Congratulations, freedom lovers. Patriots. Defenders of the republic. Holders of handmade signs. You did it. You showed up. Three thousand, one hundred marches strong — stretching from the sunbaked sidewalks of the West Coast to the windswept parking lots of suburban New Hampshire. Every single march sent an unmistakable message to power:
We are here. We are loud. We have comfortable shoes and strong opinions.
I had planned to tell people on my own terms. I had a whole timeline. There would be a right moment, a considered conversation, perhaps a tasteful announcement. I would control the narrative.
Instead, my bladder did it for me.
For several days, I lived inside the kind of pain that hollows you out. Not just physical pain, though that was real enough, but the accumulated weight of years of being managed into silence. Then one morning, steadied by rest and a small mercy of pharmacology, I made a decision. I reached out to my supervisor and contacted a VP directly. I handed them a log of everything that had happened since January 1984.
Could I be fired? Yes. Likely? Probably not. But something shifted the moment I sent that message: my supervisors no longer controlled the narrative. And with that shift came a question I could not stop turning over in my mind.
Would a spiritual person — a Buddhist, a Christian, a person genuinely trying to live with compassion — have done what I did? I have been sitting with that question. Here is what I have found.
Nicholas Kristof’s sobering column, “The $1.3-Million-a-Minute War,” forces a number into your conscience and refuses to let it go. At its peak, the war in Gaza was costing roughly $1.3 million every single minute. Not in lives — though those too — but in dollars. American dollars, mobilized with breathtaking speed and political unanimity, flow toward destruction while funding for the most basic human needs crawls through years of gridlock.
Kristof calls this a failure of “moral accounting.” He’s right. But the reckoning he demands doesn’t stop at Gaza’s border. It lands, uncomfortably, right here at home.
A Crisis We’re Choosing Not to See
While Washington debates the next defense supplemental, America is quietly sleepwalking toward one of the most predictable catastrophes in its history. By 2040, an estimated 11.2 million Americans will be living with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2050, that number approaches 13 million — and among Americans aged 85 and older, one in three already has the disease. A landmark NYU Langone study delivered perhaps the starkest finding of all: one in two Americans can expect to experience significant cognitive difficulties after the age of 55.
Read that again. One in two.
Question. Why is Iran Really Getting Whacked?
Rachel Maddow expressed skepticism regarding the motives behind the United States’ initiation of a war with Iran on a Saturday morning, arguing that the U.S. administration’s stated reasons do not withstand rational deduction. Marrow contends Iran posed no immediate threat to the U.S. homeland, as it lacked intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and is not believed to be close to developing them. Even Secretary of State Rubio is cited as admitting that such a capability is only a distant, hypothetical possibility rather than a current reality, leading the author to dismiss the missile threat as a justification for conflict. Finally, the claims that Iran is on the verge of industrial-grade uranium enrichment, as proposed by Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and friend of the president, who has been involved in high-level talks despite a perceived lack of relevant experience is bogus. The fact that neither international intelligence nor the Trump administration’s own officials—including Rubio during a recent press conference in Saint Kitts and Nevis—have provided evidence that Iran is currently enriching uranium. Thus, the official justifications for military action are inconsistent with the available facts.
So, what gives? Why did the U.S. blow Iran to the desert dustbin?
In my opinion, you have to see the chessboard. In The West Wing episode “Hartsfield’s Landing” (Season 3, Episode 14), President Bartlet tells Sam Seaborn to “see the whole board”. Using a chess game metaphor, Bartlet advises his staff to look beyond immediate, narrow details—such as a single chess move or a minor political crisis—and consider the broader strategic, long-term picture. In the case of Iran, it’s all about power.
And oh, that little itty-bitty island just 1,500 – 1,800 miles northwest of the U.S. coast might have something to do with it as well. “You mean ‘Greenland?'” you ask. Yeah, Greenland.
My boss wants his team to use AI more. “Copilot is everything,” he says. “Be more efficient,” he says. “Leverage Copilot,” he says. “Let it help you think,” he says.
A few days later, he demonstrated the perceived power of AI efficiency. He created our 2026 objectives using Copilot. His email explained it all, “Copilot wrote our objectives.”
I was awe struck. They were flawless. Perfectly structured. Impeccably worded. Strategically aligned. Action-oriented. Outcome-focused. Metric-adjacent.
They meant absolutely nothing.
There are moments when leadership is revealed not by policy, but by instinct. Not by speeches, but by what is laughed at, shared, or dismissed as “no big deal.”
Recently, something ugly surfaced—an image rooted in one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racist tropes in American history. It was not subtle. It was not ambiguous. It was the kind of imagery that generations of Black Americans have known all too well: the stripping away of dignity, intellect, and humanity with a single cruel comparison.
The clip was removed after public outrage, but the damage lingered. Because removal without reflection is not accountability. And silence from the most powerful office in the country is not neutrality—it is permission.
