I Believe

Who should pay on the first date? People spend an enormous amount of time arguing about whether the man should pay, whether the bill should be split, or whether one person owes the other something because they paid for dinner. I’ve listened to people discuss this with a level of seriousness that I’d ordinarily associate with negotiating a peace treaty. But why are two people going on a date in the first place? Presumably, it’s because they want to spend time together. They find one another interesting or attractive, and they’d like an opportunity to get to know each other. That’s the purpose of the date. Once you’ve established that, the question becomes how to make it happen. Maybe one person pays for dinner. Maybe they split the bill. Maybe neither has enough money for dinner, so they go for a walk in the park. The details aren’t particularly important. What’s important is that they want to spend time together and find a way to achieve that purpose. And if someone has to promise another person dinner, money, or some other benefit just to convince them to show up, perhaps they shouldn’t be going on that date in the first place. When we’re young, we make the biggest decisions of our lives before we realize how big those decisions are. We choose careers. We go to college, or don’t. We decide where we’re going to live. We fall in love, get married, and sometimes have children. We make commitments that will shape the next twenty, thirty, or fifty years of our lives, often before we’ve lived long enough to appreciate what those commitments mean. How do two people keep a promise for fifty years when neither can know what those years will bring? That’s just part of being young. You make decisions based on what you know, what you want, and what you believe your future is going to look like. Then you spend much of the rest of your life discovering what those decisions mean. I was twenty-three when I married my wife. Next March, we’ll celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I wonder now why I thought it was a good idea to be married in the wintertime, but I’ve forgotten. Last year, I sat down and calculated the date when I would have spent more days of my life married than unmarried. That number was 8,663. I crossed that threshold last December. My wife crossed it this year. Not a milestone I hear often. Not everyone feels the urge to do random math problems. Nevertheless, we’ve each spent more of our lives married than unmarried. At twenty-three, I couldn’t have imagined what that would mean. When I was young, I occasionally attended someone’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. I remember thinking two things. First, those people were really old. And second, someday, if I got married, I’d probably have a fiftieth wedding anniversary of my own. I didn’t think there was anything particularly unusual about reaching fifty years of marriage. You got married, stayed married, and eventually somebody brought you a cake. That’s how I understood it. It hadn’t occurred to me that both people also had to live long enough to eat the cake. Of course, when you’re young, you don’t realize how much your life can change in fifty years, how much two people might change, or how fortunate they’d have to be simply to have that much time together. And recently, I became interested in just how fortunate those couples are. PAIGE In 2011, the United States Census Bureau reported that only about six percent of married American couples had reached their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Thirty-five percent had reached twenty-five years. Six percent. That’s a remarkably small number. That doesn’t mean only six percent of marriages will ever reach fifty years, that survey was a snapshot in time. But there’s another interesting statistic. In November 1980, the National Center for Health Statistics published a study examining how long American marriages would last. Using divorce and mortality rates from 1975, researchers estimated that among first marriages reaching their twenty-fifth anniversary, about one-third would survive to their fiftieth. Two-thirds wouldn’t. Now, those estimates reflected the conditions of the 1970s. Americans are living longer today, and improvements in life expectancy have increased the opportunity for couples to spend more years together. The point. Even after twenty-five years of marriage, reaching fifty depends on more than a couple’s willingness to remain married. It also depends on how much time they have. JOEL There are really two fundamental obstacles to celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Divorce and mortality. The first is something we have at least some influence over. The second, considerably less. If two people marry at twenty-five, they both have to live to seventy-five to celebrate fifty years. If they marry at thirty-five, they both have to live to eighty-five. They can have a wonderful marriage. Neither may ever consider divorce. They can remain completely committed to one another for the rest of their lives. And still never celebrate fifty years. That’s something I didn’t appreciate when I was young. I saw a fiftieth wedding anniversary as a measure of commitment. And it is. But it’s also a measure of good fortune. Now, as I approach fifty years old myself in a couple years, I’m increasingly conscious of how quickly time passes. I remember my short time as a squadron commander. I was thirty-nine years old, and one of my responsibilities was meeting the young airmen arriving in the squadron. We’d talk about the squadron, our standards, what I expected of them, and what they could expect from the organization. Most of these young airmen were eighteen or nineteen years old. Some hadn’t been born when I’d entered military service. And I remember sitting across from them and thinking about the difference in our ages. I’d already lived two of their lifetimes. And the strange thing was, I didn’t feel particularly old. I could still remember being their age, joining the military, and wondering what the future would hold. I remembered being the young officer arriving at a new unit. It didn’t seem like all that long ago. But apparently, the calendar had a different opinion. To those young airmen, I was the grizzled squadron commander. To me, it seemed like I’d been sitting on their side of the desk just a few years earlier. And I think that’s one of the peculiar things about getting older. Thirty-nine years seems like an eternity when you’re eighteen. But when you’re thirty-nine, those years don’t feel nearly as long as you’d imagined they would. I’m discovering that twenty-five years of marriage works much the same way. We experience life one day at a time. We get up, go to work, take care of our families, and do whatever needs to be done. We make dinner, pay bills, go to bed, and do it again tomorrow. Then one day you sit down and realize you’ve spent more of your life married than unmarried. And somehow, all those days have become twenty-five years. Which has led me to think about something else. When I consider how much life can change over twenty-five or fifty years, I find myself wondering why so much of our conversation about marriage seems concerned with details and arrangements that may not survive even the first few years. PAIGE There’s certainly no shortage of opinions about what men and women owe one another. Social media is full of arguments about who should pay for the first date, whether married couples should combine their finances, how much each person should contribute to household expenses, and how responsibilities should be divided. And these aren’t meaningless questions. Financial independence matters. Unpaid household work has value. An arrangement that appears equal on paper may place a much greater burden on one person than the other. But much of the debate focuses on what each person should receive from a relationship, rather than what the two people hope to achieve together. It’s a distinction between negotiating individual obligations and deci… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Imagine a little girl sitting in a restaurant with her dad. They order lunch. She gets a soda. It’s enormous, like a bucket of coke. The city is worried about obesity, diabetes, and what all that sugar is doing to people. In our history, New York City tried to limit the size of some sugary drinks. The courts eventually stopped the rule. But imagine the city had done something different. Imagine it looked at that little girl holding that giant soda and said, Coca-Cola did this. Instead of restricting the size of the drink, telling restaurants what they could sell, or trying to convince people not to drink so much soda, the city sued Coca-Cola. Maybe Pepsi too. The argument would be pretty simple. These companies sold sugary drinks. They knew drinking too much sugar was bad for people. People became obese. People developed diabetes. The city had to spend money dealing with the consequences. So, Coca-Cola should pay. There’s something about that argument that bothers us. Not because Coca-Cola would have no responsibility. Maybe it advertised too aggressively. Maybe it knew things about its product that people didn’t know. Maybe it targeted kids. Those things would matter. But somebody still picked up the cup and drank it. And the government that later sued Coca-Cola had spent years allowing the product to be sold, taxing the businesses that sold it, licensing the restaurants that served it, and watching its citizens buy it. That doesn’t make Coca-Cola innocent. It just makes the story more complicated. Now let’s think about the lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. The case made its way to the Supreme Court last week. Boulder says the oil companies should pay part of the costs associated with climate change. Boulder also alleges the companies knew their products contributed to climate change while concealing or misleading people about those dangers. The oil companies, meanwhile, argue that this is fundamentally an interstate and international emissions problem and that federal law, not state law, should govern it. The lawyers can fight about that. Underneath the legal argument there’s a more interesting question. If Colorado is saying oil companies bear responsibility for the consequences of people burning oil and gas, how much responsibility does Colorado bear? Because people in Colorado burned the oil and gas. They still do. They drive cars. They heat houses. They run tractors. They fly in airplanes. They move freight. They build roads. They use diesel equipment. They consume electricity generated from fossil fuels. And I’m not saying that as some kind of gotcha. Of course they did. What was the alternative? To sit in the dirt? That’s the part of this that gets lost. When somebody in Colorado filled up his truck in 1985, he probably wasn’t standing there thinking, I’d like to contribute to global climate change today. He was thinking, I need to get to work. A rancher using diesel wasn’t choosing pollution. He was choosing to feed cattle. A family heating a house wasn’t choosing carbon emissions. They were choosing not to freeze. A construction company burning diesel wasn’t trying to destroy the atmosphere. It was trying to build something. The oil and gas were useful. That’s why people bought them. So we’re left with a very simple question: if everyone had known everything, would they really have stopped? If an oil company executive had shown up at every gas station in Colorado forty years ago to scream, ‘Save Yourselves! This fuel contributes to climate change!”, would Coloradans have stopped buying gasoline? Would they have parked the cars? Stopped the tractors? Turned off the furnaces? Stopped building roads? Stopped flying? Maybe some people would’ve changed some things. Maybe governments would’ve acted sooner. Maybe companies would’ve invested differently. Those are fair possibilities. But would society have simply chosen not to use the energy? No. That’s ridiculous. And that’s where the philosophy starts to get spicy. We tend to confuse causing something with being morally responsible for all of it. Oil companies were part of the cause. Consumers were part of the cause. Governments were part of the cause. Industry was part of the cause. Everybody participated in the same energy system. That doesn’t mean everyone has equal responsibility, and it doesn’t mean the oil companies get a pass if they lied. If somebody sells you food and deliberately hides the fact that it’s dangerous, your decision to eat the food doesn’t make the seller innocent. Who knows what, and who can do something about it, matters. A family trying to get to work doesn’t have the same choices as a multinational corporation deciding what to research, disclose, advertise, or invest in. But the family still has some agency. The state has agency too. Colorado hasn’t been powerless. It has adopted stricter emissions rules. It has tried to reduce vehicle emissions. It has invested money in wildfire mitigation and forest management. That proves Colorado understands that governments have choices. So if responsibility is the principle, the principle has to work in both directions. That takes us to wildfires. A couple maybe three years ago I wrote about the strange contradiction in the way we manage forests and climate change. Wildfires release enormous amounts of carbon. We know many western forests have too much fuel in them: deadwood, overgrown stands, beetle-killed trees. We also know that reducing that fuel sometimes requires things people don’t like: mechanical thinning, logging, prescribed fire, disturbing habitat, cutting trees, spending taxpayer money. There are legitimate environmental reasons to be cautious about all of those things. Protect the snowy owl. Protect habitat. Protect old-growth trees. Those concerns are real. But fire is real too. Our forests are going to burn. That’s how forests heal themselves. There is no scenario in the future that every acre of forest doesn’t eventually burn. Choosing to do nothing means there’s more fuel for them to burn hotter and longer. And when they burn, the carbon doesn’t stop at the Colorado border. So now the philosophical question gets even stranger. Can Colorado say that emissions coming from oil companies outside Colorado helped damage Colorado, while emissions from a Colorado wildfire are just something that happened to Colorado? If responsibility crosses borders, then responsibility crosses borders. That doesn’t mean Colorado caused the beetles. It doesn’t mean Colorado caused the drought. It doesn’t mean Colorado caused climate change. It means that once the problem exists, choices still exist. How much do we thin? How much do we burn intentionally? How much do we log? How much money do we spend? How much environmental disruption do we tolerate today to avoid a larger environmental disruption tomorrow? That’s responsibility too. This is where I think we sometimes build a self-licking ice cream cone. Everyone uses the system. Everyone benefits from the system. Everyone contributes something to the consequences. Then everyone points at somebody else and says: you caused this. The oil company says consumers demanded the fuel. Consumers say the oil company sold it. The state says the corporation knew more. The corporation says the state regulated us and collected taxes from the activity. The federal government blames industry. Industry blames regulation. Everybody is somehow both participant and victim. That doesn’t mean nobody is responsible. It means responsibility is shared. That brings us back to something else. The International Court of Justice, sitting in The Hague, has said climate change threatens fundamental human rights and that states have obligations to address it. There’s an irony there that I still can’t get over. The Hague was badly damaged during World War II. After the war, Europe had to rebuild. American factories ran. We made steel and cement, moved ships and trucks, burned fuel. Smoke … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

We are a month away from the midterm elections, and the American people are poised to hold the party in power accountable. Republicans raised taxes on the American people. They called those taxes tariffs, but tariffs are taxes. Then they supported going to war in Iran, which created an energy supply problem. And whenever you have an energy supply problem, prices are going to go up, because as the price of energy goes up, the price of making things goes up and the price of delivering things goes up. So now prices are higher. And while some individual prices can come down, the overall price level generally does not go back to where it was before. If your groceries went from $100 to $120, slowing inflation does not make them cost $100 again. The American people understand that because they live it. So they are going to hold Republicans accountable. The Republican response may be that President Trump did those things, not Republican lawmakers. That is not the case. When a military officer crosses the yellow line to participate in Officer Training School, he or she accepts an obligation that goes beyond their own behavior. They swear that they will “not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” The second part matters just as much as the first. It is not enough to say, “I did not do it.” There is a philosophical idea here that applies. A difference between doing something and allowing something to happen. Those are not exactly the same thing. But if you have the power to act, you understand what is happening, you have a responsibility to act, and you knowingly choose not to act, then that inaction is also a choice. That is what I mean by willful acquiescence. Republicans in Congress may not have voted directly for every tariff or every military action, but they were not powerless. Congress has authority over commerce. It has authority over spending. It has enormous power over war and executive action. They could have acted. They chose not to. So they do not get to say, “That was the president. It wasn’t us.” They chose not to stop him, and now the American people may hold them accountable for that choice. I say ‘may’ which also means ‘may not.’ Because the American voter has another problem. What’s the alternative? The Democratic Party is not exactly popular either. So if Democrats win the midterm elections, they have to be very careful about what they think happened. The American people may vote against Republicans without deciding that they suddenly trust Democrats. Those are two very different things. A voter can say, “I do not trust the Democrats very much, but somebody has to put a check on the Republicans.” That is not an endorsement. That is borrowed power. And if Democrats misunderstand that, they will waste the opportunity. Because the Democrats have a much bigger problem than Donald Trump. They do not have a plan. They can tell us which programs Republicans cut. They can tell us which programs they want to restore. They can tell us what they want to put back the way it was before Trump. But the American people already lived through the way it was before Trump. And then they elected Trump again. So simply going backwards is not a plan. If Democrats win in 2026, restore a few programs, congratulate themselves, and believe America has come back to them, they may lose again in 2028 to another candidate who should never have been competitive in the first place. So the Democrats have to answer a more basic question: Why do we exist? Simon Sinek uses the idea of Why, How, and What. That methodology is useful here. What is the Democratic Party’s Why? For most of modern American history, the Republican Party was fairly easy to understand. It was pro-business. It believed in lower taxes, free markets, deregulation, and a strong military. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Business matters. Markets matter. Economic growth matters. But somebody has to balance the interests of business against the interests of the individual. That was supposed to be the Democratic Party. The Democrats were supposed to be the party that said, “Yes, business is important, but the people who work for that business are important too.” Over time, though, something changed. The Democratic Party stopped looking like the pro-people party and started looking like the pro-government party. That is a major problem, because government is not the point. The people are the point. Government is only a tool. And somewhere along the way, Democrats started to reverse the relationship. The central American philosophy is that the people are independent and the government serves them. But too often, the Democratic approach makes the government the king and makes the people the subjects. You have to qualify. You have to apply. You have to wait. You have to ask permission. You have to hope the program still exists next year. That is backwards. The government is not the sovereign. The people are. That needs to become the Democratic Party’s Why again: serve the people. Then you get to the How. How do you serve the people? By creating a system that makes them more capable of living their own lives. The goal should be autonomy, not dependence. Not dependence on a corporation, and not dependence on the government. The How is balancing the interests and power of business with the interests and power of the individual person. Government is the tool Democrats can use to keep that balance—changing the rules, regulating where necessary, and redesigning incentives so businesses can succeed while the people who work for them also succeed. But the answer is not simply to move more money through the government. It is to design the system so more of the benefit reaches people through their own work, their own wages, their own ownership, and their own choices. And that means Democrats have to think very differently about government programs. If somebody has to come to the government, prove that they qualify, fill out paperwork, wait to be approved, receive some benefit, and then worry that the next Congress is going to take that benefit away, that person may be receiving help. But they are also dependent on the continued permission of the government. Sometimes that is necessary. But it should not be the first answer to every problem. Take wages. If somebody works full time and still does not make enough money to buy food, the first question should not be, “How much government assistance should we give that person?” The first question should be, “Why does a person working full time not make enough money to buy food?” Because if an employer doesn’t pay enough to support the worker, and the government takes money from somebody else and gives it to the worker to make up the difference, what has really happened? The money may be the same. But the philosophical point is different. The worker is receiving part of what he or she needs to live from the government instead of through work. And the government has become the intermediary between the worker and economic independence. There is a better way. Instead of simply making the minimum wage higher everywhere—which ignores enormous differences between places like New York and South Dakota—we should think about how government can help businesses raise wages. Many businesses, especially businesses in rural America, don’t have unlimited revenue. Simply ordering them to pay substantially more may not work. But government can change incentives. It can change tax policy. It can design the rules so businesses have a financial reason, and the financial ability, to put more money into their employees’ paychecks. The point is not the exact mechanism. The point is where the money ends up coming from. Whenever possible, the worker would rather receive that money from his or her employer than receive it from the government. The money may ultimately cost society the same amount. But the relationship is completely different. One creates a worker ea… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Beautiful October day. I’m walking in the park for some exercise. The leaves on some of the trees have turned yellow, with small flashes of red. There’s a maple tree that has turned maybe a dark burgundy. Blue skies, white clouds, green grass. The park has quite a few people today. There’s an older guy and a younger guy tossing a football, maybe father and son. And there’s a white butterfly floating across the green grass. My brain doesn’t turn off very easily. I’m exceptionally bad at small talk. Put me at a party with someone I don’t know, and I’m probably not very good at talking about nothing. Maybe these two things are related. Because here I am, walking through a park on a beautiful October afternoon, and what I’m thinking about is immediate need and permanent dependency. It’s a question that sounds simple until you start pulling on it: if part of my taxes goes to feed people, house people, provide medical care, or otherwise support people who need help, does any of that count toward our Christian obligation to give? This is not a question about Christianity as a whole, and it is not an attempt to define what every Christian should believe about government. It is a question about America. You can argue that America is not a Christian nation and still advocate strongly for public assistance to people in need. Or you could argue that the bedrock and basis of America’s Constitution and law is in Christian theology. Either way, here’s the question. If we use public money to help people in need, should the design of that help reflect the moral logic Christians see in Scripture? I do not know the answer. I am not the Almighty, and I’m not going to pretend that I can settle a theological question Christians have argued about for generations. But I think the question becomes more interesting when we stop asking only whether taxes count as a tithe and ask instead what a tithe, or Christian giving more broadly, is supposed to achieve. The biblical idea of giving was never simply to, “Take ten percent of your income and put it in an envelope for your local church.” In ancient Israel, tithes supported the religious community, including the Levites, but they also helped support widows, orphans, foreigners, and others who were vulnerable. That makes the modern situation complicated. Today, the government performs some of those functions. We pay taxes, and a portion of that money goes toward food assistance, housing assistance, medical care, disability programs, and other forms of public support. So maybe the question isn’t whether government should provide that assistance. If government is using our taxes to provide some of the same kinds of help Christians are commanded to provide, should that assistance follow the same moral logic? And that brings me to two stories. Consider the feeding of the five thousand. Whatever else that story means theologically, there is an extraordinarily simple act in the middle of it. People are hungry, and Jesus feeds them. He doesn’t stop to ask whether they made good choices. He doesn’t set up a job-training program before allowing them to eat. There is an immediate human need, and he meets it. Sometimes compassion is that simple. Someone is hungry tonight—feed them. Someone has nowhere to sleep—give them somewhere safe to sleep. Someone is sick—treat them. Immediate suffering creates an immediate obligation. But there is another category of stories in the Gospels. Jesus heals the blind. He heals the lame. He restores people who had been physically excluded from ordinary life. These people were restored to participation in society. They could move through their communities, support their lives where possible, participate in family and economic life, and become less dependent on others. And they could work. Possibly the most important way to participate in society and be independent, to eat your bread as a result of the sweat of your effort. So those stories suggest a second principle of compassion: meet the immediate need when the need is immediate, but when restoration is possible, structure the help toward restored capacity rather than unnecessary permanent dependency. That gives us a standard by which we can begin judging assistance itself. Does it function as a bridge through a period of need? Does it restore a person’s capacity to function and support his own life, where possible? Or does the system gradually become a permanent structure of dependency? And that question doesn’t apply only to the person receiving assistance. It can apply to businesses, too. If taxpayers repeatedly make up the difference between what a worker earns and what that worker needs to live, then assistance may be helping the worker survive, but it may also be allowing an employer to build that subsidy permanently into its labor model. So both sides become dependent on the system. But there is another side to this. Reducing dependency cannot simply mean reducing assistance. If someone is working and still cannot support a reasonable life, cutting aid does not restore independence. It simply recreates the immediate need. If the goal is restoration, reform has to work from both directions. Assistance should be structured so that people can move out of dependency. But our economy also has to make it possible for someone who works to actually make that move. Otherwise, we are not building a bridge out of poverty. We are pulling the bridge away while someone is still standing on it. So. Have we built a system that needs poverty to justify itself? And if that system perpetuates long-term dependency, then as Christians, shouldn’t we push to reform it so that it better aligns with the logic of the Almighty—meet the immediate need, restore the person where possible, avoid creating dependency, and build an economy in which that restoration can last? And maybe there is some humility required here, too. We have a tendency to believe that, with enough policy and expertise we can design a system better than the moral order we inherited. But we are not wiser than that moral order. It’s hilarious that we think otherwise, but the Almighty will not be mocked. A system that abandons people in genuine need will create resistance, because leaving suffering unanswered violates something deeply rooted in us. And a system that turns temporary help into permanent dependency will create resistance, too, because dependency is not restoration. Maybe the mistake is thinking we have to choose between compassion and independence. Can we build an American system that respects both? Sources Biblical tithing and support for Levites, foreigners, orphans, and widows: Deuteronomy 14:22–29 — Bible Gateway; Numbers 18:21–24 — Bible Gateway Christian obligation to feed, shelter, and care for those in need: Matthew 25:35–40 — Bible Gateway Bible Gateway Jesus feeding the five thousand and meeting an immediate need: Matthew 14:13–21 — Bible Gateway Jesus healing and restoring people to ordinary life and community: Matthew 11:2–6 — Bible Gateway; John 9 — Bible Gateway Work, independence, and providing for those in need: Genesis 3:19 — Bible Gateway; 1 Thessalonians 4:11–12 — Bible Gateway Bible Gateway; Ephesians 4:28 — Bible Gateway Bible Gateway Work, provision, and eating by the labor of one’s own effort: Genesis 3:19 — Bible Gateway — “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” Federal food, housing, medical, and disability assistance programs: USDA — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); HUD — Housing Choice Voucher Program HUD; Medicaid.gov — Medicaid Medicaid; Social Security Administration — Benefit Types, including Disability and SSI Social Security Administration Working Americans who still rely on public assistance: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs,” October 19, 2020 Government Accountability Office Benefit phaseouts, effective marginal t… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

I was cooking the other day when I thought about a lieutenant I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know why. That happens to me sometimes. A memory will just show up. Nothing in particular brings it to mind. I’ll be driving, or walking, or standing in the kitchen cutting onions, and suddenly I’m back in some room I haven’t thought about in years. This one has come back to me a couple of times recently. It was sometime around 2018 or 2019. I was a squadron commander in the Air Force, and one of my flight commanders, a captain and a mother, came to see me about one of her lieutenants. The lieutenant was a woman who had recently had a baby and had been away from normal operational duty for quite a while. I don’t remember the exact amount of time anymore, and I don’t want to pretend that I do. The Air Force had become increasingly generous with maternity and caregiver leave, and by the time this lieutenant was due to return, she had already been away for a significant stretch. Eventually, though, the leave ended. She was expected to come back to duty. In our squadron, duty didn’t mean showing up at an office at eight in the morning and going home at five. It meant going out on a weapons-system alert. Roughly thirty-six hours away from home. The lieutenant told her flight commander that she couldn’t go. She needed more time. She was breastfeeding. More specifically, she said she couldn’t pump enough breast milk ahead of time to leave her baby for the duration of the alert. Her husband was also active duty, but he worked a job that allowed him to be home. He could care for the baby while she was gone. The problem was not that there was no one to take care of the child. The problem was feeding the child. So my flight commander came to me and asked the question commanders eventually get paid to answer: What do we do? Do we send her back on duty? Do we give her more time? How much more? A month? Three months? Until the child turns one? And if nothing changes, then what? Do we simply accept that she cannot perform that portion of the job for as long as she is breastfeeding? I remember the problem because no answer made everybody happy. And I believed the lieutenant. I want to make that clear. I did not think she had invented a breastfeeding problem because she didn’t want to work. I think she had a baby, she was trying to feed that baby, and she was looking at thirty-six hours away from her child and saying, I don’t know how I can do this. That mattered. She had a responsibility for the child. But something else mattered too. Somebody had to go on alert. The mission didn’t disappear because one lieutenant had a difficult family situation. If she didn’t go, somebody else did. Somebody else stayed away from his or her family. Somebody else carried the burden. And suddenly a question that sounds like a personnel problem becomes a philosophical one. If we say everyone can do this job, can we also say some people don’t always have to do all of it? And if we say that, who decides when that is okay? That question is bigger than breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is what makes the question difficult, because biology is not imaginary. Pregnancy is real. Childbirth is real. Recovery is real. Breastfeeding is real. None of those things disappear because an institution adopts a policy of equal opportunity. That is where equality gets complicated. We often use the word equality as though it answers a question. Sometimes it only starts one. There is equality of access. Can you enter the profession? Can you compete for the position? Can you command? Can you serve in the operational role? Can you serve on the combat team? And then there is equality of obligation. Once you have the position, are the expectations the same? That distinction becomes uncomfortable because we like clean moral principles. Treat everyone the same. Accommodate people according to their circumstances. Both sound good until they run into each other. One way of thinking about this is the difference between equality and equity. Equality says people occupying the same role ought to face the same essential obligations. Equity says relevant differences may justify different treatment. The hard part is deciding which differences matter, and how much difference in treatment is still compatible with calling it the same job. Another way of thinking about it is role morality. Certain roles carry obligations that ordinary life does not. A judge cannot decide a case based on friendship. A physician cannot simply abandon a patient in the middle of surgery. A military officer accepts obligations that most citizens do not. That does not mean the officer stops being a mother, father, husband, wife, son, or daughter. It means those obligations sometimes collide. The philosopher W. D. Ross wrote about competing duties. You can have more than one genuine moral obligation at the same time. You can have a duty to your child, a duty to your fellow officers, a duty to the mission, a duty to obey lawful orders, and a duty not to place unreasonable burdens on other people. The fact that one duty is real does not make the others disappear. That is the part that gets lost when we turn difficult problems into slogans. Sometimes two good things really are in conflict. You can even make what you believe is the right decision and still leave something valuable damaged. Maybe you order the lieutenant back onto alert. The squadron is treated fairly, the mission is covered, and a mother believes she has been forced into a situation that makes caring for her infant harder. Something has been lost. Or maybe you excuse her. The mother and baby are protected, but another lieutenant goes in her place. And another time. And another. Something has been lost there too. There is no administrative form that makes the loss disappear. This question also has an interesting history in the American military. For much of the twentieth century, the institutional answer to pregnancy and motherhood was much harsher than it is today. Women could serve, but pregnancy would effectively end that service. One of the important cases in that history involved Air Force Captain Susan Struck, a nurse who became pregnant in 1970 and challenged the policy that would have forced her out of the service. Her case became part of the broader movement away from treating pregnancy as automatically incompatible with military service. That change was important. But it didn’t eliminate the problem. It moved the problem. At first, the institutional answer had essentially been: women can serve, but motherhood may end that service. Then the answer became: women can serve and become mothers. Which immediately creates another question: what happens when the obligations of motherhood and the obligations of military service conflict? That is not an argument against women serving. It is simply the next question. And over time the question became sharper. The military opened more roles to women: aviation, ships, operational specialties, and eventually direct ground combat positions. Each time a barrier came down, the debate centered on equal access. But another question always follows behind it. Does equal access imply equal obligation? Or can equal access coexist with different obligations? And if the answer is yes, how different can those obligations become before we are no longer talking about the same job? This is where historical fights over equality become more complicated than they first appear. A woman like Susan Struck was effectively saying that pregnancy shouldn’t automatically end her military career. I think she was right. But once an institution accepts that principle, it has to turn an individual claim into a general rule. Not because every woman necessarily wants exactly what she wanted. Not because every future mother will make the same decision. Institutions simply cannot operate on individual intent. They need principles. A person fights… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Everybody seems to be scared of artificial intelligence. Or maybe the press makes it seem like everybody is scared of artificial intelligence. AI is going to take our jobs. AI is going to replace artists. AI is going to manipulate elections. AI is going to become smarter than us. Eventually AI is going to destroy civilization. Why are we always doing this? Why do human beings always think civilization is about to end? In my lifetime, first it was nuclear war. We are all going to die. Then the millennium change. Everything is going to stop working. Computers are going to fail. Civilization is going to fall apart. Then climate change. Now AI is going to destroy us all. Before that, people thought Halley’s Comet was going to poison everybody. In 1910, scientists detected cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail. Earth was going to pass through it. People bought gas masks and supposed remedies. Newspapers ran with it. There was real dread that this thing in the sky might kill everybody. Then Earth passed through the tail. And nothing happened. That does not mean every warning is stupid. Nuclear war was a real danger. It still is. Y2K was a real computer problem. People spent years fixing it. Climate change is real. AI is going to create real problems. But we have this habit of moving really quickly from, this could be bad, to, this could end civilization. And I keep coming back to the same thing. Every day has enough worry of its own. Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief. Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can. There is that Wendell Berry poem, The Peace of Wild Things. I am paraphrasing it, but it is something like: when I wake at night and worry about my life or my children’s future, I go lie down by the water, among the wild things who do not tax their lives with the forethought of grief. That phrase is just right. The forethought of grief. We do that all the time. We grieve things that have not happened yet. We suffer tomorrow before tomorrow gets here. What happens to my children? What happens to the climate? What happens if the Russians launch? What happens if the computers stop working? What happens if the machine becomes smarter than us? And some of those are reasonable questions. But at some point, you are just paying today for grief that may never come. That does not mean do nothing. Take climate change. Climate change is not going to kill every person on Earth. Do you know what might kill a lot of people? Doing nothing to prepare for climate change. If we need to shore up buildings, improve infrastructure, strengthen the electrical grid, prepare for drought, fires, flooding, storms, then do those things. That is useful. Sitting around worrying that civilization is going to collapse is not useful. Worry is not preparation. And I think AI is the same way. There are reasonable guardrails we can put around artificial intelligence without acting like the machine itself is evil. Start with personal responsibility. No fake lewd photographs or videos using another person’s likeness. That should be illegal. Not because AI made the image. Because you used somebody else’s face to hurt them. If an AI system hacks another company and causes millions of dollars in damage, somebody is responsible for that. “The AI did it” cannot become some excuse that means nobody is liable. A person deployed it. A company built it. Somebody authorized it to do something. Now, I do not think the AI company should automatically be responsible every time somebody misuses a model. That would be ridiculous. If the company demonstrated reasonable guardrails, reasonable security, reasonable efforts to prevent abuse, then no, they should not automatically be liable because somebody found a way around those protections. But if they knew there was a problem, knew their model was being used to do something harmful, had reasonable ways to stop it, and ignored it, then responsibility starts to move back toward the company. That would make AI companies pay attention really quickly. Not because somebody wrote a vague ethics statement. Because there would be consequences. There would be damages. There would be liability. And in a messed-up twist, I am not against the use of AI for military action. I do not think that is contradictory. The military already uses force that would be illegal in ordinary civilian life. The question is who is responsible. If an autonomous or semi-autonomous system strikes a target, somebody in the chain of command still owns that decision. “The algorithm decided” cannot be an excuse. Somebody authorized that system. Somebody gave it the authority to act. Somebody remains responsible. That gets into the philosophy behind all of this. Sartre comes to mind. Freedom creates responsibility. You are free to choose, so you are also responsible for what you choose. You do not get to hide behind the system. Or the institution. Or the role. Or, eventually, the algorithm. John Stuart Mill fits here too. Mill’s basic idea was that people should be left free to act unless their actions harm somebody else. The state should not interfere just because an action is unusual, risky, unpopular, or offensive. The line is harm. That is pretty close to how I think about AI. Do not regulate it because it frightens people. Do not regulate it because it is new. Do not regulate it because somebody can imagine a terrible future. Regulate conduct when it causes real harm to other people. That is a much cleaner rule. If someone uses AI to commit fraud, punish the fraud. If someone uses AI to create a nonconsensual sexual image, punish that. If a company negligently deploys a system that causes foreseeable damage, hold the company responsible. But do not build a giant apparatus around every hypothetical thing the technology might someday do. You will never keep up anyway. And I think the same principle applies to corporations. Corporations have rights. They can own property. They can enter contracts. They can sue and be sued. They have legal protections. Fine. Then they also have reasonable responsibility. You do not get rights without responsibility. That applies to individuals. It should apply to companies. So maybe the philosophy is something like this: Maximum freedom, with responsibility for foreseeable harm. Let people build things. Let companies innovate. Let people use powerful tools. But when somebody gets hurt, ask the same questions we already know how to ask. Who did it? Who authorized it? Who could reasonably foresee the harm? Who failed to take reasonable precautions? Fraud is still fraud. Theft is still theft. Defamation is still defamation. Negligence is still negligence. Calling it artificial intelligence does not make responsibility disappear. And that brings me back to the larger point. Maybe AI could someday create some civilization-level danger. I do not know. But every generation seems convinced it is standing at the edge of the end. Nuclear war. The millennium. Climate catastrophe. Artificial intelligence. Before that, Halley’s Comet. At some point, you have to live. If there is something useful to do, do it. If the climate is changing and infrastructure needs to be stronger, build stronger infrastructure. If AI can be used to make fake sexual images of people, make that illegal. If AI systems can cause real damage, establish liability. If companies put reasonable guardrails in place, do not punish them automatically because somebody misused the tool anyway. Do the work that needs doing. Fix what can be fixed. Prepare where preparation actually matters. And then live. Because every day already has enough trouble of its own. There are people to love. There are things to build. There are things to repair. There are books to read. There is dinner to make. There is work to do. There is a world that is still here this morning. Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief. Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can. Tomorrow has enough worry of its own. Sources Public fear around Halley’s Comet in 1910, including concern that cy… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, this is Joel. I’m sitting next to a pile of flowers in the yard. I spent some time this morning taking hops vines out of our hoop house, and now I’m sitting on a bucket, picking the flowers off the vines. A buddy of mine brews beer. Sometimes he gives me some of it, so I’m going to give him a bunch of these. I grow several different varieties of hops in the hoop house. I’ve got some New Zealand varieties, some Cascade, and some Chinook. The Chinook seems to yield better than anything else I’ve tried here at high altitude. If you’ve never smelled a hop flower before, go get yourself a good, fresh West Coast IPA and really smell it before you drink it. That smell is hops. A West Coast IPA is usually very hop-forward, and when you break one of these fresh flowers open, there’s this strong green, citrusy, resinous smell. You immediately think, that smells like an IPA. Except it’s really the other way around. The IPA smells like this flower. My hands are busy, so I obviously can’t type anything. I’m sitting here talking to my phone instead. And with my hands busy, I’ve had some time to think about a few things from this week, even though I haven’t had time to write them down. The first one is cattle. I made a trip this week to the Buffalo Livestock Market up in northern Wyoming, and one of the things that stood out was the number of heifers. For people who don’t spend much time around cattle, a heifer is a young female that hasn’t had her first calf yet. If you want to grow a cow herd, you have to keep some of those young females. You breed them. They have calves. They become cows. That sounds simple enough. Except right now those heifers are worth a tremendous amount of money. An individual heifer can bring something like $2,500. If you keep her, maybe she has ten or twelve or fifteen calves over the course of her life. Maybe keeping her turns out to be a tremendous investment. But maybe cattle prices fall. Maybe three years from now you look back and realize somebody was willing to hand you $2,500 for that animal and you turned it down. And meanwhile, you have to feed her. You have to carry her through the winter. You have to buy hay. You have to buy fuel. You have all the other expenses that come with running a ranch. That was another thing people were talking about at the livestock market. Everybody hopes we get a lot of snow this winter. Snow means moisture. Moisture means grass. And grass matters because hay is expensive. Fuel is expensive. When diesel is expensive, even if there’s hay somewhere else, getting it to your ranch gets expensive in a hurry. So there’s this national conversation about the cattle herd being historically small and ranchers needing to retain heifers so we can rebuild it. But an individual rancher doesn’t operate the national cattle herd. He operates his ranch. He has bills. He has input costs. And he has an animal standing in front of him that somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for right now. Sometimes people ask why ranchers don’t just keep more heifers. Sometimes they can’t afford to. And sitting here picking hops, I realized I’ve got a pretty good example right in front of me. I’ve got thousands of these flowers. Suppose somebody came along and offered me a nickel or a dime for every one of them. At some point, the price might get high enough that I wouldn’t keep any to brew beer myself. I’d sell them. Not because I suddenly stopped liking beer. Not because I don’t know they might be useful later. The price somebody is willing to give me today changes the decision. That’s basically the position ranchers are in. The price can get high enough that you almost can’t afford not to sell the animal you would otherwise like to keep. The second thing I’ve been thinking about is Iran. Part of the reason I think about Iran more than most people probably do is my previous life working around nuclear weapons and strategy. And I keep coming back to the idea that maybe we are just too impatient with Iran. We want problems solved. We want regimes to change. We want countries to behave differently. But Iran isn’t a new country. Persia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. There’s a story about Alexander the Great that I keep thinking about. Go back to 334 B.C. Alexander is about twenty-two years old. He crosses into Asia with a Macedonian army and takes on the Persian Empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world. And then he starts winning. He defeats Persian armies. He defeats Darius III. He pushes deeper and deeper into the empire. Eventually he gets through the Persian Gates and reaches Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of Persia. Parts of Persepolis are burned. So if you stop the story there, Alexander conquered Persia. He did. But then something interesting starts happening. Alexander begins adopting elements of Persian royal dress. He brings Persian nobles into his government. He brings Persian soldiers into his army. He marries into the Persian royal family. He encourages his officers to marry Persian women. And his Macedonian soldiers hate it. They marched across the known world to conquer Persia, and now they’re looking at their king thinking, wait a minute. We conquered them. Why are you starting to look like them? Persia could obviously be conquered. Alexander did it. But there’s something remarkable about a civilization that can lose the war and still influence the conqueror so deeply that the conqueror begins changing himself. Alexander conquered Persia. And then Persia changed Alexander. I think we ought to remember that. We don’t have to be Iran’s friend. We don’t have to accept Iran possessing nuclear weapons. We don’t have to accept attacks on shipping or attacks on its neighbors through militias and proxies. But maybe we should stop assuming that the final answer is somehow to make Iran into us. We’ve tried versions of that before. In 1953, the United States became involved in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and helped restore the Shah’s position. Over the next couple of decades, the United States became very closely associated with the Shah while he pursued rapid modernization, military expansion, and increasingly authoritarian rule. It’s probably too simple to say America was trying to make Iran culturally American. But we were deeply involved in determining who governed Iran and what direction the country would take. And eventually there was a backlash. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had a lot of causes. Religion mattered. Economics mattered. Political repression mattered. The Shah mattered. Foreign interference mattered. And out of that revolution came a phrase Americans still recognize immediately. Death to America. Maybe there’s a lesson in that. Iran does not have to become us. We can deter Iran. We can contain Iran. We can protect our allies. We can oppose nuclear proliferation. We can respond when American troops or American interests are attacked. But those things are different from assuming we are going to redesign Iranian society. Even negotiating with Iran is complicated. Iran has several centers of political power. The elected government handles diplomacy and much of the ordinary work of government. But the Supreme Leader has the final say on the biggest national-security questions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answers to him, not to the elected president. So when an Iranian diplomat sits across the table from an American diplomat and signs something, the question isn’t just whether we got a signature. The question is whether the person across the table actually has the authority to bind the parts of the Iranian system that have the missiles, the ships, and the guns. Does the Supreme Leader support the agreement? Does the security establishment consider itself bound by it? Will the Revolutionary Guard carry it out? You can have diplomacy happening in one place while military pressure continues or resumes somewhere else. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Iranian diplomats are fake, and it doesn’t mean the… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Thoughts from the week, in podcast conversation form. Joel: The watch is quiet. Dark. Day and night, you don’t know the difference. Joel: Every twelve hours, you set the clock. If it’s more than a second off, fast or slow, it’s out of spec. And you have to set all three clocks at once. Paige: Three clocks, one second. I hear that and feel like it’s important. I suspect you’re going to tell me it didn’t feel that way. Joel: You’re just setting the clock. It’s standard. Wherever we were in the world, we all had to agree on what time it was. Joel: I was a nuclear weapons officer for twenty-one years. For two of them, I commanded one of America’s nine squadrons that keep nuclear missiles on alert and stand ready, day and night. You get used to thinking in a common reference time. Somebody you’re working with could be six time zones away from you, but you still need to know what time it is for both of you. Paige: Zulu time. Joel: Right. You’ll have flashbacks, stories that pop into your head whenever some random event happens. One of those that caught my attention this week was this new Gallet watch. The Flying Officer. It’s only been out a couple of weeks. I haven’t seen one in person and I don’t know that I ever will. I’ve been looking at pictures of the face. Paige: It’s an old name. The first one came out in nineteen thirty-nine. Harry Truman wore one. Joel: Is that right. Joel: There are reference cities around the dial. It’s a twelve-hour face, but when everyone somewhere on the globe operates on a single reference time you’re thinking about a twenty-four-hour day and a twenty-four-hour globe, so two places can share an hour position, twelve hours apart. Joel: London is the reference to start with. Move clockwise, or to the right on the watch face, and it’s like moving east around the globe. Geneva then Cape Town then Nairobi. Go the other way, west into the Atlantic, and you’ve got the Azores. Paige: You’re reading it like a map. Joel: Yes. The globe on your wrist. After twenty-one years it gets ingrained. You think about people being in different time zones. It’s also just an interesting watch. Paige: Fair enough. Joel: Most of that job was waiting, alert. The watch. The capability is there. It’s ready. And the whole point is that you never use it. Joel: That followed me to Leavenworth and to the Army’s Command and General Staff College. Twelve officers in our classroom. I was the only Air Force officer. There was a Marine, a Canadian armor officer, and everybody else was Army. Joel: One exercise we worked through was a thought experiment conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The question was whether we go in, and how much we’d commit to a peacekeeping mission. One of the factions was openly hostile to the U.S. Disrupting our activities in the area. Threatening terrorist attacks. The Marine was confident we should get involved in almost every regional conflict, and that it would be over quick. Joel: Most of the room said yes. I said no. I almost always said no. Paige: Wait. One country punishing people in another. And you said no. Joel: I did. Is it a tragedy? Yes. A vital U.S. interest? No. Would I support partners getting involved? Yes. Independent action? No. Paige: Partners tend to wait for us. Rwanda was a hundred days. Joel: I know. There’s a question of dependency there. And then we’d get to something I thought was important enough. Then what I was willing to accept in casualties was much higher than anybody else in the room. Paige: That sounds backwards. The man who never wants to go is the one who’ll pay the most once he’s there. Joel: Because I was looking at the objective. What were we going to achieve? Joel: The others were more willing to get into smaller conflicts. As a nuclear weapons guy, I’d look at those and think, we’re not going to have a decisive, long-term impact. Our effects need to last for 40 years, maybe even a hundred. Joel: If a major United States interest was threatened, that was different. But those are much bigger conflicts. World wars. Major conflicts involving our partners. Paige: I’ll give you that being able to intervene isn’t a reason to. But decisive is a high bar. Haven’t you walked the tunnels the North Koreans dug under the DMZ? Joel: I have. Paige: Nothing was decided there. No treaty. An armistice, signed in nineteen fifty-three, and two armies still looking at each other across it. By your test, Korea was a waste. Joel: No. It wasn’t. Paige: Seventy years of Seoul. Joel: Okay. Then decisive is the wrong word. Maybe durable. Does it last. Korea has. And we’re still paying to make it hold. That’s a cost I’d accept, for an ally, for a result that lasts that long. Joel: But there’s a cost to every one of those. When you use resources in one regional conflict, you don’t have them for something bigger. Joel: And we start from an extraordinary position. Oceans on both sides. No neighbor about to invade and subdue us. That gives us room to be patient. Joel: America will never lose a war, because nobody can come here and conquer us. Just this week we signed a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland to increase our presence on that critical piece of geography while denying China and Russia access. Further protecting American security interests in our region. Paige: Hold on. There’s a jump there. Keeping the homeland secure and winning a war abroad are two different things. Joel: I agree that’s a logic jump. What I mean is that no other country is going to subdue the United States on our shores. Joel: When we go somewhere else to fight, of course we can lose. We have a long logistical trail. We are at a disadvantage sustaining what we’re doing. And we can have enormous difficulty achieving our objectives. Paige: Which puts the weight back on the objective. What counts as success, and can the force we’re using produce it? Joel: Exactly. Our strength is in restraint. In having the capability and not always exercising it. Joel: Take Iran. We’ve been at war with Iran since the last day of February. Going on seven months. Joel: I was thinking about Cyrus the Persian this week, and how far back that history goes. Paige: About twenty-six hundred years. Joel: They aren’t going anywhere. Whatever we do over there, they’ll be living there when we’ve gone home. Paige: The country isn’t going anywhere. This government might. Joel: It hasn’t yet. We can blow things up. We’re blockading their ports right now. We can do a lot of things to hurt Iran. If we don’t get a durable American result out of it, what have we achieved? Joel: And I don’t think Israel’s immediate survival was at risk before this started. So why start a war when survival isn’t at risk? Paige: Let me make the case straight, because somebody should. A government that says Israel shouldn’t exist was enriching uranium well past what any power plant needs, even though they had never made a bomb. If the test is immediate survival, then with a bomb, immediate comes after it’s too late. You of all people know what one weapon does to a small country. Joel: I do. One weapon on a small country is a tragedy. But the state will survive. Paige: A lot of that country lives around one city. Joel: I know what I’m saying. If Iran ever used one, the world would stand against them. Israel would survive. That government wouldn’t. And it has spent more than forty years making sure it survives. That’s not a government looking to die. And remember, Iran never built a bomb. Our own intelligence says they had a weapons program and shut it down in two thousand three. Year after year, the same people said they hadn’t restarted it. It’s not in their best interest. Joel: And we had limits on them. Inspectors in the buildings. We walked away from that in twenty eighteen. Paige: The inspectors didn’t stop them from arming Hezbollah. Or Hamas. Or the Houthis. Joel: No. And Israel has been dealing with that. It has plenty of capability to defend itself, which America continues to support. I don’t s… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The shovel rings. Every year a couple or three fence posts rot along the front lane. Enough moisture gets in the wood and maybe a beetle or two, and the Earth wants to retake what it will. Everything eventually, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She has a couple of spare fence posts in the barn. Not too many anymore. She shifts other posts to unbury them, and dust and soil puff up, catching in her nose. She carries one out and lays it on the ground next to the leaning post. It’s heavy enough that she can’t carry it and the tools and she has to go back to the barn for those, a shovel, pickaxe, post hole digger. She lays them next to the fence post. She puts on her gloves to protect her hands while she frees the three cross rails from the stubborn upright. Tough yellow tan leather, turning black at the fingertips. Each rail has a screw holding it to the upright, red dust lining the metal edges. She removes them one at a time and wiggles the upright side to side pulling them away from their slot. They stack there, still attached to the side post beside the rotting upright. Then she gets to the rotting fence post. First to remove it. The best way to make progress is just to break it. So she rocks it back and forth, pushes on it with her weight, until it gives at the base. Gray decay sifts into the grass. With the post removed, she gets to work on the rotted wood under the soil line. The shovel makes quick work at first, each bite of the shovel bringing up soft, rotted wood. Before long, the digging has her breathing hard as the hole deepens. She stops to rest, then works the pickaxe through pockets of stubborn wood. At intervals, she leans over and reaches in, feeling for the bottom of the rotted post. Often her hand meets packed earth, only to find more rotted wood just beneath. At last, her hand finds the bottom. She clears as much rotted wood as she can, sorting it from the soil piled beside the hole. Then she lowers the new post into place and shovels enough saved earth around the base to hold it upright. She sets the level against the wood and nudges the post till it stands true, unlike the last one, which still leans a little crooked. Only then does she fill the hole and tamp the earth firm around the post. When the upright stands true, she reattaches the three rails, driving each screw into the fresh wood. Then she gathers her tools. Half a world away, in Sumatra, another shovel bites into the Earth for a cinnamon tree. That evening, in the kitchen, she dusts the scraps of leftover pie dough with cinnamon. Her daughter’s favorite. The spice rises sharp in the air as she slides the small cookie sheet into the oven. While the scraps bake, she blind-bakes the pie crust and prepares the filling. She makes the dough with lard and butter, flour, salt, and water, lard for flake, butter for flavor, salt because salt makes everything better. Rolled thin on the counter over a dusting of flour, wrapped around the rolling pin, draped over the blue fluted pie dish. Foil to line the bottom, then the pie weights to stop the bubbles. Into the oven. She collects the other ingredients from the cupboard: pumpkin pie filling, Libby’s. Sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, flour, condensed milk. She grabs eggs from the counter, fresh from the chickens in the yard. Pumpkin. Her favorite. The directions say to mix the dry ingredients separately, but she knows it doesn’t matter. She opens the can of pumpkin and uses a spoon to scrape out the last bits. She adds the eggs. She adds the dry ingredients straight to the pumpkin and eggs, gives everything a good stir, then pours in the condensed milk and mixes it again. About now the timer sounds. Potholders to grab the pie dish, foil and weights out, pie dish back in to finish the blind-bake. The next morning, pumpkin pie for breakfast. Out of the fridge comes the whipping cream. Two cups into the mixer, then sugar and vanilla. She starts it on low so the cream doesn’t splash out of the bowl, then turns it up to high until the stiff white peaks. The whisk turns faster than her hand could manage. She watches the cream thicken, stops the mixer, lifts the whisk to check. Peaks. She puts a dollop of the whipped cream onto her coffee, her favorite treat, then some onto the pie. She savors the vanilla in the cream, the bite of cinnamon and ginger mixed with the pumpkin, and heads into work. At work, the accounting sheets are waiting. Each needs checked and then checked again. There are more sheets than she has time to go through carefully. She opens a conversation with an AI. She details precise instructions. What she needs to check, what a mistake looks like, what should agree with what. Together they work on a piece of Python code to go through the documents one at a time. The first try isn’t quite right. She changes a term, explains it again. They try another approach. She runs the code, checks what it finds, changes the code, goes back to the conversation. A couple of hours pass this way. Eventually, it works. The code moves through the sheets finding the mistakes that need her attention. She gets to work fixing them. At a desk nearby, a mathematician works through a problem he has struggled with for years. He knows where he gets stuck. He can get partway to an answer, but the next step depends on something he hasn’t been able to prove. Every approach brings him back to the same place. He’s tried changing his starting assumptions. He’s tried approaching the problem from other directions. There are papers on his desk with passages underlined, calculations in the margins. Books and old computer programs he keeps because he thinks he might find the answer there. Some of that work belongs to people who have been working on the problem longer than he has. Some will never work on it again. He opens a conversation with an AI. Types the problem, gives it explicit details, explains where he gets stuck. The AI says it’s thinking about it. Gives an answer back. He reads it chewing on a pencil. For him to get to a final solution he has to prove every line, and he can’t get past the third. He goes back to the AI and explains the mistake, walks it through his reasoning. Another answer. This one a different route that arrives at the same difficulty. He checks each step again anyway. Over the next several days, he returns to the conversation. Sometimes it helps him work through a calculation. Sometimes he spends an hour finding out why a suggestion won’t work. Then the AI suggests a way of writing the problem differently. He copies it onto paper. Works through the first line, then the second. He tries a simple example whose answer he already knows. It works. He tries another. Then he goes back over what they have taken for granted, looking for something that slipped through unnoticed. For the first time, he can see a possible next step. There’s still work to do. He needs to know whether the approach works beyond these examples. He needs other mathematicians to look it over. A promising afternoon is a long way from his end goal. But he turns to a fresh page. We say she dug the hole by hand. We say she made the pie from scratch. And she did. But where does ‘by hand’ or ‘from scratch’ begin? She used a shovel. Somebody made it. Before someone could make the shovel, someone made steel. Someone extracted iron ore from the ground. Someone figured out how to turn it into something useful. They needed furnaces, fuel, equipment to move the material, tools to shape it, people to do the work. Every one of those had to be made or fed, too. And the handle. A tree had to grow. Somebody cut it, moved it, dried the wood, shaped it to fit the shovel, and shaped it so that your hand could hold it. Whatever fastens the blade to the handle has its own need: a pin, a screw, adhesive. How do you make resin from scratch? For every one of them, if you follow their trail backward, there’s more work. Even if she could obtain everything herself, every ingredient, s… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Taking stairs down two at a time from the giant stone building, music thrumming in her AirPods. She rounds the corner and her pace slows to a walk. The Commuter Express is still there, leaving the city. Three-tone white and green and blue, blue cloth seats, standing room only, people in suits and dress shoes. Above the windshield, Backlick Three Ninety-Five lit up in yellow. A twenty-six minute bus ride to the commuter lot. I-95 and then the parkway. The doors fold shut and then the hiss of air brakes. A young man moves his bag away from the seat next to him, but she reaches up to grab the strap hanging from the ceiling and braces for the turn onto the on-ramp. Eyes forward. She’s twelve hours in. During the darkest time of the year this is her favorite moment of the day. As they crest the top of the hill, a glowing river of red on her right. The HOV lane rules say minimum three passengers to get away from the gridlock, and most cars don’t have three. Their brake lights shine as far as she can see, the bus passing them one after another after another. Next stop, the commuter lot. The bus empties in less than a minute. Her car is close, she parked at five-forty this morning. On the way home, she stops at the supermarket. Less than ten minutes now to save the peace of a weekend morning with her coffee and the still of the screen porch, cardinals calling from the tree line and squirrels that chitter in the great woods that line the creek. Vegetables, potatoes, take and bake sourdough. Then the meat counter for some beef. Even the ground is more than seven dollars a pound. The world has gone mad. Heifers Before he can even get a toe to the wood floor she licks his foot. He walks out of the bedroom in the near-dark, and she’s already jogging a circle on the rug next to her food bowl. He puts a scoop in the bowl and hits the coffee grinder button as he walks through the kitchen. She finishes her portion, licks the bowl clean, and still beats him to the door. While she is outside he goes back to the coffee. Ten after five he hits ‘Brew’ and the coffee maker starts to gurgle. Out the sunroom window the sky to the east is a deep pink going yellow at the edge. Jesse is back at the screen door, ready for her treat. Red heeler, white Bentley mark on her forehead, nails ticking on the tile when the door swings. She wolfs the treat down in one bite and runs through the house ready to jump on anyone not out of bed yet. He drinks the coffee with some cream. Only one cup anymore. Jesse is back now; she watches the sparrows flit from tree to tree in the dim light. He grabs his felt with the cattleman’s crease. By six he’s in the pickup with the window down, diesel turbo whining along the two-track up to the north pasture to check water tanks. The tank on the north end runs off a solar well he put in four years ago, and the float sticks sometimes. Today the float is fine. The grass is not. He borrowed eleven thousand dollars through a USDA program four years ago to drill that well. For a cattleman, water means grass. It opened up enough ground to add forty pairs on a section that used to just grow sagebrush. He’s looked into what a second one for the east side would cost more than once. Another sixty pairs, maybe, if the grass would carry them. Imagine walking in to talk to a banker for a loan. Do you have any collateral? Sure do. It’s grass that I’m hoping will survive the drought. The north pasture is grazed short and has been brown all year. He asks Jesse aloud if they’re going to see any snow this winter. Then the math. How many head, how many acres, how much fuel will cost to truck hay in at more than five dollars a gallon for diesel. The math says what it said last year. Keeping cattle means losing money. The pickup idles through and he counts heifer calves. Steers already a check coming regardless. This year’s crop looks good. The kind you want to keep. He turns the radio up when the cattle market report comes on in the background. Heifer calves bringing between four-fifty and some near four-seventy-five a pound. He glances through his heifers. Near four seventy-five a pound means the calves in front of him are twenty-five hundred dollars. Apiece. Or he could lose money to keep them. Then the news. The announcer says the United States would import three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef to be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices. The president’s voice says the deal would reduce prices for American families while we work to rebuild the cattle herd and help our ranchers. He shakes his head and turns the radio back down. He looks at a heifer calf. If he keeps her there’s no check in October. She eats hay all winter, and the diesel to deliver it costs more than the hay. Then hope she breeds next summer, lose money again next winter, and then still wait another year. If. If. If. If she breeds. If they get enough snow to grow grass. If the coyotes don’t find the newborn. If all that happens, two springs from now she might put her first calf on the ground. But he still hasn’t made any money. For that to happen that calf would still have to grow, get weaned, and sell for a profit. This is twenty twenty-six. He could get paid in twenty twenty-eight. Somewhere around twenty-thirty, that calf is beef. He has a choice and he doesn’t like either option. He could spend money buying hay and paying veterinary bills and hope for luck for four years but that means losing money and a ranch that loses money doesn’t stay a ranch. Or he could put a check for twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket right now but every year he does that his cattle herd shrinks and then makes less and less money every year and the ranch doesn’t stay a ranch. And the radio just told him the government will do everything it can to make the cattle market no longer profitable. He spends the rest of the day checking calves and water tanks with Jesse. Around the time he’s wrapping up he remembers a story his dad told him. His dad loved Reagan, always telling these old stories. 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery store in Houston, Texas. He roamed the aisles of Randall’s, shaking his head in amazement. He said if ordinary Russians ever saw an American supermarket, “there would be a revolution.” He wonders what happens to the supermarket if ranchers can’t grow their herds. They’re headed back for supper. Outside the window the heifer calves are strung out along the creek in the last light, grazing down by the water. They’re worth more money than any calves in the history of this ranch, every one of them a check he can’t afford to cash, and can’t afford not to. We’ve Been Here Before, But We Were Coming From the Other Direction Nebraska, 1934. The Dust Bowl. America was five years into the Depression. Roosevelt had been president a little more than a year. Washington was inventing agencies faster than most people could learn their initials. None of them could make it rain. The grass had been gone two years. A rancher couldn’t keep an animal he couldn’t feed, and what he couldn’t keep, nobody wanted to buy. A calf was worth less than the corn it would have taken to fatten it, and the corn wasn’t growing either. The Drought Relief Service started buying cattle. Not to eat. To get them off land that couldn’t carry them anymore. Four dollars a head for calves, around a hundred dollars today. Ten to twenty for cows and steers, two fifty to five hundred. More than the packing plants could take. What they couldn’t take, trucks drove to pits we had already dug. Close to one in five of the cattle the government paid for were buried in the ground they’d been trying to graze. There are two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have. There were ninety-two years between cattle pits in Nebraska and the meat counter in Northern Virginia. Then: not enough grass and water to grow too many cattle. Now: not enough cattle, and not enoug… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

College girl. Blonde in a bright green shirt holding a clipboard, asking names and questions. Welcoming committee. What’s your major? Chemical engineering. Oh, you’re one of the smart ones. The van pulls forward through the maze of cones and kids wearing shirts that say “Unpack Your Future” that stand ready with laundry carts to take your life’s treasure into the unknown. Who will you meet on your journey? Through the great halls of stone and brick. Unknown sounds and the faces and voices of those someday familiar. Will you take the long road home? Or the shortcut? The shortcut looks like the way home. Your first meal at the feast. Your first night in a strange room. Act I. Argos Christmas Eve. The long night and the wind howling pelting snow sideways against the windows and the drifts that bury the paths and block the roads. Dreams of tunnels and forts and marshmallows dripping with chocolate. Bedtime in the far north. Two bathed now in pajamas and blankets, snuggled in with the old gray dog. Time for a story. The older is at the edge of story time and some nights he wants to listen and some nights not and days move on. Tonight, a new tale. Not an Odyssey. A tale of an Odyssey told from home. Those who remain behind. The reader starts with the title. “Argos. The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog” by Ralph Hardy. Book One. Chapter One. “On the Stupidity of Sheep.” The two giggle. The sheep refuse to find shelter from the storm. Their wool smells. Argos, the great hunting dog born of bear and wolf, their protector. Wet. Chapter One ends: “Some men did return to their homes from Troy to tell the tale. But my master and his men have not. The mountain eagles circle higher and higher, riding the rippling currents, looking for him as I have asked, but see him not. The seagulls I have ordered to fly over every ship to see if my master is enslaved report nothing. Even the vultures, which smell death everywhere, are silent. And so I believe he lives.” February. Smoke in the kitchen. The microwave door hangs open and the smell of burnt oatmeal goes all the way up the stairs. The boy stands back from it with the look of a man watching his first ship sink. Windows open. Ten below outside. The whole house breathing cold air until the smell surrenders. What’s done is done. The house stands. Later we laugh and carry the old microwave out into the snow drift and the smell inside it will never go away. That night, bedtime. Pajamas and blankets and the old gray dog. Book One. Chapter Sixteen. “Tales of Hades:” “I pray that…you set me on a pyre there and burn me with my armor….Do this for me, or I am cursed for eternity.” Honor by fire. Some nights he listens from the doorway. Tonight, he is under the blanket. March came and with it great snowstorms. First we dug tunnels tall enough for a boy to stand in. The roofs sagged and the mound slowly shrank. The book was nearly done now. Bedtime. The reader went up the stairs the way they had all winter. The two bathed and in pajamas under the blanket. The reader had to coax one out to listen, the book was nearly done. The old gray dog circled twice and lay down with his head on a leg. The last chapters. Odysseus returns at last, a stranger in his own home; only one creature in all of Ithaca knows him. Argos. Act II. Lessons Troy. The Trojan War. The legend Homer told took place around twelve hundred years before Christ. He told the tale around five centuries later. Homer begins near the end. For ten years, Greek warriors laid siege to a city that would not bend to their will. Troy’s location wasn’t an accident. It sat at a decisive point to control key geography. The straits didn’t cause the Trojan War, but they are why the city mattered. Then the trickery of the horse. Warriors inside the gates. The city slept. In the dark, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates for the army waiting outside. Houses burned through the night. Men who had names the day before, dead in the streets. They took women and children. Odysseus wasn’t watching Troy burn from a ship. He was inside the horse and inside the walls when the city fell. By dawn, the Greeks had destroyed the city. So. The war is over. There was a way home, and some of the other kings took it. He could go directly home, but there were other matters. Men he was tied to, arguments to settle, other things pulling at him, other routes to consider. Odysseus has a choice. The first: Go to class. Do the work. Come home when you said you would. Save some money. Keep the promise. Stay married. Train when you don’t feel like training. One foot in front of the other, the next step and then the next. None of those things feel heroic while you’re doing them. Or the other: the road that looks shorter. And so begins the Odyssey. Their first stop, a city called Ismarus. It had nothing to do with Troy, but they attacked it anyway. After the assault, Odysseus told the men it was time to go. For ten years there had been a time for war. Troy had fallen. That time was over. But there was food and wine and things to steal and divide, and they stayed too long. By morning, more men had come down from the country and they had to defend themselves. They fought all day, and by the time the Greeks got back to sea, six men from every ship were dead. There is a season, a time and place for everything. A time when your parents woke you up, reminded you where to be, knew where you were at night, and caught some of your mistakes before they became expensive. That season ends. Then an island where three of the men ate the lotus and forgot why they were trying to get home. Not who they were, really. They didn’t forget everything. Just the part where, somewhere across the water, there was another life they were supposed to want and get back to. They forgot. They didn’t want to leave. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships crying and tie them down. Remember why you came. One of the great treasures in life is to find work you love. Don’t trade that away because something is easier or safer or more pleasant that makes you forget what you wanted in the first place. When you are young, you want to burn the world to the ground. Remember. Then the cave. The men find cheese and sheep and food, and they want to take some and get out. Odysseus wants to stay and meet whoever lives there, and that turns out to be a bad decision he could not have forecast at the time. The Cyclops comes home, rolls a stone across the entrance, and eats two of the men. Later he eats more. Odysseus gets him drunk, tells him his name is Nobody, blinds him, and the surviving men escape when the Cyclops lets the sheep out. It works. They’re back on the ship. They’re leaving. But Odysseus can’t stand that the Cyclops doesn’t know who beat him. So Odysseus shouts his real name and where he’s from. Turns out the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son. You don’t need to tell people how smart you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, how much potential you have. Don’t announce yourself. There’s plenty of time for people to know how great you are without you telling them. People will discover that on their own. Then the King of the Winds. He gives Odysseus a bag with every wind trapped inside except the one blowing toward Ithaca, so only the wind that will carry them home is free. For nine days they sail. Odysseus stays awake at the helm until he can’t take it anymore and falls asleep. When he does, they are close enough to Ithaca to see the fires of their home burning on shore. But the crew has been watching him guard the bag, and out of envy they decide it must contain treasure he hasn’t shared with them. They open it. All the winds come out at once. Odysseus wakes up and watches his home disappear over the horizon because the men he trusted thought he was hiding gold from them. They end up back where they started. You will meet people who have more than you. More money. Better grades. Better connections. There is always someone at the dance that … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Moths circle the streetlights in the mostly empty lot. Blacktop. White parking lines. Road noise. Pickup doors slam shut. They’re supposed to park at the back of the lot. Nobody who would care is here at eleven, and they’ll be gone before Beth gets in. She’s at the door, counting heads. Everyone calls her Lou. “I need you to go get Charlie,” she says. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.” No problem. Charlie lives in a trailer park pretty close. Tires on gravel. Sideways glances. He bangs on the dark trailer door and waits. Quiet inside. Does it again. After a couple minutes Charlie opens the door, eyes bloodshot, smelling like too much of something. “I’ll be right behind you.” The kid leaves. When he gets back she’s still at the door. “He’ll be here,” she says. “He always comes.” Trucks back up to the dock. Boxes come down the rollers. Cardboard stacks up faster than anyone breaks it down. Most of the crew is new. Maybe they’ll last the week. Charlie comes in at midnight and works the line like a man paying something off. Nobody says anything. At the first break she’s smoking and eating a sandwich. Lettuce packed separate. Bread spread thin with dressing. John sleeps in the corner of the break room. Loud snores. He jerks awake, then nods off again. Above the time clock there’s a board with the stock price on it. Employee ownership plan. Somebody on day shift writes the new number in every day. “That’s not much mayonnaise,” the kid says. “Miracle Whip. If I could afford mayonnaise, I would spread it thick,” she says. He looks at his own sandwich. Eats the rest of it slower. At seven the doors open onto full daylight. The crew walks out squinting. Engines start across the lot, one after another. They pull out and head toward town and bed. He turns west, towards Midway, the sun in his mirrors. His shift at the dairy starts at seven thirty. Act I. Keys Lou’s ring of keys opens nearly every lock in the store. A key to the high valuables cage, the office, the cardboard compactor lockout. She carries them on a metal clip hung over her belt. When she walks the floor, you hear her coming. She keeps a copy of the schedule on a sheet folded in her back pocket. Not her schedule, because she has that one memorized. Everyone’s schedule. Her handwriting, all capitals, pencil. She schedules break times, teaches new workers how to unload trucks and run pallet jacks, moves people around based on who calls in. The store stays open until ten. Night shift starts at eleven. She arrived by nine, through the auto-open doors in pale jeans, shirt tucked in. She walked with highkneed purpose, denim falling straight to white sneakers. Pencil ready. The evening crew has their aisles faced and the dock swept before she comes through. Just before eleven o’clock, she’s at the door to let everyone in. Five tonight. Charlie, John, the kid, a new guy, and a woman who started Tuesday. The truck’s already backed in. She takes the paperwork from the driver and signs it on her leg. The night is orderly. Trailer, then the rollers, then her first Virginia Slim. Pallets to the floor, everyone split aisle by aisle, freight on the shelves, cardboard broken down flat and baled. Then the orders. She’s quick to jump in and fix a jam or rebuild a corner of a pallet herself so a new guy can watch. Then she hands him the next box. She explains to him, “A new truck every night. Nothing to stay in the stockroom, no back inventory. Six hundred boxes in, six hundred boxes onto shelves, cardboard baled, empty dock by seven, and another truck tomorrow.” This summer the kid is new to nights. He’s been with the store for a couple of years on evening shift, and he picked up a second job on the university dairy for the summer. When he got moved to nights she asked him about his schedule. Night shift, off at seven, dairy until five, sleep until ten, five days a week. “That’s not much sleep,” she says. She looks at him like he’s missing something obvious. Once every couple weeks the kid isn’t there at eleven. If the truck is full and the crew is short, she’ll call. If the truck is light she’ll let him sleep until one before she calls. When a truck pulls away she might sneak a puff outside the cone of the dock light. The moths shoot across the light in a streak. Around four the night gets long. Whoever’s dragging worst finds her coming down their aisle with a mini candy bar. She doesn’t say anything about it. The woman who started Tuesday asks her how long she’s been here. Nineteen years, she says. Nights for sixteen. A few nights later the woman asks about her hours. Lou takes the sheet out of her back pocket and looks at it. Thirty-two this week, she says. Forty next week. She folds it back up. Get a thousand hours in the year and you qualify for the profit sharing, she says. You still have to be here at the end of the year. The woman says okay and goes back to her aisle. One night she’s showing the kid how the order system works. He asks her why she doesn’t switch to days. Assistant manager, an office with a door and a chair. That job takes a degree, she says. She scans the barcode in front of an empty shelf to place an order. I’m fifty. Act II. The Crew Charlie arrives just after Lou most nights. He clocks in and heads straight to the dock to check out what the truck has brought him that night. He jokes with the college kids who are going home. The kid only has to go to his trailer once. Nobody brings it up. He works the west side of the store, toys and tools and home goods. He’s fast. Somewhere in the middle of the night he’ll say something the kid thinks about on the drive to Midway. One night, breaking down boxes: why would you worry about something that hasn’t happened yet? Then he tilts the bale of flattened cardboard on a pallet and gets the jack. Nights suit me, he says. John falls asleep whenever he sits down. Lou gives him jobs that keep him on his feet and moving. Clean and polish the floors, move pallets. When break time is up, they wake him up and tell him it’s time to go. That’s just John. Then one night in July, he’s different. Awake. Smiling when he comes through the door, talking during break. He tells everybody he got a machine that helps him breathe when he sleeps. Says he slept eight hours and can’t remember the last time he felt this good. He looks ten years younger. He eats his whole lunch without falling asleep. Along with Lou, they’re the regulars. The day shift is the lifers, evening for the college kids, nights for those caught in between. The crew turns over all summer. A guy who wanted a job with air conditioning. A lady who needed a paycheck, then she was headed to Springfield. They’re friendly and they work hard. Then Lou crosses their name off the schedule. The woman who started that first Tuesday lasts six weeks. One night she just stops coming in. She didn’t quit because she hated anybody. Nights are hard on your body. You work while you’re supposed to be sleeping and you sleep while you’re supposed to be working, and most people’s bodies can’t take it. Every so often a new person will ask: how long does it take your body to adjust? Opinions all around. Two weeks. A month. Six. The answer for some of them? Never. At three in the morning the store hums with noise from the fluorescent ballasts, John running the floor polisher, scrub pads turning circles on the tile, Charlie making the cardboard baler groan in the backroom. The whole town is dark, moths shooting across the parking lot lights, and they’re moving boxes in this lit-up one-hundred-thousand-square-foot metal box. Freight moving from a trailer to a shelf so a woman can buy diapers for her baby at seven a.m. One night a new guy asks about the sign by the time clock. Employee ownership. What’s the dollar sign written in marker? Lou explains. You sign up to buy company stock, they take money out of your check. For every dollar of stock you buy the company puts an extra fifteen cents into your account. Charlie says he thought about it, … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The dogwoods are blooming along the edge of the great lawn, dark pink and brilliant white. Below the hill, Brush Creek runs slow and clear past the parkway that shares its name. Beyond, Spanish mission buildings catch the morning sun. Saturday in April. The collie comes loping back up the slope. She drops the ball at his feet and barks and backs up, ready. “What’s her name?” The girl from the diner stands at the edge of the grass in a light sweater, holding two coffees. She hands him one. “Penny.” “You said you bring her out here on weekends.” She sits down on the grass. “So I figured Saturday.” He throws the ball. Penny goes. She has brought a stack of index cards, rubber-banded, thick as a fist. Names of bones on one side, in her small neat writing. “You mentioned school.” he says. “What classes are you taking?” “Medical school. UMKC.” He looks at her. “Medical school?” “It’s a six-year program. High school straight in. No college in between.” She turns a coffee cup in her hands, keeping them warm. “They gave me a patient the first month. Mostly I just took his blood pressure and listened to him talk about Korea.” “So what’s the diner?” “Tuition.” “What about you?” “Business school. Rockhurst.” He throws the ball again. “Nights and weekends at my uncle’s shop. Tool and die.” “What’s a die?” “A tool that makes the same part every time, until they eventually wear out.” She does not look at the cards once. They stay until the coffee is gone and then longer. Her hair is up and she smells somehow better than the dogwoods. When she leaves she touches his arm. He has a four o’clock shift at his uncle’s shop. Act I. The Match North Kansas City. A machine shop a block off the tracks. Hydraulic presses shook the concrete. Screw machines never seemed to stop. Over the tool bay radio, “Show Me the Way” played for what felt like the hundredth time while his uncle studied another purchase agreement. The new Cincinnati machining center had arrived in July. Five years of payments sat beside it. The shop makes tooling for the overhaul base at the airport. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. TWA is the main customer, and they order more every year. The uncle takes the orders. His brother has a desk by the window. Eight years older, married, Missouri Air Guard airlift mechanic. His unit gets called up in December to what his brother calls “the sandbox.” His uniforms still in the office closet because no one believed he’d be gone long. By now he’s twenty. Still in business school across town, nights and weekends in the shop. With his brother deployed, the nights get longer. The uncle might be the boss on paper, but his brother ran the place. In February, his mother calls the office phone. He yells into the phone, a finger in his other ear. A truck rolled on a road north of the border. His brother is alive. His back is broken in two places. The shop fires up again Monday morning. He signs payroll checks for the first time in March. He copies the way his brother wrote them in the green ledger. Six cents and change of every guy’s check comes out of every dollar for Social Security. The shop puts in the same amount. A match. It seems plain enough. The men put in their share, the shop puts in. Someday the government pays it back. Both halves go to the bank in one deposit and then to the government every quarter. He looks for something that says what the money buys. There isn’t one. Just a booklet of tax tables instead. He changes his schedule to night classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays at six. In April a shipment comes back out of tolerance, a die is worn and no one measured it. The rework takes the nights for three weeks. He makes it to one final. Sleeps through the other. In the fall he signs up for two classes and drops one. She calls the shop on Sundays now. He’s there catching up on paperwork when the machines are down. She is on rotations now. They meet at the lawn on Saturdays when she is off and he can get away. Penny is glad to see her. His brother comes home in June with a cane. The cane is not going away. Some mornings he is at the shop, others he doesn’t make it. The uncle drinks his coffee on the floor and tells him. Your brother needs time. When he is right you go back to days. A year later the shop takes on two more men for the TWA work. He is twenty-one. He runs payroll again, eighteen checks and the deposit. In early July he sends the government the largest check he has ever signed. Half came out of the men’s pay. Half from the shop. Act II. The Stub Match Day comes on a Thursday in March. Six years of school for one envelope, opened in a hotel ballroom with everyone else. The envelope isn’t an invitation. It’s orders. Hers says Houston. He drives her to the airport in June. Penny rides in the back with her head out the window. At the curb she holds the dog’s face in both hands for a while, and then his, and then she goes. The Tercel gets sold to a cousin. Everything else fits in two bags. The years in Houston are call nights and loan payments. A hundred hours some weeks. She sleeps in the hospital more than the apartment. The first paycheck comes at the end of July. She reads the stub in the parking garage, line by line. Federal. State. FICA. She asks the chief resident what FICA is. “Social Security,” he says. “Everybody pays it.” She does not read another stub. Her mother mails the Kansas City paper now and then. The airline is in it twice, and then again, and she calls the shop on a Sunday. “It is quieter here than it used to be,” he says. He does not say more and she does not ask. They trade cards at Christmas. In her fourth year, a boy comes in at two in the morning with a burst appendix. Before she takes him back, his mother asks what it will cost. Not whether he will live. What it will cost. She says she doesn’t know, and it’s the stone cold truth. The boy does fine. She never sees a copy of the bill and has no idea how much it costs. She stays two more years after residency to learn children’s surgery. She is thirty-one, and for the first time in her life there’s nothing she wants more. That fall, an envelope comes from the Social Security Administration. She’s curious. Inside is every year she has ever worked and what she earned. She didn’t know someone knew all the history. The diner is there at the top of the list even though she earned nearly nothing. Eleven hundred dollars. Below it is a number for what she will receive at sixty-seven. At the bottom, a paragraph says Congress can change the law at any time, and that by the time she retires, the taxes coming in will cover about three-quarters of what the program has promised to pay. She reads it. She reads it again. Puts it in the envelope where she keeps seven years of paper copies of her taxes. Children’s Mercy calls that spring to offer her a children’s surgeon position. She comes home. The dogwoods are blooming when she signs. Act III. The Letters The uncle signs the shop over to him in ninety-eight. He keeps a key and his coffee mug and comes in on Tuesdays to stand on the floor. His brother signs as the witness. A competitor buys the airline in the spring. They have overhaul shops and suppliers of their own in other states. Orders come in slower all summer and stop in October. Twenty years of tooling sit on the racks in the back. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. All of it built to print, property of the airline. Good tool steel, and none of it his. He calls three numbers before someone on the other end of the line knows anything. “Scrap it or store it,” the man says. “Nobody is coming for it.” The accountant doesn’t sugarcoat it. He can keep what he has in savings, or he can pay the guys their last payrolls. He tells the men after the final shift, when the checks are ready. Fifteen men shake his hand. One doesn’t. “Should’ve told us months ago, so we could have found another shop.” The men get paid. He takes the deposit to the bank; the men’s share and the shop’s match both. Then, an auction one day in March… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

May in Missouri. Warm, not hot like it will be in July. Humidity in the air, mist at the bottom of the hill hiding the green grass. Bright white gravel under tires. He opens the passenger door. He is fifteen. His grandma drove him. The Oldsmobile idles behind him until the screen door opens and a man comes out. Then she pulls away. The man is the rancher’s son. Sixty years old, maybe more. His truck is running in the yard. “You eat breakfast?” he says. Then, “Dad’s in the hospital. Nursing home after that, probably. He won’t be coming back to this.” The house first. Old, white, small, on top of the hill. A garden plot on the side, a shotgun sitting by the door nearest the garden. Dogwoods and oaks, leaves out full now. One level. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room. Clean. The beds made tight with homemade quilts. Glass jugs on the floor by the kitchen door. “Dad’s corn whiskey,” the son says. The boy can eat lunch in here if he wants. Running water. The well is outside. A newspaper picture in a frame on the side table. Five generations. A new baby, and a great-great-grandmother still alive to hold him. “That’s my mom,” the son says. “Holding the baby. That picture is ten years old now.” Then the work. Build a cattle corral and an alley good enough to back a trailer in and load. Stay out of the old smokehouse. It’ll fall down any day now. One of those sheds needs knocked down before it falls down, you can use the tractor to help. The chicken coop needs cleaned out. Probably hasn’t been since Mom passed. Most of the perimeter fence needs checked. Water tanks sorted. The truck is still running. The son looks at his watch. Plenty to do. “But there’s a job that needs done before all that.” He points down past the pens, to a hog lot at the bottom of the slope. There’s a dead hog in it. “Drag it down the hill and bury it,” he says. “Shovels are in the shed. Twenty years ago I’d have dug it myself.” He shakes the boy’s hand. The truck backs around and goes down the drive and the sound of it fades and then it’s gone. Quiet after that. Wind in the oaks. A rooster somewhere below. Act I. The Hog Lot He doesn’t start with the hog. He walks the place first, down the hill and through all of it, to get eyes on everything. The corral isn’t started. The materials are already there, stacked and waiting. Old railroad ties. Cattle panels. Each tie has a mark on it, showing how deep to set it. The smokehouse is tall and narrow. He’s never seen one before. A fire pit dug in the dirt floor with a simple metal ring, chains hanging overhead. He doesn’t go in. The chicken coop is full of old bedding, gray with dust. Hornets have built above the door. He’ll have to take care of that. One of the water tanks is dry. Wolf spiders in the bottom, big ones. He throws a rock in and they scatter, but they can’t jump out of the tank. An old blue Ford tractor sits by the shed. Small. It doesn’t have a bucket to dig, and even if it did, he doesn’t know how to use it. He’ll have to learn. Shovels inside, and a manual post hole digger leaned in the corner. The pigs and chickens are closest to the house. Cattle beyond. The fields run out to meet wooded hills. Forty acres. A big pond on the far end you can barely see from the house, a smaller one tucked in by the woods. The cattle are moving through the field toward water, and he watches them go. He’s put it off as long as he could and another hour longer. He walks to the hog lot. A short metal hog house, small doors on each end. The hog is dead in the far corner. Big. On its side. The flies rise off it when he comes near and settle again. No mark on it that he can see. No telling what killed it. The son didn’t say how it died. He said drag it down the hill and bury it. He takes hold of a hind leg above the hoof and pulls. It moves about a foot across the metal grate floor, the hide loose over the bone in his grip. He lets go and stands there. The air in the hog house is close now. He takes hold again. It’s downhill. That’s the one thing going for him. He pulls and rests and pulls. The hog gathers grass and dirt ahead of itself. The flies come along. When he stops he can hear them. When he pulls he only hears his breath. He drags the hog under the wire fence. At the bottom of the hill he picks a spot away from the ponds, where the ground looks soft. Nobody said where. Nobody said how deep. The first foot is topsoil and goes easy. Then the shovel rings. Rock. He works around it, pries it, lifts it out. There’s another one under it. The afternoon goes like that. Ring, pry, lift. His hands blister. He walks up to the well, finds some gloves, has a drink and comes back down. He stands in the hole and thinks about how deep is deep enough. Shallow, and something digs it up. Coyotes, or dogs from the next place over. Then it’s all to do again, and worse. He keeps digging. The light goes long across the field. Whippoorwills call from the trees. Gravel at the top of the drive. Headlights swing across the field and stop. The Oldsmobile sits up by the house, lights on, pointed down the hill at him. She doesn’t honk. She waits. He drags the hog to the edge and tips it in. It lands heavy. Filling the hole goes faster than digging it. He mounds the dirt over and stands there a minute in what’s left of the light. Then he carries the shovel up the hill toward the headlights. That night there’s supper, and dishes, and then she asks. What were you doing out there tonight? He tells her. “Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off of it?” “I don’t know,” he says. They never talked about it again. Act II. Corral and Alley The next morning he starts on the corral. The railroad ties outweigh him. He can’t carry one, so he tips them end over end to where they need to go. The ground is the same ground he dug the grave in. Ring, pry, lift. Each tie has its mark. He digs until he thinks it’s deep enough, then tips each tie into the hole, lifts it out again, and digs some more until the mark disappears. He tamps the dirt back in layers, and pulls on the tie with his whole weight. It doesn’t move. He does the next one. Whoever marked the ties isn’t there to ask. His hands ache and cramp for ten days until they get used to the work. He learns the tractor in the yard. The throttle is steady, and his foot coming off the clutch is not. It lurches and rocks and then it doesn’t. He cleans the old bedding out of the chicken coop, swinging the spring door open and shut, and a hornet stings him in the ear. He buys hornet spray, empties it into the nest, knocks it off the coop with a fence post, and only gets stung the once. He cleans the coop down to the boards. The shed comes down easy. The tractor pushes and the frame lets go at once. He drags the boards clear and stacks what’s worth keeping. It’s good work and it goes fast. The son comes out one day and asks what happened. It was the wrong shed. He spends weeks walking the perimeter fence and fixes what needs fixed. At noon he takes his boots off and eats in the kitchen, standing up. The house stays clean. In late June he turns sixteen. He passes the test in town, and after that he drives himself out in the mornings. There’s a last morning she drives him. Neither of them marks it. After that the mornings are his. He drives the Oldsmobile out himself, plays Metallica too loud the whole way. His grandma hates Metallica. Some evenings he drives to the next town to see a girl he met. Alone, afternoons drift. He is sixteen. He daydreams. Some days he gets less done than he should, and nobody says anything about that either. The cattle get checked every day. By the end of July the corral stands, ties to the mark, panels hung, an alley wide enough to back a trailer in. He would be home for football camp in August. In the fall they sold the animals. The cattle went up the alley the boy built, into a trailer, and down the drive. They leased the ground to a neighbor. The boy went home, back to school. The old man never came home. Act … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Her eyes open at five twenty-eight. She lifts her head and switches the alarm off before it kicks on at five thirty. She’s up and moving. Chores to do. Coffee, dishwasher, shower, lunchbox. Their apartment is a one-bedroom in Lakewood, Colorado, on the west edge of Denver. Third floor. She starts the coffee maker and showers while it runs. On the refrigerator door, under a magnet, a printed listing for a two-bedroom on South Ammons Street. Four hundred ten thousand. Beneath the price, handwriting in blue ink: eighty-two thousand down. Below that a column of dates and smaller numbers, one for every month they’ve lived here. The paper has yellowed at one corner. She pours coffee into a steel travel mug, grabs her lunch, takes the stairs, and scrapes frost off the windshield with a plastic dustpan she keeps behind the seat. She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, Lakewood Park Tennis Center. On her left, a fence. Chain link, eight feet, three strands of barbed wire on top. It runs past the first stoplight. It runs past the second. There’s a gate with a guard shack and a yellow crossing arm, and a white sign that says United States Government Property. The fence keeps going. It takes her a full mile to run out of fence. She doesn’t look at it. It’s been there her whole life. At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. Inside the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out nine folders in three neat rows. New hires start today. She’s been here four years. She knows what’s in the folders. Act I. The Wage The safety video runs eleven minutes. She can hear it through the break room wall, the same narrator, the same music, while she tapes the first boxes of the morning. Nine new people in there with their folders open. At seven forty, the break room door opens, and the trainer walks in. His name is Dave. He’s holding his own copy of the folder, open to the tabs. Tab one is the handbook, he says. Tab two is your direct deposit. Tab three is your benefits election. Health kicks in at ninety days, dental at one eighty. Don’t wait on the paperwork, it doesn’t backdate. Tab four, he says, is community resources. Food assistance, Medicaid, child care assistance, help on the winter heat bill. The applications are in there, filled out down to the signature line. Plenty of folks use them the first year. Nothing to be embarrassed about. He says it the way he said the part about the fire exits. She takes one of the nine, a young woman named Reyna, out to the floor and trains her on the scanner. Point, squeeze, wait for the beep. The screen above the aisle shows a number; that number is the building’s rate. Green means the shift is on pace to meet their quota. She’s never seen it red for a whole shift. Somewhere around ten, the number turns green and stays that way. At lunch she eats what she packed at five fifty. Reyna sits across from her with a vending machine sandwich and asks if the insurance is any good. It’s insurance, she says. The deductible is four thousand. You’ll want the paycheck to clear before you pick a plan. Reyna nods and writes something in her folder. At the end of the table, one of the other new hires has his folder open to tab four. He’s copying numbers off a pay stub that isn’t his yet, from the sample page, doing the eligibility math with the folder’s own pencil. First shift. He hasn’t clocked a full day. The horn ends lunch at twelve thirty. Everybody stands at once. Act II. The Plant The afternoon starts out like the morning. Point, squeeze, beep. The screen stays green. Nothing in the building gets made in the building. It comes in full and goes out full. They work on line three. By last break, Reyna runs two under her rate. First day. The belt on line four goes down midshift. Nobody in the building can fix it. The tech comes Thursday, from Phoenix. Nothing to be done, that entire line goes home early. The horn releases the shift at four thirty. In the parking lot her phone buzzes. A text from the storage place on West Colfax. Your autopay of eighty-nine dollars was successful. Thank you for being a valued customer. She was headed there anyway. Two plastic totes in the trunk. Christmas decorations, going back until December. Unit two fourteen. She rolls the door up and the cold air inside smells like cardboard. The totes go on the shelf her husband built from scrap the first winter. Behind them, the rest of it. Her mother’s cedar chest. A kitchen table on its side, six chairs zip-tied to the legs. A crib in pieces, wrapped in a moving blanket, that was her mother’s before it was hers. In the back corner, under a second blanket, the lathe. It’s a South Bend, cast iron, older than everyone she knows. It took four grown men and a rented dolly to get it in here. She pulls the blanket square where it’s slipped off the tailstock, and under her hand there’s a small brass plate, screwed to the base, stamped with three words. War Production Board. She doesn’t know how to run it. Nobody living in the family does. She rolls the door down and clicks the padlock. Her grandmother calls while she’s still in the lot. She puts her on speaker and pulls out into traffic. You eat yet? Her grandmother says. I’m driving home to eat. You’re still paying for that unit. I’m still paying for it. You ought to sell that machine. You’d get something for it. Nobody’s run it in ten years. I’m not selling the lathe, Grandma. Her grandmother is quiet for a second. Then she says, your grandfather ran that lathe thirty-one years at Gates. Nights, at the end. They were going to throw it away, so he took it for his woodworking. Gates got the machine from the ammo plant, surplus sale. My mother made bullets out by you, on Kipling, the whole war. Rode the bus from Tenth Avenue, three shifts going around the clock, twenty thousand people out there. Half of them were women. I know, Grandma. It’s all offices now, her grandmother says. Anyway. You two are coming Sunday. We’re coming Sunday. Bring some folding chairs if you can. They’re in the unit, she says. I was just looking at them. Good, her grandmother says. Then you know right where they are. Act III. The Ledger Friday, twelve oh five. Reyna sets the folder next to her lunch and asks if she has a minute. The application is filled out down to the signature line, like Dave said. What’s left is the list on the back page. Proof of who you are. Proof of where you live. Proof of what you make, thirty days of it. I don’t have thirty days, Reyna says. I have four. There’s a line for that. Employer statement. HR prints it, you ask at the window. Reyna writes that on the folder. Then they schedule you an interview, she says. It’s a phone call. Keep your phone on you at break, and if you miss it, call back the same day. Don’t wait. Did you do all this, Reyna asks. She folds the wax paper over the half of her sandwich that’s left. My first year here, she says. Yeah. She takes her phone, puts it speaker up on the table, and calls the number. It starts with a recording: Last year we proudly served more than one hundred thousand Colorado families. The horn goes. Everybody stands at once. Sunday, her grandmother’s house smells like a roast that went in at seven. A brick ranch off Garrison, two bedrooms, one bath, a furnace that runs loud. Her grandmother has lived in it fifty-eight years. Her husband carries the folding chairs in from the trunk and sets them up at the long side of the table. The game is on low in the front room. Broncos Chargers. A small group watching it. Any luck on a house, her grandmother says, passing the potatoes. There’s a two-bedroom on Ammons we like. What are they asking? Four hundred ten. Her grandmother sets the potatoes down. Your grandfather paid seventeen thousand five hundred for this house, she says. Nineteen sixty-eight. Back then he made nine thousand a year. We lived on one paycheck, pin… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

A family, driving north out of Denver. They left before light. Mom’s driving. Yellowstone tomorrow. Lamar Valley and the bison and wolves and trout. Tonight, the Sheridan Inn. The car planned this stop in Buffalo before they crossed the Platte. It planned every stop. Dad has the atlas open on his knees, the paper kind. Nobody’s looking at it. Two kids in the back. A yellow dog between them with his chin on the armrest. Somewhere past Kaycee the little one got carsick. Mom keeps empty cups up front for it, and she passed one back without looking. The windows are down now, summer heat and wind noise, and nobody’s saying why. In one mile, exit right. Charging stop. Buffalo, Wyoming. The chargers sit at the Miller Travel Center across the street from the Best Western. Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines. Mom backs in on the first try. Dad’s out of the car before it stops rocking. He takes a deep breath and clicks the cable home. The screen says thirty-five minutes. The kids step out slow. The dog tows the boy toward the grass strip at the edge of the lot, nose down, working. A good stop. Restrooms, coffee, a rack of postcards with bears on them. Everything works, and everything worked the whole way up, and it’ll work the whole way to the park. Somebody built all of it so that it would. A pickup comes down Sixteen pulling a stock trailer. You hear it before you see it. Nobody in the lot looks up except the dog. Leave the family at the charger. They’re fine. Go with the truck. Act I. The Bearing The same morning begins in the dark at both ends of the road. Four thirty, and the kitchen light’s the only one on for eleven miles. Coffee going. She’s up. She always is. The talk is the day’s work, not the letter that’s sitting on the table. Pairs come off the north lease today. The grass up there is done, and the section east of town has been resting since May. Move them today, or watch them walk it to dirt by Friday. The letter’s been on the table since Tuesday. It came certified, from a company out of Denver with a name that doesn’t say what it does. They want to buy the place. All of it, deeded ground and leases and water, and the letter names the number they’d pay. He read it once, standing up, and set it down, and neither of them has touched it since except to move it off the spot where the coffee goes. In a good year, this place clears a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The number in the letter is not that kind of number. He takes the letter off the table on his way out. Not to do anything with it. It just doesn’t seem like something you leave lying around, the way you wouldn’t leave a loaded rifle on the porch. It rides on the dash. Jesse’s already at the truck. Red heeler, ears up, been waiting in the dark by the left rear tire since the kitchen light came on. Chores first, then town, because the baler’s down and the hay is nearly ready. The parts counter at six forty five smells like oil and popcorn from yesterday. The bearing he needs is backordered ten days. The counter man is a good man. He offers the other way out: the whole assembly, in stock, four hundred and change, upgraded, better than the old one ever was. He stands there maybe a minute. It’s not four hundred dollars against zero. It’s four hundred dollars against ten days of July, against what a rebuilt bearing costs, against how many seasons the old assembly has left anyway. He’s done this math his whole life, standing at this counter, in about this light. The old assembly has two good years in it. The bearing wins. So. Order the bearing. Borrow the neighbor’s baler in the meantime, which will cost him a favor, and favors get paid back in this county at par. Nobody calls it anything. There’s no form for it. But that minute at the counter is an audit, and everything that comes onto the ranch passes one just like it or it doesn’t come. The truck passed one. The trailer passed one. The dog passed one years ago. Out of the lot, up through town, and onto Sixteen with the empty gooseneck rattling behind. The chargers go by on the right. Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines, two cars on them with plates from somewhere else. His eyes do what a cattleman’s eyes do with any pen, any chute, any gate: measure it. The approach, the spacing, the turnaround. Thirty two feet of truck and trailer, and stalls drawn for sixteen. There’s nothing to think about, so he doesn’t think about it. North out of town the pavement gives out to gravel, and the gravel to two-track, and the two-track climbs to where the pairs are scattered across the last of the lease grass, heads coming up one by one at the sound of the diesel they know. Two hundred and fifty miles south, a family out of Denver is passing Chugwater, and their car is already counting on one of those stalls in Buffalo. Act II. The Measure The north lease is forty minutes of gravel and another ten on two-track, a section and change of short grass running up against the timber. The grass is done, time to move on. The pairs know the truck and start drifting toward the corrals before he’s got the gate. As soon as the driver’s door is open, Jesse is out and running. Before he’s in the saddle, she’ll be out of sight, bring in any pairs not with the main group, and come back loping, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. Ray’s flatbed is already at the pens. Ray runs the neighboring lease and they work it together every year, no money in it, just the arithmetic of neighbors kept square. Ray’s cows wear collars now. He put them on two years ago when the math got undeniable, what the collars cost against what three miles of cross-fence was going to cost, and the fence never got built and never will. Nobody from any government office asked him to do it. Nobody sends him a form about it. The collars either paid for themselves and held his cows off the creek bottoms or they didn’t. They did, and that was the whole conversation. They work the pairs quiet. Hooves in the dust. Cows calling calves. Not much else. Jesse does most of the work. She’ll get the fat off his ribeye at supper. First load on. Ray talks for a minute about the sale barn and goes back to his flatbed. While Ray’s talking, without exactly deciding to, he takes the letter off the dash and puts it in the glovebox. Town is twenty-five minutes with a load on. Through Buffalo, Wyoming Public Radio comes over the speakers. The state’s federal charging program has yet to break ground. Twenty-six point eight million allocated, the announcer says, while the chargers already running, including Buffalo’s, were built by private companies. With zero chargers built, the state asked Washington to call the corridors complete. Then the weather, hot, and cattle prices, high. He’s watching his mirrors as he approaches the interstate by the travel center. Eight stalls, a car from Colorado on the cable, a yellow dog working the grass strip with a boy on the other end of the leash. The trailer rattles and the stalls go by at thirty. Small town. When the chargers went in, they got talked about at church for a month, same as everything else. Now they’re just the thing across from the Best Western. His eyes do what a cattleman’s eyes do. Measure. Every stall drawn for a car. You can’t back up to a charger pulling a cattle trailer. There’s nothing to think about, so he doesn’t. The east section is six miles on the other side of town, deeded ground, and it’s been resting since May, which is the only reason today works at all. Grass is there. Water is the problem. The section has one good well at the north end and nothing at the south, so the south half grazes short or doesn’t graze, and every dry August he hauls water to it in a tank on the flatbed, four hundred gallons at a trip. There’s a fix for that, and it’s not a mystery; it’s pipe. He heard about a grant and applied for it in the spring. Cost share, water development. There’s a conservation plan on file with his name on it, and the woman at the o… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The agenda is one page. Somebody ran it through the copier this afternoon and the toner is going, so item six is fainter than item five. You can read it anyway. Outside the county annex, there are nine pickups, a sheriff’s Tahoe, and a Buick that belongs to a woman named Arlene who has kept the minutes of this commission for thirty-one years. It is a Tuesday in March on the high plains of Nebraska. The wind is doing what the wind does. Inside, the fluorescent lights hum over four rows of folding chairs. Usually there are three people in them. Tonight there are twenty-six. There is a coffee urn on a card table by the door. It is older than some of the commissioners. Nobody has touched it. Item one is a culvert. Item two, a road easement. Item three is the ambulance service contract, and it runs long, because everything about the ambulance runs long in a county with one of them. Item four is approved without discussion. Item five is the fairgrounds. The grandstand roof failed inspection in October, and the bid to fix it came back at one hundred ninety thousand dollars, and the room takes this news the way you take news about a roof. Somebody says the fair is in July. Somebody else says everyone knows that. Then the chairman squares his papers and reads item six. Item six is a line in the county budget. One hundred twelve thousand dollars. It covers an office in the basement of this building: two salaries, a truck, a phone that gets answered. The line has been in the budget for one hundred and nine years. Tonight the commission decides whether it stays. Act I. Scene One. Nebraska The chairman reads item six the way he read item five, like reading a phone number. County appropriation, University of Nebraska Extension, interlocal agreement, one-hundred-twelve thousand dollars. He asks for a motion for discussion. It comes from his left. Then, a second. He does what the law of Nebraska requires him to do and opens the floor. Twenty-six people shift in their brown metal folding chairs. The extension educator goes first, because it is her office, and she has done this every March for nine years. Her name is Dana Fruehling. The university pays her salary. The county pays for everything that she needs to do her job: the truck, the basement office, the two women who run it, the phone. She has a photocopied annual report. She opens with the sentence that’s the cornerpost of the argument. You can hear that she likes it. The law says the work exists to aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture and home economics, and to encourage the application of the same. Land-grant university extension. Teaching people practical information they would otherwise never know. She gives the year. Two hundred forty soil samples. Thirty-one pesticide applicators certified. A hundred and six kids in 4-H. Somewhere north of nine hundred phone calls, logged by hand because the county never bought the software. Commissioner Ben Hollis waits until she sits down. Hollis sold crop insurance out of the same storefront for thirty-one years, which means he has read more balance sheets than anyone else in the room, including the bank. He is going to make the best argument anyone makes all night, and he is going to make it quietly. He says he has voted for this line eleven times. He says Dana does the work and everybody knows it. Instead of raising his voice he takes off his glasses. The whispers stop. I can tell you what we