Mike McCabe's Blog

First learned it more than 30 years after leaving school. Not just one thing, a lengthy list of things that should’ve been taught in school but weren’t. Not what you might be thinking. I took a bookkeeping class, learned how to balance a checkbook, file taxes, manage personal finances. I took shop classes covering the basics of everything from carpentry to engine repair. I took home ec for boys where we’d cook, sew and even go on field trips to the grocery store to learn how to be savvy shoppers.

What I missed out on were things I didn’t even know existed. Was never taught about Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and the race massacre there in 1921. Knew nothing of the history of sundown towns, even though it was clearly pertinent to my upbringing since nearly every community I grew up around once fit the description, with either written decrees or unwritten rules keeping blacks and other non-white ethnic groups out. If you weren’t white, you couldn’t be there after dark.

Was left unaware of another essential part of American history that was left out of social studies lessons, namely the circumstances surrounding white supremacy’s invention. Was oblivious even to the part of the story having to do with my own ancestry, how people with my ethnicity and skin color went from being despised outcasts to a recognized part of the white majority by aligning with oppressors rather than fellow oppressed classes to gain social and political standing.

Some living in places like where I grew up say teaching this kind of stuff will hurt kids’ self esteem, make them feel bad about their cultural heritage. Nonsense. Learning later in life about the Tulsa massacre or racial covenants in property deeds did not bring on self-loathing, it helps me properly understand the world I share with so many others. I needn’t have been spared this truth; I could have handled it in my youth. Discovering how indentured Irish immigrants sold out Africans they’d fought side by side with in Bacon’s Rebellion did not load me down with shame, it further opened my heart to sympathy and tolerance.

At no point in school was I taught the African proverb about how history is used to perpetuate the power of dominant groups.

Until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

The wisdom in this saying comes into sharper focus as we now witness the whitewashing of history, the defunding of reality, the erasure of the glories of lions.

It’s not just what wasn’t taught in school that left me woefully uneducated. It also was the many things taught that just weren’t so. I was taught about Adam Smith, superficially, beginning and ending with his invisible hand theory. The indoctrination I received had me believing that Smith was extolling the virtues of market capitalism free of government interference.

Turns out he was doing nothing of the sort. Turns out the understanding I was given is wrong. Turns out this lion of moral philosophy needed his own historians. The ones who told his story twisted it to their advantage, made him into a mascot for a mythology that served their purposes.

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I discovered this more than 40 years after my formal schooling was complete, too late to spare me the indignity of knowing an article I wrote for this journal in August 2025 did Smith’s work a considerable injustice. I now can only acknowledge my ignorance and seek to correct the record.

The Adam Smith taught in school is the father of economics. Truth is, he was not trained as an economist and didn’t consider himself one. The story we all were told says Smith viewed unregulated commerce as the purest form of human progress, tying him to laissez-faire, the idea that markets should be left alone. Truth is, laissez-faire was not his idea. He didn’t believe greed rules the world, he believed morality does.

Adam Smith wrote volumes. He mentioned the phrase “invisible hand” only three times in everything he ever wrote. And not one of those three references described a universal law of markets, none said deregulation is the path to prosperity. In fact, in his most famous text, The Wealth of Nations, he spent page after page warning about corporations becoming too powerful. He warned that merchants, when left unchecked, would distort markets to enrich themselves. He argued that markets are human creations that require careful oversight and moral boundaries.

The three invisible hands Smith did identify were superstition, fear and the physical limits of gluttony. Not exactly the holy trinity of free-wheeling greed-is-good capitalism. The whole purpose of The Wealth of Nations was to shine light on why markets fail, how monopolies form, how cartels manipulate prices and corrupt governments, how economic power concentrates. He argued for markets strong enough to innovate, governments strong enough to restrain, societies wise enough to demand fairness. In death, he was made into something he never was while alive, by people who wanted nothing to do with the kind of balance he favored.

This most recent shoring up of my incomplete and insufficient education does not bring on self-loathing or load me down with shame, it drives home how important it is to keep an open mind, be wary of certainty, stay on the lookout for new revelations. And it reinforces for me how genuine truths are lions that need their own historians.

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America is not talking, or even thinking. At least not about the things that matter most. Too many distractions, so many conversation stoppers. Leaving us with a future being made for us, done to us, not one we are actively seeking to shape.

