I keep hearing about making America great again.

And I keep wondering: What actually built America in the first place?

Because if we’re going to talk about American greatness, I think we should be honest about where it came from.

For the purposes of this argument, I’m going to set aside the enormous harms woven into American history—colonialism, slavery, genocide, exploitation, discrimination. They matter enormously. But that’s not what I’m interested in today.

I’m interested in the things that built the America worth fighting for.

Immigrants built America.

They brought labor, ideas, businesses, languages, food, art, science and culture. They built neighborhoods and factories and farms. They arrived with very little and built lives, communities and futures.

Workers built America.

The people who laid railroad tracks, mined coal, built factories, harvested crops, poured concrete, stocked shelves, cared for children and cleaned offices built this country just as surely as the people whose names ended up on the buildings.

And unions helped those workers demand something better: safer workplaces, reasonable hours, better wages and a voice on the job.

Science built America.

Researchers, engineers, doctors, inventors and students spent generations asking What if? and Why not? American universities and research institutions helped turn those questions into vaccines, computers, medicines, airplanes, satellites, communications technology and countless things we now take for granted.

Education built America.

Public schools. Libraries. Universities. Community colleges. Teachers who believed that a child born without privilege still deserved a chance to learn.

Public investment built America.

Roads. Bridges. Water systems. Electricity. Railroads. Airports. The interstate highway system. The internet.

We like the mythology of the self-made American, but the truth is that very little of what makes modern life possible was built by one person alone.

Freedom built America, too.

Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom to assemble and protest. Freedom to practice a religion—or no religion at all.

These freedoms weren’t created so that Americans would always agree with one another.

They exist so that we can disagree.

So that we can challenge our government.

So that we can organize.

So that we can say, This isn’t right.

And then there is democracy itself—not the perfect democracy we sometimes pretend we have, but the messy, unfinished experiment of trying to make government accountable to the people.

And perhaps most importantly, ordinary people organizing to make America live up to its promises.

Abolitionists demanded that “all men are created equal” actually mean something.

Women demanded the right to vote.

Civil rights activists demanded that freedom and equality extend to Black Americans.

Workers demanded dignity.

Immigrants demanded a place in the American story.

Generation after generation, Americans have looked at the country we inherited and said:

We can do better than this.

That’s the part of American history I find most inspiring.

America wasn’t built by one group of people. It wasn’t built by presidents or billionaires or “great men” alone.

It was built by millions of people—many of whom never made it into a history textbook—who worked, organized, taught, invented, protested, cared for one another and imagined something better.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to:

Some of America’s greatest progress has happened because Americans demanded that America become more American.

They took the promises seriously.

Life. Liberty. Equality. Opportunity. Freedom.

And when those promises didn’t include them, they fought to expand the circle.

That’s what I think about when I hear someone talk about making America great again.

I don’t want to go backward.

I want to build on the best things we’ve built.

More freedom.
More opportunity.
More knowledge.
More inclusion.
More democracy.
More people at the table.

America has never been finished.

Maybe that’s the point.

We will not make America great by going back.

We can make it great only by coming together, demanding better, and building forward.

On the fly, I came up with this: your regrets will likely not be about the things you did. They’ll be about the things you wanted to do—but didn’t.

Because you were afraid.
Because you were busy.
Because you didn’t want to look silly.

Here’s the thing—life is short. Sometimes brutally short. You might get 95 years. You might get 30.

So if you want to backpack across Europe, do it. If you want to join the Peace Corps, join it. Learn Italian. Build a tiny house. Adopt a dog. Move across the country. Go back to school.

Or don’t do any of those things—but do something that feels like yours.

Do what makes you happy. And if you don’t know what makes you happy, start paying attention to what lights you up, even a little.

A quote I saw recently really resonated with me:

“The purpose of life is to discover your gift; the work of life is to develop it; and the meaning of life is to give your gift away.”

It’s often attributed to psychiatrist David Viscott. What I learned today is that Viscott—despite his insight—lost his business and died depressed and alone.

I don’t share that to bring the mood down, but to say: no one has this all figured out. This is everyone’s first time.

I’m certainly no expert. I’ve gotten plenty wrong. Still do.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that sitting in shame or regret doesn’t lead anywhere good. It just keeps you stuck in “what might have been.”

So take this—like any advice—with a grain of salt.

But also… not knowing everything isn’t a great reason to stop trying to do better.

So here are a few things I’ve tried to hold onto over the years (with varying degrees of success):

• Live with intention

• Know yourself—and be as honest about that as you can

• Respect yourself (this one took me a while)

• Keep learning

• Give back when you can

• Don’t smoke (or if you do, quit)

• If you drink, do so in moderation

• Try to be a good, patient, involved parent

• Be a kind friend—and a decent human

• See the world, if it’s available to you

• Love yourself, your neighbor, and the earth

I also know a lot of this is shaped by privilege. Not everyone has the space to “find themselves” or travel or go back to school.

So maybe part of this is just not taking that for granted. And when you can, helping someone else up the ladder instead of pulling it up behind you.

The whole idea of being “self-made” is… questionable at best. Most of us are here because someone helped, somewhere along the way.

We can choose to be part of a society that looks out for each other. Or one that divides, hardens, and turns away.

I know which one I’m trying to choose. Most days, anyway.

I’m aiming for growth. For love. For care and concern.
Not perfectly. Just… more often than not.

What do you choose?

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Light on water.
Sky breaking open.
Beauty that asks
nothing of us.

