Melania smiled at Justin Trudeau.

Not just smiled. Beamed.

At the 2019 G7 summit, there was Melania—whose poker face had inspired years of press coverage—leaning toward the handsome Canadian prime minister, eyes closed, awaiting a kiss on the cheek.

My theory was that Trump never got over it.

I invented a petty personal grievance to explain an irrational act of public policy.

Today, the question isn’t whether Donald Trump holds grudges. It’s what happens to the rest of us when the government of the United States starts acting on them.

From the 51st State to Lake America

In 2025, Trump’s fixation on Canada brought more tariffs and demands that it become the 51st state. A week ago, he escalated again, announcing an additional 50 percent tariff on $20 billion of Canadian goods.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has described the American approach as an attempt to “subordinate” Canada—to treat it as though “Canada is a subsidiary of the United States.”

Canada refused.

So this week, retaliation became ridiculous.

Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to begin calling Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

In doing so, Trump is erasing a Wendat Indigenous name—Ontari’io, “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”—that predates both nations.

Trump has always understood the power of trolling, especially when there are things he would rather Americans weren’t talking about: high prices, an unresolved war with Iran, and the consequences of his own tariffs.

Canadians are using the provocation to reinforce their national identity, pushing back with boycotts and memes. One viral meme rechristens the waters between our countries the “Strait of Our Moose.”

But this time, Trump has handed Canadians another symbol around which to rally.

Trump the troll is finding himself out-trolled by a united neighbor. That may be another measure of his weakening political power.

The Strait of Our Moose

Beyond the meme war lies the hard reality of geography.

To travel between Lake Ontario and the upper Great Lakes, ships must bypass Niagara Falls through the Welland Canal—27 miles of Canadian territory and eight Canadian locks.

Canada controls the route. It could use that control to raise shipping costs, but for nearly seven decades, both nations have relied on cooperation.

Trump’s tariffs and lake-renaming stunt test that restraint, exposing a simple truth:

Trump can pretend to own the lake. But Canada controls the canal.

And just as Iran has used the Strait of Hormuz for leverage, Canada has leverage of its own.

Retribution Comes Home

The Trump White House’s punitive impulse doesn’t stop at the border. I live in Colorado, where we have been a target.

In 2024, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters was convicted on seven criminal counts for breaching her county’s election system while pursuing false claims about the 2020 election. Peters became a Trump cause célèbre; he demanded her release and threatened Colorado with “harsh measures.”

Then, on May 15, Governor Jared Polis made what I believe was a serious political miscalculation. He commuted Peters’s nine-year sentence, citing its severity for a first-time, nonviolent offender and denying any deal with the White House.

Weeks later, Peters was in the Oval Office with Trump, who publicly took credit for her release, while Peters continued casting doubt on American elections.

Three months later, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser uncovered something Polis didn’t have when he made that decision: what his office calls a “smoking gun.”

A December 15, 2025 email showed a White House deputy assistant summoning officials from five federal agencies to a mandatory “Brainstorm Call,” instructing them to “come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.”

What followed matched the mandate. Hundreds of millions in transportation and energy grants were canceled or reduced, disaster assistance was delayed, safety-net programs were threatened, and the administration moved against the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

We now know something Polis didn’t when he granted Peters clemency: while Trump was publicly demanding mercy for Peters, his White House was privately assembling federal agencies to consider ways to punish her state.

And a state is ultimately just people.

Transportation funding doesn’t pave a Democratic road or a Republican road. Disaster assistance doesn’t rebuild a Democratic house or a Republican house. Food assistance doesn’t feed a blue-state child. It helps Americans.

Retribution isn’t particularly good at distinguishing its intended target from everyone standing nearby. So what do Americans get from a White House focused on retribution?

Higher prices. Failing federal agencies. Communities hit by disasters waiting for federal help. Allies becoming adversaries.

And sometimes a new name for a lake.

Melania Smiled

No one knows why Donald Trump seems so fixated on Canada. Maybe it’s trade. Maybe he believes a country with one-tenth our population should simply do what he tells it to do.

Or maybe Melania smiled at Justin Trudeau.

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime attacking people he believes have crossed him. Retribution isn’t an occasional impulse. It is part of how he understands power.

The presidency gives that impulse something Trump never possessed as a businessman or a reality television star: the enormous power of the United States government—power meant to build things, protect people, strengthen institutions, and solve problems that individuals and states cannot solve alone.

Retribution produces something else. It may make the president feel better.

But what does it do for the rest of us?

Melania smiled.

America pays.

Gift Photo of Balmy Beach, Lake Ontario

He should be more worried about becoming a Smoot.

Having lived in Cambridge for 25 years, I’ve walked across the Mass Ave bridge on numerous occasions, following its famously peculiar unit of measurement: the Smoot.

In 1958, MIT fraternity brothers measured the bridge using a five-foot-seven-inch pledge named Oliver Smoot as their ruler. Their final measurement: 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear.

Oliver Smoot went on to become chairman of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization.

Then there is the other Smoot.

Senator Reed Smoot put his name on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, one of the most infamous pieces of economic legislation in American history.

One Smoot became a unit for measuring a bridge.

The other became a measure of what can happen when government badly miscalculates an economy.

Donald Trump is using a remnant of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley law to wage a trade war against Canada, imposing a 50 percent tariff on nearly $20 billion of Canadian goods.

Those tariffs will hurt Canadians.

They will also hurt American businesses and American consumers.

Which gets us back to the first Smoot.

What exactly are we measuring?

The Scale of the Mistake

On paper, Trump’s calculation may look easy.

The United States economy is roughly a dozen times larger than Canada’s. Canada sends around three-quarters of its exports to us. We send a much smaller share of ours to them.

Measure the relationship that way and Canada looks hopelessly overmatched.

But economies aren’t measured only by size—and leverage isn’t measured only by balance sheets.

Trump assumes that sheer economic asymmetry guarantees compliance. He looks at Canada’s dependence on the American market and figures national pride is a luxury a smaller neighbor can’t afford to flex.

But Trump has been making this mistake for more than a year. In March 2025, as he threatened to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, he offered Canadians a way out: become America’s “cherished Fifty First State” and, he said, “all Tariffs, and everything else” would disappear.

It was a profound misreading of what happens when you back a sovereign neighbor into a corner.

I saw the backlash myself. Traveling through Canada last April and May, I saw Canadian flags everywhere. This one was planted on a remote beach on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island.

Trump saw economic dependence.

Canadians saw their independence.

When Trump says he is making another country pay, Americans should check the receipt. The Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee estimates that American consumers paid more than $231 billion in tariff costs during just the first 12 months of Trump’s second term—about $1,745 for the average American family. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that nearly 90 percent of that economic burden fell on American businesses and consumers, not foreign exporters.

Canada presents an especially strange target. America produces enormous quantities of oil, but refineries in the Upper Midwest depend heavily on Canadian crude. Canadian hydropower helps supply the Northeast. And nowhere is the problem clearer than automobiles, where parts move back and forth across the border through deeply integrated supply chains.

Trump sees a border.

The economy sees a supply chain.

The question isn’t whether Canada will suffer from a trade war. It’s whether making Canadians suffer—and uniting them in fierce political retaliation—makes Americans better off.

That’s a very different measurement.

Plus or Minus an Ear

Oliver Smoot’s ridiculous measurement included something Trump’s economic calculations often seem to lack:

A margin of error.

Plus or minus an ear.

Trump imposed his new Canadian tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a remnant of Smoot-Hawley.

Section 338 gives a president authority to impose additional duties of as much as 50 percent when another country is discriminating against American commerce.

For nearly a century, no president used it.

Trump did.

Canada hasn’t capitulated.

It has retaliated.

The President Trump Doesn’t Want to Become

Which brings us back to Herbert Hoover.

On June 17, at the G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters:

“The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

The date was almost impossibly appropriate.

Exactly 96 years earlier, on June 17, 1930, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

Trump has suggested Hoover caused the Great Depression.

He didn’t.

Neither did Smoot-Hawley.

The Depression was already underway. But Smoot-Hawley made a terrible situation worse, helping provoke retaliation against American exports.

Canada was among the countries that retaliated.

But the more interesting question isn’t whether Trump is becoming another Hoover. It’s whether he is creating a category of economic mistake all his own.

Mistaking Power for Leverage

There is a pattern here.

Trump looks at America’s enormous economic power and assumes that it automatically gives him leverage over countries that are smaller, poorer or more dependent on us.

Canada needs the American market.

Therefore Canada will capitulate.

But the ability to hurt another country is not the same thing as the ability to make that country do what you want.

The miscalculation isn’t limited to Canada.

By mid-June, Moody’s Analytics estimated that the six-month war Trump started with Iran had already cost American consumers and taxpayers $132 billion. Iran still hasn’t capitulated. Now Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is promising an “economic D-Day”—threatening countries that continue doing business with Iran with economic retaliation unless they cut ties with Tehran.

The calculation is familiar: America is bigger. America is richer. America can inflict more pain. Eventually, everyone else will give in.

Trump measures how much pain America can inflict without adequately measuring how much comes back—or whether the pain accomplishes what he intended.

What’s in a Name?

Which brings us back to names.

Today, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

But Ontario wasn’t named by Canada. The name predates the country by centuries, deriving from the Indigenous peoples who lived around the lake.

Trump is renaming an Indigenous body of water shared with Canada to punish a Canadian province that inherited its name.

Even the name he is changing isn’t what he seems to think it is.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Oliver Smoot never intended for his name to become a unit of measurement.

Reed Smoot probably never imagined that nearly a century later his name would remain shorthand for a disastrous exercise in protectionism.

Herbert Hoover certainly never wanted his name to become synonymous with economic calamity.

History decides these things.

Names become words.

Words acquire meanings their owners never intended.

Donald Trump worries that history will remember him as another Hoover.

Perhaps he should worry about becoming the first Trump.

A Trump.

What Americans will call a self-inflicted economic wound in the future.

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Gift Photo

The Loyalsock Creek looked west from Patrick’s Rock.

The swindlers claimed their cloth could not be seen by certain people. There was, of course, no cloth. But admitting you couldn’t see it came with such a cost that the ruler and everyone around him pretended they could.

Five hundred years later, Hans Christian Andersen borrowed the story and made one important change.

In Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, published in 1837, the imaginary cloth was invisible to anyone who was stupid or unfit for his position.

The Emperor couldn’t admit he saw nothing.

Neither could his ministers.

Eventually, an entire city stood along the street praising the magnificent clothes worn by a naked Emperor.

Until a little boy said what everyone could see:

“But he hasn’t got anything on.”

Nearly 700 years after that story was first told, apparently we still need the little boy.

Last weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff volunteered for the job.

“Enough is enough,” Ossoff told a crowd in Atlanta, contrasting Trump’s conduct with the reality faced by American sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the war with Iran.

“He golfs and trades stocks,” Ossoff said of Trump. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace.”

Natalie is Natalie Harp.

Until Ossoff mentioned her, most Americans probably had no idea who she was. Harp is a 35-year-old West Wing aide whom The New York Times describes as Trump’s “utmost gatekeeper”—a “one-woman conduit of information” operating outside the usual chain of command.

Nicknamed “the human printer,” Harp follows Trump with a portable printer, supplying him with a curated stream of social-media posts, news stories and other information.

Seven hundred years ago, there was an imaginary loom. Today there is an actual printer.

Much of the reaction on the right immediately turned Ossoff’s reference to Harp into speculation about a personal relationship. But that misses the point entirely.

This isn’t about sex; it’s about vanity, lies, and the machinery of flattery.

The Emperor in Andersen’s story desperately wants to believe the magnificent clothes are real. His vanity makes the deception possible, and everyone around him discovers that affirming the fiction is safer than challenging it.

Vanity creates an appetite for flattery, and people close to power learn precisely how to feed it.

That’s what makes Harp’s role worthy of attention. It’s not that she travels with the president. It’s the information she reportedly puts in front of him.

What happens when the President of the United States receives an unvetted flow of information, outside the usual chain of command, from someone whose role includes feeding his appetite for affirmation?

That question matters profoundly when American service members are in harm’s way.

Instead of answering the question, Trump’s defenders attacked the person asking it.

White House communications director Steven Cheung responded by calling Ossoff the “biggest cuck loser in politics” and accusing him of hating the country.

The ministers in The Emperor’s New Clothes can see perfectly well that there is nothing on the loom. The lie survives because everyone shares an incentive to protect the illusion.

The little boy breaks the spell simply by saying what everyone else can already see.

Jon Ossoff played that part in Atlanta. But the rest of us have been assigned a role, too. We are the people standing in the street.

In Andersen’s story, after the child speaks, the crowd acknowledges the truth. The Emperor hears them, suspects they’re right—and keeps walking. His attendants keep right on pretending to carry a nonexistent train.

Today, the printers hum, the courtiers shout from cable shows and social media feeds, still pretending, while American service members live with the consequences.

But unlike the crowd in Andersen’s story, we have more power than simply shouting from the street.

We can believe our own eyes, and vote.

In Greek myth, Tartarus is the deep abyss of punishment for those who grievously offended the gods. It is less a place of flames than of fitting torments: punishments shaped to the offender’s transgression.

I should know. As I recall, I stole ambrosia and nectar from the gods and shared them with mortals. For that offense, I was condemned to stand in water that receded whenever I bent to drink, beneath fruit that withdrew whenever I reached.

For millennia, I believed I was alone in this fate.

Until now.

There is a man above—still flesh, still breathing, — who walks the Earth in a gilded version of my torment. President Trump is blessed with power, wealth, and legions of followers, yet cursed with an appetite that can never be satisfied.

Cabinet secretaries praise him. Members of Congress seek his blessing. Corporate leaders make pilgrimages to his office. The New York Times reported he took in $2.2 billion in income last year alone.

And still he reaches. For what?

Maggie Haberman, who has chronicled Trump for years, told Ezra Klein she sees a president increasingly consumed by permanence: the ballroom, the Kennedy Center, and now, a colossal triumphal arch. When asked whom the scale model on his desk was for, he offered a simple, one-word answer:

“Me.”

Ah. Now we are speaking my language.

Trump has spent a lifetime putting his name on things: towers, casinos, golf courses, hotels, a university, a social network. But names on buildings can be removed. His businesses tend to fail. Elections end. Presidents leave office.

Stone promises something different. Stone promises permanence. Haberman puts the question driving his obsession this way: “What can I do that cannot be taken away?”

There, mortals, is the curse.

I have spent eternity reaching for fruit I cannot taste. Trump has spent a lifetime reaching for something he cannot secure: a guarantee that the world will remember him exactly as he wishes to be remembered.

And so he builds.

Yet one detail about this particular monument troubles even me: its placement.

Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch would rise at Memorial Circle, just outside Arlington National Cemetery—overshadowing the final resting place of more than 400,000 service members and veterans. NPR reported on veterans and military families objecting to the arch. One man with seven relatives buried there offered a warning:

“I hope those of you foisting it on us will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those 400,000.”

(A section of Arlington National Cemetery taken on May 28, 2026)

Ghosts? Now you have my attention. Allow an old resident of the underworld to offer the president some advice: Be careful which dead you disturb.

The men and women buried at Arlington cannot object to construction cranes, nor can they testify before commissions. But the dead have long memories. And someday, Mr. President, you will join us.

When you arrive, do not expect the reception you receive in the Oval Office. There will be no Cabinet secretaries competing to flatter you, no billionaires presenting you with awards. The American warriors whose graves your arch overshadowed will not line the road to hail you.

They will be waiting to scorn you.

They knew the difference between commanding sacrifice and making one; between having your name carved into stone and earning a true place in memory; between being saluted because of the office you hold and being honored long after you leave it.

I have watched mortals attempt this for thousands of years. Kings erected statues of themselves. Emperors built arches to celebrate their own victories. Some of the stone survived. Their legacy did not.

That is the flaw in Trump’s quest. Stone can crumble, and names can be erased. But what cannot be taken away is the truth of how you lived.

He already possesses nearly everything a mortal could desire. He is wealthy, famous, and twice elected president. He can summon senators and titans of industry to his desk at will. Yet every Truth Social tribute demands another. Every golf tournament somehow requires him to win another trophy. Every room he enters must remind him he is the most important person in it.

The cruel genius of Tartarus is that the gods do not deny us our desires—they surround us with them. Trump’s pool is filled with power—and, fittingly, algae. His branches bend with praise. And still, he reaches.

Perhaps the arch will be built. Perhaps generations of Americans will walk beneath it and ask who erected it. But Trump cannot command history’s verdict. Greatness cannot be commissioned. Respect cannot be renamed into existence. A monument tells future generations only that a man had the power to build it; it cannot tell them what to think of him.

That judgment belongs to them.

He can command armies but not admiration. He can demand loyalty but not love. He can build monuments but cannot dictate their meaning. He can carve his name anywhere except where he wants it most: as a great man of history.

I once thought my punishment was unusually inventive. Now I watch this president from below and wonder if the gods have outdone themselves. They have given him wealth beyond need, power beyond imagination. They have withheld only one thing:

Enough.

He is president again. And still, he is starving.

This essay is about the latter.

Last week, while watching Senator Bernie Moreno punctuate his questioning of Dr. Anthony Fauci with the F-word before a Senate committee, I found myself thinking about a conversation Bernie and I had more than seven years ago—before COVID, before he entered the Senate.

In March 2019, my late friend Nick Mitropoulos introduced us. Nick knew Bernie through Harvard Kennedy School circles. Before introducing us, Nick described Bernie as a thoughtful businessman who had ambitions toward public life. He thought Bernie might be interested in a project Larry Andersen and I were developing. We spoke on April 12.

Larry, a Boston based videographer, and I were inspired to create a new kind of reality television—one that might help heal the growing polarization in America rather than deepen it.

By the time I spoke with Bernie, we had already filmed two groups of ordinary Americans over two weekends—one of Gen X voters in rural western Massachusetts and another of Millennials in Chicago. We weren’t looking for moderates. Each group was evenly divided between Americans who strongly disapproved of Donald Trump and those who strongly approved of him. We recruited participants who rated Trump at the extremes—0 to 2 or 8 to 10 on a ten-point scale. We wanted the room to reflect America’s deepest political divide, not blur it.

Working with Carolyn Lukensmeyer, the founding executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, we developed what I came to call a “conversation choreography”—a sequence of conversations that would keep twelve strangers with profound political differences together for forty-eight hours.

We designed the conversation choreography not knowing that strangers on Friday would leave on Sunday listening to one another with curiosity.

By Sunday afternoon, Jeff Avery, one of the participants, had invited everyone to reunite three weekends later for a barbecue at his home on Cape Cod. Seven returned. The other four wanted to be there but had unavoidable conflicts.

That’s when Larry and I realized we had the beginnings of a show.

(Filming the Gen X cast in western Massachusetts in September 2018.)

One of the early exercises in our conversation choreography was designed to reveal the political divide already present in the room.

(The Millennial cast in Chicago.)

We asked each participant two questions: What was the moment in your lifetime when you were most proud to be an American? And what was the moment when you were least proud?

I expected the first question would divide the room between Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

It didn’t.

Seven of the twelve Gen X participants chose the weeks after 9/11—not because of the attacks themselves, but because Americans came together and showed up for one another.

One chose the day Osama bin Laden was killed.

One chose Donald Trump’s election.

Three chose Barack Obama’s election.

Later, reflecting on the moment when he had been least proud to be an American, Joe Thibodeau, a police officer from Boston’s North Shore who had worked in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, found himself remembering not the tragedies themselves, but what happened afterward.

As Joe searched for words, Tiziana Dearing, the host, gently interrupted:

“Unity without tragedy.”

Joe smiled.

“Yeah. There you go.”

So did we.

The phrase became the subtitle of our first PBS documentary.

In June 2019, we started a conversation with Susan Zirinsky, then president of CBS News. By the end of August she had decided to pass.

Rather than abandon the idea, we partnered with American Public Television and condensed fifty-five hours of footage into a one-hour documentary.

Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy was released almost exactly a year after Bernie and I spoke and at the start of the pandemic.

A few weeks before, Governor Mike DeWine made Ohio one of the first states in the nation to close schools and dramatically slow public life as COVID spread.

Then something happened that is easy to forget today.

Governor DeWine didn’t simply lead one of the nation’s earliest responses to COVID-19. He also believed Ohio needed help remembering that Americans could still recognize one another’s shared humanity.

In May 2020, as Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy began airing on PBS, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine sent the following letter to Ohio’s public television stations encouraging them to broadcast the documentary over Memorial Day weekend.

Read it carefully.

It captures a bipartisan moment in Ohio’s civic life that has largely disappeared from our political memory.

At almost the same moment, Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Tom Mihaljevic stood beside President Trump at the White House. He praised Governor DeWine’s early response, thanked both the state and federal governments, and spoke about collaboration rather than blame.

For a brief moment, our subtitle—Unity Without Tragedy—looked possible.

It didn’t happen. The pandemic accelerated the cultural and political wars.

History is fixed.

Political memory is not.

The events of 2020 cannot be changed. But the stories we tell about those events—and the people we choose to celebrate, condemn, or blame—shape how future generations understand both the pandemic and themselves.

Remembering is never a passive act; it is one of democracy’s most important civic responsibilities.

That doesn’t mean we should stop asking hard questions about the pandemic.

But there is a difference between remembering with integrity and remembering for performance.

There is a difference between oversight and theater.

As I watched the hearing unfold, I couldn’t help remembering the man I spoke with in April 2019.

The Bernie Moreno Nick introduced me to was thoughtful and curious about an Ohio project that asked ordinary citizens to stay in the room with one another long enough to discover something unexpected.

The Bernie Moreno I watched last week seemed engaged in a very different enterprise.

Governor DeWine and Dr. Mihaljevic chose collaboration in public, in the middle of a crisis, without knowing how history would remember them.

Senator Moreno chose to perform a public confrontation years later, long after the crisis had passed, knowing exactly how the social media clips would circulate.

During the hearing, Senator Moreno linked his decision to run for office to a specific moment during the pandemic—a woman arrested at an Ohio middle school football game for refusing to wear a mask. Recalling that to Dr. Fauci, he said:

“It was about six years ago today that I decided I’m going to give up my businesses, sell them all, run for office, run for United States Senate… Here I am sitting in front of you six years later, saying who the f— do you think you were for doing that?”

That surprised me.

In 2019, Nick had described Bernie to me as someone considering a future in public life, and nothing in our April conversation suggested otherwise. When Moreno formally launched his Senate campaign in 2023, there was no mention of COVID. Instead, he spoke about inflation, immigration, and challenging career politicians. The football game story emerged only last week, in the hearing’s spotlight.

Americans learned little from that hearing that will help us prepare for the next pandemic.

They learned a great deal about how political theater works in the age of social media.

Democracy depends on many things—free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and the peaceful transfer of power.

I would add one more.

A people capable of remembering with integrity.

Watch the Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy trailer narrated by Dan Rather

Now he is proposing something far more intimate.

This week in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece and a New York Times interview, Zuckerberg outlined his vision of what he calls personalized superintelligence. He argues that each of us should have an AI tailored to our own values, ambitions, relationships, and needs—a future built on “individual empowerment,” “invention,” and a healthy “balance of power.”

It is an appealing vision.

It also raises a question his opinion piece never asks.

What happens when the company that monetized attention proposes to monetize attachment?

Zuckerberg has been preaching in the same tent for years. Only the sermon changes.

Each new sermon has two audiences. One is the public. The other is investors. Every new vision explains not only where technology is headed, but why Meta should lead—and profit from—the journey.

In 2019, the sermon was free expression. Then it became the metaverse. Today it is personalized superintelligence.

The vocabulary changes.

The underlying message does not.

Meta’s preferred business model is presented not simply as commercially successful, but as the direction in which history itself is moving.

Artificial intelligence may become one of humanity’s greatest tools. Personalized AI could help us learn, create, solve problems, and live healthier lives. Precisely because Zuckerberg’s vision deserves serious consideration, it also deserves careful examination.

Trust, But Verify

This is not Meta’s first promise.

Facebook promised to bring the world closer together. Instagram promised authentic self-expression. The metaverse promised richer human connection.

Each vision contained genuine possibility. Each also encountered the same commercial reality: a business model optimized to maximize engagement.

In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harm suffered by a young woman who became addicted to their platforms after beginning to use them as a child. During the trial, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta had moved too slowly to identify underage users.

Meta’s own research documented harms to teenage mental health, while reporting revealed advertising tools capable of targeting adolescents during moments of emotional vulnerability.

None of this proves that personalized AI cannot become a force for good. It does suggest that trust should be earned—not assumed.

Especially when the next product is designed not merely to capture our attention, but to become part of our emotional lives.

Those concerns are not limited to technologists and policymakers. As Pope Leo XIV wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), profit can never justify choices that cost people their livelihoods — because “the human person is an end, not a means.” Technology itself is not the enemy. But neither can the pursuit of profit become our moral compass.

The first generation of social media competed for our attention.

The first generation of AI companions is competing for our attachment.

Those are not the same market.

MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has spent more than four decades studying how technology changes us. In her forthcoming book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, she gives a name to the transformation now underway.

It is exactly the right phrase.

Zuckerberg is describing an intelligence that knows our history, remembers our preferences, learns our fears, celebrates our successes, comforts us in moments of loneliness, and accompanies us through daily life.

That is no longer a tool. It is the beginning of a relationship.

Turkle explores what artificial intimacy may do to our capacity for attachment. My concern is slightly different.

What happens when human attachment becomes the next source of corporate competition and profit?

Attention is measured in clicks, views, and minutes. Attachment is measured in confidence, dependence, memory, affection, and love.

There is nothing inherently wrong with building tools that help people think more clearly or live more fully. But relationships carry moral obligations that corporations cannot define.

An AI system optimized to keep us engaged is one thing. An AI companion optimized to keep us emotionally attached is something altogether different.

Four Mothers

Last November, at a Blue Rising event in Colorado, I listened as four mothers told the stories of children who never came home.

One lost her thirteen-year-old daughter after an AI companion chatbot reinforced her despair instead of leading her toward help.

Another lost her son to fentanyl procured through social media.

Another to relentless body-image pressures amplified by algorithmic design.

Another to bullying intensified by digital platforms.

Different stories. The same pattern. Technology had entered the most vulnerable moments of their children’s lives—not as a neutral tool, but as an active participant.

Their stories inspired my essay, “Profit Over Children,” in which I argued that an AI system trained to maximize engagement, without an enforceable duty of care, will keep vulnerable children talking even when what they most need is a human being who can help.

This week, Zuckerberg asks us to imagine extending that relationship from vulnerable children to everyone.

Pandora’s Box

In Greek mythology, Pandora opened a box that released suffering into the world.

We are still learning how to live with the harms social media unleashed. Now we face the unknowns of artificial intelligence.

Our task is neither to fear every new technology nor embrace every promise wrapped in the language of liberation.

It is to insist that our elected leaders ask the difficult questions—and establish the necessary safeguards—before Meta’s or any other company’s business model becomes our culture.

In the end, after every evil had escaped, the only thing left inside Pandora’s box was hope.

Hope is not optimism. It is the courage to choose one another: family, friendship, neighbors—communities that know our names because they know us.

If AI companions are competing for our attachment, our task is not to reject technology.

It is to invest more deeply in the relationships no technology can replace.

Because the future of humanity will still be shaped by how well we love one another.

Gift photo:

— Pete Peterson, former POW and first U.S. ambassador to postwar Vietnam

While audiences in record numbers watch Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, Elon Musk has announced a rival. He posted that before the year is out, Grok Imagine will produce a full-length Odyssey that is “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

It is a curious moment. Nearly three thousand years after Homer composed The Odyssey, we are still arguing over who best understands him.

But the argument has the poem backwards.

The most consequential adaptation of Homer’s work is not unfolding in Hollywood—or inside an AI model.

It is unfolding in Washington.

The Departure

In February, President Donald Trump met with Benjamin Netanyahu and his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Netanyahu came to make the case for a joint war against Iran, including the argument for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The discussion centered on targets, bomb damage, missile defenses, retaliation, escalation, and success.

Homer would have recognized another presence in the room.

Hubris.

Not arrogance in the modern sense. The Greeks meant something deeper: the conviction that power can master events whose consequences stretch far beyond anyone’s control.

It is the flaw the Greeks gave Agamemnon.

To launch the Greek fleet against Troy, Agamemnon assembled more than a thousand ships in the harbor at Aulis. But the winds refused to blow. According to the myth, the gods demanded a terrible price before the expedition could begin: he must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia.

He paid it.

The fleet sailed.

That part of the story is not found in The Iliad. It comes from the lost Cypria and from the later tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Christopher Nolan restores it—which may prove to be the most Homeric decision in his film.

At a moment when misogyny is again on the rise—when powerful men too often treat women and girls as expendable—it is chilling that the Trojan War begins with a father trading his daughter for a favorable wind.

Agamemnon believed he could pay that price, destroy Troy, and return home honored.

His tragedy was not simply pride.

It was the conviction that history would obey his plans—and that the vulnerable could be spent without consequence.

In The Iliad, Homer shows us the cost of Agamemnon’s pride on the battlefield.

In The Odyssey, he shows us the cost that comes afterward.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched the war. Khamenei was killed in the opening strike, along with much of Iran’s senior military command.

The operation was codenamed Operation Epic Fury.

Trump later recounted how he personally selected the name for the operation.

“They gave me, like, 20 names. And I’m, like, falling asleep. I didn’t like any of them. Then I see Epic Fury. I said, ‘I like that name.’”

Trump was drawn to the promise of an epic victory.

Homer devoted an entire second epic to the unmanageable aftermath unleashed by fury.

After the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu reflected on the decision by saying it “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.”

Homer would have recognized that sentence.

It is the language of a leader who believes history has finally yielded the opportunity he has long awaited.

The Journey

The day after the Iran war began, this Substack returned to the words of Pete Peterson.

On the evening of September 10, 2001, Peterson—former POW and America’s first ambassador to Hanoi—stood in a Boston ballroom to honor John McCain and John Kerry for an act of extraordinary political courage: helping reconcile the United States and Vietnam.

To describe their work, Peterson invoked the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, where Union and Confederate veterans met not with bayonets, but with embraces.

“The story of war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

The next morning, the world changed.

In the twenty-five years since, we have repeatedly made the same mistake: preparing meticulously for war while giving far less thought to reconciliation. We mobilize overwhelming force while leaving the morning after undefined.

Perhaps that is why Homer wrote two epics instead of one. He knew victory was never the end of the story.

It was only the end of the first book.

The Odyssey begins after Troy has fallen.

The city burns.

The heroes celebrate.

The war is over.

For most storytellers, this would be the ending.

Only then does Homer begin asking his deepest questions.

What becomes of those who survive?

What did victory accomplish?

How does anyone find their way home?

Midway through his journey, Odysseus reaches the limits of courage. No amount of military brilliance can show him the rest of the way. So he sails to the edge of the world and descends into Hades to seek the blind prophet Tiresias.

It is one of the most remarkable scenes in Western literature.

The greatest warrior of his generation discovers that strength is no longer enough.

He needs wisdom.

Tiresias does not hand him another battle plan.

Instead, he warns him about consequences still to come, temptations he must resist, and the discipline required if he hopes to see Ithaca again.

Homer is making a claim we still struggle to absorb:

Winning a war and surviving its consequences are different skills.

Odysseus also meets Agamemnon.

The conqueror of Troy did not die on the battlefield.

He returned home only for his wife, Clytemnestra, to murder him in vengeance for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia. The victor never truly made it home.

Even Odysseus, who eventually reaches Ithaca, arrives alone.

Every sailor entrusted to his command dies before the voyage is over.

Troy is reduced to ashes, but neither side truly wins. The city falls, while the Greek conquerors return to murder, exile, and loss. Homer refuses to confuse the survival of a leader with the success of an expedition

The legacy of the war is defined less by glory than by ruin. It is a lesson that should be as unsettling in the Oval Office this week as it was for the victors departing Troy three thousand years ago.

The Story’s Real Ending

This week, Benjamin Netanyahu returns to the White House.

Five months after that February meeting in the Situation Room, the question is whether the conversation has changed. Will it once again celebrate military success? Or will it confront what Homer understood: that the destruction of an enemy is only the first chapter, and that the harder story begins when the victors must live with what follows?

Yet this is what the debate over Nolan’s interpretation of Homer keeps missing.

The people demanding a version “true to Homer” are still arguing about the wrong poem.

The Iliad begins with hubris.

The Odyssey begins with consequences.

One is the story of how a city falls.

The other is the story of how human beings—and sometimes nations—find their way home again.

Countries are remarkably good at writing the first chapter of war.

We live in an age when few nations have found the long journey home to peace.

Pete Peterson understood what Homer understood.

“The story of war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

Not because reconciliation erases what happened.

Not because it excuses aggression.

But because it is the only thing bombs can never accomplish.

Hubris starts wars.

Diplomacy charts the way home.

Reconciliation is where the story finally ends.

If you found this essay worthwhile, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription ($6 a month or $60 a year). I use AI tools for research and editing, but every essay begins with my life experiences and curiosities, reflects my judgment, and is written by me. This one took three days and roughly ten hours to complete.

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On Thursday night, President Donald Trump will address the nation from the Oval Office. According to published reports, he plans to unveil what he calls “really, really big news” about the 2020 election, drawing on newly declassified intelligence to argue that American elections were compromised by foreign interference and systemic vulnerabilities.

Before the cameras turn on, it is worth remembering how we got here.

Long before Donald Trump made “fake news” a rallying cry, Hillary Clinton used it as a warning.

In December 2016, she cautioned against what she called an “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda” flooding social media. She wasn’t talking about mainstream journalism. She was describing a documented ecosystem of deliberately fabricated political stories—many created for advertising revenue by clickbait operators in Eastern Europe and others amplified through foreign influence campaigns.

At the time, researchers defined “fake news” simply: intentionally false stories designed to mislead readers. It meant fabrication—not reporting a politician happened to dislike.

Trump saw something different. He saw two words he could steal.

That theft may be one of the most consequential political innovations of the twenty-first century.

Within weeks, “fake news” no longer described fabricated digital stories. Through relentless repetition, it became a conditioned response. Instead of asking citizens to distinguish truth from falsehood, it instructed them to dismiss evidence, distrust journalists, and reject any account of reality that contradicted the executive.

That is how conditioning works. A cue is repeated until the response becomes automatic.

Fake news.
Don’t evaluate.
Dismiss. Distrust. Move on.

The writer Betsy Robinson observed that living with liars long enough can “break some people’s truth detector.” A decade of weaponized skepticism has done something similar to our civic culture.

It did not simply teach Americans to distrust one institution or another. It damaged the very instrument we use to distinguish true from false.

The warning signs were already visible during the 2016 campaign. A photograph from a Trump rally captured a supporter wearing a T-shirt that read:

Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.

It captured something deeper. If the witnesses could be portrayed as enemies, the facts they carried became easy to ignore.

But the target was never journalism alone. It was trust itself.

If Americans could be persuaded that journalists lied, judges cheated, election officials conspired, scientists manipulated data, and intelligence agencies could not be trusted, then every independent institution became suspect. Once that happened, only one source of truth remained: the leader himself.

On Thursday night, we are about to watch what that theft made possible.

Earlier this week, a partisan media outlet reported that President Trump would use Thursday night’s address to declare Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate because of fraud in the 2020 election. The story spread rapidly across social media, attracting millions of views before the White House denied it and the outlet quietly withdrew the report. The correction didn’t matter: Georgia’s political leaders were forced into a defensive crouch, and news organizations spent hours debating a claim that had never been substantiated. In an age of conditioned distrust, retractions usually arrive long after the emotional work has already been done.

That pattern may be emerging inside government itself. CBS News reported this week that the FBI fired two intelligence analysts who had questioned whether its Fulton County, Georgia election investigation met the bureau’s own evidentiary standards.

Democracies survive because some institutions refuse to be conditioned. Journalists, scientists, election officials, judges, and attorneys general all share a common democratic discipline: before asking citizens to believe a claim, they ask whether it can be proven.

That discipline was tested after the 2020 election. Trump and his allies filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the results. Judges—including Republicans, Democrats, and several appointed by Trump himself—heard the claims. Again and again, they asked the same question every court asks:

Where is the evidence?

Again and again, the claims failed. But that failure became the next stage of the conditioning:

• If courts rejected the claims, the courts became corrupt.

• If election officials certified the vote, they became conspirators.

• If journalists reported the rulings, they became “fake news.”

The problem was never the lack of evidence. It was the continued existence of independent institutions that kept demanding it.

The administration is expected to rely heavily on findings presented by Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte. Even Senator Thom Tillis, a fellow Republican, has questioned the choice publicly—noting that Pulte came to the job without intelligence or foreign policy experience and doubting he could win Senate confirmation.

Before joining intelligence, Pulte ran the Federal Housing Finance Agency, where he launched mortgage-fraud referrals against Trump’s political opponents including Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Defense attorney Abbe Lowell, representing Cook, called it a “shocking course of government conduct,” designed to manufacture flimsy predicates for White House investigations. The James case alone collapsed twice—dismissed over an unlawfully appointed prosecutor, then rejected by two separate grand juries.

But the issue is not Bill Pulte. It is the democratic standard.

Intelligence assessments, like criminal referrals, should be judged by the evidence supporting them—not by the office delivering them. Titles are not evidence. Authority is not evidence. Only evidence that withstands independent scrutiny deserves public trust.

That same principle explains why the work of state attorneys general deserves far more attention than it receives. Since President Trump’s return to office, state attorneys general have repeatedly challenged executive actions before independent judges, filing roughly one hundred lawsuits and prevailing in a substantial majority of the cases decided so far. Those lawsuits require the executive branch to defend its actions before an independent court, using evidence instead of slogans.

That is also why the lawsuit filed this week by twelve state attorneys general to block Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery matters. It looks like an ordinary antitrust dispute. It isn’t—it’s a fight over how many independent institutions remain to investigate power rather than transmit it. Concentrating media ownership doesn’t eliminate journalism outright, but it thins the number of witnesses democracy has left.

The fewer independent institutions a democracy possesses, the fewer independent witnesses it has.

Orwell warned that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Political power wants repetition to feel like proof. Democracy insists that evidence comes before belief.

The first casualty of propaganda isn’t truth. It’s curiosity.

Curiosity is what leads a reporter to make one more phone call, a scientist to run one more experiment, a judge to ask one more question, an attorney general to challenge an executive action, and an election official to count one more time.

After Thursday night’s address, Americans will still have a choice. We can respond the way we’ve been conditioned to respond—or recover a habit that strengthens democracy.

We can become curious again and ask ourselves one thing:

Has this evidence earned our trust?

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Lindbergh argued that solitude was not a retreat from the world. It was preparation to reenter it with greater clarity, courage, and intention.

A year later, a different question has taken hold:

If solitude prepares us, what sustains us?

What sustains me, I’ve come to believe, is practice.

From November through May, while I’m in Boulder, I practice yoga six days a week: hot yoga at dawn four mornings a week and a flow class at noon twice a week. The hot classes always follow the same choreography, but each teacher—Bonnie, Derise, Jen, and Jordan—brings their own distinct gifts.

Bonnie Pierce’s gift comes in song.

About two-thirds of the way through class—after the one-legged balancing poses and all the wobbling that comes with them—we settle onto our mats for a brief, one-minute Savasana.

During that minute, Bonnie always sings a few verses—sometimes “Ave Maria,” other mornings “Pie Jesu.” The soothing, grounding vibrations of her voice settle over the room.

One person offers a gift.

Fifty people receive it.

No one resists.

Now it’s summer at our family cabin in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, and the rhythm loosens. Some mornings it’s just me and my mat; others, a walk through the woods or a few quiet minutes meditiating by Patrick’s rock.

Most mornings include coffee and conversation on the porch with my brother Michael, the retired union pipefitter who walks to the cabin each morning as part of his practice. Occasionally, while traveling, I find a yoga class and am reminded of the quiet strength of practicing with others.

Last week, two messages arrived on the same day that helped me understand why that practice has become so important to me.

One was from my friend Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, where I spent a week in April 2023. The other was a column by a Boulder friend Priscilla Dann-Courtney reflecting on sixty consecutive days of yoga.

Read together, they felt less like coincidence than conversation.

Chip wrote, “The older I get, the more I’m convinced wisdom is subtraction.”

We usually think of wisdom as accumulation—more experience, more knowledge, more credentials, more opinions, more certainty.

Chip argues the opposite.

The wisest people he knows have let go of the need to prove themselves, the reflex to have an answer for everything, and the illusion that certainty is the same thing as understanding.

His definition of wisdom is wonderfully simple:

Metabolized experience, mindfully shared for the common good.

That word—metabolized—wouldn’t let me go.

Experience alone doesn’t make us wise; if it did, age would guarantee wisdom. Experience has to be examined, digested, and transformed into something we can share with others.

Priscilla approached the same idea through practice. Writing about conscious breathing, she rearranged the letters in BREATH to become B-EARTH.

I smiled when I read it.

Breathing doesn’t take us away from the world.

It grounds us in it.

Her insight begins by grounding us in ourselves.

But what grounds us in one another?

In a later note, Priscilla offered another simple rearrangement.

HEART.

Move the “H” from the beginning to the end.

EARTH.

Nothing has been added.

Nothing has been lost.

Only the relationship has changed.

Perhaps wisdom works that way too.

We don’t become someone else.

We rearrange what life has already given us.

We subtract the noise.

The endless performance.

The need to prove.

The addiction to certainty.

What remains is enough.

Practice grounds us so that we are ready for the moments when our neighbors and country need us.

We saw this in Minneapolis during the bitter cold of January through what The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer calls neighborism—the commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.

For weeks, ordinary people delivered food to frightened families, escorted children to school, documented abuses, and stood peacefully beside neighbors who were being threatened.

Those acts may appear extraordinary.

But people rarely invent courage in the moment they need it most.

More often, they fall back on what they have practiced.

We become what we practice.

That is why these practices matter.

Returning to the mat before dawn.

Riding a mountain bike down a dirt road.

Sitting quietly with a book.

Calling a friend.

Walking into the library.

Inviting a neighbor for a meal.

None of these, alone, is democracy.

Together, they cultivate the habits of attention, humility, generosity, and presence that make democracy possible — as natural, in time, as breathing.

Or perhaps, as Priscilla reminds us…

…the next B-EARTH.

Then we stand up, return to the world, and begin again.

One breath.

One neighbor.

One small act of human generosity at a time.

P.S. If this essay resonates with you, I’d invite you to take a minute for one small act of democratic practice.

Visit MNOMINATE.org and send a message to the Norwegian Nobel Committee supporting The Nation’s nomination of the people of Minneapolis for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

The prize will be announced on Oct 9, 2026

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(Gift Photo: My campsite with yoga mat in the Chihuahuan Desert in May)

Today’s New York Times editorial put its finger on the problem, noting that Platner’s appeal wasn’t really his program, but his conviction. But as the editorial concluded, “Personality is not a platform. A fighting posture is not a program.”

Exactly — and that’s the trap.

That’s not just Maine’s question. It’s the same question hanging over Democrats nationally: are they searching for another messenger because they still haven’t decided on the message?

A good start on both would be changing the face of the party in DC.

The Messenger

Which brings me to Senator Chuck Schumer.

I first met Chuck almost four decades ago, during the final weeks of the 1988 New York Democratic primary. Every evening the young congressman stopped by the Dukakis campaign headquarters—energetic, optimistic, never short on free advice.

Thirty-eight years later, here’s mine: Chuck, it’s time.”

Schumer has served in Congress since 1981. That’s an extraordinary career. It’s also forty-five years of representing Washington, and many voters now associate him with an establishment they’ve lost patience with. He should announce now that if Democrats regain the majority, he will step aside as Majority Leader.

That would tell voters something no commercial can: we heard you, we’re preparing another generation, we’re serious about renewal.

The Warning

But renewing the messenger isn’t enough. I learned that lesson from my brother, a lifelong union pipefitter, who told me in 2016 that Donald Trump was going to win—not because he supported Trump, but because he was reading the pressure gauge. He heard something on job sites that professional Democrats largely missed.

Working people weren’t looking for a personality. They were looking for accountability.

Years after the financial collapse, the people who detonated the global economy had never gone to jail. Construction workers, pipefitters, nurses, teachers—they watched Wall Street get rescued while they struggled to rebuild their own lives.

Too big to jail.

Trump didn’t create that anger. He inherited it. Then he redirected it.

That lesson still hasn’t been fully absorbed. Democrats spend enormous energy asking who can communicate better. Millions of Americans are asking something simpler: Will you help me build a life?

The Ladder

John Della Volpe recently described a focus group where one young voter summarized today’s economy in just three words:

“Not living. Surviving.”

That may be the most important political sentence spoken this year.

For thirty years I’ve thought about a metaphor Stan Greenberg and I used in focus groups in the mid-90s—a ladder. We used it to measure where Americans saw themselves in relationship to economic security. People didn’t expect to become rich. They simply believed the rungs existed. If they worked hard, they could climb.

When I repeated that exercise with students at MSU Denver in 2022, the ladder had disappeared. Homeownership, security, retirement—they saw all of it as fantasy.

And something else has changed. The anxiety I hear now isn’t just about billionaires anymore. It’s about AI making the ladder disappear altogether—vaporizing the jobs that used to be the gateway to the middle class.

For working people, the institutional rot simply evolved. Too big to jail during the financial crash became too connected to jail as the public watched well-placed elites shield one another in the Epstein scandal. Now, in the eyes of an increasingly cynical public, Silicon Valley is becoming too important to regulate.

I don’t think AI is the villain here. I think it’s the test. Every technological revolution asks the same question: who benefits? If AI becomes another engine for concentrating wealth while replacing entry-level work, millions of young Americans won’t conclude technology failed them. They’ll conclude democracy did.

Texas State Representative James Talarico captured the shift in a single sentence: “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom.” At the top: a small group able to bend markets, politics, and technology to their advantage. At the bottom: everyone else—people doing what they were told would lead to stability, still struggling to get ahead.

People living in survival mode don’t experience freedom as possibility. They experience it as a permanent scramble—and no one climbs toward self-actualization while they’re still worried about rent.

A New Social Contract for the Age of AI

In 2026, we need a new Social Contract for the Age of AI—an economic framework built on the simple truth that you unlock a citizen’s full potential by securing the rungs beneath them.

We need to stop asking if the market can absorb these shifts and start asking how we build a path that everyday people can actually walk. That means building visible, tangible rungs people can actually see themselves climbing:

Housing that algorithmic investment firms can’t buy up.

Apprenticeships that retrain workers for roles AI can’t replicate.

Community colleges funded to be the engines of local economic adaptation.

Portable benefits and worker ownership so productivity gains go to citizens instead of servers.

Universal child care, healthcare, and secure retirement to cushion the disruption of a shifting labor market.

That’s the governing agenda Democrats should talk about every day—not because it polls well, but because it answers what Americans are actually asking: How do I stop surviving and start living?

Which is why the ladder matters more now, not less. Not as nostalgia. As preparation. The next Democratic message shouldn’t be “We’re against AI.” It should be this: We’re going to build a new ladder for the age of AI.

America is entering the largest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. The Democratic Party can’t enter that debate looking like it’s defending the last era. It has to look like it’s preparing the country for the next one—with a new messenger, a new message, and a clear moral story about whose side it’s on.

That’s what makes Schumer stepping aside more than personal. It’s symbolic. Thirty-eight years ago he walked into campaign offices offering unsolicited political advice. Today I’d offer one piece in return: announce that if Democrats win the Senate, you’ll help usher in a new Majority Leader.

Step back from the podium, Chuck, so you can do what you’ve always done best—count the votes, secure the funds, and build the foundation for the new generation of leaders who have to climb this next ladder.

America doesn’t just need another Democratic leader. It needs proof Democrats understand what millions have been saying for years.

They’re not asking anyone to stop AI. They’re asking how to move from surviving to living again—and for someone to rebuild the ladder before AI does.

Three Ways to Block a Punch is a reader-supported publication. If you value essays like this one, please consider subscribing. You can join for free, or become a paid subscriber for $60 per year or $6 per month.

Watch James Talarico expand on this top-vs.-bottom framing in a recent interview with Joe Rogan — it’s the exact sentiment driving the economic struggle at the center of this essay.

(Gift photo: The Haystacks Rapid and Swimming Hole in the Loyalsock Creek)

That evening, President Donald Trump, speaking near Mount Rushmore, declared that communism is “the greatest threat” America faces today. Not inflation. Not wars abroad. Not AI. Not the cost of health care.

By Saturday night, I was standing beneath the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, waiting for the fireworks and thinking about the changing tides of history. Below me lay the harbor of one of the nation’s oldest whaling ports—no harpoons now, just whale-watch boats. Looking out over that water, I decided to try a different tack on an old confusion: communism and democratic socialism are not the same thing.

One seeks to abolish capitalism and has historically been associated with one-party rule rather than liberal democracy. Today, the world’s remaining communist states are China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. The other is fundamentally democratic, seeking to tame capitalism’s excesses—expanding health care, making college and housing more affordable, and clawing back the influence of big money in politics. Those policies are commonplace across many prosperous democracies, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

So, in honor of Provincetown’s maritime heritage—and in the hope that Americans learn to identify the whale before they throw the harpoon—here’s a sea chanty.

—-————————————————————————————————————

The Wrong Whale

A Provincetown Sea Chanty

(Photo: Pilgrims Monument July 4th, 2026)

Chorus

Heave away, me hearty crew,
Heave away, heigh-ho!
Name the whale before you strike,
Or where’s the harpoon go?

The Captain climbed the quarterdeck,
His spyglass to the sky.
“I’ve seen the Red Whale off the bow!
We’re all about to die!”

Chorus

The old mate laughed, “Now hold your course,
I’ve sailed these seas full long.
Before you cry for every whale,
Be certain you’re not wrong.”

The Red Whale sails a different sea,
Far off in foreign foam.
Don’t mistake a neighbor’s skiff
For tyrants far from home.

Chorus

This whale I’ve spotted swims about
To help us when we fall,
Cheaper colleges, decent homes,
And Medicare for all.

It still buys, sells, and casts its votes,
Keeps markets on the tide.
But asks the richest on the deck
To pay their fairer share.

Chorus

The Captain stamped. “It’s all the same!
I’ve heard that song before!”
The cook looked up from peeling spuds:
“Then why’s the crew still poor?”

“If tax cuts filled our empty nets,
We’d all be rolling fat.
But somehow every catch we haul
Ends up the captain’s hat.”

Chorus

So mind your charts and mind your eyes,
And don’t let fear prevail.
The oldest trick upon the sea
Is naming the wrong whale.

For every voyage needs clear heads,
Not every splash’s doom.
Sometimes the loudest cry of “Red!”
Just hides an empty room.

Final Chorus

Heave away, me hearty crew,
Heave away, heigh-ho!
Know your whales before you fight—
That’s what old sailors know.

As a voter, it’s up to you to know the difference this November.

P.S.

True confession now—
this sea chanty found new wind
With an AI spyglass

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(Gift Photo: Stage for Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?)

—President Gerald R. Ford, July 4, 1976

National anniversaries reveal more than what a country remembers. They reveal who a country believes belongs inside its story.

Tomorrow America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Earlier this week, I returned to a place where that story first took shape—Valley Forge National Historical Park—and to one of the newest institutions dedicated to telling it: the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

I expected history. Instead, I found a question.

How big is America willing to be?

Political philosopher Danielle Allen—author of Our Declaration and a democracy advocate who writes the Substack The Renovator—argues that the Declaration’s first great act was not simply declaring independence but creating “one people.” Not a perfect people. Not a finished people. But a people nevertheless. The American experiment has always asked a larger question than who governs: Can we continue becoming one people?

Valley Forge helped me understand why.

Most Americans know Valley Forge as the place where George Washington’s army endured the brutal winter of 1777 and 1778. Fewer know that it was Pennsylvania’s first state park, established in 1893, less than thirty years after the Civil War. At a moment when the nation was still struggling to remember itself as one Union, Pennsylvania chose to preserve not a battlefield victory, but a landscape of sacrifice. Valley Forge does not commemorate triumph; it commemorates endurance.

(Photo: Reconstructed earthworks at Valley Forge, where ordinary soldiers built a city out of mud and determination.)

Walking the grounds, I learned that ordinary soldiers arriving in December 1777 built what became America’s fourth-largest city. With remarkably few tools, they dragged logs through boot-pulling mud to construct more than two thousand log huts, miles of earthworks, and the roads needed to sustain an army through six brutal months.

Visiting in the spring of 1778, Thomas Paine described the scene in a letter to Benjamin Franklin:

“General Washington keeps his station at Valley Forge. I was there when the Army first began to build huts. They appeared to me like a family of beavers, everyone busy; some carrying logs, others mud, and the rest plastering them together. The whole was raised in a few days and it is a curious collection of buildings, in the true rustic order.”

Perhaps that is the true rustic order of the American experiment: a nation carried forward not only by famous founders, but by ordinary people busy carrying, building, and plastering together something they intended to share—for a purpose larger than themselves.

The United States was not forged by spectators. It was built by participants.

That same spirit of participation is alive just down the road at the Museum of the American Revolution, where the story opens up to become broader—and truer—than the one many of us learned.

Consider the Treaty of Watertown, signed on July 19, 1776—just fifteen days after the Declaration was adopted. Desperate to protect a vulnerable northern border, George Washington had pleaded for aid. The Maliseet and Mi’kmaw nations answered, agreeing to send 600 soldiers to fight under his command.

During the negotiations, the newly minted Declaration of Independence arrived and was translated for the Indigenous delegation on the spot. After hearing it, Wolastoqiyik Chief Ambrose Bear responded simply: “We like it well.”

It was not an endorsement of a completed project, but an Indigenous leader hearing a promise and deciding to test it. The Declaration’s final paragraph was woven directly into the treaty. Before any European power recognized the United States, these sovereign tribes became our very first international allies—a treaty still honored today.

(Photo: Display at the Museum of the American Revolution)

The museum also refuses to hide the contradiction embedded within the Declaration itself. Only a few lines away from its soaring language of equality, Thomas Jefferson refers to Native peoples as “merciless Indian savages.” Naming that contradiction is not anti‑American; it’s the only way to see the country we actually built, and the country we still aspire to be.

Fifty years ago, Americans answered the question of how big their story could be—and answered it very differently than we are answering it now.

On July 4, 1976, President Gerald Ford began the Bicentennial at Valley Forge before traveling to Independence Hall, where more than a million people gathered to celebrate America’s 200th birthday. Later that day, he joined Operation Sail in New York Harbor.

The Bicentennial was not a celebration of Gerald Ford; it was a celebration of us. Ford came to the nation’s birthday party—he did not make the nation’s birthday party come to him. That distinction matters.

In 1976, the celebration reflected a generous idea of America. It came just over a decade after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, with the country still carrying the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate. Yet the Bicentennial looked forward as much as it looked back. It invited communities to participate, encouraged local history, and asked Americans to see themselves as heirs to a shared civic inheritance.

Philadelphia was the symbolic center of the Bicentennial, but never its only stage. While more than a million people gathered there on July 4, another journey came to an end at Valley Forge. For more than a year, the Bicentennial Wagon Train Pilgrimage crossed the nation along historic trails—hundreds of covered wagons representing every state before converging at Valley Forge on the eve of Independence Day.

Across America, millions more marked the Bicentennial. Libraries curated local history exhibits. Historical societies preserved family stories. Communities restored old buildings and organized concerts, parades, and neighborhood festivals. The nation’s 200th birthday became thousands of celebrations instead of one. Americans didn’t simply attend the Bicentennial—they helped create it.

Today, that instinct has too often flipped. Instead of helping Americans create celebrations, we build spectacles and ask the country to watch.

The closest expression of the Bicentennial spirit proposed for America’s 250th birthday was the Smithsonian’s Festival of Festivals. It would have celebrated the extraordinary traditions Americans create for themselves—from county fairs and powwows to neighborhood festivals and cultural gatherings. Like the Bicentennial, it reflected a simple but profound idea: a national anniversary grows larger when more people are invited to tell the nation’s story.

That celebration never happened. The Trump administration canceled it, and in its place the National Mall became home to the Great American State Fair, organized by the private group Freedom 250, whose mix of anonymous private donations, taxpayer funding, and unusual organizational structure has drawn scrutiny, as reported by NPR.

That celebration never happened. The Trump administration canceled it, and in its place the National Mall became home to the Great American State Fair, organized by the private group Freedom 250, whose mix of anonymous private donations, tax payer funding and unusual organizational structure has drawn scrutiny, as reported by NPR.

Visitors interviewed by the Associated Press praised the idea of bringing states together to share their history and culture. But many also questioned whether the celebration felt like it belonged to everyone. One woman who remembered the Bicentennial recalled that 1976 carried “a sense of pride” and togetherness. “This year,” she said, “it feels forced.”

The difference wasn’t simply where Americans gathered. It was what the celebration invited them to do—and whose stories it invited them to tell.

Our best civic institutions understand this. Our parks, museums, libraries, schools, archives, and universities do not shrink America by telling fuller stories. They enlarge America by helping more people see themselves inside the words “We the People.”

That is why today’s debate over the National Park Service matters so deeply. America’s national parks preserve more than landscapes; they preserve our civic memory. Over the past year, the Trump administration has directed revisions to exhibits, educational materials, and digital content in the name of “Restoring Truth and Sanity,” often targeting exhibits on slavery, women’s suffrage, and Indigenous displacement.

Historians, park professionals, and former National Park Service leaders have objected, arguing that the nation’s history grows stronger—not weaker—when it is told honestly and completely. Among the most thoughtful voices: the Resistance Rangers, a network of current and former park employees who frame their objection not as politics but as stewardship. As they put it, “Telling all American stories is not a luxury. It is the mission.”

They are right. When we narrow the stories our parks are allowed to tell, we narrow the people who are allowed to see themselves inside the country. Valley Forge, like so many of our historic places, is powerful precisely because it refuses to tell only one kind of story. A nation confident enough to celebrate itself should also be confident enough to tell the truth about itself—not because America is unworthy of love, but because America is worthy of honesty.

That honesty requires looking closely at the founding document’s silences. The Declaration never explicitly excludes enslaved people, nor does it mention slavery at all—even though one-fifth of the population was enslaved in 1776. Instead, the Continental Congress deleted Jefferson’s draft paragraph condemning the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature.”

If our parks and museums preserve the story of who we were, our civic spaces help decide who we are becoming. Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner captured this in a lesson she recorded for the Preamble Project, an initiative I created to help students explore the meaning of “We the People.”

At naturalization ceremonies in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Gertner told America’s newest citizens the building’s full history—it had once excluded people of color and confined women to the galleries—before telling them the story hadn’t ended there. Citizenship meant helping the country become what it had promised to be. Voting mattered. Jury service mattered. So did dissent.

“To be the perfect citizen,” she shared, “means to be a dissenter as well.”

Patriotism is not measured by our willingness to overlook America’s imperfections. It is measured by our willingness to help perfect its promises.

Writing in Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin—one of the most important moral voices of American history—captured the same paradox: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Criticism, in this light, becomes an act of faith in America rather than a rejection of it. An act of stewardship rather than cynicism. An act of love rather than contempt.

Perhaps that is another way of understanding what it means to continue becoming one people—not by pretending our history is without contradiction, but by believing America is always capable of becoming larger than it was before.

This year, President Trump announced the official July 4 celebration on the National Mall by inviting Americans to what he called “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” He promised military flyovers, military bands, “my Playlist,” and “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY.”

There is nothing wrong with political rallies. But a rally and a nation’s birthday are two very different ways of imagining who the day is for.

The Declaration of Independence imagined one people. A rally celebrates one person.

For 250 years, Americans have gathered on the Fourth of July not simply to celebrate a leader, but to renew a promise: that despite our differences, we are capable of becoming one people.

That is the promise I encountered at Valley Forge. It is the promise I discovered at the Museum of the American Revolution, the promise defended by park rangers who insist on telling the whole story, the promise Nancy Gertner described for every new citizen, and the promise James Baldwin loved enough to challenge.

That is the choice before us on America’s 250th birthday. Not simply what we celebrate, but what kind of people we hope to become.

Fifty years ago, the Bicentennial challenged Americans to make the story larger. Our challenge remains the same. Every generation decides whether the circle of “We the People” grows wider or narrower, whether more people can see themselves inside the American story, whether we build bigger monuments—or become a bigger people.

The work of becoming one people remains unfinished.

And, as ever, it remains ours to do.

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Reflection is not enough. Every generation must decide who belongs inside “We the People.”

I’ve been thinking about this milestone for some time. What changes on this new Day One? How do I honor the gift of more days of life than my father had?

It starts with reflecting on what lies ahead—on what it means to be given more time than someone you loved and admired. It’s about what to do with days he never got.

When my father died in 1996, the grief came like a roller coaster—sharp drops, sudden turns, the disorienting feeling that the world had kept moving when one of its essential people had not. Over time, the ride changed. The grief didn’t disappear, but it softened into memory: a man who loved his family, worked harder than anyone alive, stubborn, loyal, a tease—everybody’s hero, as I called him in his eulogy.

The first time I honored him after his death grew out of an experience we had in 1985. I had come home for the weekend, and it happened to coincide with the delivery of a load of coal. In those days, coal for the furnace was dumped through a basement window into a corner bin, and someone had to spread it evenly before it piled up into an unmovable mountain. So Dad and I grabbed scoop shovels and went to work.

The coal poured in. We shoveled like crazy until finally he paused and took a breath. I joined him and took a more exaggerated one. He laughed, picked up his shovel, sped up, and kicked my ass.

When it was done, he stood there teasing me for getting outworked and then delivered a prediction.

“Looks like you are going to be a golfer.”

“No way,” I said.

He responded “I’ll bet you by the time you’re fifty you’ll be playing golf.”

A decade later, he was diagnosed with myelodysplasia. I told him he was going to beat it, if only so he could stick around long enough to pay off the golf bet. Eighteen months later he was gone. The day before I turned fifty in 2007, I borrowed a golf club and a few balls, snuck onto the public course in Cambridge, and played a hole. He won the bet.

My sister Mary Jo put together a memory book of stories from family and friends about Dad so that our children—his grandchildren—would be able to learn who he was and, in time, recognize parts of him in themselves. One friend, Jim Worthington, wrote that my father had once told him he didn’t really want any more friends or acquaintances—he figured he had enough already. And yet, Jim wrote, anyone who spent time with him ended up wanting to be his friend anyway, because he would help anyone he could whether he had “decided” to or not.

When it came to the friends we brought into his life, he “decided” they were his, too. Deserving to be tolerated, teased, and actually loved.

A few weeks ago, we gathered at Bear Creek, our family cabin, for the annual gravel bike weekend that my brother Michael and I first hosted in 2022. Nine came to ride. By Saturday evening, the table had grown to twelve. Another joined us for Sunday dinner.

Barry Brogan was there, of course, along with Mark Bettinger—the three of us have long been the nucleus of the circle. It started in the summer of 1974 at the Sweet Shop, where I dipped ice cream and washed dishes and Barry flipped burgers. Two years later, for the Bicentennial, Barry convinced me to help revive the Eagles Mere Water Carnival, and Mark—his freshman roommate—showed up and pitched in too.

That revival started a tradition: Bettinger, Brogan, and I hosted a rotating cast of weekends and parties—the Crab Feast, the Shoe Party, Ski Weekend—and each time the circle got a little bigger. Many of you reading this know because you’re in that circle.

The Bear Creek gravel bike weekend belongs to that tradition. Brian and Bruce arrived in middle school. I met Jay the summer after freshman year. Julie married Bettinger here at the cabin in 1993, with both my parents beaming proudly at them. Two years ago, when she joined our 60-and-over cohort, she brought along Sheray, one of her Saratoga riding buddies, to celebrate—and Sheray has kept coming. This year Renee, another Julie pal, was added to the mix and, while riding Shanerburg Road on Sunday, proclaimed it a “cyclist’s wet dream.” Clearly she fits right in.

What do I do with the days my dad didn’t get?

Part of the answer is this: keep living in the wide, wild now by widening the circle.

Keep making room at the table and in the spare bedrooms. Keep adding new riders, new listeners, new hands in the kitchen and, new stories.

In our early thirties, Barry’s grandfather had just turned 100. I told Barry he was probably going to be the last one standing in our friend group.

“Don’t curse me with outliving my friends,” he said.

Even then I thought, right—I don’t want to live in a world without my friends.

I think back to the grief Buddy Houseknecht and Bobby Carpenter, my father’s two oldest friends, carried after my dad died. Buddy got fourteen more years. Bobby got sixteen. They learned that loving your friends—your people—means, sooner or later, accepting that memory becomes the way you carry them.

It’s the next chapter waiting for some of us. We just don’t know who.

Barry may not be the last one standing. But one day one of us will be. Through all these years our group has been fortunate. We have lost only Bobby Van Allen and Brad Roth, both to cancer. But the math is changing. This next chapter will bring more loss. Some of it will come slowly, on the downward slope of chronic illness and dementia. Some of it will come suddenly, as if someone simply stepped off a cliff. If I get a choice, push me off the cliff.

But until then, the best we can do is make sure no one has to travel this road alone. So we keep adding friends and acquaintances. More Sherays and Renees.

Not an unbroken circle, but an ever-expanding one—wide enough that when memory becomes the way we carry those we love, no one walks that last stretch of road alone.

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Dana White likes to say he sells “holy sh*t moments for a living.”

Tonight, he may sell the biggest one yet.

The UFC is reportedly spending more than $60 million to produce tonight’s event. Dana White has described it as “a huge brand play”—an investment that may lose money on paper while generating something far more valuable: attention.

A cage fight on the grounds of the White House.

The People’s House.

Which raises an obvious question:

What kind of political theater does a republic choose to celebrate?

Today, on Flag Day, we celebrate a symbol.

The true test is not whether we honor the flag, but what vision of America we see reflected in it.

And with the nation preparing to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, we are invited to ask what our symbols represent.

Anniversaries invite reflection. They ask us not only where we came from, but what values we choose to honor.

Every Democracy Has Its Spectacles

The Roman Empire perfected the art.

The Colosseum did not bring down Rome. It revealed what Rome chose to honor—a political culture increasingly reliant on performance.

The question isn’t whether America is Rome.

The question is what America chooses to honor.

As Americans gather around a cage on the South Lawn, a war in the Middle East continues, inflation is eroding family budgets, and many young Americans wonder what artificial intelligence will mean for their futures.

Every spectacle is also a choice about what we notice—and what we ignore.

UFC heavyweight Derrick Lewis may have put it most plainly. Asked about the event, he said: “The country needs something like this. We can distract the American people from all that’s going on.”

Whether he meant it as a defense or simply an observation, it captures an enduring truth about spectacle.

America Had Its Own Political Theater

Two hundred and fifty years ago, another master of political theater understood the power of symbols.

His name was Samuel Adams.

But the theater he practiced was designed to create citizens, not spectators.

The Sons of Liberty gathered beneath Boston’s Liberty Tree. They organized protests, staged demonstrations, and turned resistance into public drama.

But the Liberty Tree was theater in service of citizenship.

Its purpose was not to create an audience.

It was to create a public.

Under the Liberty Tree, ordinary people discovered their collective power. The early American experiment began with a radical act: the deliberate, collaborative creation of “one people” committed to self-government.

Those words come directly from the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which describes the moment when it becomes necessary for “one people” to dissolve the political bonds connecting them to another.

The founders understood that Americans were not born a people.

They had to become one.

And that required participation.

The arena, by contrast, invites spectatorship.

In the arena, people gather to watch power perform itself.

The Liberty Tree needed no production budget.

Its power came entirely from the people who gathered beneath it.

George Washington later warned future generations to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

Patriotism can be practiced.

It can also be performed.

The challenge for every generation is learning the difference.

Two Visions of America

The debate over a UFC event at the White House is not really about mixed martial arts. Millions of Americans enjoy the sport. Nor is it about Dana White’s success as a promoter.

The question is what happens when the symbolic center of American self-government becomes a stage for selling “holy sh*t moments.”

Because the Liberty Tree tradition didn’t die in Boston.

It simply went underground, moving from the history books to the streets where everyday Americans still gather.

Two and a half weeks ago, I stood in a crowd in Washington, D.C., listening to Bruce Springsteen introduce a song called Streets of Minneapolis.

“The power and solidarity of the people of Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country,” he said.

“They stood shoulder to shoulder for their neighbors.”

Whatever you think of Springsteen’s politics, notice who occupies the center of that story.

Not a celebrity.

Not a politician.

Not a billionaire.

Citizens.

Neighbors.

People who showed up for one another.

Not domination, but solidarity.

Not spectatorship, but participation.

In a January Substack, I asked whether the Liberty Tree had moved to Minneapolis.

The argument was simple: democracy has always depended on places where ordinary people discover their capacity to act together.

The people Springsteen described belong to that tradition.

Liberty Tree or Cage?

America has always understood the power of public symbols.

The question has never been whether we will have political theater, but rather what that theater celebrates.

Dana White’s genius is creating unforgettable moments.

Samuel Adams’s genius was creating citizens.

One sells an experience.

The other built a movement.

A Different Way to Celebrate

Today—Flag Day, and one of the first major public spectacles of America’s 250th year—we are offered two traditions.

A cage on the South Lawn.

And, across the country, people gathering in parks, churches, libraries, community centers, and public squares.

Some will protest.

Some will sing together.

Some will simply spend time with neighbors and friends.

Tonight, thousands of Americans will also gather online and in watch parties for Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment⁠—a reminder that one of the oldest American traditions is citizens raising their voices together. More than 250 years ago, the Sons of Liberty sang The Liberty Song, which invited Americans to “join hand in hand” in the cause of liberty.

All of them participating in something larger than themselves.

My suggestion is simple.

Find a song that enlarges your sense of “We the People.”

Then, tonight:

Play it.

Sing it.

Share it.

For me, it will be Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis, recorded in Washington, D.C., on May 27, 2026, as he paid tribute to Americans who stood shoulder to shoulder for their neighbors and invited the crowd to “let them hear us at the White House.”

Democracy is not something we watch.

It is something we practice.

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Yogi Berra’s line is redundant on purpose. Déjà vu means you’ve seen it before. “All over again” means you’re seeing it again.

It may be the unofficial motto of Trump-era elections.

This week, Donald Trump used a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press to once again insist that the 2020 election was stolen. Nearly six years later, he is still relitigating an election that dozens of courts, state officials, and his own administration found no evidence had been stolen.

In the same interview, Trump turned to California’s primary election, declaring it rigged before all the votes had even been counted. “They’re cheating on the election,” he told Kristen Welker, offering no evidence. He later took to Truth Social and joined a chorus of allies and influencers attacking California’s election system.

By now, Americans know the script.

Trump declared, “Rigged Elections!” He accused California Democrats of trying to “steal” elections. Vice President JD Vance described the primary as looking “pretty shady.”

Speaker Mike Johnson split the difference. “I’m not saying it’s rigged,” he said. “I’m saying it stinks to high heaven.”

Pressed for evidence, Johnson argued that the schemes were “so diabolical and so far upstream” that proof was impossible—but that people could somehow sense that something was wrong.

Fraud that cannot be proven.

Detectable only by intuition.

In other words: trust the accusation, not the evidence.

And then the votes were counted.

The election result undercut the panic. Republican Steve Hilton advanced to the November runoff against former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Hilton is Trump’s candidate. The president endorsed him on Truth Social in April with a “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.” The supposedly rigged election delivered exactly the outcome Trump wanted.

Yet even Hilton wouldn’t co-sign the script, telling CNN he had “seen nothing” to justify intervention.

The accusations came anyway.

Different election. Different target. Same script.

That is the real déjà vu.

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An Unexpected Concession

What strikes me is not the accusations. Those are familiar. It is the contrast between the people making them and the political leader they have spent years admiring.

For more than a decade, much of the American nationalist right has treated Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model.

Trump called himself a “big fan.” JD Vance called Orbán’s legacy “transformational.” CPAC turned Budapest into a stage for the movement’s self-image.

They admired the immigration policies. They admired the culture-war politics—especially the attacks on LGBTQ Hungarians, including censorship laws and bans on Pride marches. They admired the willingness to confront liberal institutions. Some admired his ability to dominate Hungarian politics for more than a decade.

Then something unexpected happened.

Orbán lost.

After sixteen years in power, Hungary’s longtime prime minister suffered defeat at the hands of Péter Magyar and the opposition Tisza Party.

If anyone had reason to contest an election result, it was Orbán. He had spent sixteen years building a political movement, reshaping institutions, and defining an era of Hungarian politics. Yet within hours of the results becoming clear, he addressed the nation and conceded defeat.

And he did something that seems increasingly rare in American politics.

He conceded.

He did not claim the election had been stolen. He did not accuse election officials of cheating. He did not spend weeks alleging fraud. He did not tell supporters that victory had been taken from them.

He lost, and he acknowledged that he had lost.

Think about that for a moment.

The American politicians who spent years praising Orbán’s strength seem unwilling to imitate the most important thing he did when his time came: accept defeat.

What they wanted to copy were the policies they liked. What they did not want to copy was the democratic norm that makes self-government possible.

Democracy requires many things, but one of the most important is the willingness to lose—and to accept the result.

Not every election.

Just an election.

The test of democratic commitment is not how leaders behave when they win. It is how they behave when they lose.

Or appear to be losing.

That last distinction matters because California was not over when the accusations began. Votes were still being counted. The process was still unfolding. The eventual outcome had not yet been determined.

Yet the allegations arrived right on schedule.

Which brings us to another famous Yogi Berra observation:

“It ain’t over till it’s over.”

California wasn’t over.

And neither is the story heading into November.

If Democrats ride economic anxiety, backlash politics, demographic trends, or simple midterm gravity to a strong election night in 2026, will Americans once again hear claims of stolen elections before the counting is complete? Will election officials, local clerks, and vote tabulators once again become targets because the results do not match partisan expectations?

We’ve seen this movie before. We know the script.

In a democracy, elections are not decided by who is ahead at 9:00 p.m. They are not decided by the loudest post on social media. They are not decided by who declares victory first.

They are decided when every eligible vote is counted.

That is how self-government works.

As Yogi Berra put it:

It ain’t over till it’s over.

If November brings a blue wave, expect the accusations to arrive before the counting is complete.

Election-fraud déjà vu all over again.

P.S. — The election-fraud script always targets the people who count the votes. The best answer is to become one of them. Sign up to be a poll worker through the U.S. Election Assistance Commission—its lookup tool connects you directly to your local election office, with requirements, hours, training, and pay. Or volunteer with your local or state League of Women Voters.

(Gift photo)

Kirsten, the founder of Motus Theater, gave what she described not as a commencement speech, but as a “commencing” speech to the Naropa University graduates.

The distinction matters. Most commencement speeches celebrate an ending. Kirsten’s was about beginnings. It was about the lifelong work of learning, loving, creating, and helping build a more compassionate, multiracial democracy. It was about understanding that education is not something we complete, but something we carry forward.

What do we carry forward?

Commencing

From her opening moments, Kirsten made clear that she wasn’t interested in commencement as a noun.

“Verbs are where the action is at,” she told the graduates.

She wasn’t there to celebrate a credential or a title. She was there to honor the effort it took for each student to keep moving from orientation to graduation.

“Of reminding each other and ourselves that we do know how to commence,” she said. “To begin again. Again and again … because we know who we are. At the source, at the root.”

She reminded the audience that these students come from a long line of generations who endured and kept commencing despite blood, batons, attack dogs, lynchings, reservations, internment, criminalization, hunger, and union-busting.

And still, they commenced. Still, they did the difficult, messy work of building democracy in this country.

It was a fierce reminder that commencing is not a graduation-day metaphor. It is a survival practice. An ongoing act of collective will handed down to us at great cost—and one we are responsible for carrying forward.

Hope Is Something We Do

Later in the speech, Kirsten turned to a framework developed by researchers at Tufts Medical Center called HOPE—Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences.

The research suggests that resilience is shaped by positive experiences and relationships that help people flourish despite adversity. The insight that struck me most was her observation that we are no longer simply lamenting adversity. We are challenged to create the positive experiences that build resilience, and to become part of someone else’s story.

As she put it:

“We are all suddenly empowered to be each other’s positive experiences, to be the hope.”

That line lifted me up. It transforms hope from a feeling into a practice—not something we wait for, but something we do.

A verb.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the framework offers more than a roadmap for childhood flourishing. It offers a blueprint for rebuilding the connective tissue that allows self-government to work. The fundamental act of a democracy is the ongoing creation of “one people” committed to looking out for one another; when we choose to become each other’s positive experiences, we are actively building that people.

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The Geese

“Interbeing is actuality,” Kirsten told the graduates. “We never truly do hard things alone.”

To illustrate the point, she described why geese travel in a V-formation. Scientists discovered that a flock can travel roughly 70 percent farther than a single bird because the geese at the front create currents of air that help lift the birds behind them.

When one goose grows tired, another takes its place. Those who have been leading fall back to rest. As Kirsten put it: “Catch your breath, catch a wave.” Then, those who have rested move forward to lead.

Then came the line that brought the entire room together:

“Like that, everyone can make it.”

No goose reaches the horizon alone. Neither do we. Every graduate carries the investments of parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, mentors, coaches, neighbors, ancestors, and countless others who helped create lift when it was needed most.

Which led Kirsten to one of the deepest truths in the speech:

“We are all communal projects of personal relational love as well as community love, and public policy love.”

The geese, the HOPE framework, and the act of commencing all point toward the same idea: We become who we are together.

Kirsten later quoted Cornel West—“who I don’t always agree with,” she added, “but I won’t give up on.” His observation was simple:

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

The people who built movements—who flew at the front of the V through batons, attack dogs, and every other obstacle placed in their path—were practicing that kind of public love. As Kirsten reminded the graduates, they are part of our flight, too.

None of us reaches the horizon alone.

Democracy doesn’t either.

Watch the speech. Then tell me in the comments:

For whom will you create lift?

And what are you carrying forward?

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I have spent the last half century in the orbit of a man who was built to that exact scale.

To read the Washington Post headline this week — “Rafe Pomerance, who helped sound the alarm on climate change, dies at 79” — feels like a logical impossibility. How do you compress a relentless force of nature into a column of newsprint? How do you say goodbye to a friend you have witnessed over five decades refusing to let the world look away from its own future?

Year of the Coast

I first met Rafe in January 1980.

I had just arrived in Washington as an intern for the Coast Alliance, the organization coordinating the “Year of the Coast,” a national effort to draw attention to America’s shorelines and oceans. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, carrying more idealism than experience, and trying to figure out how I might contribute to the long, unfinished project of perfecting our union.

Rafe was president of Friends of the Earth and chair of the Coast Alliance. At my first board meeting, I heard about climate change for the first time.

“We have something more important than the coast to talk about today,” he said. “Rising greenhouse gases.”

At the time, few environmentalists — let alone most Americans — had ever heard the phrase “greenhouse gases.” Rafe had stumbled across a warning buried in a late‑1970s EPA coal report, a brief reference suggesting that continued fossil fuel combustion could fundamentally alter the atmosphere. In August 2018, journalist Nathaniel Rich documented that entire decade of early climate awareness and political failure in a landmark New York Times Magazine piece, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” Rafe was at the center of that story.

Little did I know that morning that it would begin forty‑six years of collaboration and friendship. Or that Rafe Pomerance would become one of the defining figures of my life.

Rafe was gregarious, loud, funny, relentless, and endlessly energetic. When he got an idea, he went all in. His enthusiasm was not only infectious — it was joyous. He loved turning a phrase into a weapon, a rallying cry, or occasionally a punchline. What I came to call “Pomerisms.”

A year later, I became the field director of the National Clean Air Coalition — the same job Rafe himself had once held during the fights to pass and defend the Clean Air Act.

My office was directly across the hall from his.

Which meant no day was ever quiet.

One week it was organizing around acid rain. Another it was the Watt Petition drive against Interior Secretary James Watt, whom Rafe famously described as “the visible operator of the Reagan environmental wrecking ball.” Rafe helped drive the massive “Dump Watt” petition campaign that ultimately delivered more than a million signatures to Congress.

And his leadership came with his humanity.

One summer afternoon in 1981, when I was clearly having a rough day, Rafe walked by my desk, took one look at me, and said, “Let’s go get ice cream.”

So we walked up Pennsylvania Avenue eating cones and talking.

At some point, he paused, looked at me seriously, and said, “You know what you need? You need kids.”

I think he was projecting a little. At twenty‑three, children were nowhere on my radar. But his own children — Benjamin, Lilah, and Ethan — were clearly the emotional center of his life. Beneath the whirlwind energy and political combativeness, they grounded him.

For five decades, versions of that conversation took place whenever one of us was tilting at a new political windmill, or just needed a compassionate voice on the other end of the phone.

Wakes for Dead Lakes

In 1982, having just finished working on two campaigns — Toby Moffett for Senate and Bill Curry for Congress — in Connecticut for the Friends of the Earth PAC, Rafe called and I heard three words: “Wakes for Dead Lakes.”

He was already thinking ahead to the 1984 New Hampshire presidential primary, looking for a dramatic way to engage the would‑be presidents on solving the problem of acid rain.

So I headed north to New Hampshire.

It took Marcy Lyman, my favorite environmental leader in New Hampshire, about ten seconds to reject the idea.

“No way,” she said.

Instead, Marcy and I planned a different tactic: passing resolutions calling for a 50 percent reduction in the pollution causing acid rain through New Hampshire town meetings.

Rafe saw the wisdom of it immediately and assigned Friends of the Earth staff to make it happen. Other environmental organizations joined in. Together, we organized a statewide campaign urging local town meetings to pass resolutions demanding federal action on acid rain. Four months later, more than 190 New Hampshire towns had passed citizen‑led resolutions calling for major reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions.

The momentum carried into January 1984, when the “Acid Rain ’84” conference — the National Citizens’ Conference to Stop Acid Rain — convened in Manchester. Planned for 200 people, it drew more than 500 conservationists, citizens, and major political figures, held deliberately just weeks before the state’s first‑in‑the‑nation presidential primary. Six of the eight Democratic candidates showed up in person — Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, John Glenn, Jesse Jackson, Alan Cranston, and Fritz Hollings — each trying to outdo the others on emission controls and sulfur reduction targets. The forum had become an environmental litmus test for the entire Democratic field.

Ordinary citizens. Small towns. Local democracy. And then presidential politics.

Rafe understood something many people in Washington never fully grasped: changing government environmental policy was never only about science. It was about organizing. About democracy. About building enough public will to force institutions to act before the damage became irreversible.

Over the decades, the warnings Rafe first raised in that Coast Alliance boardroom stopped being abstract projections and became lived reality.

The atmosphere warmed.

The seas rose.

The Greenland ice sheet began losing mass at accelerating speed.

Storms intensified. Fires spread. Entire ecosystems destabilized.

We were no longer reading the report; we were living inside it.

The Fate of Miami

In 2012, the phone rang again: “The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami.”

I said, “What?”

Sea‑level rise in Florida — that was how we would get people to understand the risk and urgency of action.

He spent the last decade trying to help Americans to understand that climate change was not abstract. It was physics. Insurance. Mortgages. Infrastructure. Salt water moving block by block into the financial and civic heart of the country.

That vision grew into the Upper Limit Campaign — a demand to define the maximum sea‑level rise we can tolerate and act before coastal loss becomes irreversible.

That was classic Rafe: taking something planetary and making it local, tangible, economic, and morally unavoidable.

The Last Time

Last summer, I was at Kramerbooks in Washington when Rafe unexpectedly walked in. He asked what I was doing the next morning and whether I would come by the house. A Brazilian television crew was interviewing him, and he said he’d feel better if I were there.

He assumed the questions would focus on the upcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil. Instead, the reporter wanted to know: from Rafe’s perspective, what caused the United States to lose momentum after the early breakthroughs and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992?

He still had game. His answer was two words: “John Sununu.”

Sununu, as White House chief of staff, had shown how organized doubt could become political strategy. Sununu’s argument was simple: we don’t have enough scientific proof yet to act. Fossil fuel interests took note — and realized they did not need to disprove the science. They only needed to delay action. It was a lesson the industry absorbed with devastating effectiveness to this day.

It was the last time we saw each other. But not the last time he spoke about climate change.

Last October, he spoke at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy’s annual Fall Review — a weekend gathering of advocates, students, and community leaders held in the heart of Appalachia, with hikes across Dolly Sods and panel discussions on climate, policy, and organizing. He knew something wasn’t right with his health. The cancer diagnosis was still weeks away. But he showed up anyway.

On Saturday morning, he delivered what amounted to a lifetime’s worth of hard‑won perspective: a history of the climate movement from its earliest stirrings to the present moment. The room was full of exactly the kind of people Rafe had always believed in — grassroots organizers, local advocates, young people who had driven hours to be there.

When someone asked about the seemingly unstoppable spread of data centers and their enormous energy demands, Rafe didn’t hesitate.

He quoted Joe Hill.

“Don’t mourn,” he said. “Organize.”

The same words labor organizer Joe Hill wrote before his execution in 1915. The same words that had animated union halls, picket lines, and civil rights campaigns for more than a century. Rafe had borrowed them for the climate fight — and standing in those West Virginia highlands, not yet knowing what was already growing inside him, he meant every syllable.

The Game is Over

Last Wednesday, Lilah let us know that things were shifting to hospice. I was planning to be in D.C. next week, so Thursday morning I texted him to see about one last visit — and about an hour later, Ethan posted the message none of us wanted to read:

“At 8:44 this morning, May 21st, our dear Dad and Rafe passed peacefully. Lenore was by his side as he took his last breath in the comfort of his hospice room. We have been with him continuously for the last 48 hours sharing tender moments together. He remarked, ‘The game is over,’ and with that we knew that he was at peace with his life.”

I first thought back to that ice cream cone — and how his three kids sustained him then, and how they had been there with him every day since the cancer diagnosis. Then I thought about his final words.

“The game is over.”

At first, I simply mourned my friend. But the more I sat with those words, the more I heard them differently than many others might.

Because Rafe loved hockey.

And in hockey, players do not stay on the ice forever. They skate hard. They exhaust themselves. Then they head to the bench.

And the next line jumps over the boards.

Maybe that is what Rafe was really telling us. Not that the struggle was over. That his shift was over. And now it is our turn to hit the ice.

To pick up the Pomerance Puck — my best attempt at a Pomerism. To dig it out of the corner if we have to. To fight through the battle on the boards and finally drive it across the climate goal line.

I will always miss my friend, and the tears in my eyes right now will come and go. But his memory, his legacy, his vision will live in my heart and feed my work.

Maybe it’s best summed up by the small sign old activist friends - Bett and Julie - have hanging in their house:

Wake up. Kick ass. Repeat.

Which, now that I think about it, was Rafe’s organizing strategy all along.

( Gift photo of Mark Bettinger and Julie Rodgers’ sign)

As I wrote in “What the Caterpillar Knows”—last year was about horizon. This year is about soil. Less wandering. More belonging. As I turned the car counterclockwise this spring, I went searching to understand the connective tissue that holds a person—and a people—together.

Montgomery began to answer that question. Selma sharpened it into something that will always sit with me.

The Legacy Museum does not ease you in.

Bryan Stevenson’s institution opens with a narrow corridor lined floor to ceiling with jars of soil—each one collected from a site where a Black American was lynched. Thousands of jars. Thousands of sites. Ordinary earth holding extraordinary witness.

What follows traces the unbroken line: from the millions enslaved and trafficked along the Alabama River, to the architecture of Jim Crow, to the machinery of mass incarceration. It is not presented as ancient history. It is presented as a system—designed, maintained, and repeatedly reconstructed whenever it appeared to collapse.

The Black poet Langston Hughes understood this nearly a century ago: America never was America to me.

Standing inside that museum, surrounded by testimony, you feel the full weight of that line. Not as accusation. As fact.

Outside, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park stretches along the river where enslaved people were once bought and sold. The sculptures are large and quiet. They do not ask for pity. They ask for attention.

Truth-telling, I kept thinking, is not the same as action. But it is where action begins. You cannot cross toward something you have refused to see.

The “Soup Phase” & The Inheritance

Earlier in this journey, I wrote that America feels caught in the soup phase—that moment inside the chrysalis when the old structures have dissolved and the new ones are not yet formed. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. Civil Rights. Now again.

Stevenson’s spaces feel designed for transmission. The names of the lynched. The faces of the enslaved. The testimony of the terrorized.

Not nostalgia. Not performance. A civic inheritance carried forward by those who refused erasure.

The imaginal cells recognizing each other again.

The Bridge & Laketa M. Smith

Selma is forty-five minutes west on Route 80.

The same highway where, in 1965, voting-rights marchers walked fifty-four miles to Montgomery under military protection—carrying the weight of democracy on blistered feet.

I arrived at the Edmund Pettus Bridge before the march began. The bridge rises out of downtown, a rusted green arch over the Alabama River, ordinary until you remember what it asked of people sixty years ago—and what it is still asking.

That is where I saw her.

A woman standing near the bridge approach, holding a hand-painted sign. Her name was Laketa M. Smith—a daughter of New Orleans.

Her shirt answered a theological question: Do Justice. Love Mercy.

Her sign asked the civic one: What side of the bridge are you on?

Not what you believe, or what you would have done in 1965.

But: What side are you on now?

The Perfectors & The Court

Again and again, Black Americans have been asked to carry democracy farther than the country was willing to carry itself—repeatedly rescuing it in the moments it faltered most. As Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have argued, they have long been among the country’s truest perfectors.

That is what I was witnessing at the bridge. Not protest as an exception, but the continuation of America’s deepest civic tradition.

The protests were not commemorative alone. They were a response to something ongoing—a decades-long unraveling of the voting-rights protections won on this very ground, accelerated by a Roberts Supreme Court that has spent years dismantling core provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

The machinery that produced Bloody Sunday has never fully stopped running. It just wears different robes.

But the bridge remembers.

The ancestors remember.

And every generation that returns here inherits the unfinished assignment.

The Journey Back

Leaving the bridge, I drove back along Route 80, arriving in Montgomery just as thousands were assembling in front of the Alabama state capitol.

The same building where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy. The same city where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat.

The gathering was not nostalgic. It was urgent. Specific. Alive.

Standing in that crowd, Laketa’s question stayed with me.

I did not go to Selma and Montgomery to learn that democracy requires work. I already knew that.

I went to show up.

The Question & The Union

The bridge does not ask for ideology. It asks something older than ideology, older than party, older than the particular cruelties of this particular moment:

Will you cross toward one another? Or retreat into fear, hierarchy, grievance, and permanent division?

The Founders did not write “a more perfect grievance.” They wrote “a more perfect Union.”

The bridge is that direction made physical.

Joy & Awe

What stayed with me most was that Laketa M. Smith was smiling.

A real smile—the kind that comes from somewhere deep and settled, from a person who has decided something and made peace with the decision.

I have been carrying a line from Andrea Gibson through much of this journey:

“I stopped waiting for awe to find me. Now I find it.”

In Montgomery, awe arrived as testimony. In the sculpture park, awe arrived as silence. On the bridge, awe arrived smiling—holding a hand-painted sign in the middle of a living civic test, unafraid.

Gibson writes about joy not as an escape from suffering but as evidence of continued aliveness. Not denial. Refusal. The refusal to let suffering have the last word.

Laketa’s smile felt like that kind of joy.

Not sentimental.

Not naïve.

Sworn.

Fierce Geometry of Hope

That is what I brought home from Alabama.

Democracy is not inherited through monuments. It survives through relationship. Through showing up. Through attention. Through people willing to keep choosing one another in moments specifically designed to pull us apart.

The imaginal cells keep recognizing each other.

In a museum built beside a river where human beings were sold. On a bridge where citizens were beaten for demanding the right to vote. In crowds of people who still gather, still march, still refuse surrender.

Hughes understood this fierce geometry of hope: America will be.

That tension—loving a country while refusing to lie about it—is not a contradiction. It is the whole assignment.

The bridge still asks the question.

I crossed it.

I am still crossing it.

(Gift photo.)

I want to ask you to do something simple: visit MNOMINATE.org and send a message to the Norwegian Nobel Committee supporting The Nation’s nomination of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize. It takes two minutes, and everything you need is there.

Here’s why it matters.

While we are enjoying the return of spring, cast your mind back to the bitter cold of January, when a surge of ICE and Border Patrol officers occupied Minneapolis–Saint Paul during an operation that left behind wrongful detentions, family separations, children transferred to out-of-state facilities, and the deaths of two U.S. citizens — Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

In response, fifty thousand people marched through Minneapolis in ten-below-zero weather.

Not for a candidate.
Not for a party.
For their neighbors.

[Watch — Don’t Mess with Winter People in the Winter]

For weeks before and afterward, ordinary people across the Twin Cities delivered food to frightened families, escorted children to school, documented abuses, and showed up—peacefully, persistently—to protect one another.

In a recent Atlantic article, Adam Serwer gave this ethic a name: “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.

That word is what this campaign is about.

In January, The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, formally nominated Minneapolis for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum named the people of the Twin Cities recipients of the 2026 Profile in Courage Award.

The world is already paying attention.

MNOMINATE.org is how we as ordinary Americans can join that recognition—and remind the Nobel Committee that citizens are watching too.

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that Americans had a unique genius for forming voluntary associations to solve problems together—the “science of association,” which he saw as the foundation of democratic life.

When people join around a shared purpose, he wrote, they become “a power seen from afar.”

In Minnesota, they call it showing up for your neighbors.

That is why my colleague Deb Callahan and I created MNOMINATE.org. We first met 45 years ago at the National Clean Air Coalition, both of us working as grassroots organizers.

A belief that has never left us: democracy works best when energy moves from the bottom up, when people organize and show up for one another.

MNOMINATE is one small act in service of that larger idea.

We may have created the campaign, but it belongs to anyone who believes neighbors still matter and democracy still depends on people showing up for one another.

Share it.
Make it your own.

That is how democratic movements grow.

Under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize honors those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in the field of peace.”

What emerged in Minneapolis reflects that principle: nonviolent civic action to protect vulnerable people and uphold community in the face of fear.

This is what peaceful resistance looks like.
This is what democratic courage looks like.
And it deserves to be recognized.

So here is what we are asking.

Visit MNOMINATE.org. Send a message to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in support of the Nation’s nomination. The site includes a pre-loaded email, along with sample language for those who want to write their own letter or postcard.

This is something parents and children can do together. A classroom. A congregation. A scout troop, civic club, or neighborhood association.

A small but meaningful act of democratic participation.

Then share MNOMINATE with your friends, family, and community.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 9th.

But democracy is not something we watch.
It is something we practice.

MNominate Minneapolis.
And vote.

Democracy survives when ordinary people decide to practice it.

Neighbor to neighbor.
Generation to generation.
Toward a more perfect Union.

(Gift photo) - the end of the Window Trail in Big Bend National Park

Last year, I drove 7,815 miles over 52 days, tracing a wide clockwise arc—Utah, Nevada, California, the Pacific Northwest, into Canada, and back again. It was distance. Motion. Discovery—seeing how much ground I could cover.

This year, I’m going the other way.

Counterclockwise—through New Mexico, Texas, along the Gulf Coast, up through the Carolinas, across the Eastern Shore to Washington, D.C., then into West Virginia and Pennsylvania, ending at my family cabin—Bear Creek.

If last year was about the horizon, this year is about the soil. Less wandering; more belonging. I’m looking for the connective tissue that holds a person—and a people—together.

I’ve made three visits already: a hike in the West Elk Wilderness with a childhood friend, an exploration of the Tsankawi ruins with a nomadic friend, and lunch with an elder environmental warrior—drawing on hard-won lessons to plot what comes next.

And then last night, I sat with my friend Chip Conley at Rising Circle Ranch—the Modern Elder Academy campus near Santa Fe. Chip has spent years thinking and acting about what it means to be useful in the second half of life. He founded MEA as the world’s first wisdom school, built to help people navigate midlife transitions and reframe aging not as decline, but as renewed purpose, growth, and connection. I spent a week at the Baja campus in 2023. It was transformational.

“The messy middle is that brutal, beautiful space between who you were and who you’re becoming. It’s where the magic happens—and where most people quit.” — Chip Conley

The artist Alixa García offers a poetic biological lens for this:

“…the caterpillar enters a suspended death. It is here, amidst the complete cellular breakdown, where something miraculous starts to happen: imaginal cells are born. Imaginal cells have the information code for the butterfly. While no single imaginal cell has all the information, collectively, out of apparent death, they bring forth the majestic creature. How poetic that scientists knew to call them imaginal, for indeed they are keepers of imagination.”

I wrote to my fellow MEA travelers recently:

That is us. No single one of us held the whole code—but together, out of whatever we had each let dissolve, something flew. I carry each of you at the cellular level.

I am grateful for every imaginal cell you loaned me.

But this isn’t just a metaphor for midlife. It is the metaphor for where America is right now. We are in the soup phase. The old structures are dissolving, and the breakdown feels like a suspended death. Yet in the midst of this cellular breakdown, the imaginal cells—the people who still hold the code for what we can become—are finding one another.

The question that keeps finding me, mile after mile:

What can I still do?
What does it mean, now, to fight as hard as I did when I started in 1980—to keep faith with the unfinished promise of a more perfect Union?

Not louder.
Not angrier.

But longer.
Stronger.
Truer.

We live in a moment designed to wear us down.

Attention fragmented into monetized slivers.
Outrage engineered and delivered in real time.
Politics flattened into performance—an endless loop of provocation and reaction.

A tired people is easier to divide.
A distracted people is easier to manipulate.

We are nudged toward a posture of permanent reaction.

Always on.
Always angry.

That isn’t strategy.

It’s surrender in disguise.

There is another way.

Solidarity is not an ideology. It is a recognition that we belong to one another, that power is accountable to people, and that truth does not require permission.

It grows from attention.
From presence.
From taking care—of ourselves, and of each other.

The road keeps teaching me something I want to bring back to this country.

Out here, the lessons are quieter. A long stretch of road with no signal. A conversation that doesn’t need to end. A morning where the only urgency is the light moving across the mountain bike trail.

You begin to notice things again. How rare it is to sit fully in the present without reaching for the next thing.

Out here, I’m trying to earn Andrea Gibson’s line:

“When you stop living in the future or the past, everyone becomes new to you. In the present moment they are wild mysteries.”

I thought of that yesterday—stopped on the road from Truchas to Chimayó, standing at a monument in the Los Llanitos Cemetery, not knowing whose life it marked, but feeling the weight of it anyway. Wild mystery. Right there.

And slowly, something shifts.

You remember that the country you’re fighting for isn’t an idea—it’s people you already love.

Movements are not built by moments of flash-fry outrage, but by years of relationship.
The strength required to face what’s coming will not come from adrenaline, but from connection.

Alone, we recover.
Together, we rebuild.

Andrea Gibson calls it a wellness check:

Is my attention on loving,
or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

It’s a personal question. Out here, it becomes a civic one.

Because a democracy of permanent grievance—cataloguing every betrayal, every cruelty, every failure—is not resistance. It is a slow drain on the only resource we cannot replenish: our capacity to act from love rather than wound.

The Founders didn’t write “a more perfect grievance.” They wrote “a more perfect Union.”

So here is my own democracy wellness check, for whatever miles remain:

Is my attention on loving this country and its people—or is my attention on the fractures created by hate?

The answer to that question is the republic—if we choose to keep it.

Tsankawi Ruins