spent, he says. Eleven budgets, add it up, it’s north of a million dollars. What I can’t tell you is what we bought. Samples got tested. Kids showed their steers. The phone got answered. And in those same eleven years this county lost four hundred people, the school consolidated with Ainsworth, and there are six buildings on Main Street you could buy for back taxes. So show me. I’m asking honestly. Show me the line where the county changed because we kept that office open in the basement. Nobody answers him right away. It’s a fair question, and the room knows it. The woman with the binder stands up. She has been waiting since item one. Name, Carol Ann Vasek. Her binder has a green clover on the front. Eleven years of papers she doesn’t need to read. She says her oldest showed hogs in that program, and judged livestock, and stood up at contests in Lincoln and talked to strangers with his hat off, and he is twenty-six now and he came back. He works cattle and he does the books for three neighbors and he coaches the judging team on Tuesdays. She says: you all keep asking what brings our kids back. I am standing here telling you the one thing that brought mine home: 4-H. A rancher named Albers takes the floor after her and talks for ninety seconds about the drought year, the hay that came off the Petersen place, the call he made at seven in the morning because something told him not to feed it. Nitrates. Dana sent a sample for a test that afternoon. He runs a hundred and forty pairs. He says: you want to know what the office does, it answered the phone, and I still have a herd. Hollis puts his glasses back on. He says gently that he is glad about the herd. That nobody is arguing Dana doesn’t answer the phone. He is asking a different question, and he’d like somebody to answer the one he asked. And then old man Rasmussen, who has been coming to these meetings since before Arlene kept the minutes, cuts through all of it. A hundred and nine years, he says. This county has paid for that office for a hundred and nine years, my dad paid it and his dad paid it, and I would bet anyone in this room a dollar that nobody can say why we started. Act I. Scene Two. Boll Weevils Nineteen oh three. Terrell, Texas. The boll weevil is eating the South. It crossed the Rio Grande a decade ago and it takes the cotton, farm by farm, county by county. Nothing anybody knows will stop it. The federal government has a man named Seaman Knapp who knows something nobody in Washington believes: farmers distrust everything Washington knows. And he has an idea. Knapp doesn’t mail out a pamphlet. He finds one farmer, Walter Porter, with seventy acres. He asks Porter to work part of his land a new way. Weevil-resistant practice, Porter’s own tools, Porter’s own hands, Porter’s own risk. The neighbors can watch or not watch as they please. They watch. The field pays. And the neighbors believe it, because it didn’t happen in a college or in a pamphlet. It happened in the real world, across the fence, to a man they shared Sunday supper with. Knapp says: what a man hears, he may doubt. What he sees, he may possibly doubt. But what he does himself, he cannot doubt. That is the whole invention. County extension. That is the office in the basement. Because the knowledge was real, and it was locked up. In nineteen fourteen, colleges know how to double crop yields, and the average farm has never heard of any of it. Yields are flat. Soil is failing. Young people are leaving rural America in numbers that frighten the government enough that a presidential commission studies the countryside and comes back warning that the movement toward the towns, left alone, will sterilize the open country. So Congress makes a bargain, and the bargain has three parties. Washington pays a share. The state college pays a share. And the county pays a share, because the men who wrote it wanted the knowledge to live where the farmers live, in the courthouse, down the hall from the assessor, behind a door you could walk to. A person, not a pamphlet. The work is one tool, instruction and demonstration, the Porter farm written into federal law. The gap between what was known and what was done was the whole problem. Close the gap and the country lives. For a long time, that was true. In the annex, Carol Ann Vasek is halfway through a sentence about the fair. Act II. Scene Three. The Annex …the fair, which her family has worked every July since her oldest was … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The shouts pass over the water to Lincoln. He sits there, silent. The man who, more than any other, overstepped his authority in a time of war. Habeas corpus suspended. A nation half at arms. And the question underneath all of it, whether any nation so conceived and dedicated could long endure. He broke the limit. But he never pretended he was above it. He answered to the Congress, to the ballot, to the cost, and he paid that cost in the open for the only stake that could justify it. The Republic. Real power accepts its limits. Performed power breaks them, and breaks the one thing we can’t rebuild: Our power to say no. Humidity on the night air. The statues of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt look down on the South Lawn of the White House. There, a cage. A hulking structure of steel and chain link named The Claw. Seven fights tonight. Men punching and kicking and choking each other on the grass where children roll Easter eggs in the spring, steps from the Oval Office. A million-dollar restoration commitment waited for the grass. Ruined by morning. The president comes out of the Oval and down the colonnade beside the man who runs the fights. Dana White is smiling. Behind them, four thousand people. Cabinet secretaries. Generals. The Secretary of Defense. The Vice President. Mark Zuckerberg. Active duty troops in the seats. The Zac Brown Band sings the national anthem. The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds come over the house low and loud, and the president raises his hand and salutes. A chant starts somewhere in the dark. U-S-A. U-S-A. The broadcast goes out on Paramount. Closed captioning brought to you by TrumpCoins dot com. Limited quantities available now. It is the fourteenth of June. The Republic is two hundred and fifty years old this year. The president is eighty years old today. He wrote a book about power called The Art of the Deal. In that book, the deal is the close. The handshake, the signing, the moment in the room with the cameras running. The deal is the thing they watch you win. The spectacle. The theater. The entertainment. There is an older book about real power. The loudest move on the board is the weakest one, and a man who has to show you strength has already lost it. The statues keep looking down. They knew the difference between the two books. It is why we carved them in stone. Act I. Two Books He saw his name on everything. On the towers. On the steaks. On the water bottles and the ties. On the airplane that brought him in. Gold letters. His letters. Big enough to catch the light. A thing was not his until his name was on it. Then it was his. Then all men knew it. That was the book he had written. The Art of the Deal. A deal was a hand coming out. A flash. Men leaning in so they would be in the picture. Hold it. There. That was the one. They hung the picture on a wall. But a picture on a wall is quiet. A quiet thing dies. So there had to be another one. Another hand. Another flash. Another tower. Another name in gold. A man was only as strong as the last picture. The last picture was already fading. So the man was always late. Always running. Always losing the thing he had just won. It was a loud way to live. Loud and bright and over. And it had to be seen. A handshake in private never happened. A name in the dark was no name. He knew this as other men know weather. He had never done a thing that did not need a witness. The other book had no gold on it. It did not shine. It was old and plain and small enough to put in a coat pocket. Another book of Art. Of War. It did not ask to be looked at. He did not like that about it. He opened it and read a little. The words were old. They had crossed too much time to be in a hurry. They spoke of ground and water and waiting. They spoke of the fight won before the fighting. They spoke of not striking when the shape of things was already moving for you. He shut the book. Outside, the river moved below the house. He went down and stood on the bank. The water moved without hurry. It didn’t strike the bank. It took the low places. It went around stone. It slid under the willow roots and carried leaves and silt and small sticks and the cold of the mountains. It was going the way he needed it to go. He could have let it go. There was no one there to see that. There was no flash. No hand to shake. No wall to hang the picture. The river made no speech. It did not say his name. He watched it and felt nothing happen. That was the trouble. Nothing happening looked like losing. Long later than any man could live, the water would have the rock. It would not take it in one morning. There would be no sound of surrender. No one would know the hour. The rock would simply be smaller. Then smooth. Then the canyon would be there, and men would stand at the edge and call it beautiful. The river would not have signed it. He looked back at the house. The two books were still on the table. One had his name on it, the other did not. He knelt and put his hand in the water. It was colder than he thought. He closed his fist hard and stood. The water ran out between his fingers. Act II. The Siege There was a real river, and it was running his way. By the winter of that year, Iran was coming apart from the inside. The money was worthless. A man’s wages on Monday would not buy his bread on Friday. The women walked bareheaded into the street. They had cut their hair and burned the cloth the state put between them and the world. Girls had done it too, in schoolyards, with the cameras watching and the men with guns close enough to come for them. The people went into the streets in numbers the country had not seen since the revolution that made it, in every province, and the regime answered the only way it knew, and still they came back the next night, and the next. A government that must shoot its own people is a failing one. No one had to push it. It was going down on its own, and all we had to do was wait on the bank and watch. The night before the strikes, a man went on television and said the word peace. The talks had been running for weeks, led by Oman. A deal was within reach. On the table: Iran would never stockpile the material for a bomb. Inspectors would have the run of the place. The enriched uranium already in the country would be blended down and turned to fuel and made irreversible. It was not signed. It was a hand, extended. The thing his own book is built on. A hand coming out, across the table, in the room. We did not take it. He reached into the water and he closed his fist. It came the next night, all at once. The supreme leader, killed in his house. His family with him. While the smoke was still going up, a message went out to the Iranian people, telling them the hour of freedom was at hand, telling them to rise up and finish it. Regime change, announced from a podium, as a thing we had come to do. The regime that was falling on its own, for free, we now had to knock down ourselves, in front of everyone, so that everyone could see who knocked it down. And then the water did to him what he could not see coming. Iran had cards left to play, and one was made of water. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow throat, a fifth of the world’s oil moving through it. They closed it. We ran a blockade. We sent the Navy to walk the ships through by force and called it Project Freedom, and the oil did not move, and the price of everything climbed, and week after week we spent another show of force to hold a thing that yielded nothing. The man who could not believe that power was water was being beaten, now, by water. By a current he could not strike and could not reopen and could not sign. So he went to the table after all. Versailles. Iran set the terms. They handed us the plan in April. The nuclear question, the only one we ever said mattered, unanswered. The toughest question set aside for later. We released billions of dollars for them. We agreed to help rebuild what we had spent the spring destroying. In exchange they open… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The mess. Mid rats. He came in a couple minutes early. He ate fast, at a table that became a hospital bed for the wounded, and then he cleared his tray and dishes and moved into the narrow passage with the pipes running low overhead, ducking his head around them. Up the metal stairs to starboard. A couple of minutes with the sea before the watch. The deck was nearly empty. In a few minutes the others would join him, shadowed faces moving through the dark. He stood at the rail to watch the sea under the dark sky. Clouds. Stars. The wake ran out like a long trail behind the ship, two glittering edges. In the morning he would commune with the sea again, and the wake would have a bright spine where the sun shone along it, further and further until the sea stopped being water and became sky. Forward of him a younger sailor stood the rail, eyes on the water, a phone cord running from his chest into the dark. The boy would relieve him. Then the watch. Below him the ship hummed, scopes and gauges and green light on men’s faces. Up here there was only his eyes and the water. He watched for the thing that would come out of the trail in the dark that the machines could not catch, and when he saw it he would call it down the wire to a man he could not see. He knew the man would answer. Nothing came for hour after hour. You stood there for a thousand nights so that you would be there on the one night it did. No thanks for the thousand. No one would know about the one. The wind crossed the swell and laid whitecaps on water. He smelled salt in the air. Act One. Brasada The brush did not care that he had left, or that he had come home. It just was, gray and low and thick, mesquite and blackbrush and cenizo that flowered purple after the rain but was not purple now. The ground under it, white dust that stayed on his boots. Nothing in the country was soft. The catclaw reached out and took his sleeve. He stopped and worked the thorn loose and then went on. By midmorning the heat had settled in. A caracara sat the fence post and watched him. To the south the river and past the river more of the same. He had stood the watch a long way from here. He had thought about this ground and what it would mean to come back. Now he was on it, hot and full of hooks, and he was glad to be here. His father was at the pens. He never asked the boy to help him do a job he could do himself, which was nearly everything. He did not ask how long the boy was home. He did not look up from the gate he was wiring shut. A plane flew overhead, low. “Cow’s calf is off in the tasajillo,” the old man said. “She’s bawling for it.” They found it in thick brush, in the only shade for a quarter mile, lying down. It was small and it did not get up. The son went down on one knee in the white dust and saw the navel and the wound. Wet and dark and moving. He knew. The wound was full of them, packed in tight and working deeper, head down, feeding, and the smell came up off it sweet and wrong and turned his stomach. He did not pull back. He looked at the small animal and the small mouths in it. He held the phone over the navel of the calf and took the picture and did not look at it. “Screwworm,” the old man said. Then he said, “We’ll doctor it,” and went for the truck. He cleaned it and picked them out and dressed it. The rider came up the road in the heat of the afternoon while they were still at it. Horses could go where you could not take a truck, and the rider wore leather to the knee against the thorns. He came this way every week, working the river and the ranches along it, looking at what crossed and what strayed. The watch. He looked down at the calf and at the navel they had cleaned, and his face changed, and he asked to see the picture, and the son gave him the phone. The rider looked at it a long moment. Then he made his calls, quiet, off to the side. He had hoped he would not have to. “Got word last week to watch the river hard,” he said. “Somebody south of here saw something.” He took some larvae from the dust. After that it moved fast. The sample went somewhere far north the old man had never seen. And then more planes. They came over low in the early morning, day after day, working a pattern above the brush, and the son stood out in the white dust and watched. He knew what they were carrying. Flies. Sterile. They would drop them out over the country by the millions so that the ones already here would breed to nothing and burn out. The cure and the sickness were the same bug, one barren and dropped from the sky onto the other. The son went back to the calf. It lived. First they fed it with bottles and then it got up on the fourth day and went to the cow. The wound dried and began to close. By the end of the week it ran from him along the fence and the old man watched it and was satisfied. “All that,” the old man said that evening on the porch. “Government flying airplanes around. Dropping bugs out of an airplane. Over one calf.” He drank his coffee. “And the calf’s fine. Hell, I doctored a hundred calves in my life and never needed the government to help me do it.” “You never saw one before,” the son said. “Never had to.” He finished the pot into his cup. “Man depends on a thing he can’t see and can’t fix, he’s not a free man anymore. He’s just waiting on somebody else to keep doing him a favor.” He drank. “I never wanted to be that man.” “You’re not wrong,” the son said. “The day they quit, we’re in trouble.” He watched the calf along the fence. “But the day they quit isn’t this day. This day the calf’s alive because a man in Panama didn’t quit. And a pilot you’ll never meet didn’t. The most you and I could do tonight was clean a wound. The rest of it we can’t do.” The old man thought about that and judged it foolish. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “Spend a man’s taxes on something that don’t happen.” He finished his coffee and went in to bed. The son stayed out on the porch. He had stood a great many watches full of things that did not happen. He knew what they cost and who paid for them. The cost wasn’t money. It was that a man who never stood the watch got to believe, his whole life, that there had never been anything out there in the dark at all. Act One and a Quarter. The Line Moscow. February. The cold came through the wall behind him. Someone in Washington had cabled a small question. Why do the men across the way behave as they do? He sat down to answer it. He filled one page and started another. The thing across the way did not hate them over this quarrel or that. Not the kind of quarrel men settle and forget. It hunted an enemy because it needed one. Take the enemy away and it would find another, because without an enemy it could not explain itself to its own people. He saw. Wrote it down. The answer ran too long for the wire. He broke it into five parts and sent them through one after another. The clerk worked the key deep into the night. Moscow to Washington. Piece by piece. He did not know if anyone would read it the way he meant it. He sent it anyway and went to bed. He said we could not beat the thing head-on. The trying would break us. He said we should stand at every place it tried to widen. Hold there. Wait. Let it spend itself against its own nature. The thing carried the seed of its own ruin and would rot from the inside if we only denied it room. Men on the far side had to hold too. They needed roads and radios and law. They needed officers who would answer when called, and clerks who would send the message, and pilots who would fly the route. They needed men who could see the thing when it came. We could not be their backbone forever, but we could bring tools and money and time, and we could leave them able to hold their own ground. He could not prove it and that was the trouble. Hold and wait looked like weakness to good men, and good men told him so. He could read the enemy one way and they could read it another, and no one could open the thing up and see who was right. He hel… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Behold again the stars. The light. The stairs down. Down. There are no windows in the basement of the residence hall. The light comes from tubes that hum in the ceiling. It does not change, the same at five in the morning as at noon. He could work an entire spring semester down here and never once know what the sky was doing. He lets himself in with the key on the loop at his belt. The door shuts behind him. The hum of the fixtures, the only sound in the part of the building that is awake. He fills the bucket at the mop sink. Warm water. It will be gray inside the hour. He wheels the cart down the tiled row to the elevator. The squeaky casters have needed oil since before he started this job and he has stopped hearing them. He begins on the third floor at the far end, where the rooms are worst, because the morning can only get better after those. He works the stalls first. He doesn’t think much about what the weekend has left him. It’s the same every Monday. He mops. Wrings the mop. Sets the yellow sign across the door though no one will come for an hour. He does the work the way it needs done because there is no reason to do it the other way. A bathroom is clean or it is not. A great and shining institution cannot have filthy bathrooms, and so the bathrooms are clean. Who would clean them? And so he does. It’s not the hardened waste or urine on the floor or vomit or hair or broken glass or cups or mud or the smell that beats him. It’s the wall under the hand dryers. The hot air throws water off wet hands and the water carries what is on them, and over the years it streaks down into the paint, a yellow bloom low on the wall in the shape of everyone who ever made the mark and walked out. He scrubs. He has scrubbed since September. He found the cabinet with the stronger chemical and used the stronger chemical. The bloom lifts a shade. It’s the color of piss, but it’s been scrubbed clean. The supervisor is an older man who has been in the building longer than some of the faculty. He stops on his round and looks at the wall and tells him kindly to give it another go. The supervisor believes the wall comes clean. It is his building and his name on the schedule, and he cannot allow himself to believe it will never come clean. Even though he knows only paint will make the wall white again, the boy gets back to it. He works the brush in tight circles. The chemical bites the back of his throat. The musty heat of the room comes up through his jeans. Above him the dryers wait their turn. He scrubs it again. It does not come clean. Act I. No Windows Ten O’Clock. The boy’s hands, clean and resting on a table on the second floor, where there are windows. He showered. Changed his shirt. The cart back in its closet, yellow sign hung above the mop sink. None of the morning is on him now. Not the smell or the chemical, nothing a person could see. The room is comfortable in a way the basement was not. The light moves through clouds outside. He takes a seat where he can watch it. There are nine of them and the professor. They are reading Rawls. The professor asks a question he is fond of. Imagine you do not know who you will be. Rich or poor. Gifted or ordinary. This family or that one. You must choose the rules of the society before the curtain lifts and you are told which life is yours. He lets it sit. Would you choose this one? The boy across the table answers first. He almost always answers first. This boy’s room is on the third floor. A corner suite, good light, and two windows. The nearest bathroom to his is the worst room in the hall. The third-floor boy doesn’t know that anyone knows this. All he knows is that the room is clean when he wakes. He has never wondered who cleans it. No reason he would. The world arrives each morning already ready for his use, the way it always has. The loud boy says society is just. He speaks well. He says that the door is open to anyone and that the ones who walk through it do so because of who they are, not who they were. On the other side of the door is a place that doesn’t ask where you came from, only what you can do. No one hands you anything here. The boy who scrubbed his bathroom at five stays silent. He could say something. He knows the thing you would say. He read it in this very seminar, three weeks back. They had all read it. There are as many students here from the top percent of the country as from its entire bottom three-fifths. He knows which part he came from. He cleans bathrooms at five in the morning. He could lay it out for them now. He does not. The attention is not on him and he would rather keep it that way. He folds his hands. Watches the cloud move across the light. The seminar runs its hour. The professor is not cruel. Not one of them is lying. But the room cannot see. Up here, the room believes everyone here is equal. The corner room boy believes the door is open because when he walked through it, it was open. The professor believes the question is still a question. Only the boy with the mop sees both parts of the building, and he says nothing because there is nothing to say that the room will hear. The professor closes the book. The hour is up. The boy from the third floor gathers his things and goes, and does not look at him on the way out, the way you do not look at what you do not know is there. At five tomorrow, he will be scrubbing the wall again. At ten, he will be back in this chair. He is the only one at the table who is both, and no one at the table knows it, and that is the stain. Act II. The Dark Page There is a window. At night the window is a black square with his reflection in it, not a view. He sits at the desk in the dark so as not to wake his roommate. The light comes off the screen and the cursor waits on him. The assignment. Six pages. Take the veil of ignorance and test it against a life. He can finish the essay in an hour. He has it in his head already. He starts. “Behind the veil, not knowing whether we will be rich or poor, we would build a society that protects the worst off, since any of us might be the worst off.” True. He keeps going. He writes that protecting the worst off does not have to mean the dishwasher and the surgeon take home the same pay. It means the dishwasher’s kid gets a fair run at the surgeon’s job. He thinks of a runner’s analogy and writes that fast runners should be allowed to run. He believes a piece of it. After all, in a classroom, he is a fast runner and has always been. That’s how he came to be at this university. He has known since he was small that his mind closes on a problem faster than the room around him, and he cannot pretend otherwise. He also knows there are slower runners, and you can’t make a slow runner fast. He writes that the rules should clear the track so a man or woman willing to run can get somewhere. This is what justice owes a person. Not the finish line, but a fair run at it. He reads it back. It is clean. Correct. He cannot find a false sentence in it. And it is a lie. Not in what it says. In what it leaves out, which is the whole of his own life. He is fast. And he cleans the bathroom at five. Both. No one cleared the track for him; he ran it carrying a mop, at an hour the corner-room boy will never see, and he is going to make it anyway, and the essay he just wrote would say that proves the system works. The fast runner ran and won. It is a lie. He keeps at the philosophy and the philosophy keeps beating him. Reward the runner who’s willing to run. Fine. But who handed the runner the will? The ability to run with the pain in your side. The discipline to run the sprints, quarter mile after quarter mile. He didn’t build the part of himself that works. It came down to him, from a mother, from somewhere, set before he could choose it, the same as the fast came down to him. Praise a man for trying and you’re praising him for something somebody handed him. Turn it the other way, though, and it’s worse. If trying comes down to pure luck, … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

A man selling good cows is not happy about it. Wednesday morning in May. He pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven. The sun is up but the cold has not gone. Winter is fighting summer. Some days in May might reach the 80s, some days snow. His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat. Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door. The lot is full. It should not be full. Wednesday is not a normal sale day in May. Today is a drought sale, and the trailers are lined up in rows he has not seen in this lot in years. Goosenecks and bumper-pulls. Plates from three states. Some of the trailers have cows in them with calves still wet at their sides. The market is so busy there aren’t enough pens to hold all the groups. The ranchers unload, and the cattle move straight through the alleys into the sale ring, then onto a different truck. A rancher does not haul a wet calf to a sale barn unless something is wrong. He kills the engine. Sits a moment. The check he is about to get is already in his head. The math is bad and the math is the math. Twenty-five head in the trailer. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Good cows. Bred back. The snow and the grass didn’t come this winter and the hay he would need to carry them through summer is gone or priced past what the check from October will cover. Some years he might have been able to buy hay from Missouri and ship it, but fuel prices are way high because some strait on the other side of the world is closed, so that doesn’t pencil out. He has run the numbers a hundred times since April. There is no version where he gets to keep them and still make money. He steps down. The gravel crunches. Jesse, Bentley mark on her forehead, stays in the cab. The brand inspector is at his post off to the left of the building. Same man. Carhartt and a brown ballcap. He looks up and nods. He has been doing this a long time and he has never seen a Wednesday like this one. He does not say so. He does not need to. Inside, the pay window. Three ladies behind it. One of them smiles at him the way she has smiled at him for twenty years. He touches the brim of his hat. Through the door to the arena. The stairs are tall and the bleachers are full. Men he knows. Men he does not. Coffee in styrofoam. The smell of diesel and pine shavings and manure that his father knew and his grandfather before him. The auctioneer is already going. He climbs up. Finds a seat. Watches. The buyers are in the front row. He counts them. Three. There should be more. He drove four hours past Buffalo to get to a barn that has eight on a good day. Today there are three, and none of them are looking up. A heeler trots up the aisle. Red, with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot. Moves on. The cows come through. Cow calf pairs, mommas still wet from calving with their calves in the pen behind them. A man two rows down has his hand over his mouth. The auctioneer’s chant rises and the gavel falls and rises and falls again. His turn comes. Twenty-five head out of the trailer. Black, good condition, papers clean. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves and dust, and the man with the flag moves them into the ring. The chant starts. A nod from the buyer for the Nebraska feedlot. A nod from Oklahoma. The Colorado man does not look up. The pause. The gavel. The price is the price. He walks down. Goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. She doesn’t smile. He folds the check and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat and walks out. The trailer is empty when he gets to it. Jesse stands up on the seat and waits for him to open the door. He sits a moment before he turns the key. The lot is still full. Other men are still in the bleachers. Cows in the holding pens behind the building are bawling for the calves they came in with, the calves now in different pens behind different trailers belonging to men they have never met. He has played the game for thirty years. His father played it for forty. His grandfather homesteaded the ground. It was never designed for him to win. He starts the truck. Pulls out of the lot. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. On the drive home, he passes a sign for a high school football field. He doesn’t think about it. He should. Act I. Hope in the North A Sunday in January, a sports bar in Detroit, a man in a Lions jersey watched his quarterback take a knee. Jared Goff at quarterback. Three years before, the Lions and Rams had swapped quarterbacks. The Lions sent Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles. The Rams sent Goff to Detroit along with two of their best draft picks for the next two years to make the deal go through. The NFL holds one draft a year. Every team picks new college players in turn, worst team first, best team last, the rule that has built competitive balance in the league for ninety years. Los Angeles gave up its top picks in two of those drafts to get Stafford. Two years of the league’s best mechanism for building a future, handed over for one quarterback. The Lions took the deal because they hadn’t won a playoff game in thirty-two years and had nothing left to lose, and because the picks the Rams handed over were what they needed to build a team around the quarterback nobody else wanted. Then, 2022. HBO put new head coach Dan Campbell’s fiery speeches on ‘Hard Knocks’ and the city took to him right away. The team started one and six that year, and then won eight of their final ten games. A year later. On this Sunday, in the wild card round of the 2023 playoffs, the Lions were ahead of the Rams by three with two minutes on the clock. Goff dropped back. He threw a first down to Amon-Ra St. Brown, a fourth-round receiver every other team had a chance to take, a receiver Detroit had taken because the rules of the draft put him in their pile when nobody else wanted him. The first down moved the chains. The clock kept running. Then the victory formation. Goff under center. The snap. The knee. Clock running. The crowd on its feet. The man at the bar with his hand on his beer and his eyes on the television and his throat closed. The Rams fans somewhere far away, already gone. The man at the bar had grown up watching the Lions lose. His father had grown up watching the Lions lose. Thirty-two years. The Lions had been the worst-run franchise in American sports. The rock bottom of those years came in 2008 when they became the first team in NFL history to lose every game of a season. Detroit was the punchline of every joke about American decline and the people who lived there had been told by everyone who had never lived there that the city was finished. The man at the bar had not moved on. And on this Sunday in January, his team was taking a victory knee in a playoff game. The league was built for this. The teams had the same salary cap. The same revenue from the same national television deal. The same weighted draft order that gave worse teams better picks the next year. Rules written so that thirty-two years of losing could be ended by good drafts and good decisions and a fair chance. The Lions did not win the Super Bowl that year. They lost the divisional round the next week by three points, on a kick as time expired. The season didn’t need a trophy. The season had done the work. Detroit had been crushed by shuttered auto plants and fights between capital and labor. The Lions gave them reason to keep going. The man at the bar would carry that reason into his Monday morning. Into the rest of the winter, into the next season and the season after that. Whatever else the Lions did or did not do, the man at the bar had been given back the thing that had been taken from his city for thirty-two years. A country, like a city, has to be allowed to keep what it has earned. Our founding do… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Nick van Terheyden had bone pain that he could not explain. He was fifty-eight, a physician in Maryland. A specialist ordered a $350 blood test for vitamin D deficiency. The test came back positive. The deficiency was severe enough that if left untreated, it would lead to osteoporosis. Van Terheyden’s insurer was Cigna. They refused to pay for the test. The corporate medical director who signed the denial letter said the test wasn’t medically necessary. Van Terheyden read the letter, looking for the clinical reasoning. There was none. Only generic language, a response from a machine. He filed an appeal. A second medical director upheld the denial. To reimburse van Terheyden for the test that had come back positive, van Terheyden would have to prove he had a vitamin D deficiency before the test had been done. He kept investigating. Cigna used a system that flagged mismatches between billing codes and acceptable diagnoses. It let the company’s medical directors deny claims in batches without opening a patient’s file. Internal documents later showed that the doctor who rejected van Terheyden’s claim rejected roughly sixty thousand claims in a single month. Over a two-month window, Cigna physicians denied more than three hundred thousand payment requests. The average review took 1.2 seconds. It took seven months and an external medical review to force the insurer to pay the $350. Two years passed. On December 4, 2024, a man named Brian Thompson stepped out of a New York hotel and was shot dead on the sidewalk. He was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Shell casings left behind were inscribed with three words: deny, defend, depose. Across demographic lines, Americans began telling their own stories. Denials, delays, bankruptcies, deaths. The shooter had read the same files Dr. van Terheyden had. So, it turned out, had millions of others. The event left a question America still cannot bring itself to ask out loud. What would it take to build a healthcare arrangement Americans can actually live with? Act I. The Body In Centerville, Ohio, Tim Anderson watched his wife die for three years. Doctors diagnosed Mary Anderson with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS destroys motor neurons one at a time. The body loses the ability to walk, then to swallow, then to speak, then to breathe. The mind stays. The patient is awake for all of it. By the end, Mary could no longer move her arms or her legs. She could no longer eat without help. Her voice was going. Her physicians prescribed equipment to help her breathe and to help her speak. The Andersons were insured through UnitedHealthcare. UnitedHealthcare denied both claims. Tim Anderson appealed. The company denied the appeals. He appealed again. The denials continued. The medical necessity of the equipment was not in dispute among Mary’s doctors. The diagnosis was not in dispute. The progression of the disease was not in dispute. The only substance in dispute was whether the insurer would pay. The Andersons could not get coverage for the machines that would have helped Mary breathe or speak. Toward the end, Mary communicated by blinking when Tim held up pictures. The family relied on donations from a local ALS group to cover what their insurance had refused. She died in 2022. After the shooting on the sidewalk in New York, Tim Anderson spoke to a reporter. He said this: “The business model for insurance is don’t pay. When Mary could still talk, she said to me to keep fighting this. It needs to be exposed.” The Andersons live in red, rural Ohio. Tim Anderson is sixty-seven. He worked his whole adult life, paid his premiums, raised his family. He didn’t enter the healthcare debate through ideology. His wife’s battle brought him into it anyway. Eight hundred miles south, in Jefferson, Georgia, Luke Seaborn opened a shop to restore classic cars. Seaborn was fifty-four. He had been trained as a chemical engineer and had spent years in corporate work before leaving to do what he loved. The shop was small. The private insurance market for a small business owner in rural Georgia was punishing. For himself and his son, the premiums were close to impossible. In 2023, Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp launched a program called Pathways to Coverage. It was a Medicaid waiver with a work requirement. Eligible Georgians could enroll if they could prove they were working, studying, or volunteering at least eighty hours a month. The program was designed as a conservative answer to Medicaid expansion. It tied coverage to personal responsibility. Seaborn enrolled. He believed in what the program said it was. He was grateful for the coverage. When the governor’s office asked him to film a promotional video, he agreed. He stood in his shop, surrounded by vintage Fords, and praised Pathways as a blessing. The governor used the footage to argue that work requirements foster independence. Then the program began to fail him. Seaborn logged his eighty hours every month, as required. In November, the state canceled his coverage. The state had quietly introduced a new form. It required enrollees to periodically re-enroll by re-entering the same information in a different format. Only an insurance executive Seaborn had met during the promotional shoot could restore his benefits. He had to call her directly. A few months later, a software glitch stopped his text alerts. He logged into the portal in March and discovered his coverage was set to terminate on April first. The state said he had missed an annual income statement. His policy was not yet due for renewal. He could not reach a caseworker by phone. He paid out of pocket for his family’s medications while he tried to fix it. The Pathways program had cost Georgia taxpayers more than eighty-six million dollars by then. More than fifty million had gone to Deloitte Consulting to build the portal. The program had enrolled barely three percent of those eligible. Seaborn said this to a reporter: “I am so frustrated with this whole journey. I did what I was supposed to. But that wasn’t good enough.” Two Americans. Different states. Different tribes. Different illnesses and programs. UnitedHealthcare denied Mary Anderson’s breathing machine. The State of Georgia’s Medicaid portal canceled Luke Seaborn’s coverage. One was private corporate denial. One was public administrative failure. They are the same failure. In both cases, a working American did what the system asked. Paid the premiums. Filed the forms. Logged the hours. Played by the rules of the arrangement. In both cases, the arrangement failed to honor its own terms. The diagnosis, the mechanism, the grief. These are not partisan. The conservative rancher’s widow and the conservative small-business owner are not the only Americans this happens to. The diagnosis runs the country. Healthcare administration, then, is not a debate. It is a machine. Act II. The Architecture In Holly Springs, Mississippi, Dr. Kenneth Williams runs the only hospital within twenty-five miles. Williams is a family physician and the chief executive of Alliance HealthCare System. Holly Springs is in Marshall County. Marshall County has about thirty-eight thousand people. The next-closest hospital is a long drive. Williams has been there since 1999. Sixty to sixty-five percent of his patients are on Medicare. When Medicare Advantage came into the program in 2006, the math of running his hospital changed. For five years before that, Alliance had been profitable. After Medicare Advantage took hold, the hospital lost almost two million dollars in a single year. Denials came in patterns Williams had not seen before. Insurers rejected treatments his physicians ordered. Insurers a thousand miles away shortened stays his physicians said were necessary. The denials killed a geriatric psychiatry program Alliance had built to serve the county’s elderly. The hospital had to close it. Williams was blunt about the system and the insurers. “I knew that our hospital co… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day. Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south on 25, coffee in the holder, the dog settled, the cattle quiet behind him. The dash reads twenty-six degrees. The eastern sky is still black. He’s made this drive many times over thirty years. His father made it before him in a different truck, but the math was the same. Raise them, feed them, haul them, take what you’re offered. The price is the price. He knows what he’ll get today, give or take. He knew last week. The packers’ bids move together. Four buyers act like one buyer because that's what four buyers do when they're the only four.. He’s run the numbers a thousand times. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan in 2022 when the rates were still reasonable. Every time, the numbers are the same. He needs the price to be a little higher than it’s going to be. The radio finds a station out of Casper. He turns it down but not off. Jesse walks a circle on the seat and lies down, chin on the console. Past Glenrock, the sky starts to come up gray. He thinks about their three kids. The oldest is in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save up, the prices have moved. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse, her husband works for the railroad, and they want three kids but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. The youngest is in Billings. After a year of work, he’s decided to give college a try, looking at the University of Wyoming for the fall. He doesn’t know what he might do after. The ranch needs him to come back and run things. There hasn’t been money for two households in a while. He passes a gas station outside Douglas. Diesel is up again from last week. By the time he hits Torrington, the sun is full up, and the lot is filling. Trucks from Goshen County, from the Panhandle, from up north like him. Men he’s known for years and men he’s never seen. They nod at each other and back their trailers toward the chutes. The auction starts at nine. The buyers are already inside, drinking coffee, looking at the sheets. He kills the engine and sits for a second. Jesse stands up in the seat. A beautiful morning. He’s not asking for anything. He’s done the work. The cattle are good. The truck runs. The loan gets paid. He’d just like the price to be the price his work is worth, in a market that is what it was supposed to be. He opens the door. The cold comes in. Jesse jumps down ahead of him, but she’ll stay with the truck. Act I. Scene 1. The Half of Friedman Everyone Quotes Fifty-six years ago, in September of 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay that has shaped American economic thinking ever since. Author Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economist who would win the Nobel Prize six years later. The title was The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, about three thousand words long. Most people who quote it have read the title and a paragraph or two. This essay, more than any other, changed how business in America works. The commonly understood argument is straightforward. A corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. His job is to make money for them, within the rules. If he spends company money on social objectives, such as reducing pollution beyond what the law requires, hiring quotas beyond what the market supports, or making charitable contributions beyond what serves the business, he is spending other people’s money on objectives those people did not choose. Taxing the shareholders without their consent. The phrase that survived is the one that was easiest to put on a coffee mug. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. It became a motto, then a worldview. By the time Reagan took office in 1981, it was the dominant framework of American corporate governance. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had become something close to common sense. Maximize shareholder value. Let the market sort the rest. Before Friedman’s thesis, many businesses believed they had a broad role to maintain an equitable balance among interest groups. Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Friedman drew a different line. Businesses owed shareholders profits. Social objectives were the work of a different institution. His thesis cleared the way to dismantle the post-World War II structure. Businesses would have minimal obligation to workers, communities, and the country. Their obligation was money. Manufacturing went offshore. Industries consolidated. Productivity gains flowed to CEOs and shareholders instead of workers. Friedman’s thesis was the one people reached for when they needed cover. And the dagger…Friedman was right. The logic is sound. An executive who pursues social objectives with shareholder money is doing two things he is not authorized to do. He is making policy decisions that, in a democratic Republic, are supposed to be made through political deliberation. And he is taxing the shareholders to fund those decisions, without their vote, and without their consent. The objection most people raise to Friedman is that the framework is too narrow. Businesses operate in a society, depend on a society, and owe something back to the society. Treating the corporation as a profit-maximizing machine misses the human reality of what corporations actually are. These objections have weight. Businesses do operate in society and depend on it. But the objection misses the counterpoint. Friedman himself addressed this concern in the same essay. The part nobody quotes. Act I. Scene 2. The Half Nobody Quotes Friedman continued. A few hundred words after the line that became the coffee mug, he wrote that if anyone is going to pursue social objectives with public resources, that person has to be a civil servant. Selected through a political process. If anyone is going to impose taxes and spend money on those objectives, there has to be political machinery. Machinery to decide what taxes to assess. Machinery to decide what objectives to pursue. That’s the part nobody quotes. Friedman is not saying social objectives don’t matter. He is not saying businesses have no obligation to society. He is saying these obligations matter so much that they need a specific kind of institution to pursue them. That institution is not the corporation. That institution is the government. Friedman wrote a complete system. Two halves. The corporation does its job, which is profits. The government does its job, which is everything else the public decides matters. The two halves depend on each other. Social objectives matter. They don’t go away when business stops pursuing them. Without the government doing its job, business doing its job isn’t enough. Friedman knew we need both. He wrote it down. Published it in the same essay. The business disciples kept the first half. They have no role in the government half, so they dropped that part. The part about taxes assessed through deliberation. The part about objectives chosen through consent. The part about political machinery that the public controls. That’s the part that holds the whole system together. And because it had no champion, we lost it. So business profits increased. Industries consolidated. Wages stagnated. Housing got unaffordable. Then, instead of making the rules fair again, making the two halves fit together, we decided we would let business do whatever they needed to increase profits. Workers didn’t get their fair share of wages, but no matter. We would instead funnel money through our political machine to help people have enough money to live. How would we … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The Open Door. October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delaware. He had run from his older brother’s printing shop in Boston without permission and with no prospects. He knew no one in the city. He walked up Market Street looking for bread. He asked a baker for three pennies’ worth. The baker gave him three great, puffy rolls. He had nowhere to put them. He carried two under his arms and ate the third as he walked. A young woman watched him pass from her father’s doorway and decided he looked ridiculous. He probably did. Years later, after she had become his wife, they would laugh about it. Walking back toward the river, he came upon a woman and her child who had been on the boat with him from Burlington. He gave them the two rolls he had left. He was tired, friendless, nearly broke, and he had just given away two-thirds of his food. He drifted with the Sunday crowd into a Quaker meeting house near the market, sat down in the silence of unprogrammed worship, and fell asleep. When the meeting ended, a stranger gently woke him. He noted decades later in his autobiography that the meeting house was the first building he ever slept in in Philadelphia. The boy was Benjamin Franklin. The first house he slept in in his new city was a church, and the door was open. No guard checked his papers. No barrier to the kind of stranger Franklin was. Exhausted, unwashed, unknown. The door was open because we had not yet chosen to close it. That door is locked now. Most church sanctuaries in America are bolted on weekdays, and many even on Sundays. We claim good reasons. Security. Theft. Damage. And we’ve locked other doors a young person used to find open. The starter home. The trade. The boarding room. The open campus. Each lock added by someone defending what they had. Hear it again. The declaration of our belief is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. We tell ourselves we are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. The phrase is familiar. National wallpaper. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the words the Founders actually used. He defined “to pursue” as to hazard, to put to chance, to endanger. Pursuit was a verb of risk and motion. The Founders did not protect a state of contentment. They protected an action. Inherent in acting is a place to act, a door to enter, a runway from which to begin. A Republic that locks its doors against beginners has not protected the right to pursue happiness. It has protected the comfort of those who already arrived where the rest cannot follow. Act I. The Verb May, 1776. Three weeks before Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia to draft the Declaration of Independence. A Virginian named George Mason was already drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The document he produced contains a sentence that Jefferson read carefully and then condensed. Mason wrote that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights. Namely, “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Four rights. The first two are life and liberty. Third, the “means” of acquiring property. We might call this ‘effort.’ We own ourselves first, and we labor. Our labor mixed with the world makes it ours. Fourth, the “pursuit” of happiness and safety. If property is the result of effort, happiness is in the pursuit, not the property. Life. Liberty. Effort. Pursuit. The Virginia Declaration is built around what citizens do, not what they receive. Jefferson tightened the language three weeks later. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Three rights, parallel and memorable, recited by schoolchildren two and a half centuries on. But our reading of the words changed over time. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was the standard reference for the educated Anglo-American world in 1776. Johnson defined to pursue in terms a modern reader would not recognize. To chase. To follow with hostility. To prosecute. To put to chance. To endanger. Pursuit was a verb of motion that cost something. It implied risk, friction, a thing that might fail. A man who pursued happiness in 1776 was not asking the state to deliver it. He was hazarding his life to chase it, knowing the chase might end in ruin. And what was the happiness he chased? Not what we mean by the word now. Eighteenth-century happiness still carried Aristotle’s meaning. The word translated the Greek eudaimonia. Flourishing. An active life of virtue. The full exercise of one’s faculties in the world. Aristotle argued that happiness was not a feeling but the function of a human being living well, exercising reason, participating in the city, raising a family, practicing a craft. The proper end of human life. By Mason’s time, happiness in serious political writing meant the conditions under which a free citizen could flourish. Not a pleasant feeling or satisfied desire. Not guaranteed comfort. So the phrase Jefferson preserved, read in its original meaning, says something close to: the unalienable right to actively chase a life well lived. That is the right the Republic was founded to protect. Not contentment. Not security. Not even comfort. The action of striving, conducted by free citizens moving in an uncertain world. Now consider who this right is for. Pursuit is not evenly distributed across our lives. It is concentrated in the years we stake a claim in the world. We leave home, learn a trade, marry, have children, borrow money, build equity in our first home. How old are we? Roughly between seventeen and forty. The years before, we prepare. The years after, we steward. Pursuit belongs to the young. The state cannot guarantee the young’s success. But the state should not lock the doors. This is not a complaint about older Americans. It is an observation about the structure of human life. A citizen at seventy enjoying the fruits of a long career is not pursuing. They have already achieved what they will achieve. A citizen at twenty-five who is trying to start a business, buy a first home, or raise a child is pursuing. The Constitution does not name pursuit as a right of the young. But the right is exercised primarily by the young. A structure that blocks the young from pursuit fails to deliver on the right. A Republic that takes the verb seriously asks a structural question modern policy debate almost never asks. Are the conditions of pursuit available to those who are just beginning their pursuit? Are the doors open to the seventeen-year-old who arrives with a Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper? Can a young couple of ordinary means, working ordinary jobs, find a starter home in a place where they want to raise children? Can a young person enter a trade without paying for credentials they cannot afford? Can a young family form, take root, and grow? Or do we have good reason to lock the door? We claim so. Security. Theft. Damage. Who benefits when we change from a country where young people can pursue into a country that protects those who have pursued? What did we protect? Act II. A Table With One Short Leg Older Americans hold the wealth. Americans aged 55 and older hold roughly 73 percent of all household wealth in the United States. Americans under 40 hold less than 7 percent. The ratio is at its most extreme in modern American history. It’s a long-term trend that’s been building for forty years. This is not an attack on older Americans. When you’re young, you live in an apartment that’s barely a room. You show up on day one of a job, and you don’t have the money to buy th… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Gravel lot. Friday morning in Torrington. The trailers are lined up in neat rows at the front, goosenecks and bumper-pulls together, dust still settling from the last one in. He pulls in at the end of the row and steps down from the cab. October cold. His breath hangs in the air and catches the low sun. He only comes on Fridays. The bakery is only open Thursday through Saturday, and there’s no sale at the market on Thursday or Saturday, so Friday it is. Sale at ten. Bakery by noon. Home by four. The brand inspector’s office is off to the left of the building. Proof of ownership for cattlemen who run stock on shared grazing land. A man there in a Carhartt and a good hat, checking papers, making sure nobody’s selling another man’s livelihood. The inspector nods. He nods back. They have known each other a long time. He walks in through the front door. The pay window is right there, three ladies behind it who will take his money if he buys and cut him a check if he sells. They know him too. One of them smiles. He touches the brim of his hat. Through the door to the arena. Tall stairs up to the bleachers. The seats are bench-style, worn smooth by forty years of men in Wranglers. Coffee in styrofoam. Diesel, manure, pine shavings. The smell is the same smell his father knew. A heeler mix trots up the aisle. Red with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot and moves on. Somebody in the third row has a hot dog from concessions and the dog knows it. The auctioneer is already going. The chant. Workers below move the cattle through the arena, through the pens, out to the holding lots behind the building. From a walkway above you can watch the whole thing. The ring, the pens, the loading chutes, the vet’s shop in the back where the doc is never sitting still. His turn comes. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck that morning. Six-weight, good feed. He’ll come back a couple more times for sales, because his truck can’t pull them all in one go. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves on concrete, and a man with a flag moves them into the ring. Three buyers in the front row. One for a Colorado feedlot. One for Nebraska. One buying for an Oklahoma stocker that ships to Tyson. They don’t look up. The auctioneer starts. The chant rises. A nod. Another nod. A pause. The gavel falls. The price is the price. Set on the board in Chicago before his trailer left the ranch. His cattle are in the pen. He can’t refuse this price without losing money. He goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. He folds it and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat again. Out the front door. The gravel lot is still full. The sun is higher now. The brand inspector is still at his post. Four blocks to the bakery. He can’t pull his gooseneck over there. Nowhere to park it. It’s only a ten-minute walk even if you don’t hurry, and he doesn’t. Small town. Brick storefronts. The bakery is the one with the line. Tight space. Warm. When he opens the door he has to push through the line. Flour in the air. Crusty French sourdough stacked on the shelf behind the counter. A mostly empty tray of cinnamon crunch croissants, crusty outside and soft in the middle, and whole pies behind the glass when the baker feels like it. His wife wants a pie. Partly because she likes the treat. Partly because she wants the bakery to stay in business. He buys the pie. Apple, because that’s what they have. A cinnamon crunch croissant for the drive. Coffee in a paper cup. He eats the croissant in the window seat and watches the street. The check is folded in his shirt pocket. It’s a good check and a thin margin both, and he knows which one will matter by spring. Nobody at the sale barn asked about his costs. What he paid his ranch hand. What the diesel was. He finishes the coffee. Picks up the pie. Walks back to the truck the long way. The gravel crunches under his boots when he crosses the lot. The trailers are thinning out now. Some of the men who came in this morning are already gone. He loads up. Starts the truck. The pie rides in the passenger seat where his wife would sit. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. Act I. The Goal, Maths, and Patterns The wage debate is asking the wrong question. What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim? An Abraham Lincoln draft he wrote before taking his seat in Congress. “To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” Restated. A goal of good governance is that businesses pay workers a wage high enough that their neighbor doesn’t have to make up the difference for them to live. Jessica Tarlov and Scott Galloway make the case on their podcast Raging Moderates that America needs a twenty-five-dollar federal minimum wage. Galloway’s argument, developed over several years in his writing and in his 2024 TED talk, is that we’ve transferred America’s wealth from young to old over four decades, and raising the minimum wage is the most elegant tool to reverse it. Tarlov shares the position and carries it into the daily political conversation. Serious people making a serious argument. American workers are getting squeezed. The current federal minimum wage is a cruel joke. A country that can’t pay its workers enough to keep them off social programs is not the country it claims to be. I agree with them about the goal: If you work, your employer owes you enough money that your neighbor doesn’t have to give you extra money out of their pocket. A business that pays wages so low that the taxpayer has to fill the gap for you to heat your house and put food on the table isn’t a business standing on its own. It’s a business subsidized by every working American who files a tax return. The Lincoln standard, at minimum, is that the whole product of labor means the business pays for it, not the taxpayer. So let’s do some math. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit phases out for a single adult with no dependents at $19,104 in 2025. If that adult works a full-time job, that means 2,080 hours a year. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $9.19 an hour. SNAP gross income for a single-person household tops out around $20,331, or $9.77 an hour. Medicaid in the forty states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act cuts off for a childless adult at about $21,597, $10.38 an hour. Below these numbers, the single adult working full time is guaranteed to be on some form of federal assistance. The taxpayer is making up the difference. Call it ten dollars and some change, or even eleven. That is the subsistence floor for a working single adult with no dependents. It’s the wage below which the government takes money from your neighbor’s pocket to give it to you. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25. It hasn’t moved since 2009. Whatever else we argue about, no one should be allowed to pay less than the wage that keeps a working single adult off the programs designed to combat poverty. A business that cannot pay ten dollars an hour to a full-time adult worker is a business being subsidized by its neighbors, and neither party should defend that arrangement. Now run the same test the other direction. Twenty-five dollars an hour for a single adult with no dependents is $52,000 a year, well above every threshold in the hard welfare cluster. For that worker, twenty-five dollars is far more than self-sufficiency in large parts of the country. The neighbor is not making up the difference anymore. The wage has cleared the bar and then some. But twenty-five dollars isn’t enough for a family. The traditional American expectation is a family where one parent stays home with the children. The EITC threshold for a married couple with two children is $64,430. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $30.98 an hour. That is the single-earner floor for a traditional family of four to get off the programs. For three kids, $33. One working pa… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The apartment is cold. Outside, sirens. Somewhere down the block, gunshots. This is Hunting Park, North Philadelphia. The sounds of Hunting Park don’t stop because a mother is trying to feed her children. At the kitchen table, two kids are eating. Whatever was in the cupboard, she put it on their plates. Her son is going blind and needs a doctor. Her daughter is small and hungry. She knows. She sits with them. She is holding a piece of paper. Sometimes a pizzeria menu. Sometimes whatever paper she could find. A flyer, a receipt, anything. She reads it. Studies the pictures, if there are pictures. Asks herself what she would order if she could. She calls this read eating. Her name is Barbie Izquierdo. Years later, she will tell advocates what this was. Her stomach had been empty long enough that the brain had learned to feed itself on images. “I was feeding my brain,” she said, “when I couldn’t put food into my stomach.” She had a job. A full-time job, through her advocacy work. She had done what everyone told her to do. Get off assistance. Get back to work. Climb the ladder. She climbed. Her paycheck put her two dollars an hour over the SNAP threshold. Two dollars. SNAP ended. The childcare subsidy ended. The cash assistance ended. The children’s free and reduced-price school meals ended. Three separate systems, each one operating according to its rules, each one executing those rules without error, collectively produced the outcome in the cold apartment with the pizzeria menu. No corruption. No villain. No malfunction. The machine worked just like all bureaucracy works. “Just enough,” she said, “to feel like you’re still poor but not homeless.” The neighbors sometimes brought a can of beans. A cup of rice. Whatever they could spare, which was never much, because they were her neighbors. This is not a story about a broken system. The system worked just like we designed it. That is the problem. This is a story about a country that wrote a pledge and forgot what it was for. A country that built machinery in the name of that pledge and then let the machine run without looking at it for so long that the machine stopped serving the pledge and started serving itself. A country that now finds itself so loud with argument about how the machine should run that no one remembers to ask why it exists. We are a country at war with itself over the how. We have forgotten the why. And in the space between those two things, a mother sits alone in a cold apartment in Hunting Park and reads a menu while her children eat the last of the food. If we want to fix what is broken in America, we have to go back further than the argument. We have to go back to the page those fifty-six men signed. We have to start with why. Act I. Four Score and Seven Years Ago In February of 2011, Simon Sinek walked into the Commandant’s hall at Nellis Air Force Base. A civilian. An author. A man who had spent years studying what made certain organizations inspire loyalty while others just sold product. Why some thrive while others fail. His thesis fit on a napkin. Most organizations, he argued, start with “what” they do. Great ones start with “why” they exist. The room is full of apex predators. Air Force Weapons School instructors. Fighter pilots. Weapon System Officers. Before they were students, they were the top officers in their squadrons. Selected, nominated, and sent to the toughest school in the Department of Defense. Six months of grueling hours and indifferent, violent intensity. The best of them graduate at the top of their class and are asked to train the next generation. Every fighter squadron in the Air Force has one. Almost every top officer in the Air Force is a distinguished graduate. Nothing on a military combat uniform is silver, except a Weapons School patch. A silver beacon with a black border. When a Weapons School instructor walks into a briefing room, every pilot in the room sits up straight. Sinek told a room full of Weapons School instructors to start with “why.” I was in that room. I was skeptical. I ran missions for a living. Missions are what. Brief, execute, debrief. Achieve the objective. If you failed, cut everything and everyone to the bone until you achieve it. The whole Air Force runs on what. Sinek was telling us to start somewhere else. Somewhere softer, slower. Somewhere the math was not immediately obvious. It took me ten years to break it down. No organization, movement, or country ever endured because of the what. It endured because of the why. The what changes. The how changes. The why holds. And the American why is written down. Fifty-six men signed it on a hot July day in Philadelphia, in a room that smelled of candle wax and ink and sweat. All men are created equal. The Almighty endows each of us with unalienable Rights. Life. Our breath and being. Liberty. To act. Speak. Grow. The right to pursue happiness. And at the bottom of the page, under the last paragraph, we agreed. We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. A pledge. A contract signed in ink, and within months, in blood. Seventy-six years later, on the Fifth of July, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of an audience in Rochester, New York, and asked a question about the grand national lie. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? His answer, across pages of the most devastating rhetoric in the English language, plainly stated: The Declaration is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. Douglass was not asking a rhetorical question. He was demanding an answer. We either believe that we all share the same rights, or the document is a fraud and the country has no moral foundation. Douglass demanded that the country look at its own pledge and decide whether we had meant it. The Harlan brothers answered him. Two boys grew up under the same roof in Danville, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. The first, John Marshall Harlan, son of James Harlan, a prominent politician and slaveholder. The second, Robert James Harlan. Born a slave in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, on December 12, 1816. Brought to Kentucky as a boy. Raised in the Harlan household. Educated alongside James’s white sons. It was widely understood in the hushed, polite etiquette of slaveholding society that James Harlan was Robert’s biological father. John and Robert were half-brothers. The two of them ate at the same table. Studied the same lessons. Walked the same halls of the same house. One was free. One was property. The life of Robert Harlan, born a slave, tests our national “why” against reality. The test: given a fraction of the opportunity the Declaration promised, could a Black man match the free men who had kept him in chains? In 1849, he goes to the California Gold Rush. A Black man, legally classified as livestock, runs a business in a boomtown where the rules haven’t finished being written yet. Within eighteen months, he comes back east with a fortune — somewhere between forty-five thousand and ninety thousand dollars in gold and currency. Worth millions today. He returns to Ohio and invests in real estate. He opens a photography and daguerreotype gallery in Cincinnati. He purchases his freedom from the Harlan family. He sails to England. Spends nine years in the high-society horse racing circuit. The Kentucky style, taught in English jockey clubs by a man who had been born in chains. He comes back. Settles in Cincinnati. He opens the first school for Black children in the city. He becomes a trustee for the local Colored Orphan Asylum. He becomes the first African American member of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee. In 1872, he serves as a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention. President Ulysses S. Grant requests a private audience with him. They sit together and discuss international treaties with England, because Robert knows England better than most of Grant’s cabinet. They discuss the racial situation in the post-war South. Th… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

They came for him in the night as men come for the things they fear. The house was small and made of stone and set against a hillside in a country not his own. He knew they would come. He had seen it in a dream. A woman. She had held his head in her arms and painted his face as though preparing him for the earth. He woke to the smell of smoke. The fire climbed the walls and found the timber roof and the room filled with a light that was not daylight. He rose and gathered the bedding and the cloaks and threw them on the flames but the flames took them and grew. Outside he could hear the men shifting in the dark. They would not come in. They knew who he was and what he had been and not one among them would face him in the close space of a burning room. He wrapped his cloak around his left arm. He drew his dagger with his right hand. He was forty-six years old and he had fought at Potidaea and at Delium and had commanded fleets and toppled governments and seduced a king’s wife and betrayed every city that ever loved him. He went through the fire. Through the door untouched. The flames behind him and the blade before him and the men scattered like dogs. Not one stood. Not one raised a sword. They fell back into the darkness and from the darkness they threw their javelins and their arrows. They killed him from a distance. Men who would not speak their names. The woman came to him after the killers had gone. She pulled the robes from her own body and wrapped him in them and buried him with what she had, which was not much. She had loved him. Athens had loved him. Sparta had loved him and feared him and Persia had sheltered him and all of them in their time had tried to use him and all of them in their time had sent him away. Now he lay in the dirt in Phrygia with a courtesan’s garments for a shroud and the empire he had broken was still breaking, three years after the ships went down. He had stood on the stone steps of the assembly and told a democracy that patience was cowardice. That what they had wasn’t enough. That strength meant reaching, always reaching. They believed him. They sent the fleet. And they spent the rest of their history trying to recover what they had already owned. Twenty-four centuries later, ships move through the Strait of Hormuz again. Slowly. Only with permission. Iranian armed forces watch from the coast and the ships that pass have paid to pass, a million dollars or more per crossing, in yuan and cryptocurrency, and the men who own them call it progress. A Greek-owned bulk carrier was the first through. Four hundred tankers waiting behind it in the Persian Gulf like cattle at a gate. There was a time when oil moved through the strait every hour of every day. A hundred tankers a week threading the narrows between Iran and Oman, and the arrangement that kept them moving was not a show of force. It was the quiet way. Patient. The way that asked nothing of the Navy and nothing of the taxpayer and cost no one a single life. At a moment of strength, we chose weakness. This is that story. Blood and salt. Salt and blood. Act I. The Beautiful Man Summer. 416 BC. A man named Alcibiades entered seven chariots in the races at Olympia. No private citizen had ever done this. No king had done it. His teams took first, second, and fourth. Euripides wrote him a victory ode. He fed the tens of thousands of spectators from gold and silver vessels he had borrowed from the Athenian state treasury. He did not ask permission. No one stopped him because no one in Athens could stop Alcibiades from doing anything. He was born into the highest family in the city. His father died in battle when the boy was three and Pericles himself took the child as his ward. He grew up in the house of the man who built the Athenian empire. He learned how power worked by watching it at the dinner table. He was beautiful. Plutarch says the beauty flowered out with each successive season of his life and made him lovely in boyhood and youth and manhood alike. He cultivated it. He knew what beauty was worth in a democracy where citizens voted with their eyes as much as their ears. He had a lisp. His r’s came out as l’s. The comic poets mocked him for it. The young men of Athens copied it. They copied the way he walked and the way he wore his robes and the way he let his cloak drag along the ground behind him. He set fashions the way a stone makes ripples. He did not follow anything. He bought a dog. An extraordinary animal, large and beautiful. He paid seventy minas for it. A working man in Athens earned one drachma a day. Seventy minas was seven thousand drachmas. The whole city talked about the dog and its price and the arrogance of the man who paid it. Then Alcibiades cut off the dog’s tail. His friends came to him in alarm. All of Athens is talking about this, they said. Everyone is angry. He laughed. That is exactly what I want, he said. Let them talk about the dog. Then they will not say something worse about me. He understood something about democracies that Pericles had understood before him but would never have exploited. A democracy is a creature of attention. Control what it watches and you control what it does. Give it a scandal it can chew on so it won’t notice the larger thing beneath it. Alcibiades wasn’t just vain. He was a propagandist of the self. Every outrage was calculated. Every scandal, a screen. The most complicated thing about him was Socrates. At Potidaea, in 432, Athens besieged the rebellious colony through a brutal winter. Alcibiades was young and serving his first campaign. The fighting was close and ugly, the kind of siege work where men die in ditches for a few yards of frozen ground. Alcibiades was wounded. He went down in the line and the enemy came for him and Socrates stepped over his body and fought them off alone. The philosopher in his threadbare cloak standing between his student and the spears. He saved the boy’s life and then he used his influence to make sure Alcibiades received the prize for valor. Not himself. The student. He thought that tying honor to the young man’s name might anchor the ambition to something worthy. Twelve years later at Delium Alcibiades repaid the debt. Athens lost the battle badly. The line broke and the men ran. Alcibiades on horseback. He could have ridden clear. Instead he found Socrates retreating on foot through the chaos, an old man with a shield and no horse in a field full of cavalry, and he refused to leave him. He rode beside the philosopher and kept the pursuing army off him until they were both clear. He loved Socrates. Not just love. He loved him and wanted to be him. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades bursts into a dinner party uninvited and drunk and crowned with ribbons. He delivers a speech about Socrates that is half confession and half accusation. He says Socrates is the only human being who has ever made him feel ashamed of the way he lives. He says he knows he should listen. He knows the philosopher is right about the care of the soul and the dangers of ambition and the hollowness of public adoration. But he cannot do it. The roar of the crowd is louder than the voice of the philosopher. The people want him and he cannot say no to the people because the people are a mirror and in the mirror he is a god. Socrates could not save him. Athens would remember. When they put the philosopher on trial decades later, the ghost of Alcibiades was in the room. You were supposed to make him better. You were his teacher. Look what he became. Every democracy has an Alcibiades. The question is whether it listens to him. He grew up in the house that built the strategy. The Athens empire won by not fighting. The walls protected the corridor between the city and the port. The navy controlled the sea. Tribute paid for everything. The rule was simple. Do not overextend. Be patient. Sit in strength and let time grind the enemy down. It worked. By 421 the war with Sparta had lasted ten years and both sid… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The shingles were hot enough to burn through his knees if he stopped moving. July in Leavenworth and the sun hit the roof and the heat came off in waves you could see rising like water that wasn’t there. He was skinny. Wiry. The kind of thin that doesn’t come from a gym. It comes from being on a roof in Kansas every day for years until the work carves you down to what’s essential and everything else burns off. He moved well up there. You don’t notice a good roofer until you watch one. The way the body knows where the pitch changes, the way the hands find the nail gun without looking. He was good at his work. You could see that from the ground. He lived above the great river. In the evening, he walked down the giant hill to the beer store. Not drove. Walked. He came back with a couple of tall boys, and he sat in the symphony of cicadas and evening glow and drank them. In the morning he went up on somebody else’s roof. Six days a week. Before I lived next to him, and after I left. He was a good neighbor. Quiet. Didn’t bother anybody. Had the sense not to drive after he’d been drinking. I never asked for his papers. It didn’t occur to me to. Little kids would play around his yard. He would drink his beer, listen to the cicadas, and go back to work. Some nights he dreamed. I don’t know what about. Probably the things men dream about when they’re far from where they started. I knew what I needed to know about the man. I don’t know where he is now. Maybe still in Leavenworth. Maybe he went home. Maybe ICE pulled him off a roof last year and put him on a plane. I think about him sometimes. Not because his story is tragic. It isn’t. His story is the story of the purpose of life. Eat and drink with those you love, and enjoy your work. A man who does hard work and drinks a beer after and goes to bed and gets up and does it again. There are millions of stories like his, and that’s the point. The tragedy isn’t his. It’s ours. Act I. The Roofer We have a wound. It’s been open for forty years. It’s rot. Gangrene. We want the roofer on the roof. We want the cheap shingles. We want the restaurant meal and the picked lettuce and the framed house. We won’t decide what we owe the people who do the work. Do we look at him drinking his beer in the evening and ask what we owe him? Want his kids in our schools? Hospitals? Do we count him in the census or plan for his kids or acknowledge that he’s been here for forty years and he’s our neighbor? Do we punish the businesses that hire him? In 1986, a young man crossed a border. Maybe he walked. Or rode in the back of something. He was thin even then, probably. Nineteen or twenty. He found work on roofs because nobody asks for papers on a roof. The sun and the shingles and the years carved him down to what you saw from the ground in Leavenworth. A man made of wire and work. That same year, a president looked at three million people just like him and said the honest thing. They’re here. They’re being abused. Anybody who’s here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially or physically. Those are the words of a conservative Senator, talking about a Republican president. Reagan treated the wound. He signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Offered legalization. Toughened employer penalties. It was imperfect. It was unpopular. Maybe the roofer got his papers that year. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t understand the process or didn’t trust it or couldn’t get to the office or didn’t know the window was open. Three million people and not all of them made it through the door. But the door was open. That was the last time. Forty years ago. The wound was three million people. Nobody treated it again. Not the next president or the one after that or the one after that. Every Congress looked at it and saw how unpopular it read in the papers and said later. When we break it down, there is no Congress. There is ‘we.’ ‘We’ are the people. We are Congress. We need courage. The easy thing was to talk tough or talk compassionate depending on the audience and do nothing real. So the wound grew. Six million. Eight million. Eleven million. The flesh going gray at the edges. The roofer kept working. He got older the way men who work outside get older. Not soft. Stiff. The sun took the back of his neck first and then his forearms and then everything the shirt didn’t cover turned to leather. His knees learned the pitch of every style of roof in eastern Kansas. Some mornings they wouldn’t bend right until he’d been up there an hour and the heat worked into them. He stayed thin because the work kept him thin. The weight never came because there was nowhere for it to go. The body was still doing what it was built for. It just cost more to do it. He didn’t need the country to decide. He’d already decided. He was staying. He was working. He was living the purpose of life. The country was the one that couldn’t make up its mind. And a wound you won’t decide to treat is a wound that decides for you. Act II. The Surgery And then we tried to amputate. The largest deportation effort in American history. The most money. The most agents. The most political will any administration has ever brought to this. We doubled the ICE workforce. Twelve thousand new agents. Over 1,200 agreements with state and local law enforcement. Detention capacity pushed to nearly 70,000, the highest America has ever seen. National Guard deployed. Door-to-door operations announced. Billions committed. We swung the blade. Here’s what it hit. The Brookings Institution tracked the results. Actual deportations in 2025 came to roughly 310,000 to 315,000. Under Biden’s final year, the number was 285,000. The largest enforcement operation in American history moved the needle about thirty thousand people. The administration claimed 2.2 million self-deported. Internal government figures obtained by CBS News showed official tracking recorded about 13,000 in the first six months. Brookings estimated somewhere between 210,000 and 405,000 left voluntarily above the normal baseline. Be generous. Call it half a million to 700,000. Deportations and voluntary departures combined. We started with around eleven million undocumented immigrants. Ten million people are still here. The roofer is probably still here. The wound is still open. We spent billions to move the needle thirty thousand deportations beyond what the previous administration achieved without the raids, without the National Guard, without the door-to-door operations. Without the Americans shot in the streets. Thirty thousand. On a population of eight to ten million. That’s no more than a rounding error with a budget. But the cost wasn’t only money. The blade didn’t just miss the target. It cut the wrong tissue. ICE arrests quadrupled. But arrests of people without criminal convictions increased sevenfold. The machine we built to find dangerous criminals like the cartel operatives, the traffickers, the genuine threats, pointed itself instead at roofers and dishwashers and farmhands. Not because those people were dangerous. Because the operation needed bodies to justify its scale, and the roofer is easier to find than the cartel operative. The roofer is at work. On a roof. He’s where he always is. He’s not hiding. We chose weakness. We fought the wrong enemy on the wrong ground. Every agent who pulled a roofer off a job site was an agent not chasing a trafficker. Every bed in a detention facility occupied by a dishwasher was a bed not holding a threat. We had limited resources and we spent them on the people who were never the problem, and the people who were the problem watched from wherever they watch. Federal judges found that ICE violated hundreds of court orders. Missed deadlines. Deported people after courts issued injunctions. Transferred detainees in defiance of judicial rulings. The Board of Immigration Appeals was shrunk by nearly half and packed with appointees who ruled for the government in all but one of twen… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