I’ve written before about how we’re living in a state of emergency, starting with the very first entry in this journal of mine nearly four years ago, then half a dozen more times since. In that first article, I wrote that it was not one single emergency but six all at once. A little over two years later, I upped it to seven. Now I’d say it’s at least eight, and we’re not having anything remotely resembling a national conversation about any of them.

We’ve got unaddressed national emergencies coming out of our ears and we’re not meaningfully discussing them much less taking corrective action. This is not only an indictment of elected representatives. The cowardly and politically paralyzed Congress we currently have is a reflection of an impoverished national conversation, not its cause.

Much is made of how divided and polarized our society has become, yet a strong case can be made that it’s something we largely agree on that’s most to blame for derailing national discourse and preventing problem solving. Yes, we have our differences, plenty of them. All generations of Americans have had differences, often very sharp ones, but previous generations managed to work through them. They didn’t get stuck, not the way we are today.

If there’s a national consensus on anything nowadays, it’s that America is in deep trouble, heading in the wrong direction, going downhill. One thing we all seem to agree on is that “the system is broken.” When we say that, we really mean to say systems, plural. The political system, economic system, health care system, all broken. And those are only the three brought up the most.

As for those eight largely ignored national emergencies, here goes:

1. There is grotesque economic inequality in America, and it worsens by the day, with the wealthiest 10% of Americans making half of all consumer purchases. Our society seems resigned to this arrangement. The federal tax rate on the highest income bracket is half what it was 50 years ago, the top rate the wealthiest paid at the end of World War II was nearly triple what it is now. There is not so much as a whisper—either in Congress, at the White House, in the media or much of anywhere else—about restoring such policies that even out the distribution of income and wealth.

2. Millions of Americans lack health insurance, millions more are a pink slip away from losing theirs, growing numbers who manage to stay covered have crappy insurance, nearly everyone who gets care has a horror story about how the medical industry did them wrong. Seven in 10 Americans believe the health care system has major problems or is in a state of crisis. No concentrated attention is being paid to overhauling it.

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3. Fear of a technological takeover of our lives and livelihoods has 70% of us here in Wisconsin believing artificial intelligence is overall a bad thing for society and similar majorities opposing the energy- and water-devouring data centers needed to power AI. In what passes for a technology debate, it’s all or nothing. One side demands outright bans on AI and data centers. The other side insists on a cyber version of the Wild West, with no rules or regulation whatsoever. So far there’s been no attempt to find a middle ground that accepts there’s no shoving this genie back in the bottle but also sees the need for economic safeguards for workers along with protection of personal privacy and intellectual property.

4. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels to produce electricity and provide transportation has caused undeniable environmental harms that are showing themselves in the form of more volatile weather and violent storms as well as adverse health consequences. As demand for electricity surges globally, the rest of the world is racing to transition to alternative sources of energy. Meanwhile, the current regime in the U.S. is doubling down on fossil fuels while withdrawing support for the development of renewables. The climate crisis is getting scant attention these days, having been driven off the agenda here. Few are complaining.

5. Plainly visible and loudly vocal expressions of racism and other forms of bigotry have been made fashionable again. After decades of progress, backsliding on women’s rights and even open displays of misogyny are gaining alarming degrees of acceptance. Scapegoating of immigrants and other vulnerable populations has grown commonplace. Such social injustices are in the back of our minds for the time being.

6. America condones and even celebrates violence while talking little and doing less about glaring symptoms of what 90% of Americans consider a mental health crisis. The U.S. leads the world in gun deaths, has the highest suicide rate among wealthy countries, fueled by an epidemic of loneliness and depression. That sums up a nation with more than unattended public health and safety concerns, one with uncorrected moral failings that are swept under the rug. Out of sight, out of mind.

7. Our country passed a grim milestone just the other day when the national debt surpassed America’s total annual economic output. Government debt has mushroomed to $31.27 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury, while the Department of Commerce estimated the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) for the past 12 months at $31.22 trillion. How best to raise revenue and reduce spending is not exactly a hot topic. The line for volunteers willing to stave off the nation’s insolvency by paying more, getting less or some of each is not long.

