In Our Name
Bread, Circuses, Missiles, and Bombs
I’ve carried an Adbusters photograph in my memory for years. It showed two frames in a full page image, side by side: a family of Americans in their living room, enjoying snacks while gathered around the television, watching the news, comfortable and content. In the next frame, a mother, clearly in a war zone outside a bombed building holding a dead child, her mouth agape in a silent scream of anguish.
The photograph did not need a caption. It needed only for you to look at both images at the same time. That is still all it needs.
Three C’s of the Apocalypse: No Longer Speculative.
We Are Inside.
Not long ago I wrote about the Three C’s of the Apocalypse: Conflict, Climate, and Concentration of Wealth. It was framed as a warning. A dark but still somewhat distant possibility.
We are no longer watching the storm gather on the horizon. We are in it.
Global conflicts are raging. Climate catastrophe is upon us. The concentration of wealth is suffocating democracy under the weight of billionaire-hoarded assets.
The apocalypse did not announce itself. It rarely does. It showed up quietly, between the commercials. Gil Scott Heron was right, the revolution was not televised. It will not go better with Coke and it will not fight germs that cause bad breath.
Raging Global Conflicts
While dinner was beeping in the microwave, at the same moment, somewhere else, the sky was lit with explosions. Israel and the United States conducting military strikes inside Iran. No declaration of war. No congressional vote. No national conversation.
Decisions stemming from both Trump and Netanyahu, desperate men, attempting to obscure their crimes by starting wars.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is in its fifth year of defending itself and Europe from yet another war criminal -Putin. Russia continues to strike cities, hospitals, the power grid, and apartment buildings, inflicting widespread civilian deaths and suffering.
Gaza is in ruins. Hospitals, schools, bakeries, mosques, apartment towers -destroyed. The people who lived there are displaced, starving, grieving, or dead. Netanyahu has now extended IDF military operations into Lebanon and launched strikes on Iran. The region is not on the edge of a wider war. It is already wider.
Cuba, 90 miles from the coast of Florida, is being strangled by a tightening Trump-imposed naval blockade. Food and medicine, restricted. This is, at a minimum, a provocation of war. It is inflicting suffering to the civilian population of Cuba and is immoral.
The Secretary of War, in plain language at a public podium, announced that U.S. military forces would give “no quarter” to the enemy. No quarter is a phrase with a specific legal meaning. It means you will not spare the wounded. You will not accept surrender. It is a war crime. He said it out loud. Cable news noted it and moved on.
We’re at War?
In the United States, things are different.
Here, the war is an AP News notification on a phone, scrolled past on the way to checking the weather. It is a chyron at the bottom of a screen in an hours-long line at the airport. It is something a neighbor mentions briefly before the conversation turns to the restaurant that just opened downtown.
This is not ignorance. It is not even indifference, exactly. It is something more structural and more troubling: it is insulation. The deliberate engineering of distance between American life and the consequences of American power.
Presently, there is no draft. There is no rationing (yet). There is no moment at which the ordinary American is asked to sacrifice anything at all in connection with the wars being conducted in our name, with our tax dollars, by our government.
Meanwhile, quietly, the cost of everything is rising. The already broken healthcare system is worsening. Vital institutions are being dismantled piece by piece. Record-breaking heatwaves and massive flooding in Hawaii. This is reality. Today.
Panem et Circenses (Bread and Circuses)
The 2026 Baseball Season is here and officially begins with the Yankees and the Giants.
Despite the world around us, I always feel some youthful excitement when the season begins. I still remember going to Dodger Stadium a lifetime ago with my dad to watch L.A. beat the Cardinals while enjoying my first Dodger Dog (in my pre-vegetarian days).
On March 25th in San Francisco the baseball stands will fill. The beer will be cold (and incredibly expensive). The crack of the bat will be one of the most satisfying sounds a human being can hear, and I say that without irony, because it is true and because the truth of it is part of what I am trying to say. The game will be the reality for the thousands in the stands, and the millions streaming the game on Netflix.
And yet, at roughly the same time,
In Kharkiv, a mother will check her phone hoping her son, a soldier defending Ukraine from the criminal Putin is still alive.
In Rafah, a family will bury children, or grandparents they could not protect.
In Minab, a father will try to explain why his daughter’s best friend was killed in a missile strike on her elementary school.
In Lebanon, a family flees from their home in the Nabatieh region while airstrikes and artillery explode nearby.
In Havana, a critical surgery will be performed with a flashlight or candlelight because the island has no energy supply.
For us, the baseball season begins. The distance between our American life and those suffering from the horrors we inflict will be exactly as wide as we have decided to let it be.
How We See the War
We see it the way we see everything now: as content.
A strike on Tehran loads between a sponsored post and a friend’s vacation photos. It has a thumbnail. It has a view count. It has, depending on the platform, a reaction button. You can respond to an airstrike with a red heart or a crying face, and then the feed moves on.
The language we have developed for this is telling. We talk about “the situation” in Gaza. We talk about “the conflict” in Ukraine. We talk about “tensions” with Iran. These are the words of weather forecasts and traffic reports. They are words designed to convey information while insulating the listener from weight.
We have, without quite deciding to, turned the suffering of millions of people into a genre. And like all genres it has conventions, and pacing, and the assumption that there will be another episode tomorrow, the day after, and next week.
How They Live the War
A mother in Kharkiv has not slept without the sound of air raid sirens in fourteen months. Her son is at the front. She checks her phone the way the rest of us check email. She is looking for his name on a list she hopes never contains it.
A father in Gaza is trying to explain to his surviving children why the building where their cousins lived no longer exists. He does not have the words. There are no words for this in any language. He is also trying to find water.
A family in Tehran sat down to dinner and heard the explosions. No one warned them. There was no declaration that reached their kitchen table, no congressional debate that interrupted their evening, no vote that allowed them to be represented in the decision to bomb their city. There was just the sound, and then the silence, and then the sound again.
A family in Havana is watching a child go hungry. Not slowly. Now. Because a Trump/Hegseth ordered blockade believes suffering is an acceptable instrument of political pressure. Ninety miles from Florida.
These stories are of people struggling to survive the cruel intent of criminally unbridled power. They were eating dinner and making plans and putting their children to bed, and then the world that we are responsible for came through the walls and ceiling leaving behind death, despair, and grief.
Our Moral Collapse
We did not arrive here suddenly.
The distance between the American couch and the rubble of Gaza and Tehran was not created overnight. It was constructed over generations, deliberately, through the defunding of journalism, the rise of algorithmic media that buries what remains, the end of the military draft, the normalization of forever wars, and the abstraction of Americans from consequence. War is a video game and its victims are what Elon Musk describes as NPC’s: Non-player characters.
Yet there is a moment when insulation becomes complicity. When the distance we maintain is no longer innocent.
We are funding these wars. The weapons landing on Gaza have “Made in America” on them. The strikes on Iran were ordered by an American president with American military assets. The naval blockade on Cuba is American policy. These are not things happening to us or around us. These are things being done in our name, with our money, by people we elected through voting (or non-voting) or failed to prevent from taking power.
The American Experiment was a societal aspiration toward a better way. A beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. Never perfect. Always ebbing and flowing through generations, however, with a long running idea that together we could work toward a “more perfect Union”. That one day we could fully realize Martin’s dream.
Now, the Experiment lies bleeding in our hands. We have traded a representative democracy, the Constitution, international law and treaties, for a lawless and corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted felon, his VP and Cabinet of incompetent sycophants, and a GOP-led Congress that has abandoned its collective Oath of Office and as a result, has betrayed every citizen and its responsibility to act as a check on tyranny.
The Worst Leadership at the Most Critical Time
At the precise moment in history when the complexity and danger of the world demands the most capable, experienced, and morally serious leadership the United States can produce, we have the Trump/Vance Administration.
Trump has not used nuclear weapons -yet. He has, however, unilaterally launched military strikes on Iran without a declaration of war, without a congressional vote, and without a coherent strategy beyond the impulse of a man who abuses power with impunity. He has imposed a naval blockade on Cuba. He attacked Venezuela and kidnapped their contested President and his wife. He has done all of this while the Epstein/Trump/Maxwell files sit largely redacted, obstructed, or possibly destroyed, the credible accusations of rape and the abuse of girls and women buried by his loyalist Pam Bondi, beneath the relentless churn of the next Trump-caused outrage.
One of his Fox “News” appointees, as Secretary of War, announced publicly that American forces would commit what is, by the legal definition established after World War II, a war crime. (https://www.justsecurity.org/133970/legal-advice-hegseth-no-quarter-hypo/)
Around him: a cabinet assembled not for competence but for complete fealty. Not for judgment but for silence. Not for the capacity to navigate a dangerous world but for the willingness to let one man navigate it alone, unchecked, unaccountable, and increasingly unhinged.
This is not the leadership failure of a bad hire. This is a generational catastrophe. The decisions being made right now, the enemies being made permanent, the alliances being torched, the wars being started without votes, will cost lives for decades. Not metaphorically. Actually. Today’s children will pay for what is being decided by a man with unchecked power and no capacity for consequence.
No Kings 3 and Beyond
Join me in Tucson on Saturday, March 28 or find a demonstration, march, or rally near you. Visit https://nokings.org for more information.
Defend, Support, and Build
The Midterms are a referendum on crimes, corruption, and chaos. 2026 isn’t about a blue or red wave but about democratic principles and the rule of law. Now there are concrete galvanizing issues: undeclared wars, a hollowed-out federal workforce, tariffs and incompetence-driven inflation, and a Supreme Court that has provided the cover of immunity, and a cowardly GOP-led Congress that continues to betray their legal obligation to the United States: to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
Defend
Every member of Congress swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Most have broken it. The courts have been stacked. The media has been captured. The Department of Justice is functioning as the President’s personal law firm. When every institutional guardrail has failed, we are the last one.
We must show up at every rally, protest, and demonstration in our unwavering support of democracy, equality, and justice.
With the midterm elections looming, and a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives -each planned rally should make unmistakably clear that we reject the lawlessness, corruption, and obstruction of justice of the Trump/Vance administration. Put the GOP on notice that their cowardice and continuing support of Trump by their silence and inaction will be addressed in November by a massive wave of voters.
Defend also means showing up for the people this administration has targeted most directly. The immigrant families torn apart by federal agents who kill unarmed citizens and block medics from reaching the dying. The Dreamers whose legal status is being weaponized. The refugees sent to countries where they face persecution or death without due process and in defiance of judicial orders. Communities of color subjected to militarized policing under the banner of immigration enforcement. The families losing healthcare coverage so that billionaires can receive another tax cut.
These are not abstractions. They are people -moms, dads, grandparents, your neighbors, your coworkers, the woman behind you at the grocery store trying to figure out how to feed her family this week. Defend them. Physically show up when ICE operates in your community. Know your rights and help others know theirs. Donate to legal defense funds. Do not look away.
Support
The institutions and organizations still fighting the crimes, corruption, and abuse need more than our attention. They need resources.
Visit https://civ.works/defend for a growing list of local, regional, and national organizations on the front lines.
The lawyers and legal organizations challenging unconstitutional detentions, deportations, and the administration’s defiance of court orders. The civil rights organizations documenting what is happening in communities across this country. The environmental groups fighting the rollback of protections while this administration greenlights carcinogens and guts the EPA. The voting rights organizations working to ensure that every eligible citizen can cast a ballot in November and that every ballot is counted.
And the journalists. The independent reporters and outlets doing the work that the consolidated corporate media will not do. The NPR investigation that uncovered the DOJ’s illegal withholding of Epstein files. The CBS News reporters who broke the story of Operation Chain Reaction. Subscribe to independent journalism. Share it. Fund it. It is not a luxury. It is critical infrastructure for democracy. Without it, everything documented in this article never sees the light of day, and that is exactly what this administration is counting on. And don’t forget our educators, our public libraries and librarians who are courageously on the front lines in the fight for academic freedom and against censorship.
Remember -any meaningful democracy requires an educated, informed, and engaged society.
Build
November 2026 is not a hope. It is a deadline.
Every special election between now and then is a rehearsal. Every voter registration is a brick in the foundation. Every conversation with a neighbor, a family member, a coworker who has checked out or given up is an act of construction. This is not about a blue wave or a red wave. It is about whether a country built on the premise that no one is above the law will enforce that premise or abandon it.
Build the movement in every school board race, every city council seat, every state legislative contest. Build it in every swing district where a single congressional seat can shift the balance of power. Build it with people who have never voted and people who stopped believing their vote mattered. Build it across every line this administration has tried to draw between us.
And build it with the understanding that November may not be the end. An administration that has launched unauthorized wars, defied federal law, obstructed investigations into the sexual assault of children, and attempted to overthrow the results of a previous election is unlikely to respect the results of the next one. Be prepared. Organize not only for the election but for what may follow: a prolonged, disciplined, and unified general strike if this administration attempts to subvert the democratic process again.
In 2024, approximately seventy-five million Americans voted to take the United States in a different direction. Since then, independents and even Republicans under 35 have abandoned him in numbers that would have been unimaginable fourteen months ago. The coalition that can end this corrupt, lawless regime is not a minority. It is an overwhelming majority of this country, and it is growing every week this administration drops another bomb, buries another file, and kills another unarmed citizen.
We do not get to look away and remain innocent. What is done in our name belongs to us. Seeing it changes nothing unless we act on what we see.
We must defend, support, and build.
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Liz Oyer, Former DOJ Pardon Attorney
The contrasts between people here vs. the suffering peoples in the Middle East are eloquent, George. I think about these contrasts when I’m outdoors looking at spring delights and want to cry. One man and his cronies are wrecking our world.
This is so painful. I grew up in Germany after the war. We kids were told to stay away from the rubble of destroyed houses on every block, and to not play with bombs should we find one. The insulation of the U.S. was always obvious to me, and shocking. Last Saturday The Guardian reported that "5m tonnes of CO2 emitted in just 14 days of US war on Iran, analysis finds... draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined" -- batshit crazy. I visited Beirut in 1969, a beautiful city, called "the Paris of the Mediterranean" I think, and now the Israeli government is again trying to destroy it, like Gaza. You could pay me NOT to go to Saturday's NO KING 3, a whole lot, and I'd say "F..k you." But I'm almost 80 and I'm glad that I won't be around for that much longer. My daughter, the generations after -- well, it's sad.