You’re gassing up at a Flying J just west of Rawlins, Wyoming, and the wind is having its way with you. The gusts come off the high plains at sixty miles an hour, shoving your truck door open, ripping it from your hand. Down the interstate you passed two semis on their sides, lying in the median like dead animals. Strange lattice fences line the highway; if you’re not from here you don’t know they’re snow fences. They’re losing. Truckers and old wise ones call this stretch the Snow Chi Minh Trail. They’re not joking. You squeeze the pump handle and watch the numbers climb. You do the math without meaning to. You watch the bill tick higher. Higher. A refinery sits less than two hours west of here in Sinclair. You can see the stacks from the highway. Wyoming pumps oil. Wyoming refines oil. And somehow the number on this pump is set by a war seven thousand miles away in a gulf that doesn’t get cold like this. Why? The easy answer is oil. That’s the answer they give you on television. But it’s not the real answer. The real answer is older, stranger, and closer to your life than you’ve been told. It’s a trap. Act I. The Architecture Before we get to the gas pump, we need to go back. Five scenes. Each one has men in it making decisions, and those decisions still set the price on that pump in Rawlins. Scene one. Tehran, 1953. The smell of summer dust. Mohammad Mosaddegh is Iran’s constitutionally appointed prime minister. He has overwhelming democratic parliamentary support. An old man with a long face who sometimes wept in parliament and received foreign dignitaries in his pajamas from bed. The British thought he was mad. Crazy. He was not mad. He nationalized Iranian oil. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which you know today as BP, had been pumping Iranian crude for decades and paying Iran pennies on the dollar for it. Mosaddegh asked to audit the books. The British refused. So he kicked them out. They would not go quietly. British intelligence drew up a plan to remove Mosaddegh. They called it Operation Boot. But Mosaddegh had expelled British diplomats and intelligence officers along with the oilmen. The British spy agency MI6 had no one left in the country. They couldn’t do it alone. So they went to Washington. The Truman administration said no. But in January 1953, Eisenhower took office, and the British changed the sales pitch. They stopped talking about oil and started talking about communism. Iran was unstable. The Soviet Union was circling. It was a Cold War argument built for a Cold War president. Eisenhower approved the operation. Allen Dulles at CIA set the budget at a million dollars. And the man they chose to run it was Kermit Roosevelt. In July, Roosevelt crossed the Iranian border in the back seat of a car. He was the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. A bureaucrat’s face. Black glasses. High forehead. A colleague once called him the last person you’d expect to be up to his neck in dirty tricks. That colleague was Kim Philby, the most famous double agent in British history. Roosevelt was a career spy and he had come to overthrow a government. He carried with him a million dollars in cash and a plan called Operation Ajax. He was later asked on camera whether the million dollars was real. Yes, he said. Though he only spent a fraction of it. The plan was to buy crowds and make it look like the Iranian people wanted their prime minister gone. The first attempt failed. Mosaddegh’s people arrested the Shah’s messenger before he could deliver the decree. The Shah, who was supposed to be the face of the new order, panicked and flew to Rome. CIA headquarters cabled Roosevelt to stop. Come home. It’s over. Roosevelt read the cable and said no. We’re not done here. The next day, paid crowds poured out of southern Tehran shouting for the Shah. Soldiers joined them. By the end of the day, the people had overrun Mosaddegh’s house; he had fallen, and the path was open for the Shah’s long authoritarian rule. A twenty-six-year dictatorship had begun. The Shah told Roosevelt, “I owe my throne to God, my people, and to you.” Some years later, Washington helped him build SAVAK. His secret police. CIA-trained, American-designed, and for a quarter century one of the most efficient instruments of surveillance and torture in the Middle East. The Shah kept the oil flowing west. Washington kept quiet. This arrangement held for twenty-six years. There was no congressional vote on any of it. No treaty. No debate. The coup was not about oil alone. But without oil, there is no coup story to tell. Remember this scene. We’ll come back to it. Scene two. Camp David, in the Maryland woods. August 13, 1971. A Friday. Richard Nixon has called his inner circle to the presidential retreat. They arrive quietly. No press. Some of the men in the room do not know why they’ve been summoned until they get there. The problem. After World War II the victorious allies built a monetary system called Bretton Woods. It was elegant and it was fragile. They pegged the dollar to gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce. Every other currency, pegged to the dollar. Any foreign central bank could present dollars at the Treasury window and receive gold in return. The system made the dollar the foundation of the world economy. It worked as long as America didn’t print more dollars than it had gold to cover. And then America printed more dollars than it had gold to cover. Vietnam. The Great Society. The space race. By 1971 there were far more dollars in foreign hands than there was gold in the vault. The reserves had fallen to ten billion dollars against forty billion in foreign liabilities. Frenchman Charles de Gaulle saw it first, or at least said it loudest. He had long resented what France called America’s exorbitant privilege, the power to print the world’s money and spend it however it wished while other nations held the paper. In 1965 France began converting dollar reserves into gold and pressing the United States where Bretton Woods was weakest. Other countries followed. The gold was physically leaving. Inside Camp David that weekend the arguments ran hot. Arthur Burns, the Federal Reserve chairman, worried about America’s word. The country had made a promise. You could exchange dollars for gold. Breaking that promise would shatter trust in the international system. John Connally, the Treasury Secretary, did not much care about trust. He was a Texan. He wanted to close the window and use the crisis as a club to force other countries to revalue their currencies upward. Paul Volcker, undersecretary for monetary affairs, was somewhere between. He understood the necessity but feared the disorder. George Shultz, the budget director and a student of Milton Friedman, had the most radical view. Let it all float. No more fixed rates. Let the market decide what a dollar is worth. Nixon listened to all of them but cared about one thing. How would it play with the American public on Monday morning? On Sunday evening, August 15, the president went on national television. He announced that the United States would no longer honor the Bretton Woods commitment. The gold window was closed. Dollars could no longer be exchanged for gold. He did not ask Congress. He did not consult allies. He did not warn them. America’s allies woke up Monday morning to a unilateral break in the postwar monetary order. The promise was broken. Every finance minister on earth asked the same question. If the dollar wasn’t worth gold, what was it worth? Temporary answers came fast, but none held. The dollar fell. Inflation climbed. The international monetary system drifted without an anchor. Then the answer arrived. Not from a conference room. From a war. Scene three. An American gas station in October 1973. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The United States airlifted weapons to Israel. The Arab producers announced an oil embargo against the United States and its allies. America discovered a critical share of its energy depende… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Act I. The Mountain Danny Kowalski’s alarm went off at four-fifteen. He dressed in the dark so he wouldn’t wake the baby. Jeans, thermal, boots. His wife, Sarah, still asleep on her side. One arm over her belly, where the second one was growing. He pulled the door shut. Stood in the cold on the landing of their apartment in Chambersburg and waited for the truck. Rick pulled up at four-thirty with the headlights off until Danny waved. Kyle was already in the back seat. Danny climbed in. Took the thermos of gas station coffee Kyle handed him. They drove south on 11 and picked up 16 east toward the mountain. Nobody talked much. The radio was on low. A voice was saying something about the billionaire tax started by a senator from Vermont. Rick reached for the dial and turned it up a little. The bill had passed. Five percent a year on anybody worth more than a billion dollars. Three thousand dollars for every American making under a hundred and fifty. The President had signed it that morning. The numbers floated through the cab the way numbers do at four-thirty in the morning when you haven’t finished your coffee. Kyle said something from the back seat that might have been “we’ll see” or might have been nothing. Rick turned it back down. They were three men on a six-month contract doing electrical work for the federal government inside a top-secret facility most Americans had never heard of and weren’t supposed to think about. Danny had his journeyman’s card eighteen months. This was the best job he’d had since he got it. Prevailing wage. Thirty-five an hour. More than his father ever made. More than most of the guys he graduated with would ever see. He knew that. Everybody told him that. What nobody told him was how thirty-five an hour could still leave you sitting on the couch at midnight after your pregnant wife fell asleep, doing the math again on the back of an envelope, and coming up short the same way you came up short last month. They didn’t buy expensive stuff. They even stopped eating beef. He had a new baby coming. His father had made less and owned a house by thirty. The road climbed. Houses thinned. Farms gave way to timber, timber to the Blue Ridge, dark against a sky that wasn’t black anymore. Mist hung in the hollows. This was the gap where Stuart’s cavalry had come through after Gettysburg, though Danny didn’t know that. The land knew it. The road knew it. The mountains on either side were old enough to have seen it all and said nothing. They turned off 16 at the access road and stopped at the first gate. Rick handed over the badges. Pentagon Police had seen them every day for almost six months, but it didn’t matter. The guard checked them against a list and looked in the truck bed and waved them through. They parked in the lot and walked to the portal. The portal was the size of a stadium entrance cut into the side of the mountain. It didn’t look like it belonged there. It looked like something a country would build only if it really believed the world might end and that it was worth spending whatever it cost to make sure the government survived. The tram was down. “Walking today,” the site foreman said. He was a retired master sergeant named Colvin who had been working at the complex for eleven years. He referred to it only as “the Rock.” He said it the way a man talks about a church he’s attended all his life. Respect. No explanation. They started into the tunnel. Danny had been on the job three weeks, but he still wasn’t used to the walk. The tunnel was wide enough for trucks. The walls were rough-cut and dark and wet under the fluorescent strips that ran along the ceiling in an unbroken line that curved away ahead of them until the curve swallowed it. The first time he’d made this walk, Colvin had stopped the crew about two hundred yards in and put his hand flat on the wall. “Everyone thinks this is granite,” he'd said. “It’s not. It’s greenstone. Metabasalt. Granite fractures. This doesn’t. It absorbs the force and holds together. That’s why they picked this mountain.” Danny didn’t know what metabasalt was. He’d nodded the way you nod when someone tells you something you know you’re supposed to care about. But the word had stuck with him. Greenstone. A rock so hard they’d tunneled deep and blasted half a million cubic yards out of this mountain in ten months and built a city inside the hole. They walked. Heavy packs. The daylight behind them faded and then disappeared around the curve. The air changed. It was cool and constant, a temperature that had nothing to do with the season. The hum of the ventilation was everywhere, sourceless, the way silence is in a place that has never been silent. Kyle made a joke about something and his voice sounded different in the tunnel. Smaller. He didn’t make another one. Danny counted his steps sometimes. Not because he wanted to know the distance. Because counting was something to do while the mountain pressed down on him from every direction. He knew the rock above him was hundreds of feet thick. The tunnel curved to deflect a blast wave. Behind the doors at the end of this walk were five three-story buildings that weren’t attached to the walls. They were mounted on springs so they’d ride out the shockwave of a nuclear detonation the way a boat rides a swell. He knew all this because Colvin had told them, and because Colvin loved telling them, and because the telling was part of how Colvin made the place make sense to himself. They walked for thirty minutes. Maybe more. Danny’s boots were loud on the concrete and the sound bounced off the greenstone and came back to him changed. They just kept going. Deeper into the mountain. Then the blast doors. They were enormous. Not in the way a building is enormous, where you stand back and take it in. In the way a thing is enormous when you are standing next to it and it makes you understand something about your size that you hadn’t understood before. They were steel and thick and existed for one reason, to seal a mountain shut while the surface of the earth burned. Lately, Danny walked through them every morning. He showed his badge again on the other side and picked up his tools and went to work. Pulled wire. Ran conduit. Terminated panels in rooms where generals would sit if the worst day in human history ever came. He did it well. He was good with his hands and he was careful and he took pride in the work, the same way his father had taken pride in his work at the shop, and his grandfather before that. At lunch, he sat on a chair near some old antenna and ate the sandwich Sarah had made him. He didn’t have his phone. Even if he had, there was no signal inside the mountain. He’d check it when he got back to the truck. He thought about Sarah, still in bed when he left. The baby, Lily, fourteen months old, who had started walking three months ago and kept pulling herself up on the coffee table and falling and pulling herself up again. He thought about the one coming. April, they said. A boy. He hadn’t told the crew yet. He didn’t know why. Maybe because saying it out loud would make the math louder too. Another mouth. Another body in an apartment where four would be tight. Another reason Sarah couldn’t work, even if they could find daycare that didn’t cost more than she’d make at the pharmacy where she’d been before Lily came. He finished the sandwich and walked down the corridor to fill his water bottle. On the way back, he passed the bunk rooms. He’d seen them before, but today he stopped. The racks were six high, maybe eight, bolted to the wall, bare mattresses on metal frames stacked so close together a man would have to roll sideways to get in. Colvin had said they were hot bunks. One shift climbed out, the next shift climbed in, mattress still warm from somebody else’s body. Sailors and soldiers sleeping in shifts in the belly of a mountain, everything accounted for. Somebody had planned this. Someb… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The day before we started bombing, Iran agreed to stop stockpiling nuclear material. The day before. We bombed them anyway. This is a piece about what strength actually means. And what we do now. Act I. The Playground The morning sun, warm on the blacktop. The yard smelled like cut grass and rubber. Beyond the kickball diamond, a basketball hoop with a chain net and monkey bars where the younger kids hung upside down. Row of swings with pebbles worn smooth underneath. The bases painted on the blacktop in faded white, and the outfield ran long to the fence where the grass was patchy from a thousand sneakers. It was the kind of yard where everything important happened in twenty minutes. The game was kickball. Rules whatever the kids said they were. No ref. No umpire. Just the blacktop and the chalk lines and the fence around the yard and twenty kids who wanted to play. Fair or foul, safe or out. They argued and settled it themselves. Someone would storm off. They always came back. The game was the thing that mattered, and everybody knew it. There was a big kid. When he was a 4th grader, his class had won the school kickball tournament. They had beaten even his sister’s 5th-grade class, and he would probably remind her forever. Now he was a 5th grader. He could kick the ball over the fence, and everybody knew it. He didn’t need to prove it every time. He just played. He knew that when the game was orderly, he got to play more. They only had a twenty-minute recess twice a day. There was no time for kids to both argue and play kickball. So he played straight. The game moved along. The teams stayed even and the little kids got their turns at the plate. He was the best player out there and the game was better because of him. Sometimes there was trouble. A kid would shove another kid off the base. A kid would bring something to the yard that didn’t belong there. And everybody looked at the big kid. Not because someone told them to. Because that is what happens when you are the biggest kid out there. You don’t get to decide whether that responsibility is yours. It just is. And the big kid would step in. He’d get between the two kids and he’d sort it out and the game would go on. Nobody questioned it. That was the deal. They didn’t have enough time to argue and play. You are the biggest, so when it matters, you act. And when you act right, everyone respects you. Not because they fear you. Because you earned it. The big kid won most games. But he didn’t win them by hitting people. He won them by being the kid everybody wanted on their team. The kid who held the game together. The kid who could kick it over the fence but didn’t need to every time. His power was obvious and because it was obvious he didn’t have to use it. The game moved faster when he kept it quiet. One day, the 3rd grader mouthed off. Kicked rocks at him. This kid mouthed off a lot, and most of the other kids didn’t love it. Today, maybe the call was bad. Maybe it wasn’t. It was the kind of thing that happened every day on the blacktop, and every day the kids sorted it out. Today, something was different in the big kid. He had been out there every day. He sorted out the fights and kept the teams even and stepped in when the little kids needed him and nobody ever thanked him for it. The game went on because of him and the game always went on. Some days he was tired of being the reason. Some days he just wanted to kick the ball and not carry the whole yard on his back. The 3rd grader mouthed off. A small thing, but today the big kid felt something hot and simple rise in his chest. For a half second, he held the ball and knew. He knew what the right thing was. He had done the right thing a hundred times. Walk away. Let it go. Be the big kid who doesn’t need to prove it. He knew. But knowing wasn’t enough. Not today. He took the ball, and he threw it hard into the little kid’s face. Then the game stopped. No more kickball. Not because the kids were afraid. The big kid was always the biggest. That was never the question. The question was whether he would play straight. And now they knew. The 3rd grader sat on the blacktop with blood on his lip, and the other kids stood there. The blood tasted like copper, and the kid didn’t cry. He pressed his hand against his mouth. Looked at it, and then he looked away. Not at the big kid. Not at anyone. He got up and walked to the fence and stood there with his back to the yard. He would remember. Not the pain. The pain was already gone. He would remember that he was small and the big kid was big and the big kid chose to do it anyway. Something had changed that you could not change back. The big kid was still the biggest. He could still kick it over the fence. But nobody wanted to play with him now. Not because he was strong. Because he had shown them what he would do with it. The game didn’t end that day. The kids came back the next morning because kids always come back. But it was different. The little kids played careful. They watched the big kid and they kept their distance and when the calls were close they didn’t argue. The game went on but the game was worse. Smaller. A game held together by fear instead of respect. The big kid was still out there. He was still the best player on the blacktop. But he had traded something he couldn’t get back. Or maybe he could. Maybe the game wasn’t over. Maybe the little kids would come back when the big kid gave them a reason to. Not with another throw. Not by being the biggest. But by playing straight again, morning after morning, until the yard remembered what it was like before. It would not feel like winning. But it was the only way the game could be good again. Act II. Diplomacy ‘With’ Other Means The playground is a metaphor. But the game is real. For eighty years, America kept a game going that most of the world depends on. We keep shipping lanes open in the Persian Gulf so that oil moves and economies run. We keep a Navy in the South China Sea so trade routes stay free. We built alliances across Europe and the Pacific because stable partners make stable markets and stable markets make Americans prosperous. We are the big kid on the global blacktop, and when we play straight, the game works. This is not generosity. This is strategy. When we invest in the security of our partners, we invest in the conditions that benefit the American people. The sailors on destroyers in the Gulf aren’t there for Iran or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. We are right to be there. We are right to protect the American people. We are right to maintain the architecture that keeps the world’s economy from collapsing into chaos. That is not imperialism. It’s the big kid stepping in when someone gets shoved off the base. That is what strength is for. Another wrinkle. The point of business is to increase profits. That’s how markets work. Should an oil company sell oil to Americans for less when the global market commands a higher price? No. No business would. No business should. The oil man isn’t cheating you at the pump. He’s responding to the market, and the market is responding to supply, and the supply is responding to what happens in a narrow waterway on the other side of the world. When the Strait of Hormuz is open, oil flows. When oil flows, the price at your gas station reflects a stable global market. Even though it’s on the other side of the world, when the Strait closes, supply shrinks, and the price goes up. Not because anyone decided to punish you. Because that is what happens when the big kid stops playing straight, and the game falls apart. You felt it at the pump this month. You will feel it in groceries next month, and in airfares the month after that. Your kitchen table is connected to the playground. It always has been. We just don’t think about it until the price tells us. The question is not ‘whether’ America should be strong. The question is ‘how’ we should be strong. The most famous line about war has been misquoted for two cen… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Once upon a time, I might have been a Democrat. The theory sounds good. Love your neighbor. Build systems that catch people when they fall. Use the government to do what charity alone can’t. I’ve read the arguments. Listened to the sermons. But the more I pull on the logic threads, the more it comes apart. Not because the compassion is wrong. The compassion is right. After all, rend our hearts, not our garments. We need to dig deeper. I’m listening to James Talarico, the Texas state rep running for Senate. The seminarian. Stephen Colbert wasn’t allowed to put him on television. He gave a sermon in Lubbock, where he said the word “love” three dozen times, and people in the second most conservative city in America didn’t laugh. He says politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors. He’s right. That’s not a liberal idea. It’s a constitutional idea. The framers called it the General Welfare. It’s one of our six national goals, along with Justice, Liberty, Order, Defense, and Union. So I’m writing this to Democrats. Not as an opponent. You’ve been searching for a path forward because you’re getting pummeled. I think your guy is close to something real. And I don’t want you to waste it. Let’s start with a story. There’s a town in northern Missouri called Chillicothe. It sits where the Grand River gathers its creeks and the hills open into bean fields. I’ve chased big whitetail bucks there. The town is real. The math is real. The people I’m about to describe are not. And there are a thousand towns like this between here and Washington. Act I. Chillicothe The Grand River comes down out of Iowa in two forks. They run south through Livingston County and meet a few miles west of town. From there, the river carries everything the land gives it. The Thompson comes in from the north. Coon Creek, Blackwell Branch, Shoal Creek. All feed into the same channel. Half a dozen named waterways and a hundred unnamed draws all running to the same low ground. They all flow to the Missouri. The Missouri to the Mississippi. The Mississippi to the Gulf. This is where the country changes. West of here, the hills are closer together and thick with timber. Draws steep and tangled, the kind of ground that breaks equipment and hides cattle. East of here, the land opens. The hills roll longer and lower. The big oaks give way to grass. Bean fields. Corn ground. Fencelines you can see for a mile. Chillicothe sits on this seam. Nine thousand people at the crossroads of 36 and 65, where the water gathers, and the hills let go. Grain elevator on the horizon. A Casey’s, where teenagers get donuts on Sunday mornings. A couple of churches. A bar that does a fish fry on Fridays during Lent. Washington Street runs through the middle of town. There’s a diner called the Grill. A farm supply store. A hardware store that’s been in the same family for three generations. The diner employs six people. The owner is a woman named Pam. She’s had the place eleven years. She’s not getting rich. The margins on a small-town diner are what you’d guess. She clears maybe forty thousand a year after she pays her people, her food costs, her insurance, her rent, and the fryer that breaks every winter. She pays her cooks too little. Her waitstaff get nine plus tips. It’s not enough. She knows it’s not enough. She’d pay more if she could. Then the minimum wage goes up. Not because anyone in Chillicothe asked for it. Because good people in Jefferson City and Washington decided that workers deserve more. And they’re right. Workers do deserve more. Nobody here disagrees with the principle. Pam runs the numbers on a Tuesday night after close. She’s at the same table where the farmers sit in the morning. Calculator, notebook, the grease smell still in the walls. At fifteen dollars an hour, her labor cost goes up thirty-one thousand dollars a year. She doesn’t have thirty-one thousand dollars. She has the diner. She can raise prices. A dollar on every plate. Maybe the regulars stay. Maybe they don’t. The regulars are the farmers and the guys from the MoDOT crew and the women from the school district office. They’re not rich either. A dollar a plate, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. That’s two hundred and fifty dollars a year out of their pockets. Money they would have spent at the hardware store. Or the farm supply. Or the fish fry. Or she can cut hours. She cuts the weekend breakfast shift. That’s Kaylee. Nineteen years old. Single mother. She was making nine dollars an hour plus tips on the weekend morning rush, which came out to about fourteen an hour, and it was the only shift that worked with her kid’s schedule. Kaylee doesn’t get a raise. Kaylee gets a phone call on a Tuesday night. Now Kaylee drives thirty-two miles to Cameron to pick up shifts at a Waffle House off I-35. She spends more on gas. She sees her kid less. The Waffle House pays fifteen. After gas and the extra childcare, she nets less than she made at the Grill. The farm supply store does its own math. Labor costs up. They raise the price on wire, on posts, on mineral tubs. Not a lot. Four percent, maybe five. Enough that the cattle rancher south of town notices when he’s buying supplies for calving season. He doesn’t say anything. He just tightens somewhere else. Doesn’t fix the fence on the north pasture. Puts off the vet check. Skips the bull sale in Trenton. The contractor who was going to build a starter home on the east side of town pencils it out again. Framing crew costs more. Materials cost more because the lumber yard raised prices for the same reason everyone else did. He was going to build two three-bedroom houses and list them at a hundred and eighty thousand. The kind of house a young couple with two incomes could buy. Now the numbers don’t work below two-ten. At two-ten, the young couple doesn’t qualify. He doesn’t build the houses. A year passes. Washington Street looks the same. The Grill is still open. The farm supply is still open. The churches still have Sunday service and the Casey’s still sells donuts. But Kaylee is gone. The houses weren’t built. The rancher’s north fence is sagging and he’s running heifers he should have culled. The hardware store cut its part-time kid. The diner is quieter on weekends. The creeks still run to the Grand. The country still opens east of town. The grain elevator still stands against the sky like it has for sixty years. Nobody did anything wrong. The people who wrote the bill wanted to help. Pam wanted to pay more. Kaylee wanted to work. The contractor wanted to build. The rancher wanted to buy a bull. Everyone loved their neighbor. And the water still runs downhill. Gravity. It doesn’t care what you meant. Act II. The Butterfly Here’s one place we need to keep digging. To raise wages, small businesses have to grow revenue. You can’t pay people with money you don’t have. Pam clears forty thousand a year. She pays federal income tax. Self-employment tax. State tax. After the government takes its share she keeps about thirty. That’s what she lives on. That’s what she runs the business on. Equipment. Repairs. The fryer. The margin between keeping Kaylee and cutting Kaylee’s shift is somewhere in the ten thousand dollars the government took. Cut her taxes. Not to make her rich. To give her room. The difference between forty and forty-six thousand dollars is the weekend shift. It’s Kaylee staying in Chillicothe instead of driving to Cameron. It’s the phone call Pam doesn’t have to make on a Tuesday night. But the cut comes with a condition. You get the break when your filings prove you paid livable wages. Every worker. Enough that none of them qualify for SNAP. Enough that none of them need the Earned Income Tax Credit. Enough that Kaylee can work the weekend shift and take her kid to the doctor without a government program covering the difference. Pam gets the cut and keeps wages flat, she loses it next year. The incentive only runs one direction. Pay your people, keep the break. Th… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Western Iraq. The Euphrates River Valley. Flat country. Date palms and canals and dust so fine it gets into the action of a rifle and into the boots and lungs of the men and women who carry them. The enemy buried bombs in the roads. Watched from rooftops. Wore no uniform. Walked among the living like the living until the moment he was not. A man drove a fuel truck and skimmed money from the sale and the money bought wire. The wire connected to a shell and a different man buried the shell in the road. Another man watched from a rooftop. Made a phone call and the convoy passed and the world turned white. That was how the killing worked. One network against another. Men hunting men. You mapped them with sources who whispered in doorways. Signals pulled from the air and things that will not be spoken of here or anywhere. You followed the money from the fuel truck to the market to the man who sold the wire to the man who buried the shell. Patient work. Human. The work of months compressed into a day that could be good or bad depending on whether your analyst got sleep. The night before the mission, they got ten minutes to call home. He made sure everyone else called home first, even if it was just to a friend. He was last. He had bought a cellphone for his daughter so he had someone to call. He didn’t call her mother anymore. Fifty-six months in the sandbox will do that. He called his daughter. Told her he loved her. Said something about school. She asked when he would call again, and he said Tuesday. He didn’t know if he would remember what day was Tuesday, because every day here was Monday. But his junior squad leader would remind him. Next morning in the briefing room. A young Brit stood in front of them and told jokes nobody understood. The Queen’s English. Accent like another language. He kept telling jokes. After a while, one man laughed. Then another. Then the room. He was there to teach them how the British system worked alongside the American ones. The Americans flew an airborne system over the city before patrols left, pre-detonating radio-controlled bombs in the roads. Unpredictable times, so the enemy couldn’t adapt easily. On the ground, both nations ran jammers that blocked the triggerman’s signal. Three allied systems, operating on similar frequencies in the same city. If they didn’t know about each other, the airborne system could detonate a bomb while a patrol was on top of it. A jammer could block the system trying to clear the road ahead. The machines could not sort this out on their own. A man with bad jokes and good patience sorted it out in an hour. He said he knew when they understood his accent because they laughed at his jokes. Even speaking the same language did not mean you understood each other. Then they went out into the dust. The dust came in storms that lasted days. When the storms came, the helicopters did not fly. You waited. Read a terrible book. The war went on without you because you are human and humans wait for weather. It did not call home. It had no one to lie to on Tuesday. Did not wait for dust. And here he was, in the middle of it. Another Monday. Act I. The Hard Way The systems helped. Electronic jammers on the convoys blocked radio signals that detonated the bombs. They worked. Casualties dropped. The Pentagon spent thirteen billion dollars and fielded thirty thousand jammers. But the jammers also knocked out friendly communications. Drone pilots lost control links because the jammers didn’t know the drones were there. The machines designed to save lives created new ways to get people killed. That was why the Brit was in the briefing room telling jokes. The machines could not sort themselves out. A man in a room could. And the enemy adapted. When the jammers blocked cell phone signals, he switched to pressure plates. When they blocked garage door openers, he switched to command wire. When the armor got thicker, he used explosively formed penetrators smuggled across the Iranian border that could punch through anything the Americans had. The bombs got cheaper. The countermeasures got more expensive. A thirty-dollar bomb against a thirteen-billion-dollar program, and the math never changed. It took four IED attacks to cause a casualty in 2004. By 2007 it took twenty. That was progress. Lives, saved. Mothers who answered the phone on Tuesday and heard their son’s voice. But IEDs still killed more than half the Americans who died in Iraq. The technology improved the odds. It did not change the game. The game changed when Sunni tribesmen in Anbar decided to trust the Americans enough to support them. They wanted no more violence in their backyards. The Awakening. Not a weapon system. Not an algorithm. Men deciding to trust other men. The oldest technology in war. The commander knew all of this. The jammers, the armor, the intelligence on his screens were tools. Good tools. Tools that kept his people breathing, and he made sure they all called home before he did. But he also knew that the kid from Oklahoma driving the lead vehicle was alive because a sergeant who hadn’t slept in thirty hours looked at a route map and said that road doesn’t feel right and they took the other one. He knew the mission went right because he had spent months earning trust from people who didn’t owe him any. Today, though, his patrol was quiet. Date palms and canals and dust. Just another Monday. That night, he went to the legal meeting. Several times per week, the commanders met with the lawyers to review the legality of orders and intent. Deliberate, lawyered, slow. When he arrived, the general’s aide was talking to some senior officers. The aide was always talking. Especially when he should be silent, he was talking. He had heard a rumor of some new tech that would change the game. A machine that could map every network in the province before the morning brief. Process every signal, every transaction, every phone call, every movement pattern. Identify the man who drives the truck and the man who sells the wire and the man who buries the shell and the man on the rooftop with the phone. It prints a confidence interval on a screen while the analyst sleeps and the sergeant finally closes his eyes. It can see what the sergeant felt. It can calculate what took months of whispers in doorways. Maybe someday soon, the kid from Oklahoma is driving the lead vehicle. The road hasn’t been cleared. The sergeant is running on fumes. The source that whispers in doorways hasn’t reported in three days. And the machine says the road is clear. Ninety-one percent confidence. The sergeant, on his best day, is maybe seventy percent. And the sergeant is rarely on his best day. Would you use it? If you chose not to use it, what would you tell the mothers and fathers of your Marines who died? They sent their sons and daughters to you to protect, even if that is not the reality for some. Can you look a mother in the eye and tell her you had a tool that might have saved her son and you chose not to use it? Every commander will make the same choice you just made. He will say yes because he is human. And that is the right answer. The question is what happens after. Act II. The Screen Twenty years later. The dust was gone, but it wasn’t. It was there in the way he read threat briefings, looking for the thing that wasn’t on the page. It was in his dreams, which he did not discuss. It was in his memory. A young sergeant who didn’t come home from a road that hadn’t been cleared. The commander was a senior officer now. Pentagon. Program manager. He wore a suit some days and a uniform others. Rooms with no windows where people briefed him on capabilities he’d spent twenty years wishing he’d had. He remembered the aide at the legal meeting. Always talking. The rumor of a machine that would change the game. Twenty years ago, it was just a rumor. Now it was a program with a budget and a timeline and a name he couldn’t say outside the room. It could map … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