8. Belief that corruption is killing democracy has the blood of most Americans boiling, but equally strong feelings of political impotence quickly turn that anger into despair, as far too many among us wrongly assume it’s always been this way and always will be. Those who lack confidence in the possibility of any reform are convinced there’s no use talking about things like ending the legal bribery of elected officials or banning congressional stock trading. Needed conversations about these kinds of cures for what ails us are stopped dead in their tracks.

Eight mammoth problems, one murky future. We let everything from bombs to seashells get in the way of us dealing with them.

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Can easily take the boy out of the country, it’s much harder taking the country out of the boy. I’ve spent a little over 20 years of my life in rural settings, twice that many in the city. Despite my familiarity with urban living, to this day I feel like a bit of an alien in a city setting. Not all but most of my time living in remote outposts came during my childhood. Those formative years sure do leave a lasting imprint.

The place I call home now has been petless the last couple of years, for the first time in close to 30 years. Even though there’ve been pets of one kind of another in our house for decades, still seems sort of unnatural. Growing up, we always had a dog to guard the grounds and help herd the cattle, was never allowed in the house, had a doghouse for shelter in case of storms, covered the floor with straw in the winter for warmth.

We also had barn cats to keep down the vermin, as many as 13 at one point if I recall accurately. I call them barn cats for a reason, that’s where they stayed when they weren’t wandering around outside. They lived off prey, though we also gave them table scraps. Those were mostly for the dog. Never once did we buy a bag of dog food or canned cat food. No Kibbles ‘n Bits for the pooch or Friskies for the mousers.

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This all seemed perfectly normal. Still does, even though I fully realize it’s well outside the cultural norms of city dwellers. Come to think of it, what was normal to me growing up where I did is not necessarily the way people in small towns live today. There is not a single rural culture, there are many, just as there is not a uniform urban culture. Both small towns and big cities are complicated and stratified and ever changing.

Perhaps because I’ve lived my life straddling what is now a troublingly pronounced rural-urban schism, have had a foot in both worlds, I was recently asked by a local League of Women Voters chapter to be a panelist in a discussion of ways to bridge the divide.

The job I’ve been assigned is to identify problems that rural and urban communities share in common and problems that are unique to urban or rural settings. I don’t plan to talk about dogs and cats. I’m expected to dig a little deeper. I’m looking forward to the challenge. This is a much-needed discussion that could do some good. If you’re interested in joining in, consider yourself invited.

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The spotlight shines only on a few, or one. For longer than anyone can remember, the most privileged have stood in the gleaming light, adorned with great power. It’s a human condition as old as time.

The threat or actual use of violence is, of course, a primary means of maintaining that power, but not the sole means, not even the most effective. The powerful cannot remain so unless those who are ruled accept their supremacy. Once that acceptance begins to crumble, not even the most ruthless violence is sure to prevent a ruler’s fall.

The Roman Republic was established more than 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, one of the world’s earliest experiments with a republican form of government. It lasted for close to half a millennium, coming to an end less than three decades before Christ’s birth.

Patricians were the aristocratic, land-owning elite in ancient Rome who held exclusive control over political, religious and legal offices. The rest of the populace—the lower and middle classes, the commoners—were known as plebeians.

In ancient Rome, patricians were in charge because they regarded themselves as aristocrats and actively sought to adorn themselves with authority they considered their birthright, but also because plebeians cooperated with the adornment, saw them as elite, as worthy to rule. So it is in modern-day America. Today’s patricians are seen, even celebrated, as special.

Our current president is loved by some, hated by many, watched by everyone. He has proven to be an erratic if not completely inept commander in chief, but the one and perhaps only thing he can indisputably command is a stage. He has genius-level ability to attract attention, keep himself forever in the spotlight. All eyes are on him, doesn’t matter if he’s being worshipped or savaged, he’s the subject of daily conversation. He is a living testament to the old saying all news is good news. He dominates every news cycle.

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This is how he wound up in the White House in the first place. This is why despite historically low public approval during his first term, he managed to win a second one. People can’t stop thinking about him, can’t resist talking about him. By obsessing over him for so long, we made him strong. By continuing to obsess over him, we prop him up. We’ve fallen into the same trap ancient Rome’s plebeians fell into, shining light and thereby bestowing ruling privileges on a patrician’s patrician.

In politics, sadly, the single most influential factor determining election outcomes is name recognition. The current president has made it his life’s mission to make his one of the most recognizable names on Earth. He’s aided immeasurably by America’s plebeians, who utter the name countless times every day.

Knowing this, I try my level best to resist, consciously avoid bringing him up. Don’t bother speculating on his motivations, there’s no looking into his heart. Don’t speculate on his physical or mental fitness, there’s no diagnosing from a distance. Been sharing thoughts here on a wide variety of topics for going on four years now. This is my 203rd post. Out of the first 202 articles, only 14 mentioned him by name. Even those 14 were not about him, they were about us, our problems, our blessings, our past, our future. But fleeting references were made to him because his words or actions were pertinent to the subjects being addressed.

Try as I might to sidestep the plebeian pitfall, I bear witness to the power of patricians, seeing how devoting only 7% of my attention to him and his regime works to my own detriment. Of the more than 200 articles shared prior to this one, the most-read one by a longshot—with nearly three times as many readers as my average posts get—was essentially about him, well, an especially odious lieutenant of his. If I wrote about him more, I’d surely have a larger readership.

I take solace from the fact that my most-read article also is about what happened when plebeians of yesteryear got tired of patricians throwing their weight around and the spell they were under finally broke. Happened before, will happen again, once our focus shifts from him to us, our problems, our blessings, our past, our future.

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Took me three tries to watch The Wizard of Oz to the end. First time, couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5. Watched on the only television my family owned, a bulky black and white set, leaving me unable to experience the full effect of the magical moment when Dorothy’s house falls from the sky, lands with a thud, she opens the door, the scenery transforms from the drab gray of Kansas to Oz’s brilliant colors.

As soon as the Wicked Witch of the West appeared out of nowhere from a swirling plume of smoke, I could bear to watch no more and fled. I cowered as far from the living room as I could get, in a linoleum-floored utility room in our old farmhouse where the twin tub wringer washer was kept. Stayed there until my siblings assured me the show was over.

The movie played on TV only once a year back then, so I was a full 12 months older by the time the chance to redeem myself came around. Knew the witch was coming, was braced for her entrance. Settled in after that, confident—too confident—I’d make it through the whole thing. The story took a darker turn, then another, tension rose, I started to crack. When the flying monkeys swooped down into the Haunted Forest to haul Dorothy and Toto off to the witch’s castle, I made a run for it.

The following year I did manage to watch the entire film. Went on to see it dozens more times. Years later, watched with my son when he was around the same age I was when I first saw it, was amazed he didn’t once seem unnerved from beginning to end. Either I was an especially lily-livered child, or kids grow desensitized to fright at an earlier age than used to be the case.

Could be a bit of both, but that’s not the point of telling this story. As we age, we outgrow certain things and let those go, clothes, shoes, coats, boots, childhood friends, playground hijinks. Some no longer fit, others just seem childish, we find it embarrassing to hold on to them in our haste to be grown-ups. Once-cherished stuffed animals get thrown out or stored away. They did us no harm, on the contrary proved quite comforting, yet they get discarded.

We give up childhood innocence, never do replace it with any adult surrogate. We come to see innocence as naïve and weak, opting instead to allow ourselves to grow jaded and cynical, seeing those as proper responses to the rough and tumble of adult life.

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When we outgrow childhood fears, these too take on a new form later in life. All kids are afraid of monsters of one kind or another. Those flying monkeys set me off. For my son, it was Bruce the shark in Finding Nemo. When Bruce nearly leapt off the screen with jaws wide open, a terrified boy left my wife and me with no choice but to leave the theater. When the monsters of our youth no longer scare us, we curiously do not put fears behind us, we go so far as to monsterize people who are the least bit different than us, turn them into targets of our wrath and blame.

We leave behind childhood horseplay, but move on to gamify cruelty and killing, choose the most childish of leaders to handle our nation’s affairs, men and women highly skilled in scaring and demeaning and maiming.

Once we say goodbye to the freedom from care we knew as children, we waste no time bidding welcome to worries that enslave us as adults. With aging comes greater responsibility, making it impossible to be as care-free as we once were. But taking responsibility doesn’t make it necessary to load ourselves down with so many matters beyond our control, to the point of crushing our zeal for living.

As we age, the boundless energy of our youth wanes, but this loss is at least theoretically offset by gains in insight and wisdom. I say theoretically because it’s so glaringly apparent that many of the choices we’re making as a nation right now are neither insightful nor wise. Can’t help but sense a loss of innocence as America hardens, becomes less generous, less idealistic. Can’t help but feel how tightly fear now grips us, how cynical we’ve allowed ourselves to become.

Pondering what lies ahead for our country and our world, I’m thinking it’s never too late to grow up, but it’s also never been more important to remember the simple blessings and virtues of youth, what’s necessary to let go, what’s worth holding on to.

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Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t. He’ll tinker with it for sure, explore, discover its many features and functions. He’ll figure out how to download apps. He’ll game and he’ll game. Maybe he’ll still play with friends, maybe not so much anymore. He’ll beat some dreaded foe, finish a level, another level awaits, always another level, another foe.

He’ll keep going and going, battling by the screen’s light under cover of blanket, long after bedtime. He’ll talk a parent into paying for add-ons, more features, more functions, more levels, more foes. Maybe he’ll tire of it. Maybe he won’t. He’ll find adult content, you know he will. He’ll feel so grown up, peeping through a crack in some shuttered window, peering around some dark corner, then another, then one darker still. Chances are he moves on, gives authentic human relationships a try.

Or maybe he stays cooped up in that cell. Might never seek his release from this quarantine, might age without growing up, may go on to hunger more features, more functions, more levels, a new battle, another enemy. What if he finds surrogates he can talk into getting him what he wants, what he needs. Keeps them nearby, stuffed in a cabinet right next to where he rants and raves and mounts attacks by the screen’s light under cover of blanket immunity. Keeps going and going, pushing buttons, blowing up stuff, never having given genuine relationship a try, never having learned the diplomatic lessons playground scuffles teach, knowing only some app’s way of obliterating dreaded foes.

I startle, heart pounding. Unsettling images race, surely imaginary, wait, suddenly not so certain. Pulse finally slows, mind clears. A less unnerving thought occurs, a calming feeling fills me. Grateful there was no cell to give me as a boy.

I shudder to think what would have become of me if I’d gotten one. Surely would have tinkered with it, figured out how to download apps, gamed and gamed, peeped and peered. Highly doubt I’d pass time in the earliest days of my youth the same way now as I did back then, hitting small stones with a baseball bat, so many that the wood chipped away until the barrel was as slender as the handle.

It got so I rarely swung and missed, could direct a struck stone with uncanny accuracy, only very occasionally mishitting one, even more rarely hearing the glass of a barn window shatter when I did. I’d run for cover, plead innocence later. With time, I outgrew the deceit, kept the hand-eye coordination. The fascination with the game that caused me to whittle that club to a stick has stayed with me all these years. With a new season underway, the joy that brings, I wonder if I’d have this love affair had I been put in a cell as a boy.

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I wonder if my brother and I would have grown as close if we’d had cells. We were so different, him short and stocky, me tall and slender, him fond of guns and hunting, me drawn to balls and sports. I’m afraid if we’d been given cells, we would have retreated to separate digital corners, found our own virtual amusements. We wouldn’t have just had each other.

Without this technological wedge, we were virtually inseparable. Once our chores were done, we were released to the wild, which we took as permission to get dirty and cause trouble. Mud puddles were to us then what Minecraft is to kids now. We’d jab the barrels of our pop guns into rain-soaked ground, blast the wads at wasp nests, take off running before the colony swarmed us.

We went on bike hikes to a nearby lake, where we swam and fished. We arranged hay bales into forts in the mow, swung from one to another by ropes tied to the rafters. We got our hands on empty aerosol cans, made a fire in an empty iron barrel, chucked the cans in the flames, watched them shoot up like rockets. Got quite a kick out of this until one landed in some tall dry grass, starting a fire. We succeeded in stamping out the flames, but not before they came perilously close to one of our sheds. Scared us straight. Also bonded us.

As a child, probably would’ve happily traded all this for a cell. That I couldn’t is a blessing. If my brother and I had not grown so close, can’t be sure where I’d be now—or who I’d be—but have a hard time imagining following the same paths in life that I did. I’ve written before how circumstances of his birth led him to be mercilessly bullied. Witnessing this—sometimes up close, other times from a distance—changed me, made me more compassionate and less inclined to bully others than I fear I would have been had I not grown up with him in my corner, not off on some remote electronic island.

What we did together and the torment he endured alone through no fault of his own taught me a great life lesson, that none of us is self-made. We walk in others’ footsteps, we stand on others’ shoulders, we’re shaped by others’ experiences and influences.

Learning this never comes easy, it remains lost on some of the oldest and most powerful among us. I could be wrong, and I can’t know because there’s no swapping my upbringing a half-century or more ago for one now, but learning the importance of others in our lives seems infinitely more challenging when confined to a cell.

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Their flaws were many, but our nation’s founders were no fools. They crafted an ingenious design, but were not so proud or arrogant to consider it perfect. They built in a mechanism for the design to be altered, and they themselves altered it, barely waiting for the original masterpiece to be on display for all to see before starting to address perceived imperfections.

To these men, owning people with different skin pigmentation was normal, even among those who thought it wrong. Possessing people with different reproductive organs was normal, too. They could scarcely imagine women voting. They didn’t see a civil war coming.

Many other things we take for granted were entirely unknown to them. Electricity. Flush toilets. Motor vehicles. Factories and assembly lines. Furnaces. Air conditioning. Telephones. Radio. Television. Computers. The Internet. Scroll was their word for a piece of parchment, not a mind-numbing way of passing time and ushering doom.

They did not have vaccines, knew nothing of anesthesia, x-rays, antibiotics. Couldn’t dream of airplanes, rocket ships, nuclear reactors, solar panels. But they had sense enough to understand life is forever changing and the world will never be the same. They accounted for that in their design.

Their very first design alteration sought to cement in place five essential freedoms. Two of them—free speech and a free press—today face very real and dangerous threats. A third—religious freedom—is an abstraction to multitudes who’ve fled the church and a blunt instrument for the pious who overlook the fact that it is really two sibling liberties, the freedom to worship and freedom from the imposition of any particular religion. Brother and sister do not walk freely for long unless they walk hand in hand.

The other two of these five freedoms—the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and the right of association that grows out of the freedom to peacefully assemble—are growing weak, like muscles that atrophy when rarely flexed. Other than the mercenaries paid to be couriers for their employers, few Americans bother to communicate their wishes to elected representatives. America once was a nation of joiners. Not anymore. Increasingly small numbers of Americans now act on their fundamental right to join organizations, unions, clubs and other associations to collectively express, pursue and defend common interests.

The founders thought to bestow on us these and other freedoms in the form of a Bill of Rights, but neglected to pass along a second equally valuable bequeath, an accompanying Bill of Responsibilities. They knew no democratic republic would be long for this world without universal education in the ways of citizenship. They took this obligation seriously, we shirk it, having abandoned the task of civic education in our schools to make way for more vocational training and workforce preparation.

We shirk the responsibility to build and nurture community, to an extent that would have left the founders both dumbfounded and dismayed. Without active community building, there is a loss of social connectedness. With that comes erosion of trust. As trust between us declines, fear and division grow. The esteemed social scientist Robert Putnam meticulously chronicled all of this a quarter century ago in his brilliant book Bowling Alone. Putnam slapped a label on the act of joining together in pursuit of common aims. He calls it social capital.

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America is now a lonesome place. Joining is no longer in fashion. Our social capital is dwindling and that shrinkage is having all the predictable effects. We have become increasingly fearful and less trusting of one another. As we’ve grown more polarized, our faith in government and other social institutions has evaporated. Defeatism is on the rise. Many if not most Americans seem resigned to the country going downhill. There’s widespread belief that we’re screwed, that our best days are behind us, that democracy is doomed, America’s doomed.

It’s tempting to lay the demise of social capital and our national loneliness at the feet of the pandemic. Tempting, but mistaken. Social disconnection started long before 2020. Symptoms will almost certainly worsen society-wide before they begin to show signs of improvement. This prediction is not based on a gut feeling, it’s based on ongoing study of the behaviors, attitudes and values of the youngest Americans. Social disconnection is noticeable in all age groups, but is most pronounced among the nation’s youth.

Such dismal trendlines make it tempting to conclude the pessimists and cynics are likely right about the American experiment. Its days must be numbered. One reassuring truth stands in the way of succumbing to the temptation. The founders never lived to see it, and none of us living today were born yet when it happened, but what’s going on today has visited America before. What we’re going through now may be new but it is not unique.

Social capital collapsed before, at the end of the 19th Century on the heels of what was known as the Gilded Age, when robber barons amassed fortunes, built dynasties on the backs and at the expense of working-class masses. Life then was dog-eat-dog. The biggest feasted, the smallest were devoured. Society tore apart. Social cohesiveness was by all appearances dead and gone. Then it came roaring back to life. There was a massive surge in joining.

In the span of a single generation at the very beginning of the 20th century, a joining culture emerged and Americans mass-produced social capital. Clubs galore sprung up, Masons, Elks, Moose, Eagles, Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, Knights of Columbus. Every imaginable kind of group was formed, from the League of Women Voters to the NAACP, fraternities, sororities, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H, AAA, the list goes on and on. As if a dispossessed, downtrodden generation imagined a Bill of Responsibilities.

This is what democracy truly looks like. Some of these groups are surviving if not thriving, most are dead or dying. They all will eventually fall by the wayside, swept away by powerful generational tides. But they will not leave an empty void, at least not for long. Soon enough, growing despair over social disintegration will inspire new formations of social capital. And the world will never be the same. The founders knew that in their day. We’ve temporarily forgotten it in ours.

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Lots of brainy people work on Wall Street, misdirected though their smarts may be. Highly credentialed, cloaked in sheepskin, yet still so easily duped. A key indicator of their activity, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, surged Monday on the word of a habitual liar.

The Dow jumped 631 points on the day, taken as a sign of rebounding investor confidence. Stock traders rallied when news reached them that the U.S. and Iran were in serious and “productive” talks that could soon bring an end to the war that’s tanked the market and much of the rest of the economy. Except the two countries involved in these supposed negotiations were not seriously and productively talking, not if you accept a dialogue takes at least two.

Whether on Wall Street or Main Street, we all had every reason to wait and see. After all, we’d been told the war would be over in a matter of days, then were told it could last months. Last June, we were told Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.” A few weeks ago, we were told destroying those already obliterated nuclear capabilities was the whole reason for starting this war.

One day, it definitely wasn’t about regime change in Iran. Then it was. Another day, it was about protecting American companies’ assets in the Persian Gulf. Or preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Or…

We all were told that “nobody” believed Iran would respond to coming under attack by retaliating against neighboring Arab countries. Within days of hostilities starting, we all were told the U.S. had “destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capability.” Then came one report after another of Iran bombing its neighbors.

A strike on an elementary school in the early hours of the war killed at least 175 innocent people, most of them children. We were told it was “done by Iran.” Evidence later showed that to be untrue.

We were told the U.S. military had a “virtually unlimited supply” of high-end weaponry allowing it to unleash epic fury for as long as it takes to vanquish the enemy. Then we hear help is sorely needed from allies around the world. Next, we hear we don’t need anyone’s help. Before we know it, the Pentagon asks Congress for an extra $200 billion to fight the war.

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I have a question for the Wall Street traders, the feckless members of Congress down on bended knee, the millions of my fellow Americans who remain trusting of the habitual liar and loyal to his regime: Aren’t any of you parents?

Surely you must be familiar with the routine. Soon as most kids get caught messing up, they devise what they are sure is a leakproof alibi with lightning speed. When much to their surprise the story doesn’t hold up, they quickly cook up a new excuse. And another, and another. Gets downright laughable. No matter how amused I was as a dad myself, I did my best to stay in character, kept looking disappointed and angry.

Combat on the child-raising battlefield left me not with scars but a mantra that I repeated more times than I care to admit, to my own son as well as the little leaguers I coached: If you make a mistake, don’t make two. You boot a grounder, don’t turn it into a little league home run. The lesson applies to so many facets of adult life, where stakes are far higher than on a ball diamond. You know how it goes, it’s not the initial crime that does you in, it’s the cover-up.

Kids boot grounders, turn a one-base error into four bases and a run. Then they learn the game. Kids cheat or steal or hurt someone, lie about it, are found out, get in twice as much trouble. Then they grow up, know better. Most of the time.

America’s big failing right now is entrusting our country’s future to people who never were taught the folly of compounding errors, who’ve never had to grow the hell up. They screw up, lie about it, get called out for lying, then lie some more. Their behavior is reprehensible. It is also tolerated, and the more it is condoned, the more it’s normalized.

Even though it sure seems we’re doubling down on stupid these days, our big failing is not stupidity. Willful gullibility is more like it. Blind partisanship certainly plays its part. So do selfishness and greed. To Wall Street traders, to cowering members of Congress, to my country, I say this: If you make a mistake, don’t make twenty. Or, God forbid, two hundred billion.

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I yield my time to the Danes. My posts on this platform are typically about 4-minute reads. Keeping the words to a minimum this week in hopes you’ll devote our time together to watching this 4-minute video. Maybe you’ve come across it before. If so, experiencing it one more time might hit the spot considering how quick we are to put people in boxes these days and how inclined we are to see our society as hopelessly divided. If you’ve never seen this, pretty sure you won’t regret watching.

If you’ve got three extra minutes to spare, check out this bonus content.

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Note to younger self. Thank you. You dove right into churning waters when you didn’t know any better, paying no mind to societal undertows that could have easily pulled you under and drowned you in roles others wanted you to play.

Eyes rolled and heads shook at what they took for folly, but a ton of approval is not worth an ounce of self-respect. Choices you made then make me grateful today, remind me to resist acting in a retiring manner just because I am now retirement age.

In a stuffy gymnasium on a warm June evening back in 2001, I was the commencement speaker at the high school graduation ceremony in a small town where I spent the early part of my childhood. Few actually listen to commencement speeches, and mine was well on its way to being typically unmemorable. Until I strayed from my own thoughts to Thomas Jefferson’s.

Recounted how Jefferson believed each generation should start a revolution, rip up the Constitution and start over. How he famously said that expecting each new generation to forever live by the customs and laws of past generations is like expecting adults to wear the same clothes they wore as children.

You’d have thought I quoted Hitler, not Jefferson. A few in the audience clapped briefly when I stepped away from the microphone. Most sat silently with furrowed brows. Some parents in the crowd shot me dirty looks. The graduates squirmed in their seats, seemingly not knowing how to respond. School administrators who flanked me onstage looked like they had seen a ghost.

One school board member caught up to me as I was crossing the parking lot on my way to my car. Told me he loved my speech, but that it had caused quite a stir. His colleagues on the school board were incensed; the school principal and district superintendent were up in arms.

He could tell I was perplexed by the reaction to the speech. “You have to understand, Mike, they’ve been telling these kids for four years to sit down, shut up and do as they are told.”

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Such meager regard for the value of thinking for oneself is coming home to roost. Today, we are at war. Or whatever military attacks are called when never lawfully declared or constitutionally authorized and when they look suspiciously like the maneuverings of two men desperate to stay out of jail.

Millions of Americans are putty in their hands. Curiously, these millions spent the last several years huffing and puffing about the price of eggs and gasoline, demanding our government focus on problems here at home, no more wars or foreign entanglements. By all appearances, they’re now on board with another overseas misadventure, buying the ruling regime’s kitchen-sink explanations and ever-shifting justifications for spending a billion dollars a day blowing stuff up in a faraway land.

A billion dollars a day would cover the cost of loads of medical care, build an abundance of housing, pay for an awful lot of schooling. Aside from two men steering clear of prison, perhaps choking off the supply of resources that could be used to make working people healthier, wealthier and wiser is the real aim of this war.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, the war involving three great powers is not meant to be won. It is meant to be perpetual, a “purely internal affair” whose true purposes are to consume material surpluses without raising living standards, keep the population in poverty and fear, ensure the ruling elite stays in control by fostering national unity against a manufactured enemy.

Note to younger self. Thank you. For not sitting down, shutting up, doing as you were told. For saying what you did that warm June evening in your one—and turns out only—chance to give a commencement address. The capacity to think for ourselves is our best and possibly only line of defense against wrongs done in our name and at our expense. The best and possibly only way to see through the fog of war.

Maybe the remarks made in that gym almost 25 years ago made little difference, left no lasting impression. Changing even one little corner of the world wasn’t a reasonable expectation. Not letting the world change you and the old man you would go on to become, that was plenty.

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