I wonder—

is Mother Earth still enamored
with her children?

Does she see
what we could be?

Or is she tired
of what we’ve done?

Does the sun rise
and set
despite us?

A whisper, then.

Be well, my child.
Find peace, my sweet.
Love each other
as I have loved you.

And then—

she crosses her fingers,
and goes about her business.

Hoping
we will finally
see the light.

Because this is the throughline with Trump.

Not strength.

Not strategy.

Not even ideology, really.

The throughline is that human life is cheap.

To men like Trump, human life is just another commodity. Something to leverage. Something to trade. Something to sacrifice, so long as it is never your own.

That is the logic underneath all of it.

So while Trump escalates a war with Iran over a crisis the U.S. helped inflame, while the Strait of Hormuz becomes a pressure point for global oil and gas, while markets convulse, while he picks fights with allies over tariffs and NATO, while he guts USAID, while he hides behind spectacle and chaos at home, it is worth pausing to remember that we have already seen what his recklessness costs.

We saw it during COVID.

And that body count should never be memory-holed.

COVID was not only a pandemic. It was also a test of leadership. And Trump failed it in the deadliest possible way: not only through incompetence, but through delay, minimization, contradiction, ego, and political performance masquerading as governance.

Several studies have tried to estimate what earlier action might have changed. A Columbia University model found that earlier intervention could have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. Other analyses estimated that 130,000 to 210,000 Americans died who otherwise might not have, had there been earlier action, real leadership, and federal coordination.

No study can tell us the exact number of people who would still be alive if Trump had taken the virus seriously when it first emerged.

But that uncertainty does not let him off the hook.

If anything, it sharpens the indictment.

Because pandemics punish delay.

War makes ordinary people pay for elite recklessness.

Aid cuts punish the poor.

State violence punishes the vulnerable.

And Trump’s governing instinct, over and over again, is to treat all of that as acceptable collateral.

That is why the dismantling of USAID matters. Not because agencies are sacred, but because people depend on what those programs do.

And when those programs are gutted, people die.

These are not separate stories. They are not random outrages. They are not disconnected headlines.

They are all expressions of the same governing ethic:

Other people’s lives are expendable.

That has always been the bargain.

The cruelty is not incidental.

The chaos is not accidental.

The death toll is not unfortunate collateral.

It is the outcome.

We have to stop treating each new outrage like it arrived out of nowhere.

It didn’t.

We’ve already seen what his recklessness costs.

And we will keep seeing it, over and over again, for as long as human beings are treated as disposable inputs in someone else’s power project.

Because in the end, that is the whole thing.

Your life is worth what it can be used for.

And that is not leadership.

It is cruelty masquerading as strength.

Americans are privileged, even in their grief.

My daughter recently saw a woman she went to high school with posting bigoted garbage on Facebook about trans and gay people.

My daughter, who has been very public about being anti-Trump, pro-Palestinian, anti-war, pro-human rights, pro-trans rights, and anti-capitalist, responded the way she should have. She basically said: I’m honestly shocked I still have MAGA people on my friends list. If you support Trump, show yourselves and see your way out.

One woman responded by posting a link to Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).”

And I thought: the world didn’t stop turning.

That is a lie Americans tell ourselves.

Yes, almost 3,000 innocent civilians were killed on September 11, 2001. That was horrific. It was evil. It was devastating. It shouldn't have happened.

But the world did not stop turning.

America just isn’t used to being touched by the violence it exports.

That’s the difference.

For most of modern American life, war has been something we send elsewhere. Death is something we package into foreign policy, military aid, sanctions, drone strikes, destabilization campaigns, and righteous speeches about freedom. It happens to other people, in other countries, in other languages, under other skies.

And when it finally happens here, Americans act like history itself has been interrupted.

It hasn’t.

The United States has experienced remarkably little war on its own soil compared to what it has unleashed on the rest of the world. In 1941, 2,403 people were killed at Pearl Harbor. 9/11 killed 2,977. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing killed six. These losses are remembered and ritualized in ways that Americans seem unwilling to extend to anyone else.

Every year on September 11, there is a reading of the names. “Never Forget.” Flags. Somber music. Commemoration. Ritual.

And to be clear: those people were precious, and they should be honored.

But human life is precious everywhere. Not just in America.

That is where American grief becomes privilege.

Because when Americans lose people, it becomes a permanent moral reference point. A wound to be honored forever. A justification. A mythology. A reason to distrust Muslims, Arabs, or anyone vaguely “Middle Eastern.” A reason to look away when Palestinians are starved, when Lebanese neighborhoods are flattened, when Iranians are bombed, when Syrians are buried under rubble.

But when we gut a country, occupy it, sanction it, bomb it, disappear people, destabilize it, starve it, torture it, or back the government doing it, those same people are expected to move on. Sign accords. Rebuild. Reconcile. Be reasonable. Be peaceful. Don’t radicalize. Don’t hate us too much.

That expectation is obscene.

A Brown University Costs of War report estimated that hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Hundreds of thousands.

And yet Americans still speak about 9/11 as though it exists in a moral vacuum, detached from what came before or after. As though our dead are sacred and theirs are collateral.

That mentality is exactly why so many Americans can rationalize what Israel has done to Gaza after October 7.

About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the October 7 attacks. That was horrifying. Civilian killing is horrifying whether the victims are Israeli, Palestinian, American, Iranian, Iraqi, or anyone else.

But look at what followed.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians dead. Entire families erased. Children dismembered. People burned, buried, amputated, starved, and crushed under concrete.

And still Americans ask for more “context.”

Still they invoke October 7 as though it explains everything and absolves anything.

It doesn’t.

And now there is Iran.

As of today, thousands have reportedly been killed there in the past month alone. More people than the United States lost on 9/11. But there will be no annual American mourning rituals for them. No sacred country songs. No bumper stickers. No “Never Forget.” No bipartisan sermons about innocence. No permanent emotional infrastructure built around their suffering.

Because they are not us.

That is the whole sickness.

American grief is not just grief. It is ranked grief.

Our dead become history.
Their dead become statistics.

Our trauma becomes sacred.
Theirs becomes geopolitics.

Our fear becomes justification.
Their fear is ignored.

And this is exactly why that Alan Jackson song enrages me in this context.

So no, Vicky.

The world didn’t stop turning. We just acted like it did because we are egocentric, narcissistic, insufferable twats with a monopoly on public mourning. America First in everything, even collective grief.

So keep waving your Trump 2028 flag. Keep talking about freedom, terrorists, and Never Forget.

Some of us have opened our eyes.

And once you’ve seen fathers carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags, once you’ve seen entire populations terrorized and then told to be civilized about it, once you’ve watched America and American-backed Israel brutalize people and still insist on victimhood —

you cannot unsee it.

And you cannot keep pretending we are the ones the world has wronged most.

If the government is broken enough to miss paychecks, the first people who should feel it are the ones elected to govern.

Not TSA agents.
Not federal workers.
Not the public.

Congress.

It’s supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

Instead, it feels more like by the oligarchs and off the backs of the people.

How did we get to a place where actual human lives and livelihoods are used as leverage to pass legislation? Where TSA agents are forced to work without pay while ICE gets sent into airports to hover over them—handing out water bottles, looming in the background, feeding the surveillance machine, and reminding everyone exactly who this government is willing to intimidate?

All while the public gets longer lines, more confusion, more tension, and a more hostile travel experience.

That is not governance. It is political theater with real people trapped inside it.

And “government shutdown” is a polite term for deliberate chaos.

If Congress cannot agree on a budget, then Congress should feel the consequences.

Sequester Congress.

Lock them in Longworth and Rayburn. Cordon off the Capitol. Stage a Congressional conclave. No recess. No cameras. No paychecks. No escape hatch into cable news spin rooms and donor dinners.

Let them sit with the discomfort they so casually dump on everyone else.

In the meantime, the people who actually keep this country running should be paid.

TSA should be paid. Federal workers should be paid. Essential government functions should continue operating on an emergency austerity budget that protects workers and preserves core services.

Because using ordinary people as bargaining chips is not some unfortunate side effect of our political system.

It is a choice.

And it reveals, over and over again, how little the people in power are willing to absorb the consequences of their own failures.

They break the system, then expect everyone else to carry the cost.

They call it strategy. They call it negotiation.

But what it really is, is a system where the public is expected to absorb the instability while elected officials keep cashing checks, performing outrage, and protecting the machinery that keeps them insulated from the damage.

That should end.

If the government is too broken to function, then the first people who should feel that failure should be the ones elected to govern.

Not TSA agents.
Not federal workers.
Not travelers.
Not the public.

Congress.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

Right now, we are getting none of the above.

He is traveling home from Disney with his parents, little brother, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and baby cousin.

I am 56. Traveling alone. Five days at a conference. Tired. Observing.

David’s father is wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt. The marketing machine calls Orlando “the happiest place on earth.” I have my doubts.

Someone who is not happy is David’s father.

Maybe he is stressed. Maybe he is broke. Maybe he is overstimulated and sunburned and sick of spending money. I don’t know.

What I do know is this: David is three.

Three-year-olds do not know when to leave a frustrated adult alone. Three-year-olds climb chairs. Ask questions. Pester. Spin. Wiggle. Exist loudly.

Something pushes his father over the edge. A command to stop. A small body that doesn’t stop quickly enough.

His father grabs his upper arm and squeezes. Hard.

Not a tap. Not a redirect. A squeeze.

David cries. Rubs his arm.

And I sit there. Feet away. Watching a grown man in a shirt covered in cartoon mice hurt his child in public.

I stare. I give him the look. The disapproving woman look. The moral superiority look.

I see David’s mother sitting quietly beside them. Small. Contained. Sheepish.

I want to tell her to leave him.

I want to tell them not to hurt their little boy.

But I do not speak.

I do not move.

I do nothing, even though I know better.

In 1989, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world. It establishes something both obvious and radical: children are not property. They are rights-holders.

The Convention guarantees children protection from physical or mental violence. Dignity. Development free from harm.

Nearly every country on earth has ratified it.

Mine has not.

And yet ratification papers are not what failed David that afternoon.

I did.

Last week, my three-year-old grandson was sick. Pale. Quiet. Not himself.

When he perked up, he asked for a cupcake. So, we made cupcakes.

We stirred the batter together. He dumped in too many sprinkles. Frosting ended up everywhere. The cupcakes were bright pink and chaotic and imperfect and joyful.

Because children are precious.

Children are people.

Children have rights.

Children deserve love and protection.

That is not sentimentality. It is structural.

Protecting children is not partisan. But accountability is not optional.

When leaders weaken protections for children, it is not theoretical.

It shapes what adults think they can do — and what bystanders believe they must accept.

If you protect the powerful instead of the vulnerable, you deserve scrutiny. You deserve protest. You deserve to be challenged.

Not because of politics, but because children cannot protect themselves.

I cannot go back to that airport chair.

But I can decide who I am going forward.

Children are not property.

Children are not inconveniences.

Children are not collateral damage in political games.

And I will not look away again.

Photo credit: Amal Media Group.

Across human history, war has killed well over a quarter-billion people. From ancient conquests and medieval crusades to colonial extermination, industrial warfare, and modern airstrikes, organized violence has been humanity’s most consistent technology.

The Mongol invasions alone killed tens of millions. European empire and conquest in the Americas wiped out entire civilizations. The 20th century—supposedly the age of progress—added more than 100 million war deaths, including 70–85 million in World War II.

The 21st century has continued the pattern: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza—millions more dead, most of them civilians, many of them children.

After thousands of years, war has not brought peace, safety, or enlightenment. It has only refined our ability to kill faster, farther, and more efficiently. If war were wisdom, it would have worked by now.

In the first 13 months of President Trump’s second term, the United States has attacked seven countries, captured the president of Venezuela, killed the Supreme Leader of Iran, blown 150 people out of the water in illegal maritime operations in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and created a so-called “Board of Peace” staffed with people wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

These international attacks exceed those of any previous U.S. president within a single year in the modern era. They reflect a deeply militarized approach to foreign policy even as war continues to fail as a path to lasting peace.

Trump’s supporters insist his administration will “Make America Great Again.” While they rarely define when America was ever great, nostalgia often points to the period after World War II—when fascism was defeated, the Holocaust ended, and American soldiers returned home as heroes.

But what followed was not peace.

War after war. Genocide after genocide. Millions dead.

Korea. Vietnam. Iran–Iraq. Bosnia. Rwanda. Congo. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Yemen. Ukraine.

The Iraq War alone killed nearly 300,000 people through direct violence—most of them civilians. Yemen’s war has taken hundreds of thousands more, largely through starvation, disease, and the collapse of basic systems.

I’m currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Kroc School of Peace. I’ve been called naïve for believing that we should work toward world peace. “Men have been killing each other since the beginning of time,” I’m told.

Yes. They have.

Calling for peace is not a denial of reality; it is a refusal to accept perpetual slaughter as inevitable.

It’s time to try something different.

Quiet, Piggy

Hats and flags and plastic pride
Peace boards laundering genocide
Crypto, planes, and naming rights
We sold our souls to keep things white

Slogans, jargon, downright lies
Can you look your child in the eyes
It appears we’re run by the worst
But hey, no worries—America First

Well, unless it’s oil or Israel or grift
But never for someone in need of a lift
Quiet, piggy.
You asked for this.

He abused some kids, but that’s okay
They’re bringing back the KKK
And if you want it run this way
Well, my friend, you’ve got to pay

So quiet, piggy, daddy’s here
You get to keep all you hold dear
Keep your white Jesus. Keep your hate.
We get to make America great.

He didn’t steal it in the night.
It was all arranged in broad daylight.
Called it business. Called it smart.
Said it's normal from the start.

So hush now, piggy, don’t you squeal
Oh, how can this nightmare be real?
Be a good little piggy. Just comply
While we think up our next alibi.

This year, I watched the Super Bowl at my daughter’s house, surrounded by fourteen other people. What stayed with me wasn’t the score or even the halftime show itself, but the room I was in while it unfolded.

Around that room were recent immigrants from Guatemala, family histories rooted in El Salvador, and ancestral ties to Nigeria, Senegal, Argentina, and Peru. We also carried English, Norwegian, Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, French, and Danish roots. Three of us communicated in American Sign Language. Four spoke Spanish fluently. Three others are learning it. One is exploring Chinese and Arabic. It was not a curated diversity. It was just… us.

Not one of us was Indigenous to North America. And yet here we were—family, friends, neighbors—living and working in Northern Virginia, building lives together just miles from where Donald Trump and Stephen Miller continue to spew fear about who belongs and who does not.

Watching the backlash to this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, particularly the outrage over Spanish-language performance and unapologetic cultural expression, felt surreal in that context. The panic over diversity, equity, and inclusion—or over whose language gets airtime on the biggest stage in American sports—only makes sense if you believe diversity is a threat rather than a fact of life.

But in that room, diversity wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t a policy debate or a culture-war slogan. It was my 23-year-old son dusting off his high-school ASL to communicate with a deaf woman across the table. It was my 20-year-old son’s girlfriend leaning in to translate Bad Bunny lyrics for the rest of us. It was a room that crossed age, education, and ability, without anyone pretending those differences didn’t matter—or letting them divide us. It was conversation stretching, adapting, meeting people where they were.

I had just finished reading The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a book that insists we pay attention to who gets to tell the story, who is erased from it, and how power reacts when the story refuses to stay small. Coates reminds us that backlash is not accidental. It is the predictable response when people who were meant to remain invisible insist on being seen.

The outrage over a halftime show is not really about music. It is about control. It is about whose culture is treated as “neutral” and whose is framed as political. White supremacy survives by pretending that one narrow version of America is the default, and everything else is an intrusion.

But the truth is simpler—and harder to deny. Borders are administrative. Languages evolve. Cultures mix. What we call “American” has always been plural.

In that living room, diversity was not something to manage or fear. It was strength. It was beauty. It was both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

That is the America I want—not as nostalgia or myth, but as intention. An America where difference is not merely tolerated but valued. Where every voice counts and every child matters. Where rights are inherent because you are human, not because your ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.

It is an America that understands its power carries responsibility: to respect the sovereignty of others, to stop extracting wealth through violence and coercion, and to reject domination as destiny.

That America has often been a mirage. But it remains the goal—and the only way forward.

Together, we are America.
This is the message worth defending.

Editor’s Note: This essay is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One, “The Case for a Political Divorce,” explores why forced unity in the United States is becoming structurally and morally unsustainable.
[Read Part One here]

Disclaimer: This essay continues a broader political thought experiment. It is not a call to action, an endorsement of violence, or an argument for unlawful behavior. It is an invitation to think seriously about scale, capacity, and what deliberate political change could look like.

We often talk about political unity the way people talk about bad marriages: as something that must be preserved at all costs, as a moral obligation, as a failure if it ends—regardless of how destructive the conditions have become.

But relationships, like political systems, exist to serve the people inside them. When they demand obedience instead of mutual respect, when survival requires self-erasure, choosing to leave is not recklessness. It is clarity.

Secession remains a taboo word, treated as synonymous with violence or collapse. Yet historically, political systems change shape when they outgrow their containers. They decentralize, split, or dissolve—not always as failure, but sometimes as an acknowledgment of reality.

If that is true, the question becomes not whether change is imaginable, but what deliberate, non-chaotic change could actually look like.

Once you accept that political systems are not eternal, the next question becomes unavoidable: if change were to happen intentionally rather than violently, where could it begin?

This is where scale and capacity matter.

If any U.S. state were positioned to test the assumption that unity must be enforced at all costs, it would be California.

California already operates at the scale of a nation. Nearly forty million people. One of the largest economies in the world. A coastline oriented toward global trade, particularly with Asia. A workforce spanning agriculture, technology, logistics, manufacturing, and culture. This capacity is not theoretical. It already exists.

More importantly, California is a minority-majority state. Its diversity is not aspirational; it is functional. Millions of people from different backgrounds live and work together every day, not through forced ideological conformity, but through practical cooperation.

That matters because one of the strongest arguments against decentralization is the fear of balkanization—the assumption that difference inevitably leads to conflict. California complicates that narrative.

This is not to suggest that California is free of inequality or internal tension. It isn’t. But unlike the federal system, it operates at a scale where governance can still feel responsive rather than purely coercive, and where accountability remains tangible rather than abstract.

This is not an argument that California should secede tomorrow. It is not even an argument that secession is the best outcome.

It is an argument that if political divorce were ever to happen, it would likely be seen by many as rebellion or revolution. But at its core, it would reflect a deeper truth: scale matters, trust matters, and governance cannot function indefinitely without legitimacy.

Secession is often imagined as chaos because it is imagined as abrupt. But political change does not have to be sudden to be profound. It can be negotiated, phased, and conditional. It can be grounded in consent rather than force.

California is not notable because it is perfect. It is notable because it reveals what becomes possible when size, diversity, and economic capacity align.

If unity no longer serves the people inside it, then the real danger is not imagining alternatives.

The danger is pretending there are none.

Change does not begin with certainty. It begins when we allow ourselves to imagine that other arrangements might be possible.

Start, even if you don’t know how.

Disclaimer: This is a quiet Sunday-morning reflection, not a hot take. It is an exercise in political thought and structural analysis, not a call to action, an endorsement of violence, or an argument for unlawful behavior. It is an invitation to think carefully about change, scale, governance, and the limits of the way we’ve always done things.

We talk about the United States as if it is a law of nature. As if a 250-year-old political experiment is somehow permanent, inevitable, immune to fracture or decline.

It isn’t.

In the last century alone, we watched empires rise and fall in real time. The Soviet Union was born, consolidated power, fractured, and disappeared in under seventy years. Yugoslavia dissolved. Colonial empires unraveled. Borders shifted. Systems changed shape. Wishing for stability did not prevent any of these systems from collapsing.

Change is not the exception. It is the rule.

Much of today’s political anxiety is not really about chaos. It is about resistance. Fear of losing what feels familiar, even when that familiarity no longer works. We treat unity as an unquestioned moral good, without asking whether the structure we are preserving is capable of supporting the people living inside it.

The uncomfortable truth is this: the United States has become too large to be united in any meaningful way.

Too much land. Too many people. Too many fundamentally different regional economies, cultures, and political realities. We are trying to govern a continent as if it were a country. When shared norms and mutual trust erode at that scale, the system compensates.

What we are witnessing now is not random dysfunction. It is a structural response.

When governance through consent breaks down, control fills the gap. Rules harden. Surveillance expands. Dissent becomes suspect. Obedience replaces participation. Authoritarian drift is not the cause of the fracture. It is the response to it.

The irony is stark. In the name of keeping the country “together,” constitutional freedoms are steadily narrowed. Unity becomes compliance. Stability becomes something imposed rather than shared.

There is another truth we have to reckon with, especially those of us who are white: this system did not suddenly stop working. It has always worked unevenly, by design.

The United States was built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black people. Its early wealth and political power were structured around exclusion. For generations, many Americans were shielded from this reality not because it wasn’t real, but because it wasn’t theirs to bear.

What feels like collapse now is, in part, the moment when that insulation is breaking down. When the costs of the system are no longer contained to those it was built to exploit. Today’s unrest is not just about polarization or scale. It is about belated recognition.

A system that never truly worked for everyone cannot be saved by asking the same people to endure it longer.

This is where the metaphor of divorce matters.

I have been divorced twice and am now in a healthy, stable relationship. Divorce was never my first instinct. I believed in commitment. I believed in endurance. I believed staying was a virtue.

But there comes a point when staying no longer preserves the relationship. It only codifies the damage.

When faced with the choice between a shrinking life and the unknown, I chose to leave. That decision was not impulsive. It came after every other option had been exhausted. It was not a rejection of values. It was a life-saving, life-affirming act of self-preservation.

Leaving was messy, but it did not lead to permanent chaos. It led to growth. It made stability possible.

We often talk about political unity the same way people talk about bad marriages: as something that must be preserved at all costs, regardless of how destructive the conditions have become. Leaving is framed as failure. Endurance is mistaken for strength.

But relationships, like political systems, exist to serve the people inside them. When they demand obedience instead of mutual respect, when survival requires self-erasure, choosing to leave is not recklessness.

It is clarity.

If political divorce feels unthinkable, it’s worth asking why—and who benefits from treating the way we’ve always done things as the only option.

Part Two will explore what deliberate, non-violent political change could look like, using California as a case study.

We have seen this pattern in Minneapolis, in courtrooms, and in the White House.

We are standing at the moment when recognition becomes unavoidable.

That moment when you finally understand that the devil you do not know cannot possibly be worse than the one you are living with.

That moment when give me liberty or give me death stops sounding theatrical and starts sounding rational because you are scared, furious, exhausted, and done.

Pain, uncertainty, even risk no longer terrify you the way continued abuse does. You have looked evil in the eye. You have lived under its roof. You know its rules. Rules designed to consolidate power, extract obedience, isolate you, and keep you afraid.

Any survivor of domestic abuse recognizes this moment.

It is now or never.
If you do not change now, you never will.
If you do not take your power back, you may not get another chance.

That is where we are.

And yes, I am talking about Trump. About Miller. About Musk. About Vance, Bondi, Noem, Patel. About the tech barons, the financiers, the political dynasties, and the media enablers who protect one another. Those who put profit over people as policy. Who accumulate wealth and power through dehumanization, desensitization, grift, and abuse.

But this reckoning is bigger than any one person.

It is about whether we continue to tolerate systems that gaslight us into accepting cruelty as normal and corruption as inevitable, or whether we finally say no. No more rules that only benefit the abuser. No more pretending that survival equals freedom.

I recognize this moment because I have lived it.

I stayed in an abusive marriage far too long. Leaving meant losing everything familiar and starting over. It was hard. It took years. But distance made survival possible, and survival made rebuilding possible. I became stronger. I became a better mother. A better person.

This is the moment survivors recognize.
Now or never. Do or die. The moment you stop lying to yourself. Because no matter how good or compliant you are, this is not getting better. They are not going to change.

So you have to.

You say this stops. Now.
You walk away from the abuse.
You find new community.
You organize.
You document.
You heal.
You help others.

And you fight like hell.

Author’s note: This piece is written from a survivor’s perspective. The ending reflects the moment when denial breaks and clarity arrives. It is about refusing complicity, not advocating harm.

He could have been stopped then.
We could have saved so many girls—and boys—from abuse.

Instead, he trafficked and abused children for at least another five years. Possibly ten. Maybe more.

Twenty-one years later, the full truth is still being buried.

Rich and powerful people are protected, while justice for survivors always seems just out of reach. We can see it. We just can’t touch it.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is who we are. This is what we do.

We sugarcoat. We defend. We look away when things get uncomfortable.
We lie—to each other and to ourselves.

It is the American way.

We lie about our righteous beginnings. About freedom and the Constitution and our supposed moral clarity.
We lie to our kids with stories of democracy and opportunity—and then cage children who walked 2,000 miles chasing that dream.

We tell ourselves we are tolerant and peaceful, yet we have lost four presidents to assassination. We have murdered our own heroes—Martin, Malcolm, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, and Harvey Milk—when their demands for justice became too disruptive to ignore. We pledge allegiance, say In God We Trust, and then go and export war to other people’s shores.

Our lies—and our guilt—helped create and enable Netanyahu. The genocider grew up in the suburbs of Philly and was educated here. A homegrown terrorist.

We turn away from the evidence that racism did not end in 1865—or in 1964—because the truth is harder to face: the Founding Fathers pursued independence for land, wealth, and power, and they were willing to secure it through slavery and dispossession. The real cost of their freedom was borne by Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, and that unpaid debt calcified into systems that still determine who inherits wealth, who inherits scarcity, and who is insulated by privilege they did not earn.

Two hundred and fifty years later, almost nothing has changed. The wealthy continue to avoid taxes and consequences. Everyone else pays the price.

“Make America great again,” they say. But America has never been great. It has always been a work in progress. Pretending there is some sacred golden era reeks of white supremacy. It’s cruel. And it’s lazy.

And that’s the thing—people can be cruel and lazy.

Life is hard. Voluntarily adding more moral, emotional, and intellectual labor feels counterintuitive. So we avoid confrontation. We seek comfort. We work for bad people and bad companies and tell ourselves we didn’t know that our labor—our compliance—paid for the bullets that killed Hind Rajab. That our silence paved the way for the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Elijah McClain, and Ahmaud Arbery. And Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Breaking that silence comes at a cost. It costs us our negative peace.
But remaining silent now is a choice. And it is consent.

Our compliance made room for men like Prince Andrew and Donald Trump to purchase children—to rape and discard them—without consequence.

Do not yearn for an America that never existed.
Work relentlessly to build a new one.

A truthful America.
An accountable America.
An America that can finally look itself in the mirror—and not turn away.

Donald Trump keeps suing U.S. institutions not because they lied about him, but because they told the truth. Again and again, lawful oversight and disclosure produce facts that are damaging, and Trump responds not by disputing those facts, but by attacking the institutions that revealed them. In his worldview, the harm is not inaccuracy; it is exposure.

Which is exactly why the answer isn’t silence or accommodation, but accountability. They love to say “no one is above the law”—Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, Tricia McLaughlin, and Karoline Leavitt all repeat it. The Supreme Court may have bent the rules for Trump, but it didn’t erase them. Donald Trump should be investigated, impeached, and prosecuted. Transparency must be non-negotiable, including the full release of records tied to powerful men and abuse, Epstein files included. This democracy will not survive by protecting reputations; we must all face the facts, even when those facts implicate the people at the top.

Get out of your comfy cocoon and stand up and demand your rights. Protect your neighbor’s rights. Speak out against injustice, here and everywhere. Our history, our news, has been whitewashed and sanitized. The machine does not want you to know the truth— that this country is built on lies and genocide and oppression and greed. Inequality and hatred and fear feed the beast and keep us all in our places. Cogs in the wheel. People of color have been trying to tell us for centuries. We celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s messages of peaceful protest, the fight against injustice, and civil disobedience earlier this week. A federal holiday to honor this man and these concepts. And then five days later, we woke to the news that the state had again murdered a citizen in Minneapolis. Second time in 17 days. DHS did not like the peaceful protest yesterday, when the city of Minneapolis shut the system down to reject oppression. So they upped the ante, and now a 37-year-old nurse is dead.

We have to shut this down. We must get better organized and choke the beast into submission. It is 2026, the 250th birthday of the country. It’s time we stopped acting like spoiled teenagers. It’s time we mature as a nation and a people. We’re 250. We need to grow the fuck up. Act like the democratic republic we portray ourselves to be. A nation run by a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Not run by Trump and his cronies. Not run by Elon. Not run by tech bros. Not run by the military industrial complex. Not run by the oligarchs. Not run by the KKK.

The people united will never be defeated. But we’ve got to unite. We’ve got to be willing to be uncomfortable. March, protest, speak out, boycott, and organize. Stand up for what’s right. We have to do this now. These next six months are going to be so important. If we get to the 4th of July and we’ve not made headway, we are in deep shit. Join a mutual aid group TODAY. Join 50501. Code Pink. No Small Act. Indivisible. The Socialist Party. No Kings. Women’s March. SURJ. A labor union. ACLU. A grassroots local organization. Start your own group. Do something. Say something. This doesn’t get better by holding your tongue, polite discourse, looking the other way, or preemptively complying with illegal orders. This only gets better when the two things that matter to the powers that be — money and power — get threatened. Withhold your money. Withhold your compliance. And don’t let these goons get away with murder.

There is a pattern emerging across American government institutions that should concern anyone who takes the First Amendment seriously. Subtle nods to Christianity as our default religion have turned dramatic and increasingly pervasive.

Democratic erosion rarely arrives with a single unconstitutional act. It comes through repetition, symbolism, and institutional alignment — through what we are slowly taught to accept as “normal.”

What we are witnessing now is the rapid fusion of religion and state, advanced not through law, but through rhetoric, ceremony, and partnership.

Rhetoric comes before policy

When senior officials describe the United States as a Christian nation, that is not idle speech. It is a claim about national identity — about who belongs and which beliefs define civic legitimacy.

Government rhetoric matters because it signals intent. It shapes priorities, partnerships, and boundaries. Establishment does not begin with legislation. It begins with narrative.

Symbolism is instruction, not decoration

When federal agencies post explicitly religious messages, when state honors are imbued with sectarian meaning, when public memorials blur into political-religious spectacle, these are not neutral acts.

They teach the public what the state values and whom it centers. Symbolism normalizes hierarchy long before policy enforces it.

The oath problem exposes the contradiction

Recently, Zohran Mamdani was sworn into office on the Quran. Many Christian officials swear on the Bible. Some Jewish officials use the Hebrew Bible. This is often framed as inclusion — everyone may swear on their own sacred text.

But this framing misses the constitutional point entirely.

Why is allegiance to serving the people tied to God at all?

What does a religious text — any religious text — have to do with executing secular law, representing a pluralistic electorate, or upholding a Constitution that explicitly forbids religious tests for office?

The issue is not which book is used.
The issue is that divine authority is invoked at all.

If the oath is about duty, accountability, and allegiance, then the only text that makes sense is the Constitution.

Why this custom is dangerous

Swearing an oath on a religious text, even voluntarily, does real work:

• It implies legitimacy flows from faith rather than from the people

• It frames governance as accountable to God instead of citizens

• It normalizes religion inside the machinery of the state

• It pressures conformity through ceremony

A government genuinely committed to religious freedom would make faith irrelevant to public authority — protected, but private.

Institutional alignment deepens the concern

When civic education initiatives partner overwhelmingly with Christian or Christian-aligned organizations — while excluding other faith traditions and secular civic groups — neutrality gives way to preference.

Preference becomes precedent.

And precedent, once established, rarely remains symbolic.

Partial separation always fails

We reassure ourselves that ceremonial religion is harmless. That it reflects heritage. That it doesn’t coerce.

But compromise creates ambiguity. Ambiguity creates opportunity. And opportunity is seized by those who seek power, not pluralism.

Once religion becomes visible inside the state, it becomes political. Once political, it becomes a tool.

What real separation actually requires

If we are serious about the First Amendment, then clarity — not comfort — must guide us:

• No swearing oaths on religious texts

• No official prayers or prayer breakfasts

• No religious messaging from state institutions

• No public performance of faith in an official capacity

• No federal or state holidays based on religious observances

Government officials may believe, worship, and pray — privately. Their faith is none of my business. But the moment it is ritualized by the state, it ceases to be personal and becomes political.

This is not hostility to religion. It is respect for it.

The only stable solution

Every halfway measure fails. “Ceremonial deism.” “Heritage faith.” “Inclusive prayer.” These concepts collapse under pressure because they concede the premise that religion belongs inside government.

Complete separation protects everyone:

• Believers from state interference

• Nonbelievers from exclusion

• Government from capture

• Religion from corruption

If religion shares space with power, power will eventually dominate.

A warning, not a panic

This is not alarmism. It is constitutional realism.

The Constitution does not belong to God.
It belongs to the people.

And the only book any public official should ever swear allegiance to is the one that governs us all.

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The data are unambiguous. Wages have stagnated while executive bonuses soared; corporate tax cuts turned into stock buybacks rather than jobs; and the public institutions that once expanded opportunity—schools, infrastructure, healthcare—have been starved in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” The American worker was sold an economic miracle and handed a mirage.

Trickle-down economics isn’t a theory—it’s a grift. A decades-long shell game in which the rich and the powerful convinced the rest of us to celebrate our own exploitation. And perhaps the cruelest part of the con is how persistently it’s been repackaged as common sense, as if we hadn’t already lived through its consequences again and again.

Real prosperity doesn’t trickle—it rises when we invest in people, in public goods, and in fairness. Until we admit that trickle-down was never an economic model but a moral failure, we’ll keep mistaking greed for growth and grift for governance.

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Bloated and zoned out by consumption of shitty food and customized, yet crappy, news/info/entertainment, we’ll live in our own little world where our device is our best friend and the only thing that truly “gets us”. Or are we there already? Our devices/apps/sites know what we’re into, what we’re interested in...what we’re thinking. It’s amazing technology but not being used for good, for the improvement of the human condition. For all the apps, all the social media outlets, all the info at our fingertips, everyone’s experience is so individualized that there is no way for me to know what you know. We may as well be living in two different worlds.

We are being turned into mindless robots that spend and consume at an astronomical pace, all the while becoming more alone, more isolated, more depressed...driving us to consume even more in an attempt to feel good. Think about it...years ago, we all read the same newspaper, watched one of the three available news shows, went to the library and looked up facts in the same encyclopedias as everyone else. Yes, our information was more limited, but are we any better off for having unlimited access to misinformation? Have we gained worldly wisdom or instead become pseudo-experts in echo chambers? We are on information overload, sitting in our own little silos. Our children have powerful computers in their hands, but are no smarter than us at their ages. Is my son teaching himself a new language at night in bed, thanks to his unlimited access to technology and information? No. He doesn’t have to learn the Dewey Decimal system, he won’t ever need to look at microfiche, his science teacher doesn’t show him film strips…yet, what good has technology done him, besides making him addicted to it? He was given a phone way too early. Eight years old. Divorce can make parents do stupid things, and putting a cell phone in the hands of an eight-year-old is a really stupid thing.

I found the above passage in my drafts. It was written October 29, 2018. Things haven’t improved in the past seven years. The son I was writing about was 13 at the time. He’s now 20, and thanks to COVID, he did half of high school over Zoom. I myself have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Substack, Bluesky, Threads, X, and TikTok. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

We need to get out of the metaverse and go outside. And since I’m in the mood to hand out free advice, here goes:

• Question everything. Question your parents, your preachers, your teachers. Question yourself. Examine what you think and what you believe in. Justify your positions. Be willing to say you don’t know. Be willing to say you were wrong.

• Never stop learning. Read. Research. Don’t get your news from just one source. Get news from at least 4-5 different sources, including outlets outside the U.S. You’ve got the world in the palm of your hands—use that power and technology to expand your brain, not shrink it.

• Go substance-free. I know that this is going to sound holier-than-thou. But I learned the hard way, and I can guarantee you that your life will be better if you can quit smoking, drinking, weed, drugs, vaping, or whatever the hell you’re addicted to (including food, sex, porn, shopping, and social media).

  • It will save you a shit ton of money.

  • Getting rid of all these crutches will force you to deal with life head-on. It also forces you to get real hobbies. Happy hour is not a hobby. Going outside for a smoke does not count as an activity.

  • You will be more productive and have more mental clarity without the haze of alcohol, weed, drugs, or hangovers.

  • You will be happier and healthier.

Note: I’m not talking about you lucky folks who can have a glass of wine, now and then. For me, it wasn’t worth drinking if I wasn’t going to have at least two or three. The truth is, if you’re getting drunk, you’re drinking too much. Alcohol is, quite literally, poison.

Look, no one wants unsolicited advice, but if ChatGPT is your best friend or therapist, I implore you to put all your devices in sleep mode and go for a walk. Start a book club. Join a kickball, softball, or bowling league. Protest. Volunteer. Talk to people. Learn their stories, and share yours. Build community. Create art. Find joy. Get strong. Love hard.

Twerk.

We are organizing to fight fascism over at No Small Act. People are coming out of their homes and meeting up and figuring out ways to fight the fascist regime taking over our country. Find your people online and then connect IRL. We can do this, but we need everyone to DO SOMETHING. There is no more status quo.