An eternity ago on a Sunday night. But it was never about Sunday night. Unseasonably warm in Dallas. Blue sky, few clouds. February but it doesn’t feel like it. Feels like a gift after the recent ice. The kind of morning where you leave the door propped open and let the air in. It’s gonna be a big day. The biggest day, actually, if you’re in the business of cold beer and television sets. Championship Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday. After tonight, there’s no more football until September. Seven months of nothing. Sure, there’s the draft, and some exhibition games, but those don’t draw eyes. Nobody can fill a Sunday the way the NFL does, and everybody in the bar business knows it. Marco knows it, too. He showed up at noon. Early for a dishwasher, but Super Bowl Sunday isn’t a regular Sunday. Double prep. Endless plates. The noise from the dining room sounds like a stadium even before kickoff, and by halftime, the dish pit looks like something you’d need a building permit to fix. Marco’s been washing dishes at The End Zone for three years. The busboys bring back tubs. They say they scrape the plates, but they don’t. He sorts through the mess and puts the plates and silverware in the slotted trays and sprays them down and feeds them into the machine. They come out smoking hot, and he burns his hands stacking them. The assistant manager tells him to go faster. There are no breaks. There is no time to take out the trash. He’s nineteen years old, and he’s never once called in sick. He doesn’t care who wins. The game matters because it brings the people, and the people bring the money, and the money is the whole point. If the Seahawks win, good. If the Patriots win, good. If the halftime show is in English or Spanish or Mandarin, good. Ray is the owner. He pays Marco time-and-a-half on Super Bowl Sunday. As long as the dining room stays full and the checks stay open and Ray keeps the kitchen running past the fourth quarter, Marco’s good. Ray has owned The End Zone for eleven years. Thirty-two TVs, a smoker out back, and a lease he’d rather not talk about. He got into the bar business the way most people do. He thought it would be fun. It was, for about six months. Then it became a job. Then a religion. Show up early. Stay late. Pray a lot. Ray’s been up since four. Briskets went on at four-thirty. Ice delivery at seven. The produce guy shorted him limes again but that’s a Monday problem. Today is not a day for problems. Today is a day for solutions and the solution is simple: keep the TVs on, the beer cold, the tabs open. The NFL does the rest. He’s expecting three hundred covers tonight. Maybe more. He’s got two extra bartenders, a barback he borrowed from his buddy’s place in Deep Ellum, and enough wings to feed a small army. He’s run the numbers. If tonight goes the way last year went, he’ll clear enough to cover the entire month. The Super Bowl doesn’t just end the season. It pays for the hangover. By four o’clock, the lot’s already filling up. By five, the noise is right. That good noise. People are spending money and feeling good about it. Ray’s behind the bar and he’s moving, and he’s got that feeling that the whole machine is working. The kitchen’s not backed up. The taps are flowing. Nobody’s complaining. Then his phone buzzes. It’s Hutch. Hutch is Ray’s oldest friend. They go back to Plano, to high school, to a time when neither of them had to worry about anything more complicated than Friday night. Hutch is a good man. Loyal. The kind of guy who helps you move and doesn’t even ask for pizza. He’s also the kind of guy who’s been getting his news from places that make him angry. The text says: You better not show that halftime garbage. I’m serious. Ray doesn’t respond. He’s got tables to turn. Act I. Pregame Hutch doesn’t text again. He just shows up. Five-thirty, first quarter crowd settling in, noise building toward that pitch where you have to lean in to hear the person next to you. He’s wearing his Cowboys jersey. Aikman, now an announcer. Had it since they were kids. He’s got that look on his face. Ray’s seen it before. He’s been in the truck listening to something that got him wound up, and now he needs someone to agree with him. He doesn’t sit at his usual spot. Stands at the end of the bar where Ray’s pouring and waits. Ray sees him. Nods. Pours a Shiner and slides it down without asking. Hutch doesn’t touch it. “You see my text?” “I saw it.” “And?” “And I’ve got three hundred people in here, Hutch.” “That’s what I’m saying. Three hundred people who don’t want to watch some — “ “Three hundred people who are buying beer and eating wings and watching the game. That’s what they’re here for.” Hutch leans in. Lowers his voice like he’s being reasonable. Like he’s helping. “All I’m saying is flip it over to the other show during halftime. The real one. American music. Fifteen minutes. Nobody’s gonna complain.” “Half the bar’s gonna complain.” “No they won’t. They’ll thank you.” Ray keeps pouring. A four-top near the window flags him for another pitcher and he fills it without breaking stride. The kitchen bell rings twice. A busboy passes behind him with a tub and heads toward the back. Toward Marco and the machine. “Hutch. I love you. You know I love you. But I’m not turning off the Super Bowl halftime show in a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s the show the NFL is broadcasting. What Apple paid for. A hundred and thirty million people are going to watch. And those people in my bar are going to watch it here, on my TVs, with a beer in their hand that I sold them.” Hutch picks up the Shiner. Takes a drink. Sets it down a little too hard. “You sound like a company man, Ray.” “I sound like a man who owns a company.” “You know what they’re doing, right? You know what this is? This is them shoving it down our throats. The whole thing. The Spanish, the flags, the — “ Ray cuts him off. “Hutch.” “What?” “Who’s ‘them’?” Hutch doesn’t answer that. He looks up at the nearest TV. Highlights. Graphics. The machine that prints money. “You know what your problem is?” Hutch says. “You don’t care about anything except the register.” Ray almost laughs. Almost. Because that’s the first honest thing either of them has said. “Yeah,” Ray says. “That’s my job. That’s the whole job. I care about the register. The NFL cares about the register. Apple cares about the register. Every business in America cares about the register. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You taught me that.” “Don’t turn this around on me.” “I’m not turning anything around. I’m telling you what you already know. The NFL isn’t a public service. It’s not the government. It’s not a church. It’s a business. And it made a business decision. The most popular artist on the planet is playing the halftime show and a hundred and thirty million people are going to watch it and my bar is going to be full when they do. You want me to turn that off because you don’t like the guy? Because he sings in Spanish?” “It’s not about the language.” “Then what’s it about?” Hutch finishes the Shiner. He looks at Ray. His eyes turn distant. Act II. The Boardroom We leave the bar for a minute and head to the boardroom. In 1970, an economist named Milton Friedman wrote an essay for the New York Times. Title, eight words long: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Eight words that became the bedrock of American conservatism for the next half-century. They were framed in offices. Quoted in boardrooms. Taught in business schools. Used to justify every decision a corporation ever made that somebody didn’t like. You don’t like that we moved the factory overseas? The social responsibility of business is to make money. You don’t like that we cut your pension? The social responsibility of business is to make money. You don’t like that the CEO makes four hundred times what you make? The social responsibility of business is to make money. … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Blue sky, golden grass, tall sagebrush, mountains capped white behind. Chores done. Coffee in the sun room. He looks out across the south pasture. The tips of the tall sage quiver. The wind picks up the flags along the fence line, tugging at the screw lock chain links that hold them to the wire. The Stars and Stripes is up all the time, frayed at the edge. And the other. It’s been up since the election. Inside, a catalog open on the table. Maybe he’ll buy a new bull this year. He needs new genes. The best bulls make small calves that grow fast. Easy on the heifers, good for the pocketbook. Lot 42 has a two-year-old Simmental out of a high-altitude herd near Meeteetse. Good EPDs. Clean trich test. Should sire calves with a good frame and some thickness through the rib. He could go Angus. Tried and true. Good growth, good marbling, the sale barn in Billings knows what to do with a black calf. They’re nervous bulls, though. 2200-lbs and twitchy. His wife likes the Herefords. Red body, white face. She’s the one who has to move them when he’s at work in town, and Herefords are calm. She has made this point before, and she is not wrong. But the Simmental interests him. Supposed to be a good high-altitude cross. He’s never tried Simmental. He takes a sip of coffee. He’ll figure out the bulls later. The books come first. He closes the catalog and pulls the receipts toward him. The manila folder and the stack of printouts from the ranch supply account. He does the books every winter. Coffee, calculator, the table clear of everything except the numbers. He starts with what he knows. What he earned. What he spent. What the government says he owes and what it says it owes him. He’s not fast, but he’s careful. He keeps everything. His wife would tell you he keeps too much. But the numbers should tell a story that makes sense, and every year they do, more or less, and he files the return and writes the check or waits for the refund and keeps up with the work. This year, the numbers don’t. Not the income side. That’s fine. The calves sold. The cattle market was decent. He’s not complaining about what came in. It’s what went out that puzzles him. Act I. The Books He pulls the ranch supply printout and starts down the column. Fencing wire. He bought forty rolls in April, just like every spring. Last year, it was eighty-two dollars a roll. This year, one hundred and twelve. He looks at the number again. More than a hundred dollars for a roll of barbed wire. He writes it down. Moves on. The wheat didn't do much this year. It never does much. But he keeps the pivot running on the acres along the creek because his father did, and some years it pays for itself. Fertilizer. He spreads it on the hay meadows every spring. It’s not optional. You either feed the ground or the ground doesn’t feed the cattle. Last year, he paid four-eighteen a ton. This year, six-oh-five. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t ask. He just paid it because it was May and the hay meadows need it. Diesel. Up. Not as bad as the wire, but up. The bulk tank at the co-op, the same co-op his father used, the price on the board was higher every time he filled. Cake. Protein supplement for the cows in winter. Soybean meal and corn and molasses pressed into blocks or poured into troughs. The soybean price is tangled in something he doesn’t follow, something about China buying from Brazil now. He doesn’t get it. If there are more soybeans here, shouldn’t the price go down? And the cake is up twelve percent. The cows don’t eat less because Washington has some trade policy thing going on. Salt and mineral. Up, but not much. Vet supplies. Up. The squeeze chute he’d been pricing, the old one is twenty years old and the headgate sticks. The base model went from eighty-five to ninety-eight hundred between March and September. The better ones double that. He didn’t buy it. He’ll fix the headgate again. He adds the column. Adds it again. He’s careful. The number is right. He just doesn’t like it. He moves on. The calves brought good money. Nearly four ten a hundredweight, last year they only brought three twenty. The expenses ate the money the calves brought. Not all of it. He’s not broke. But wire is one-twelve, and the hydraulic chute is twenty grand. The space between what came in and what went out, where the bull purchase is possible, where a good squeeze chute is possible…the margin got thinner. And he doesn’t know why. If live weight cattle prices are near record highs, and he’s a cattle rancher, his margins should be good. That’s not true. He knows why. Everything cost more. He just doesn’t know why everything cost more. He’s heard the word tariff. He’s not sure how it connects to fencing wire in Wyoming. The president says the tariffs are on China, on Europe, on countries that have been ripping America off for decades. That sounds right to him. He voted for the man, and he’d vote for him again, and he’s not the kind to second-guess a thing just because it costs him. Everything worth doing costs something. But he’s looking at the numbers. One-hundred-twelve dollars for a roll of wire that was eighty-two dollars a year ago. He didn’t buy the wire from China. He bought it at the ranch supply in town. Same place he always buys it. Same wire. Same clerk. Different price. He pulls the form toward him. He knows taxes. He’s paid them his whole life. Income tax, line by line. Property tax on the ranch. Self-employment tax, which he doesn’t love but understands. Sales tax on everything he buys in town. These are visible. They have names. They have lines on the form. He can argue about them if he wants to. He can vote for people who promise to lower them. He knows what he pays and who he pays it to. He looks at the form. There should be a line for what he paid this year that he didn’t pay last year. The wire. The fertilizer. The diesel. The cake. Somewhere between the ranch supply store and the US Treasury, someone added a cost to everything he buys, and he’d like to know where to put it. There is no line. He looks again. Schedule F. Farm income and expenses. He can deduct the wire and the fertilizer as business expenses, sure. He always does. But that’s not what he’s looking for. He’s looking for the tariff tax. The one built into the price of the wire. The one that made one-twelve out of eighty-two for the wire. It isn’t there. There is no line. No box. No schedule. He paid it. He has the receipt, but according to the United States government, the tax does not exist. The president says foreign countries are paying. The rancher doesn’t know what schools say. He knows what the ranch supply store says. The receipt is in his hand. He suspects he paid the taxes and not some merchant in China. If someone in China paid it, why are all his expenses up so much? He could write a letter. To the IRS. To his congressman. To the president. He could ask: if I didn’t pay this tax, who did? And if I did pay it, where do I file for the refund? He won’t write the letter. He knows what would happen. The same thing that happens when he calls the Forest Service about his grazing allotment or the BLM about the lease. Nothing. A recording. A form letter. Silence. He shipped seventy-eight steer calves in October. Around six weight and slick. They had had good feed. The check was north of one hundred and ninety thousand. It was yellow. He left it on the dashboard of the truck for three days before he could get to the bank. For someone who lived in town, it was a lot of money. A winning lottery ticket, enough to buy a life. But the ranch is not a savings account; the ranch is a mouth. He paid the bank. He paid for the diesel and the fertilizer. Then he paid for the wire. When he finished writing the checks, the money was nearly gone. He went out to the barn. The squeeze chute was there in the shadow. It was the old manual one. Same chute his dad ran. He wanted the hydraulic chute, but didn’t buy it. His shoulder hurts when… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The Founders knew about the Leviathan. They had read their Bibles. Job. Isaiah. Ezekiel. The beast that cannot be bargained with. Cannot be tamed. Cannot be killed. They had lived under a king. They knew what unchecked power looked like when it wore a crown. They did not fear a British king. They had beaten him already. They feared an American one. So they built a cage. Three branches. Separate powers. Ambition made to counter ambition. No single branch could grow so powerful that it swallowed the others. The cage was made of parchment. Ink and argument. Parchment doesn’t hold beasts. Only an oath could do that. Prologue: The Weight of Oaths An oath is an ancient thing. In the old world, to swear was to stake your life on your word. You called God to witness. To lie was to invite destruction from the Almighty I AM. The Hebrews understood this. When God gave Moses the commandments on Mount Sinai, He gave ten. The first: I AM. You will have no other gods before me. And right after: do not swear an oath in my name in vain. The order is striking. Right after idolatry. Before murder. Before theft. Before adultery. Most people think that the commandment means not to curse using God’s name. It does not. It means: do not swear an oath in God’s name and then break it. Do not call the Almighty to witness your word and then make Him witness to a lie. God cared about this enough to put it near the top of the list. Above killing. Above stealing. A man who swears falsely in God’s name profanes the relationship between humanity and the divine. He makes God complicit in his lie. That is an oath sworn in the name of the I AM. Not a formality. A covenant, sworn at the foot of the throne of God. The American oath didn’t start that way. In 1789, the First Congress kept it simple. It was only: I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States. That was it. There were plenty of Founders who did not believe, and they left the Almighty out of it. No enemies. No mental reservations. No “so help me God.” The Founders trusted that men who swore would mean it. They had just fought a revolution alongside each other. They knew who they were. Then came the Civil War. In 1861, Southern officers resigned their commissions. Southern senators walked out of the chamber to join the Confederacy. They had sworn the short, simple oath and broken it before the ink was dry. Abraham Lincoln watched the government tear itself apart from within. He had administered the oath to men who treated it like a formality. A ceremony. Words you say because the occasion requires it, not because you mean them. So, in 1862, Congress rewrote the oath. They added “enemies foreign and domestic” because Lincoln had learned what domestic enemies look like. They look like colleagues. Friends. Men who sit beside you, debate policy, and then choose to burn the country down. They added “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” because Lincoln had watched men parse their words, keep their options open, swear with their fingers crossed behind their backs. They added “so help me God” because they wanted everyone who spoke the words to remember who was listening. The oath became: I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. Lincoln’s oath. Forged in betrayal. Designed to smoke out traitors. To make a man say, out loud, that he had no secret loyalties. That he meant what he said. That the Almighty was watching, and would judge. Every Senator since has spoken these words. Hand raised. Voice steady. The chamber, watching. They can choose to affirm rather than swear on the Almighty, but most choose to swear. The oath is not a contract. A contract binds two parties. Breach it, and there are remedies. Damages one can pay and walk away. The oath is a covenant. You are not making a deal with the Senate, or the people, or the Constitution. You are making a promise to God, and the Republic is the subject of that promise. When you break it, you do not answer to voters or courts. You answer to the Almighty. This oath is the bars of the cage. The cage holds only as long as the oath-keepers keep their word. They stopped keeping it. Act I. The Cage Congress gave away the power to declare war. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before Congress and requested a declaration of war against Japan. They voted. That’s how it works. The last time Congress declared war was 1942. Since then, American soldiers in Korea. Vietnam. Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Yemen. January 3, 2026, Venezuela. Congress watched. Congress complained. Congress did not vote. They gave the president permission to do what he wanted so they wouldn’t have to answer for it. Authorization, not declaration. Authorization. A word designed to provide cover. To let them say, if it goes badly, we didn’t decide this. And if it goes well, we supported it all along. The Constitution says Congress declares war because the Founders knew what kings do with armies. They wanted the people’s representatives to look a mother in the eye and say: I voted to send your son. Here is why. Congress doesn’t want to look anyone in the eye. They handed the first key to the president and pretended the cage was still locked. Congress gave away the power of the purse. In 1976, they passed the National Emergencies Act. The idea was simple: a president could declare an emergency, but Congress would review it every six months. Congress would decide if the emergency was real. Congress would hold the purse strings. Now we live under around fifty active national emergencies. Some date back decades. Congress can force the question. Congress rarely does. One of them is from 1979. It’s older than most of the staffers who work in the Capitol. It’s been renewed, automatically, ninety times. Somewhere, a family’s assets are frozen under an emergency declared before their children were born. Congress has reviewed none of them. They discovered that complaining about the president was easier than stopping him. Complaining gets you on television. Stopping him gets you a primary challenger. So they complain. They hold hearings. They write letters. And the emergencies compound, year after year, while the wars keep grinding on under authorizations no one remembers voting for. Another key, handed over. The cage door, rattling. Congress gave away the power to tax. We fought a revolution over this. Taxation without representation. The words are carved into the American memory. The Founders put the taxing power in Congress because they understood: the people who pay should choose the people who decide. In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Economists blame it for deepening the Great Depression. So Congress decided the problem wasn’t the policy. The problem was having to vote on it. They delegated tariff authority to the president. Ninety-five years later, one man sets tariff rates by tweet. A soybean farmer in Iowa watches the price of his crop collapse overnight. He didn’t vote for tariffs. He voted for a congressman who pretended it wasn’t his problem. Tariffs are taxes on the American people. Every economist knows this. Every member of Congress knows this. And every one of them has decided that fighting the president is harder than letting him do what he wants. A third key. The cage, standing open. Three surrenders. War. Emergencies. Taxes. Not one of them taken by force. Not one of them seized by a tyrant. Congress voted for each surrender. They held hearings, made speeches, and handed over the keys because keeping them meant taking responsibility, and respon… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Kansas. Summer, 1936. The bluffs above the Missouri. The river didn’t look dangerous. Wide and brown and slow. Trees leaning over the banks. A boy could stand on the bluff and think he understood what he was looking at. He was fourteen. Watching a man jump from the railroad bridge. Everyone did it. You climbed the trestle. Leapt. Hit the water. Swam to the bank. He’d done it himself, twice. The shock of cold. Hard swim to the shallows. You came up laughing. The undertow you couldn’t see. The surface looked the same everywhere. Brown and slow and safe. The man jumped. Hit the water clean. Came up once. Twice. Didn’t come up again. People were shouting. Someone ran for a rope. The boy took a step toward the edge. Stopped. His hands were shaking. He didn’t jump. They found the body two miles downstream. Tangled in the roots of a cottonwood, water still pulling at his legs. The man’s face looked surprised. There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him? Act I. The Floorboard Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left. He talked too much. He knew it. The city was full of people who’d spent four years learning to be silent. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. How to keep their faces empty. Voices low. Thoughts locked behind their teeth. He moved through it like weather. Big hands, loud laugh, American uniform. They’d won. The Germans were gone. What was everyone so quiet about? She was sitting alone at a table in the jazz club. Blonde. Thin in a way that made him look twice. She held her glass like she wasn’t sure she had permission. He sat down without asking. “You speak English?” “A little.” “More than a little, I think.” She didn’t smile. Didn’t leave. Touched her hair. He talked. Couldn’t help it. The silence in the room pressed against him like something physical, and he pushed back the only way he knew how. Words. Noise. The sound of his own voice filling the space. He talked about the war. His unit. The things they’d seen. He talked about Kansas. Bluffs. River. Sky that went on forever. He talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Big plans. She listened. Let him talk. She was good at that. Later, he’d understand. She had learned to be invisible. He had learned to be impossible to ignore. By June, the city remembered itself. The canals turned silver in the long northern light. People sat outside, chairs scraping on cobblestones, glasses catching the sun. She laughed too loud one night and heard herself and didn’t stop. They walked the city. The parts the Germans hadn’t touched and the parts they had. Fresh paint on corner shops. New glass in old windows. She walked close to the buildings. Kept her voice low. Moved like someone who’d learned not to take up space. He walked in the middle of the street. Talked loud enough for people across the canal to hear. She didn’t ask him to be quieter. He didn’t ask her to be louder. One night, by the lakes, he put his arm around her. She let him. It happened the way those things happened. He had cigarettes. Real ones, American tobacco. She had a room with a window that faced the harbor. The city was broken. They were young. Enough reason for anything. He kept talking. Couldn’t stop. She learned to let the noise wash over her like water. Sometimes she’d surface long enough to ask a question, and he’d be off again. Kansas, the river, the bluffs, what he was going to build when he got home. She didn’t talk about the occupation. Didn’t talk about her father, taken in ‘43, who never came back. Didn’t talk about what she’d done to survive. The decisions no one should have to make at nineteen. One night, she showed him the emerald. She kept it in a box beneath a loose floorboard. German boots had walked on those same boards. She pulled back the rug, pried up the board, lifted it out like something holy. It was small. Cold. Cloudy. The color of ice under green water. “Family,” he said. Not a question. “My great-great-grandmother’s.” He turned it over in his palm. Felt the weight of it. If he wanted it, it could be his. Cloudy. Old. Probably not worth much. She was watching him. Waiting. The way people wait at the edge of water. He handed it back. “Nice,” he said. The man came up once. Twice. Not again. He reached for a cigarette. Lit it with the Zippo. Started talking about Kansas. She put the stone back in the box. Back under the floor. He shipped out in September. They stood on the dock. He held her hands. Said the things men say. “Keep that emerald safe,” he said. Trying to smile. “I will.” He kissed her. Walked up the gangway. He saluted the flag, and the Officer of the Deck gave him permission to board. He turned to look for her. She was already walking away. He sent letters. November. December. Snow in Kansas. Frozen river. Winter silence. A long one in January that said he meant it, he’d come back, she should wait for him. She folded it carefully. Put it in a drawer with the others. He waited until June. The silence wasn’t an accident. It was an answer. Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small. He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking. No one remembers when he grew too large.No one remembers the first timeno one could stop him. Act II. The Vault Copenhagen, April 1949. A palace room full of signatures and glassware. Four years since the war ended. The city had rebuilt itself. That’s what people said. Stone by stone, street by street. The canals ran clean. The shops had glass. The streetlights worked. He knew better. He’d seen the ledgers. American steel in the bridges. American wheat in the bakeries. Thirteen billion dollars across sixteen countries. He didn’t resent it. You don’t rebuild a continent because you expect gratitude. The Soviets were already in Berlin and Prague. Pushing their iron curtain further. Reaching for anything that wasn’t nailed down. You rebuild because you’re watching the water, and no one else is. He wasn’t a sergeant anymore. He wore a suit. Good wool. Italian shoes. He had a firm handshake. He expected his calls returned. He didn’t expect to see her. She was standing by the window when he walked in. Blonde. Older. The softness of girlhood gone. She was talking to a Belgian. Something about transit routes. She held herself like a woman who belonged in the room. He stopped. 1941. The Germans. Denmark couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t hide. Couldn’t fight. A small country with a long coastline and not enough friends. The Americans came for the emerald before the Germans could take it. Took it to Washington. Kept it safe. But they didn’t just keep it safe. They used it. Greenland. The rock and ice at the top of the world that everyone forgot about until they needed it. The Americans built runways on the ice. Radar stations in the mountains. Weather posts that tracked the storms. They watched German submarines from the rock. Guided convoys through the North Atlantic. The emerald wasn’t in a drawer. It was in a command center. It won a war. And when the war ended, they gave it back. That was always the deal. Keep it safe. Use it well. Give it back. She turned, mid-sentence, as if she felt it. Four years of silence. No letters. No explanation. She excused herself from the Belgian. Walked toward him. Unhurried. “You came back,” she said. “I wrote.” She didn’t look away. “I know.” They talked. He asked about her work. She was part of the Danish delegation now. Her family had old connections, a name that opened doors even after an occupation. She asked about his. Defense. Contracts. Building things. “You’ve done well,” she said. “I got lucky.” “You got rich.” He laughed. She didn’t. She reached for her glass. Water, not wine. He didn’t know why he noticed. A ring. Gold. Simple. He looked at it too long. “Married,” he said. Not a question. A brief ceremony. Twelve nations. Twelve signatures. Simple language. An attack against… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him? Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small. He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking. No one remembers when he grew too large.No one remembers the first timeno one could stop him. They thought they could build a cage for him. Twelve of them.Stone and iron and promises. The Leviathan watched.Patient.He learned to wait. God asks again,Will he make a covenant with you?Speak to you soft words?Keep his promises? No.He will not. He grows hungry.He forgets the covenantshe made when he was small. He sees what he wants.He takes what he sees. Even the Leviathan owes God a death.We all do.But not yet.Not tonight. The Leviathan does what he wants.Who can subdue the Leviathan? Music byArtist: Jon BjörkSong: Dwell Upon Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him? The Zippo. He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Took it out of his pocket. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Act I. The Affair Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left. You could still smell it. Smoke, petrol, something sour underneath. The city was learning how to breathe again. Nobody knew what to do with their hands. She was twenty-three. Blonde. Thin in a way that made people look away. She’d spent four years learning to be invisible. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. To keep her face empty. Make herself small enough to survive. He was American. A sergeant from Kansas. People thought all of Kansas was flat, but not where he was from. Huge houses on the river bluffs, oak trees. Nearly every year, someone drowned. They jumped off the bridge, knowing they could swim out of the great river. They could not. He had a wide smile and big hands and he talked too loud for any room he was in. They met in “Glasshall in Tivoli.” A Danish jazz club. Defiant of German rule to the end. Jazz was Allied music. The Nazis despised it. She was drinking alone. She knew she shouldn’t, but the Germans were gone, and she didn’t feel afraid. He sat down across from her without asking. “You speak English?” “A little.” “More than a little, I think.” She didn’t smile. But she didn’t leave. She touched her hair. By June, the city remembered what it was. The canals turned silver in the long light. Sun sat on the water like a thin sheet of metal. The sun only pretended to set, hovering just below the horizon, turning the sky the color of bruised peaches over slate roofs and church spires. People sat outside again. Chairs scraped on cobblestone. Glasses clinked. Bicycles hummed past in steady lines. They drank beer in Nyhavn. Watched the boats. She laughed too loud. Heard herself. Didn’t stop. She showed him the city. The parts the Germans hadn’t touched and the parts they had. Street corners, the paint still new. Shop windows. Fresh glass that didn’t quite match the old panes. The gardens, gates open again, lights coming on one by one. The fountains, running with joy. Shopkeepers repainting their signs with careful strokes, making the letters bold again. They walked along the lakes at dusk. The air cooled and smelled of water and grass. Swans drifted in the half-dark, white shapes sliding over black glass. He threw bread. She told him not to, said it made them aggressive. He did it anyway, and she didn’t mind. A couple passed, arms linked, moving slow like they had nowhere they had to be. One night, he put his arm around her. She let him. It happened the way those things happened. He had cigarettes. Real ones. American tobacco. She had a room with a window that faced the harbor. The city was broken. They were alive. Enough reason for anything. He talked a lot. She learned this about him early. He talked like he didn’t know the precious silence. It was something to be filled, like the world would forget him if he stopped making noise. He talked about the war. His unit. The things they’d seen. Friends he’d lost. Kansas. The bluffs. The river. The fields. The sky that stretched out forever. He talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Big plans, big dreams. Like he had a key to the future. She listened. He was kind. Happy. Funny. She didn’t talk about the occupation. Didn’t talk about her father, who’d been taken in ‘43 and never came back. Her father had believed in things. Agreements. Treaties. A league of nations. He’d been wrong. She didn’t talk about what she’d done to survive. The humiliations. Decisions no one should have to make at nineteen. Some things you don’t say. Not even to the man in your bed. One night, she showed him the emerald. She kept it in a box beneath a loose floorboard. Her grandmother had given it to her before the war. Before everything. It was small, cloudy, the color of ice under green water. She had hidden it from the German searches. Always worried she would lose it. “Family?” he asked, holding it up to the light. “My great-great-grandmother’s.” He turned it over in his palm. Squinted at it like estimating its value. Then he handed it back. “Nice,” he said. Reached for a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Lit it with his Zippo. Black crackle metal. Rounded on the edges, where the color of the rubbed metal shown through. She watched him light it. He glanced towards the window. Still talking. He had already forgotten the stone in her hand. She put it back in the box. Back under the floor. Didn’t say anything. He had a pocket full of stones. She’d seen them. Sapphires, rubies, a diamond. He was twenty-four years old, and he’d already had someone’s lifetime. Her emerald was cloudy. Sentimental. Not worth much. He didn’t want it. He shipped out in September. They stood at the dock. He held her hands, looked into her eyes, said what he thought were the right things men say. I’ll write, I’ll come back, this isn’t the end. She nodded. She didn’t believe him. But it cost her nothing to let him say it, and it seemed to cost him something, so she let him. “Keep that emerald safe,” he said, smiling like it was a joke. “I will.” He kissed her. Walked up the gangway. Didn’t look back. The letters came for a while. November. December. A long one in January that talked about home. Snow. Missing her. Then February. Nothing. Nothing again in March. She didn’t write to ask why. She already knew. She wasn’t the kind of woman he’d marry. She’d known it that first night in the club and every night in the room with the window. She was what happened during the war. She had loved him anyway. She went to the floorboard. The emerald was there, where it had always been. Where it hadn’t always been. A flashback. The stone, in her palm. Cloudy green. Cold. Her grandmother’s hands had held it. Her mother’s. Hers. Not only hers. She remembered the day they came. Spring, 1941. Germans had searched her room. They knew about the emerald. They just came in. Moved her aside. Later that week, two Americans on the stairs. Their uniforms didn’t fit the narrow turn. They were polite. Professional. They spoke English to each other, slow Danish to her. For safekeeping, ma’am. Just until things settle down. She was nineteen. The occupation was a year old. Her father was still alive then. He still believed in agreements. He told her to cooperate. He said the Americans were friends. She handed it over. They wrapped it in cloth. Carried her grandmother’s stone down the stairs and out into a street full of German soldiers. The Germans didn’t stop them. Americans were still neutral then. She said thank you. Standing in the doorway. Thank you to the men taking her inheritance because she could not keep it. Four years. The emerald spent the war in a vault in Washington. Safe. Dry. Far from the Germans. Far from the Danes, who couldn’t stop them. She spent the war in Copenhagen. Learning to be invisible. Learning where to look and where not to look. Her father was taken in ’43. She didn’t think about the emerald that night. Or the night after. Later, she did. A small green stone. What it might have bought. Passage. A bribe to the right man at the right time. She told herself there was no chance. The stone couldn’t have saved her father. She would never know. They gave it back in the summer of ’45. A note on American paper about Danish American friendship. They handed her the cloth like a gift. We kept it safe for you. She knew they were right to take it. That was the part she couldn’t forgive. She said thank you again. Smiled. That night she put it under the floorboard. Didn’t look at it for months. Until she showed it to him. The man in her bed. Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small. He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking. Act II. The Vault Copenhagen, … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The banana cost forty-seven cents. I got it from the vending machine at work. I grab it on my way out to the parking lot. Fifteen minutes of freedom. The break room smells like microwaved fish. I just need to be outside for a minute. I lean against the wall by the loading dock. Trucks roll past on the 15. The sun’s already down, but the sky is still that burnt orange it gets out here. The smog holds onto the light. I peel the banana without looking at it. Four bites. I toss the peel in the trash on my way back in. I don’t think about where it came from. Nobody does. It’s a banana. Forty-seven cents. Later, I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe there’s blood in the fruit. Act I. The Racket. Scene 1. My name is Elena. Twenty six. I work at a fulfillment center in Fontana. One of those massive warehouses off the 15 where the trucks run all night. You’ve ordered from us. Even if you don’t think you have. Everyone has. I’m good at my job. Fast. Reliable. Management likes me. I’ve been there four years now, since I dropped out of Cal State San Bernardino. Couldn’t afford to stay. I live with my parents in San Bernardino. A working class town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Railroad, then steel, then military, now shipping. Hot and dry. The mountains trap the smog from LA, but on a clear winter morning, when the wind comes down the pass, you can see the snow on Mount San Gorgonio. My grandfather bought the house in 1971. He never talked about where he came from before that. None of us asked. He worked the railyards in Barstow. Saved everything. Bought the house outright. Three generations later, we’re still there. We don’t love it, but we own it. The only security that feels real. My parents are citizens. I’m a citizen. Born at St. Bernardine’s. San Bernardino County, California. Seven pounds six ounces. Birth certificate in the safe. But my mother won’t answer the door if she doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. My father keeps a folder in the fireproof box by the bed. Birth certificates. Naturalization papers. Deed to the house. Just in case. I asked him once. Just in case of what? He didn’t answer. You know what I want. I want to stop living like we’re here on a pass that could get revoked. I want my mother to open the door without checking the driveway first. I want my father to throw that folder away. I want to feel like I belong in my own country, like the word citizen means what it says. I want to be able to drive down my street and not worry about being shot during one of the raids. Three generations. My grandfather built a life here. My parents built a life here. I was born here. I am an American. And still there’s a folder in the safe. Still my mother won’t answer the door. I was home when the news broke. Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. Half watching something, scrolling my phone. My mother had the TV on in the kitchen. Background noise. She doesn’t really watch. She likes the sound of voices. The news broadcast cut in. Urgent. “US special operations forces have successfully captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a predawn raid in Caracas. Maduro, who has been under federal indictment since 2020 on charges of narco terrorism and drug trafficking, was extracted by helicopter and is currently in US custody. President Trump addressed the nation from the White House…” My mother turned it off. Didn’t say anything. Started wiping down the counter. She cleans things that are already clean when she worries. My father was in his chair. I said, “Papá, what do you think?” He didn’t look at me. Pursed his lips. Glanced at my mother. He said, “I think it’s going to be a long year.” Then he went to get a tool from the garage. I could feel something in the room. Old. Something they weren’t saying. That night I can’t sleep. I have homework for my history class at Chaffey College. Latin America. Colonial Period to present. A speech by some old dead guy from the 1930s. I hadn’t started it. I made coffee. Sat at the kitchen table. Opened my laptop. Started reading. Act I. The Racket. Scene 2. Elena: 1935. A Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler. I keep reading. Then…I was there. A folding chair. Wood seat, cold metal frame. Room smells like cigarette smoke and wool coats. A banner on the wall. VFW Post something. American flags on either side of the stage. The man at the podium is old. Sixty, maybe. But he stands like he’s still in uniform. Proud. Shoulders back. Chin up. Two medals on his chest I don’t recognize. He’s looking out at the crowd. Starts to speak. His hands grip the podium. Knuckles, white. Holding on like he might fall if he lets go. Butler: “War is a racket…at the expense of the very many…a few people make huge fortunes…I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business… I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914… Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues... Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912… The Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916… Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903… There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes. And the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.” Elena: He stops. Quiet. Someone coughs. Butler looks at a man in the front row. Old. Maybe his age. Maybe they served together. He doesn’t look away. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. The most highly decorated Marine in history. The only Marine to earn both the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor. A gangster, he said, for Wall Street. He didn’t say we should never fight. He said we shouldn’t lie about why we are fighting. Next morning I go to work. Same shift. Same trucks. Same routine. On my break I go outside. Banana in the vending machine. I stand there looking at it through the glass. Forty-seven cents. I don’t buy it. Act II. The Blood in the Fruit. Scene 1. Narrator: Chaffey College. Health Sciences Building. Anatomy lab. The room smells like formaldehyde and cold air. Fluorescent lights. Steel tables. A skeleton hanging in the corner like it’s waiting for someone to ask it a question. Valentina: My name is Valentina. I left Caracas, Venezuela in 2018 with two suitcases and a pharmacy degree. The suitcases are in my closet. Degree framed on my wall. Neither useful here. I work at CVS in Rancho Cucamonga. Shift supervisor. Not a pharmacist. I wear the red polo and the name tag. I answer questions about where the cough syrup is. Sometimes people ask me for medical advice. I give it because I know the answer, then I tell them to talk to the pharmacist. I’m not allowed to know the answer. Three years I’ve been trying to get my credentials transferred. Forms. Fees. Evaluations. More forms. They want me to retake classes. They want transcripts that don’t exist anymore because the university can’t keep the lights on. They want me to prove I am who I say I am, over and over, in a language that isn’t mine. The bureaucracy isn’t a wall. It’s a maze. It lets you keep walking so you don’t notice there’s no exit. So here I am. Chaffey College. Twenty-eight years old. Anatomy and Physiology. Sitting in a room full of nineteen-year-olds, learning the names of bones I learned six years ago in Spanish. Narrator: She’s at a lab table. Skeleton hand in front of her. Index cards. Valentina: Carpals. Metacarpals. Phalanges. I know this. I knew this before most of these kids had driver’s licenses. But the paper says I don’t know it, so I’m learning it again. My phone buzzes. I should ignore it. Lab policy. Professor’s a hardass about phones. But I see the notification. WhatsApp. Mamá. I grab my bag and walk out. Narrator: Hallway. Cinder block walls. The hum of vending machines. Valentina: I lean against the wall and press play. The connection is bad. Static. Her voice cutti… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Act I. Tick Tock [SFX: The noise of New York City] [Narrator] New York City in December. Manhattan. No snow yet, but the cold sits like it’s waiting for something. A kid walks home from work. Twenty-four years old. Jacket zipped to the throat. Same route he always takes. Down from Midtown, cutting through the side streets. Too many tourists on the main streets. He wants to move through the world without it touching him. It’s 6:12 PM. The sun is already gone. The crosswalk timer across the street blinks 12, then 11, then 10. Tick. Tick. Cars honk. Little beeps, long beeps, the ones that hold down the horn. Trash trucks. Ambulances with sirens blaring. Delivery drivers on bicycles. All stuck. The kid walks by the way he walks by everything. Eyes forward. Keep moving. Cops on almost every corner. Keeping the peace. On the buildings, American flags, lit from below, snapping in the wind that cuts between the towers. Red and white and blue against the black. And the steam. It comes up through the grates, the vents. Somewhere underneath. The water in the gutter catches it, and the whole street looks like it’s breathing. Like the city has lungs. A waist-high stack painted orange and white hisses near the curb. Warm air in cold air. He asked someone once. Why does it do that? Why is there always steam? Like the water is smoking. The subway, they said. The pipes. The heat below. The cold above. The whole city is a machine, and the steam makes it run. [Daniel] I love it. The city breathes. Exhales. Makes it feel alive. Like something’s happening under the surface, even when nothing’s happening at all. I put my headphones on. The noise is still there. I can see it. Mouths moving. Cabs lurching. Cops talking into their radios. But I can’t hear it. I’m inside my own head now. The tourists look up. They stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures. Big coats. Shopping bags. Walking three across, like the city belongs to them. The New Yorkers move like water around rocks. They don’t stop. Just flow toward wherever they’re going. I’m one of them now. Four years in. The headphones that say don’t talk to me, don’t see me, I’m not here. [Narrator] The lights from a bodega spill onto the sidewalk. Red and gold. A pizza place on the corner, line out the door. A woman arguing into her phone in a language he doesn’t recognize. He turns onto his block. Streetlights tinge yellow-orange. A guy smokes on his stoop, looking at nothing. Somewhere above, music loud enough that the bass comes through the walls. Home. He steps inside. [Daniel] There he is. My little brother. Sitting on the couch. Looking at me like he’s got something to say. [Narrator] Daniel stands in the doorway. Doesn’t move. His brother looks up. People call him “K.” Nineteen years old. Named after his great-grandfather. Same face Daniel’s known his whole life, but something’s different now. The way he sits. The way he holds himself. K speaks first. [K] “I tried to call you. A few times.” [Narrator] Daniel pulls off his jacket. Tosses it on the chair. He moves to the kitchen, opens the fridge. [Daniel] He’s right. I never pick up. “You hungry? I’ve got leftover Thai. The good place.” K says he’s not hungry. [Narrator] Daniel grabs two beers. Pops the caps. Sets one on the coffee table in front of his brother and sits down across from him. K has been waiting for him to sit down. [K] “I joined the Navy.” [Narrator] Silence. Daniel’s beer stops halfway to his mouth. [Daniel] “What?” [K] “The Navy. I leave in two days.” [Daniel] I don’t say anything. I’m trying to hear it again. Navy. Two days. “When did you decide this?” [K] “A while ago.” [Daniel] “And you didn’t tell me?” [Narrator] The brother looks at him. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t apologize. [K] “I’m telling you now.” [Daniel] “That’s a waste.” [Narrator] It comes out before Daniel can stop it. K’s jaw tightens. [Daniel] “You’re smart. You could do anything. You’re going to swab decks and take orders from guys who peaked in high school?” [Narrator] K doesn’t look away. But something closes behind his eyes. [K] “Great-Grandpa Kenneth was Navy.” [Daniel] “That was different. That was a real war.” [Narrator] The words hang there. K picks up his beer. Sets it back down. [K] “I needed to do something.” [Daniel] “You were doing something. You had a job.” [K] “I was delivering packages.” [Narrator] K stops. Looks down at his hands. Then back up. [K] “I wanted to matter.” [Daniel] He says it like it’s simple. Like that explains everything. And I just told him it was a waste. Told him his war wouldn’t be real enough. [Narrator] K stands up. [K] “I should go. Early flight.” [Daniel] “K—” [K] “It’s fine.” [Narrator] It’s not fine. Daniel can hear it. But K is already at the door. [Daniel] “Be safe. Okay?” [Narrator] K nods once. Doesn’t look back. [Daniel] The door closes. I sit there with two full bottles and the thing I said still in the room. He wanted to matter. So he signed a contract. Raised his right hand. And now he belongs to something I don’t understand. Act II. Duration [SFX: Train wheels on tracks, rhythmic, then slowing. Station announcement muffled.] [Narrator] The train pulls into the station. New Jersey suburbs. Christmas Eve. Daniel is on the platform. Cold air. Gray sky. Not cold enough to bite. Just there. He didn’t want to come. His mother called three times. The third time, she didn’t ask. She just said what time dinner was. So. Here he is. The house is twenty minutes from the station. His father picks him up. They don’t talk much. The radio fills the space. Sports. Weather. Traffic. [Daniel] Dad asks how my place is. He asks if work is good. We talk about sports. That’s the whole ride. [Narrator] The house is already full when they arrive. Cars in the driveway. Lights on in every window. A wreath on the door. Same wreath since Daniel was a kid. Inside, the house is warm. The smell of food. Voices overlap. Christmas music competing with a movie playing in the other room. His grandmother finds him first. “There he is. Look at you. So skinny. Are you eating?” [Daniel] “I’m eating.” [Narrator] She doesn’t believe him. She never believes him. She tells him she made a brisket and pulls him toward the kitchen. His mother finds him before he gets there. Hugs him like she’s checking if he’s real. [Daniel] She says I look tired. She asks about work. She asks if I’m seeing anyone. And there it is. I say no. She tells me about a girl. Rachel’s daughter. In law school. Very pretty. She could introduce us. “Mom.” She’s just saying. I need air. Quiet. To be anywhere but in the middle of this. [Narrator] He escapes. The back room. Used to be his grandfather’s study. Now it’s just a room with old books and a chair nobody sits in. Except tonight. Kenneth is there. In his late nineties. A circle of cousins around him, laughing at something he just said. He’s holding a glass of wine like a prop. He won’t drink it. Just likes having something in his hand. [Daniel] Great-Grandpa Kenneth. Everyone’s favorite person. Always has been. He’s the one who remembered every birthday. Sent five dollars in a card until I was ten, then switched to twenties because, in his words, “inflation is a thief and you deserve to keep up.” He’s sharper than anyone expects. Mixes up some names. Thinks my cousin Mike is still in college, even though Mike is thirty-two and sells insurance. But he knows what year it is. Knows who’s President. Has opinions about both. [Narrator] The cousins drift away when someone announces food. Kenneth stays in his chair. Daniel sits down across from him. [Daniel] “Do you think the Jets will make the playoffs next year?” [Narrator] Kenneth laughs. A real laugh. Starts in his chest. [Kenneth] “I’ve been waiting on the Jets since nineteen-seventy. I thought we were going to repeat.” [Narrator] He looks out the window. His fingers tap the arm of the chair. Something shifts behind his eyes. [Kenneth] “You know what waiting really is? I learned it in the Pacific.” [Narrator] Daniel didn’t expect this. But you don’t … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne] Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and the days of long ago? We’ve forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year’s Eve. Let’s remember. Back to Ulysses S. Grant. He couldn’t hear music. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And the most important moment of his life would be defined by a song. Act I. The Man Who Couldn’t Hear Music Washington, D.C., March 8, 1864. Ulysses S. Grant walks into Willard’s Hotel. Forty-one years old. Filthy from four days on a train. He is the most famous man in America, and nobody recognizes him. The hotel is famous. Senators swagger and generals preen across its thick, patterned carpet. Gas lamps throw a yellow light that doesn’t reach the corners, so faces drift in and out of shadow. Furniture packed in tight clusters. Little tables and chairs arranged for waiting, not resting, crowded by hats, gloves, and half-empty whiskey glasses. The desk clerk eyes Grant as he crosses the room. Mud-spattered coat. Rumpled uniform. No entourage. His boots are caked with Tennessee mud, red clay flaking onto the carpet. The clerk judges his station in life and says there’s nothing available but a cramped room in the garret. The attic. Grant takes it. He signs the register in a plain hand: U.S. Grant & Son, Galena, Illinois. The clerk reads the signature. His face goes white. Suddenly, the Presidential Suite, the rooms Abraham Lincoln occupied before his inauguration, is available after all. Grant declines. The garret is fine. This is Grant. No drama. No ceremony. And something even more peculiar. Ulysses S. Grant cannot hear music. It’s not that Grant “doesn’t like music.” Not that he “has no taste for music.” He can’t hear it. When a band plays, Grant hears only noise. A choir sings, Grant hears chaos. Marches. Hymns. Sentimental ballads. They all register the same way. Pots banging. Wagons rattling. Nothing more. He once described it this way: “I know only two tunes. One of them is ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and the other isn’t.” People took this as a joke. A curmudgeon’s quip. But Grant wasn’t joking. He could recognize “Yankee Doodle” because it came wrapped in parades and flags and ritual. He knew it by context, not by sound. Every other tune in the world was the same to him. Noise. Doctors today call it congenital amusia. The brain can’t process pitch. Each note disappears as soon as it sounds. The pattern never forms. In 1864, they had no name for it. Grant just lived with it. He never explained why music meant nothing to him. But other officers noticed he would leave the room when bands played. He didn’t grimace. He didn’t complain. He just drifted away. Back to Willard’s Hotel. That evening, Grant cleans up and goes down to dinner. He and his thirteen-year-old son Fred take a small table in the crowded dining room. He orders. Within minutes, someone recognizes him. A congressman stands and bellows across the room: “Ladies and gentlemen! The hero of Donelson, of Vicksburg, and of Chattanooga is among us! I propose the health of Lieutenant General Grant!” The chant begins. Grant. Grant. Grant. The diners surge toward his table. He stands awkwardly, bows, tries to eat, gives up. The mob presses closer. For three quarters of an hour, he shakes hands with strangers. Finally, he escapes to his room. He never finishes the meal. Later that night, politicians appear at his door. They rush him through the rain to the White House, where President Lincoln is holding his weekly reception. The East Room is packed. Hundreds of Washington society figures, all hoping to glimpse the western hero. The crowd parts. Grant walks through. Abraham Lincoln stands waiting. They have never met, though they are now the two most famous men in the country. Lincoln is a head taller, six foot four. Grant is five eight. Lincoln steps forward, smiling, and extends his hand. “Why, here is General Grant. I am most delighted to see you, General.” Grant answers with a nod and a few words so quiet Lincoln has to lean in. The Union Army of Grant’s time was saturated in music. More than 500 regimental bands. Drummers and fifers at every unit. Bugles structured the entire day. Reveille. Assembly. Mess call. Sick call. Taps. Music lifted spirits. Stiffened resolve. Gave orders. And Grant was deaf to all of it. He understood music strategically. He watched what it did to other people. Saw men weep at certain songs. Stiffen at others. The way someone colorblind might notice how others respond to a sunrise. After West Point, Grant was a young lieutenant in Mexico. His regiment’s band raised morale, but it needed funding. Bands were absurdly expensive, and politicians loved them. Congress would argue over rifles, but bands needed paid. So Grant ordered the unit’s daily rations in flour instead of bread, at significant savings. Then he rented a bakery. Hired bakers. Sold fresh bread through a contract he’d arranged with the army’s chief commissary. The profit went to music he could not hear. This is who Grant was. Practical. Unsentimental. Results-oriented. Sentiment in the Union Army was a liability. The next morning, Lincoln hands Grant his commission. Lieutenant General of the United States Army. The highest rank in the army. Grant is now in command of all Union forces. More than half a million men. The war is in its fourth year. Two hundred and fifty thousand Union soldiers are already dead or wounded, with little progress to show. Every general Lincoln has appointed to fight Robert E. Lee has failed. They engage. Suffer losses. Retreat north to regroup. Then they do it again. The reality is that the Civil War is a war of attrition. Wars of attrition aren’t clever. Force meets force until one side can no longer continue. To achieve the nation’s ends, Lincoln needs someone different. Someone who doesn’t retreat. Days after the ceremony, Lincoln’s assistant asks what kind of general Grant will be. Lincoln thinks for a moment. “Grant is the first general I’ve had. He doesn’t ask me to approve his plans and take responsibility for them. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.” Lincoln pauses, then adds. “Wherever he is, Grant makes things git.” The Army medical corps had made it official. They called it nostalgia. Not nostalgia like we use the word today, a warm feeling about the past. Nostalgia as a diagnosis. A disease. A killer. Union surgeons wrote down thousands of cases. Men who wasted away, moaning for home. The symptoms look like what we would now call severe depression. Insomnia. Loss of appetite. Withdrawal. Despair. In the worst cases, they just stopped. Refused food. Refused nursing. Died. The army identified a trigger. Music. Sentimental songs did it. Ballads about home. Mothers. Sweethearts left behind. The most dangerous song in camp was “Home, Sweet Home.” Men heard it and broke. So officers barred bands from playing it. Songs like “Auld Lang Syne” carried the same danger. Remembering friends from long ago. Remembering home. Memory as a weapon turned inward. The song that made you weep for the past was the song that could kill you in the present. Grant would have understood that logic perfectly. Now Grant is in Washington, his new commission in hand. Culpeper, Virginia waits, his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee waits, fifty miles south. Grant lays out his philosophy in a single sentence: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” No sentiment. No retreat. Attrition. Act II: The Overland Campaign The Wilderness, Virginia. May 5, 1864. Grant crosses the Rapidan River at midnight. Sixty thousand men. Pontoon bridges sway in the dark. By dawn, the Army of the Potomac is deep inside a seventy square mile tangle of v… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

This story is true. Except for the parts with the ghosts. [SFX: Theater applause] Dim the lights. Prologue. London. December, 1776. One lone leaf on the London plane outside the King’s window trembles in the light breeze, like the whole city just let out a quiet breath. It had clung to its branch through the long autumn, through winds that had stripped its companions and sent them spinning across the grounds of Windsor Castle. But now, in the stillness of a December evening, with no wind at all to speak of, it fell. The branch did not shake. The leaf simply let go, as if it had finally grown too tired to hold on, and drifted downward through air that smelled of coal smoke and coming snow. It landed on the stones of the courtyard without a sound. A guardsman’s boot crushed it a moment later, unknowing. The groundskeeper would collect it soon enough. Inside the palace, candles burned against the early dark. Servants moved through corridors with the particular silence of those who have learned that kings prefer not to be reminded of their presence. Fires crackled in grates throughout the residence, and the smell of roasting meat drifted up from kitchens where cooks prepared for the Christmas feast. The King had already declared he would not attend. George William Frederick, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, sat alone in his private study. Most called him King George III. He was not yet forty. His hair had not gone white. His eyes had not drifted to that far-off place that later painters would catch. He blinked once, slow, like the weight of the crown had its own gravity. He was still a young king, or youngish. The rebellion in the American colonies had aged him in ways the mirrors had only begun to report. On the desk before him lay dispatches from America. He had read them twice already. He would read them again before bed. Again, when he woke. Again, mid-morning. Searching for the thing he could not find in them. An explanation. The reason. The sense of it all. The rebels would not break. This was the fact that he could not understand. Would not. By every measure that mattered, this rebellion should be over. The Continental Army had been driven from New York. Their capital had fallen. Their soldiers deserted by the hundreds, slipping away in the night to return to farms and families, to sanity, to submission. Washington’s forces had dwindled to a ragged few thousand, starving and frozen on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. And still they would not break. George set down the dispatch and walked to the window. The courtyard below lay empty save for the guards at their posts, still as statues in the cold. Beyond the palace walls, London prepared for Christmas. He could not see the preparations from here, but he knew them well enough. The garlands and the wassail, the church bells and the charitable distributions. The goose being fattened in every household that could afford one, and many that could not. Christmas. The celebration of a child born in poverty who had somehow overthrown an empire. George did not make this connection consciously. It floated somewhere beneath the surface of his thoughts, unexamined. He touched the back of a couple of fingers against the glass. It was cold. On the other side of that glass, on the other side of an ocean, men wrapped their feet in rags, leaving bloody footprints in the snow. Men were choosing to freeze. Why? What word had reached them that could make men choose cold over comfort? He did not doubt the outcome of this rebellion. He had the strongest Army and Navy the world had ever seen. His generals would see to their submission. But didn’t they understand what he offered? Order. Protection. The steady hand of a Crown that had outlasted plagues and pretenders, fires and mobs. A world where the rules did not change because a crowd felt hot blood in its throat. Obedience, in return. That was all. One plain word, and it was suddenly the only word nobody in America could stand to hear. He had read their pamphlets. Their petitions. Liberty was a thing you could hold in your palm and keep clean. As if “freedom without order” could live out in the open without turning into smoke and shouting. He told himself they would come back. This rebellion was a fever, not a cause. Noise. A few men with printing presses and loud mouths. The larger crowd would quiet down the moment winter did its work. But right now, his eyes refocused from the daydream. The light grew dim. The glass fogged at the edges, as if someone had breathed on it from the other side. Odd, but no matter. It must be the snow coming. George turned from the window and walked to his desk. The candle nearest him flickered, then steadied. The shadows in the room shifted and resettled themselves. Outside, the temperature dropped, the smell of snow in the air. A white Christmas for London, if the clouds obliged. In the fireplace, a log cracked and sent up a shower of sparks. George watched them rise and wink, rise and wink, like small rebellions burning themselves to nothing against the indifferent air. The clock on the mantel struck nine. Somewhere beyond the walls, a watchman sang the hour into the cold. George gathered the dispatches. He placed them in the locked drawer where he kept such things, away from prying eyes and gossiping servants. He would read them again tomorrow. He would search once more for the explanation that was not in the dispatches. The King prepared for bed. His evening routine varied little from one night to the next. He allowed his valet to help him undress. He said his prayers, more habit than devotion. He climbed into the vast bed with its heavy curtains, warming pans, accumulated weight of royal tradition. He closed his eyes. His sleep came and went, shallow and troubled. George tossed in the darkness, talking in his sleep. Words that his attendants, just outside the door, could not quite make out. The fire burned low. The candles, one by one, became a trail of smoke. The room, black. Outside the window, the first flakes of snow began to fall on London. Gentle. Silent. It covered the courtyard where the plane leaf had landed. The city asleep in a blanket of white that looked almost like a fresh page. He heard the clock strike midnight and keep ticking. George, alone in his royal bed, surrounded by luxury and power that brought no comfort, found the wee small hours. The thin place where a man is neither awake nor asleep. Some time later, the room, which had been empty, was suddenly not. A voice spoke out of the dark, as if it had been waiting for him. Act I. The Ghost of Christmas Past The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, the way a church bell finds you three streets away. (inaudible) “George.” “George.” The King opened his eyes. The room was dark, but had not changed. The same heavy curtains and dying fire. Winter pressing against the windows. But this dark was different. Breath. Presence. “Who’s there?” His voice came out steadier than he felt. A king’s training. “Guards…” “They cannot hear you. Nor you them. We are between the ticks of the clock, you and I. In the space of memory.” “There’s no one here.” “There is,” the voice said, not unkindly. “Come. The night will not wait.” George sat up. His eyes adjusted. There was no figure in the room. Only shadow, and within the shadow, a deeper shadow. Not a person. Breath on the air. “What are you?” “I am what was. The road behind you. The roads behind that road. The choices made before you drew breath.” George felt his feet touch the cold floor, though he hadn’t moved. His hand reached for a robe that was not there, and he found himself in only his nightshirt, shivering slightly. A pale light gathered at the window. The glass, which should have been solid, yielded like water. He passed through it without feeling it pass, and then he was somewhere else entirely. London. But not his London. The street… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

2025. The president fires an FTC commissioner before her term is up. The statute says he can’t without cause. He does it anyway. Now the Supreme Court has to decide whether ninety years of precedent was real law, or a bluff. Act I. The Wager [SFX: casino room, cards dealt, chips stacked, ice clinking in glasses] Players stare at each other across a poker table. Four cards are up. One card is face down. The last card decides everything, but nobody gets to see it until somebody commits. You can stare at the felt and pretend time is on your side. But the cost of waiting goes up anyway. You have to put in a bet to keep playing, and that bet keeps getting bigger. The pot grows. The pressure rises. Sooner or later, you have to act with incomplete information. New York City. Late Spring, 1789. George Washington took the oath on April 30. He is the first President of the United States. He has duties. He has no government. No State Department. No Treasury. No War Department. No one to answer a foreign minister or respond to a crisis. The executive branch exists on paper. In reality, it is one man in a rented house with a small staff and a pile of unanswered letters. The Constitution is eight months old. The ink is barely dry. And the world is not waiting. The British still occupy forts on American soil. Forts they agreed to vacate six years ago. Native attacks keep coming from those regions. Plenty of Americans suspect the British, but Washington has no department to respond with. Spain has closed the Mississippi River to American trade. Western settlers are talking about leaving the union. Diplomacy might help. Threats might help. But there is no one to conduct diplomacy. The president cannot do everything himself. American merchant ships are being seized in the Mediterranean. Algiers declared war on the United States four years ago. Sailors are chained in North African prisons, waiting for a ransom that cannot come because we have no Treasury and no Navy. The pot is already enormous. The blinds are rising. And Congress has a problem. The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint officers “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” It says nothing about firing them. Nothing. That silence is not calm. It’s cards sliding out. Sideways glances. Men looking across the table, trying to decide what the other man is holding. Sixty-five men crowd into Federal Hall on Wall Street. A repurposed city building that still smells like fresh paint. May turns to June. The weather thickens. No ventilation worth mentioning. Wool coats. Wigs. Windows that don’t open properly. Paper everywhere. Quills scratching. Men sweating through their shirts while arguing about the shape of executive power. They have to build a working government, but the game is already underway. The cards are on the felt. The pot is growing. And they’re still arguing over who gets to deal, who sets the rules, and who can push a man out of his seat. The question before the House is simple to ask and impossible to answer: Who can fire a cabinet secretary? James Madison rises to make a motion. He is thirty-eight years old. A hundred forty pounds soaking wet. He speaks so softly that reporters lean forward to hear him. He is brilliant, but he has never seen combat. He has never led troops. He spent the Revolution in the Virginia legislature, arguing about paper while other men bled. But Madison wrote the Constitution. He wrote most of The Federalist Papers defending it. He has thought more carefully about the structure of American government than anyone alive. When Madison speaks, the room listens. His motion concerns the Department of Foreign Affairs. A department that does not yet exist. A secretary who has not been named. He is writing the job description for a position that is still an idea on paper. Madison proposes one line: He says that the secretary shall be “appointed by the president, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; and to be removable by the president.” Four words. Nine syllables. “Removable by the president.” The room erupts in disagreement. They can see the future in that sentence. A future president. A future fight. A future Congress trying to bind a president’s hands. They are not arguing about today. They are arguing about every president and every Congress that will ever follow. And they are terrified. But not of the same thing. To understand why the room erupts, you have to understand the ghost in it. That ghost is King George III. Theodorick Bland commanded cavalry in the Revolution. James Jackson of Georgia fought at Cowpens, Augusta, Savannah. Hand to hand when it came to that. Jackson fought twenty-three duels in his lifetime. He settled disagreements with pistols. When he stood up to speak, men listened because they knew what he was capable of. Elbridge Gerry was asleep at the Menotomy Tavern on the night of April 18, 1775. The night Paul Revere rode. British troops marched past his window toward Concord. The weapons they were marching to seize were weapons Gerry had put there. His roommate during the siege of Boston was Joseph Warren. Warren died at Bunker Hill with a British bullet in his skull. On and on. The room was full of men who bled for independence. They sent their sons to bleed. They watched friends die at Brandywine, at Germantown, at the frozen hell of Valley Forge. The Declaration of Independence was thirteen years old. It was a list of crimes committed by a king who answered to no one. These men had signed it. Some had nearly died for it. Now, James Madison, who spent the war arguing about paper, stands before them and proposes giving one man the power to fire anyone in the executive branch. To some of them, it sounds like the first step toward a throne. Underneath that knife’s edge urgency, they are dueling with words while playing this game of American poker. Uncertainty. Ambiguity. They’re all fearful, but not of the same thing. One man hears “removable by the president” and sees a king. Total loyalty. Total control. Every officer knowing he serves at the president’s pleasure. Every officer afraid to disagree. William Loughton Smith of South Carolina places his bet here. He points to the Constitution: the only removal it mentions is impeachment. If you start inventing powers out of silence, you are training future presidents to do the same. Theodorick Bland of Virginia throws in chips next. He hears “removable by the president” and sees the Senate being erased. The Constitution says the president appoints “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” The Senate has a role. Would you let a man hire but not fire? Strip the Senate of removal, and you strip the bridle from the horse. Roger Sherman of Connecticut adds to the pot. He hears “removable by the president” and sees chaos. Drift. Officers who answer to no one because no one has clear authority. He says Congress creates these offices, Congress sets the terms, Congress can decide. The Constitution doesn’t give removal power to anyone specifically. So Congress fills the gap. And then there is Madison. Madison has watched legislatures become tyrants. State assemblies under the Articles of Confederation printed worthless money. Exposed private contracts to public violation. Trampled the rights of minorities, religious dissenters, anyone without the votes to protect themselves. In Rhode Island, the legislature printed currency to pay off debts, and the creditors fled the state. Kings were dangerous. Madison knows that. But legislatures were also dangerous. They claimed to speak for the people. They wrapped their tyranny in democratic legitimacy. And they could do it faster than any king because they did not have to pretend to be anything other than the majority. Madison fears Congress more than he fears the president. He could not foresee a Congress that would voluntarily surrender its power. A Congress that would create agencies to avoid making hard choices. A Congress that would … Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Act I. The Sky War SFX: Thunder rolling in the distance. A slow rotor hum. Laos. March 20th, 1967. A C-130 Hercules lifts off from Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base just after sunset. The crew has the cargo bay loaded with canisters. Not bombs, not supplies; canisters of silver iodide mixed with lead iodide and acetone. Command briefed the crew separately from every other unit on base. The flight plan logs say the crew's mission is “weather reconnaissance.” Their actual mission: to make it rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Not to predict rain. Not to wait for rain. To make rain. To pull water from clouds that weren’t ready to give it up yet. We weren’t trying to win the weather. We were trying to weaponize it and choke off the supplies that kept the war alive in the South. This is Operation Popeye. And for the next five years, it will remain the most classified weather experiment in American military history. SFX: C-130 rotor hum. Wyatt: “Hell, son, we weren’t tryin’ to predict the weather. We were tryin’ to break it.” The problem started with a road. Except it wasn’t really a road. A network of trails, footpaths, rivers, tunnels, and jungle passages ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. The Americans called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The North Vietnamese called it the Truong Son Road. And no matter what the Air Force threw at it, the damn thing wouldn’t die. We tried bombing it, thousands of sorties under Operation Steel Tiger. The jungle swallowed the craters. We tried napalm. The canopy grew so thick that the fire barely reached the ground. We tried defoliants, including Agent Orange by the truckload, and managed to strip some foliage, but the trail just shifted a hundred yards east or west, braiding through the forest like a living thing. We even considered using nuclear weapons, but decided they wouldn’t end the war and would only invite the enemy to use them back. The North Vietnamese moved at night. They built the trail in sections. Different units maintained each section. They camouflaged each one during the day with cut branches and woven bamboo mats. When American reconnaissance planes flew over, they saw nothing. When the bombs came, the crews scattered into prepared bunkers, waited out the strike, then came back out and filled in the holes. By 1966, as many as 20,000 North Vietnamese troops moved down the trail every month, along with enough supplies to sustain the Viet Cong insurgency in the South. Trucks rolled south. Bicycles carried 500-pound loads. Porters balanced bamboo poles across their shoulders. The trail functioned as the circulatory system of the war. Cut it, and you would bleed the enemy dry. But nothing we tried would work. Bombs couldn’t stop the trail. Fire couldn’t stop it. But water could. During monsoon season, May through October, the trails turned to soup. Trucks bogged down axle-deep in mud. Bicycles were useless. Porters slogged through conditions that turned a day’s march into three days. The North Vietnamese themselves estimated that supply capacity dropped by sixty percent during heavy rains. So someone at the Pentagon had an idea. What if we could extend the monsoon? Aida: “Cloud seeding had existed since 1946. Vincent Schaefer at General Electric discovered that dry ice dropped into supercooled clouds could trigger ice crystal formation. Essentially, you could start the rain process manually. By the 1960s, people used it commercially. Ski resorts, farmers, even some cities experimented with it.” But this was different. Farmers weren’t trying to coax an extra inch of rain onto their fields. The United States military wanted to manipulate weather patterns over a foreign country to gain a tactical advantage in a war. The Pentagon classified the operation at the highest level from the start. So secret the program didn’t officially exist, and only a select few even knew about it. The Joint Chiefs approved it in 1966. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara signed off. President Johnson knew. But almost no one else did. Someone told the crews that the missions were “weather modification experiments” and that the details exceeded their clearance level. The planes, C-130s and F-4 Phantoms modified with cloud-seeding equipment, flew out of bases in Thailand. Crews ignited the silver iodide canisters at altitude. The canisters released microscopic particles into the clouds. These particles acted like ice crystals. In the right conditions, with supercooled clouds that had plenty of moisture, the crystals would grow, become heavy, and fall as rain. The theory sounded solid. The question remained whether it would work at scale. The first test runs happened over the Laotian panhandle in March 1967. Someone gave the operations pastoral codenames: “Motorpool,” “Intermediary,” “Compatriot.” Publicly, if anyone asked, these were agricultural flights. Crop dusting. And it worked. Quietly, invisibly, and just enough to tempt us into thinking we could control the sky. We increased rainfall in the targeted areas by around twenty-five to thirty percent. Roads that should have dried out stayed muddy. River crossings that should have become fordable stayed swollen. Entire sections of the trail turned into bogs. Wyatt: “We’d fly the pattern they gave us, release what they told us to release. Sometimes a few hours later you’d see weather building that didn’t make sense for the conditions. Made you wonder what the hell was in those canisters.” We expanded the operation. By 1968, Popeye missions flew regularly during the rainy season, focusing on the sections of the trail in Laos and the demilitarized zone. Command mixed the sorties in with regular bombing runs so they wouldn’t stand out. The pilots treated it like any other mission: brief, fly, return, debrief. If cloud seeding could have put the entire Ho Chi Minh Trail underwater for months, cut those 20,000 troops down to zero, and stopped the supply flow completely, we would have seeded clouds until the whole jungle was mud. That was the job. That could have meant winning. But it didn’t do that. It worked, but not well enough. Twenty-five percent more rainfall meant muddier roads and slower convoys. It meant frustrating the enemy. It meant some marginal degradation of their logistics. But it didn’t cut the trail. It didn’t stop the war. It didn’t change the outcome. What it did do was teach the wrong lesson. Not that the tool was weak, but that the temptation was strong. If the United States could make it rain over Laos, even imperfectly, then the Soviet Union could make it rain over West Germany. China could trigger droughts in Taiwan. Weather could become an instrument of policy. Did we want that? If we can turn weather into strategy, then weather becomes politics. SFX: Thunder closer now. Rain beginning to fall. Congress didn’t learn about Operation Popeye until 1971, when investigative journalist Jack Anderson broke the story. Anderson had a reputation as a muckraker, but the hearings that followed made people uncomfortable. Senators asked military officials to explain how the program had been approved and executed in secret for years. The answer always took some version of the same form: “It was necessary. It was effective. It was war.” Except it wasn’t effective enough. We’d spent five years secretly weaponizing the sky for results that barely moved the needle. We’d opened Pandora’s box on weather modification for marginal tactical gains. By 1972, the Pentagon shut down Popeye. By 1977, the United Nations drafted and ratified the Environmental Modification Convention which prohibited military or hostile use of environmental modification techniques. Forty-eight nations signed it. The United States signed first. A done deal, right? No more cloud seeding. But here’s where the story turns. Let’s go back to 1915 and a man who claimed he could make it rain. And it worked! Act II. The Rainmaker San Diego. December 13th, 1915. A man stands before the city co… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe