The Memorial They Deserve..

Today, I find myself thinking about the young men of my grandfather’s generation — boys, really — boarding ships bound for North Africa, or the blood-soaked beaches of the Pacific. I'll bet they were terrified, most of them, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at their faces in most of the photographs. They stood tall, cracked jokes, smoked cigarettes with shaking hands. Scared out of their minds, perhaps, and trying like hell not to show it.

Before the war was through, they’d be asked to summon a kind of courage most of us will never have to imagine. They would crawl through hellscapes of mud and fire, would witness things too awful to tell their mothers when the letters home came — if they came at all. 

Some would be among the first to step into Nazi concentration camps - places where the full horror of human cruelty was paid bare. They saw the emaciated survivors, the piles of bones and discarded shoes, the silence of a place where so much suffering occurred it will likely never be forgotten. After seeing that, they weren't just there under the auspices of fighting for a symbol or a flag, they knew that they helped pull the world back from the edge of total darkness. 

Many of them died there, far from the quiet neighborhoods and corner diners and baseball fields they called home. They died soldier’s deaths — in trenches and beaches and fields with no names — casualties of a cause bigger than themselves, a cause they chose to believe in.

But don’t let the sepia photographs and stone memorials fool you — these were not marble men. They were dreamers. They were kids with plans. They were thinking about holding their sweetheart’s hand in the soft flicker of the movie house, about the sound of the bat cracking at the ballpark on a summer night, about sitting down at a worn kitchen table with their folks, laughing over a pot roast and mashed potatoes.

They dreamed of coming home. They dreamed of this, Today. They probably dreamed it would be a little more peaceful at home, but that's besides the point. 

Look around today. Look at the families stretched out in the grass at the park, at the smell of charcoal and burgers on the grill, at the kids laughing, sun-drenched and barefoot. Look at this little slice of American peace, and take a moment. Take a deep breath. And remember them.

And while we remember them, let us also remember this: True heroism is quiet. It doesn’t need a slogan. It doesn’t strut or shout. It is sober, and often lonely, and rarely comes with fanfare. In an age where some in power are more interested in projecting strength than practicing humility, more invested in the performance of masculinity than the preservation of decency, we must resist the temptation to let our fallen be reduced to a prop The memory of the dead is not a tool to be wielded for political gain, nor a mantle to be draped over any party or politician.

In a time of polarizing conflict and vitriolic discourse, let us remember that America’s obligation to the Fallen does not end at the moment of death — No, what begins at enlistment, continues beyond death. To truly honor them is to see them as whole people, with names and stories and hopes, not symbols. The Fallen must never be used as tools for political means. They deserve more than soundbites. Their families deserve our care, our memory, our gratitude.

Our country deserves a people that will keep their promise to the Fallen and to one another. This place, despite the upheaval, remains a repository of the hopes and dreams of millions within our borders and around the world. If we allow cruelty to settle into our hearts and our policies, we betray the ideals that the men and women we honor today died defending. Their deaths demand more of us - more decency, more courage, more grace. 

May God bless their sacrifice — tender, terrible, and true. And may we honor them not just with words, or flags, or moments of silence, but by living the kind of lives full of the joy, freedom, and everyday beauty that they never got to come back to.

That is the memorial they deserve.

A Precarious Moment: Your Golden Age Fallacy is Bullshit.

There’s a certain grim irony in watching today’s right-wing political class sabotage the very global systems that once made their version of “traditional family values” economically viable. And by “traditional,” of course, they don’t mean the truly old model—subsistence farming, communal labor, multigenerational support. They mean a very specific, very recent historical blip: the postwar, single-income, male-breadwinner household. A structure subsidized, not by timeless virtue, but by rubble, racism, and Roosevelt.

It’s worth recalling that this brief window of prosperity—white, nuclear, middle class—wasn’t the natural fruit of conservative ideals. It was the byproduct of two enormous, liberal internationalist forces: the decimation of industrial competition in World War II, and a massive, coordinated effort by FDR and allies to build an open, rules-based global trade order. These policies were not incidental—they were essential. And yes, they were deeply flawed and racially exclusionary in practice. But they also laid the foundation for an economy that, for a moment, allowed bottom-half men to earn enough to support families in ways that now seem mythic.

What’s tragic, then, is that the same political movement now claiming to defend the “traditional family” is dismantling the architecture that made their version of that family possible in the first place. As John Ganz recently put it, “[MAGA Republicans] are destroying everything that kept the world relatively prosperous and safe for the past 80 years.”

Tariffs are at the center of this self-defeating crusade. We know—from history, from economics, from lived experience—that tariffs don’t revive domestic manufacturing in any sustained way. Trump’s own 2018–2019 tariff spree resulted in net losses in manufacturing jobs. Bush’s steel tariffs fared no better. Even in the 19th century, when American agriculture still reigned, tariffs made life harder for farmers by making imported equipment more expensive.

Now, tariffs are sold as a tool to protect workers and restore “family values,” but in practice they punish working-class families by raising prices on goods they rely on. And when those price hikes aren’t met with real wage growth—because they rarely are—the result is a net loss in economic stability. And with economic insecurity comes exactly the sort of familial instability the right claims to want to reverse.

So why push them? Part of the answer lies in the political utility of trade restrictions: they create endless opportunities for those in power to dole out exemptions, punish enemies, reward donors. They invite corruption. Trump has already signaled his openness to such “offers,” in what feels like a perfectly American blend of strongman populism and late-stage capitalism.

Ganz, again, offers a sobering reminder: "FDR’s embrace of trade wasn’t just about prosperity—it was about avoiding the “beggar-thy-neighbor” spiral that deepened the Great Depression. It was a recognition that mutual flourishing was possible—and necessary—in a globalized world. To reject that lesson is to court another age of retrenchment, division, and shared decline."

And what of the “traditional family”? That ideal—so often evoked, so rarely interrogated—was never as stable or universal as its defenders suggest. It was exclusionary, isolating, and, for many, quietly devastating. Its decline has brought loneliness, yes, but also new forms of freedom, new kinds of kinship, and the beginnings of more honest conversations about what support, love, and solidarity might look like in this century.

We are, undeniably, in a precarious moment. But precarity can be clarifying. It reminds us that what we build next—economically, politically, familially—does not need to mimic the past to be good. It simply needs to be more just, more inclusive, and more resilient. And maybe, if we get very lucky and a little bit wise, more joyful too.

The First Cut

"Just so you know,” Joe said, handing her a starched black apron on her first morning at the butcher shop, “the women will hate you.”

It was December, and the snow had just begun to press its soft weight on the rooftops of the small Michigan town where she’d landed, suddenly and with little plan, like a letter delivered to the wrong address. She had stepped off the bus with a canvas bag and a name no one here knew, and walked the main street with that quiet, resolute look of someone who had left something unfinished behind.

The butcher shop had appeared like a lighthouse in a cold mist—its windows warm-lit and slightly fogged, the air inside perfumed with spice and marrow. She had wandered in, not quite looking for work but knowing, instinctively, that work might be the surest way to anchor herself to this new geography. Joe had hired her without asking many questions.

"Eiighteen an hour,” he’d said, as though it was neither a gift nor a risk, just the natural order of things. “Come in Saturday. Early.”

Now, standing in the raw, meaty hum of the shop, she looked up at him, confused and half-smiling, as if searching for the punchline. Joe stared back at her through the thick lenses of his black plastic frames, his expression unmoved.

“They’ll hate you because you’re beautiful,” he said, as simply as one might mention the fat content of pork belly. “Because you’re bright.”

He didn’t mean it cruelly. There was no edge in his voice, no caution. Just a plainspoken kind of knowing, the way you might tell someone that porcelain tiles hold the morning’s chill long after the sun has risen, or that the best walnuts are kept near the baking supplies in aisle nine.

She nodded slowly, the smile fading. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear with a hand that had not yet learned the rhythm of knives and cleavers, that still smelled faintly of lavender soap and ink.

Behind the counter, Megan—the old manager with a soft-spoken mouth and a hard-earned calm—watched the exchange. She gave her a wink, a glance like a hand extended underwater. Joe was right.

Megan, impervious to the hierarchy of gazes and the economies of desirability, had no use for the kind of rivalry that flickered in other women’s eyes like a match half-lit. She didn’t care if men looked or didn’t. She didn’t measure herself in comparisons. That made her rare. That made her kind.

And so, she began—learning the cool heft of bone beneath blade, the language of fat marbling through muscle, the choreography of wrapping, weighing, exchanging. She would come to understand the temperature of silence in the back room, the scent of iron that clung to her hands even after hot water and lemon. But most of all, she would learn to read the eyes of the women on the other side of the counter—not with judgment, but with a tender kind of comprehension.

She would not hate them in return. That, too, would set her apart.

Training Wheels

The alley was never the place you’d expect magic to happen. People avoided it. It was narrow, dirty, and somehow always colder than it should’ve been, even on days when the sun made a half-hearted attempt to warm the concrete. It was the kind of place where things weren’t quite right—flickers of light from the streetlamps, too much shadow in corners that shouldn’t exist, the occasional low hum of something mechanical, like a forgotten engine deep within the building. The alley seemed to know something the rest of the world didn’t, like it had been around long enough to see the patterns, the failed attempts, the slow decay of promises. And today, on this Sunday, it had a particular kind of gravity to it.

Manny stood there beside his son, the bike gleaming in a fitful sun that threatened to collapse under its own weight. One hand on the handlebars, one hand on the seat. He’d taken the training wheels off. Of course, that was the plan, wasn’t it? Get him on the bike, get him to move. But this wasn’t just a simple bike ride. This was some sort of strange, quiet microcosm of the world—a little black hole in the corner of the universe where all of Manny's doubts and fears collided, where past and future merged, where everything could either fall into place or go terribly wrong. And yet—nothing. There were no bystanders, no cheers from the sidelines, just the distant clatter of metal against stone and the smell of trash from behind a rotting dumpster.

"Alright," Manny said, his voice carrying a tremor. "We’ll give it a shot, but if it doesn’t happen today, we’ll try again another time." A moment of preemptive defeat, but a kind of protective shield, a way of navigating the inevitable disappointment that always seemed to linger just beyond the horizon. Maybe it was genetic. His father had always been the same way: soft-spoken, hopeful, but with an ever-present awareness that things didn’t always work out as planned.

And so it began: the attempt, the wobbling, the doubts creeping in from the edges of Manny's mind. His hands were steady but unsure, holding on to the seat and the handlebars as if by some strange alchemy he could will the world into submission. But no. This wasn’t about control, was it? Because what happened next was something completely out of his hands.

There was a moment—a fleeting moment, more of a sensation than a thing—that passed between them, between the bike and the boy. And suddenly, his son was flying. There was no other way to describe it. Manny didn’t have a word for it, not in that instant. But the boy was on his way, moving, gliding past the detritus of a city that had long since lost its sense of purpose. And Manny stood there, hands empty, knowing that for reasons he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, the universe had simply decided to give them both a break.

The air in the alley, still thick with the dust of a hundred failed attempts, had shifted in some inexplicable way. The boy was gone—past the garbage bins, past the edges of reality itself. And Manny, with his hands still tingling as if they had held something precious, let the alley collapse back into its usual quiet, unsure whether anything had really changed, or whether this would all vanish, like a forgotten dream. The boy, for his part, didn’t look back.