocidal and colonial relationship to Palestine fuels both nightmarish conditions of death and destruction and a simultaneous yearning for freedom for Palestinians and their allies.

Relationships also fuel political and personal transformation. The bond of national unity against foreign aggressors such as what we’ve seen with Iran holds the power to push back US empire. International solidarity between nations has brought us historic acts of heroism such as Yemeni blockade of Israel during the Gaza genocide. From 1975 to 1991, the besieged Cuba sent 400,000 troops to Angola to break the back of Apartheid. Global change, and revolution, begins with relationships.

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships of late due to a number of losses I’ve experienced since 2017. First, my father died. Then two giants of the anti-imperialist and radical left so influential to me, Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford, died in 2019 and 2021 respectively. Then I lost my wife’s father in 2023, a therapist to illness (still alive), and just this month a former teacher with whom I shared an 18-year relationship.

All of these men pushed me in one way or another to deepen my understanding of the world and to build relationships in it so that I sustain my love of humanity. Some looked over my writing, others gave me advice from their histories in social movements, and, in the case of my father and therapist, bore witness to my lowest moments emotionally and spiritually. Some, like the teacher, did all of the above.

Negative relationships can be incredibly influential in pushing humans to evolve. Of course, abusive and destructive relationships should not be trivialized for the immense pain and suffering they cause. But today I was reflecting on one I rarely return to in adulthood: my high school basketball coach. I had hoop dreams back then and worked incredibly hard to hone my craft. However, his scathing assumptions of me being “too soft” , “scary” and affluent (this was definitely not true) greatly impacted my play. I always tell people I was about 50-70 percent of the player I could have been in large part because I just didn’t respond well to coercive and intense punishment.

He would bench me in my final game of my high school career, the cherry on top of a horrifying relationship with someone who was I was supposed to be able to look to for guidance. Why was I benched? Despite being a lethal shooter and top scorer on the team that year, I was benched because I was a few minutes late to the bus to the game after my best friend and teammate at the time did what teenagers sometimes do (hooking up with his girlfriend instead of focusing on the time). I was heart broken. I fell into deep depression. The game, and the world that I knew, was dead.

For years I held deep resentments toward all involved. To my friend who had broken my trust and out me in that situation. To my coach who once again disappointed me and instead of supporting me, punished me in the cruelest way. And to the entire game of basketball for being dictated and dominated by people more interested in stepping on the backs of others than lifting each other up.

Today, I think differently. If none of this happened and I played in the playoff game we lost by three points and scored four or more to win it (a high likelihood), perhaps I would have become a different person. Maybe I would have tried to pursue college basketball at some level and spent most of my time on traveling, practicing, and training. Maybe my interest and passion for world politics and the global struggle for peace and justice never becomes a reality. Maybe I exhaust my basketball potential and then find a job in some profession where my primary focus is on me, myself, and I alone.

What I am trying to say is that there is gratitude to be found in pain. I don’t forgive my coach for what he did, but I do thank him. I thank him for freeing me from the chains of a game that was no longer therapeutic and good for me. I thank him because with this freedom came the opportunity to become a global citizen that dedicates mind and body to the existential questions of our time. I thank him because I am far more proud of me than I could imagine being if I didn’t do what I do, and if I hadn’t built the relationships with a massive audience and global connections who sustain my drive to keep going.

I wonder what he might say to me now. Would he call me “soft” and have the courage to look at an adult me in the eyes and spew the same, tired, power tripping bullsh*t? How would he react if I explained to him what the multipolar world is trying to build and the unipolar order is trying to destroy? And how it all connects to the indignities that our poor, incarcerated, terrorized, and exploited people right here on US shores suffer? Would he apologize for the decisions he made and how he treated me?

These questions will never be answered. There is too much to do. A new world order is upon us and it’s a break from the past, a centuries-long process of the enslaved and downtrodden standing up and building a better future. To take part in this, we must understand our past and then break from it too. We must build new relationships to ourselves and to others dedicated to the goal of world peace and common, collective prosperity. And we must work tirelessly to break from old relationships such as allegiances to the “exceptionalism” myths of US empire and the elite figureheads who propagate them.

Along the way, we will say goodbye to loved ones. We will say hello to new ones. And we will navigate the pain that humans operating roles in an unjust order inflict upon us. The geopolitical is personal, and the personal is geopolitical.

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