Notes in Review
This Week’s Notes
This Week’s Artwork
This Week’s Discussion
This week on Notes of the Week, Nick Paro and Walter Rhein open with reality: physical injury, aging bodies, and the brutal inefficiencies of the U.S. healthcare system. Walter’s skiing accident opens our discussion with a wider critique of insurance profiteering — a system that punishes people for seeking care while exhausting doctors and patients alike. Nick reinforces this with his lived experiences inside the VA system — insurance based bureaucracy degrading our quality of life, even for those supposedly “taken care of.”
From there, our conversation pivots into one of our most common, recurring themes: intelligent masculinity. Both of us value presence, humility, and care — especially as fathers. Celebrating our daughters’ artwork is our way of declaring that nurturing creativity, curiosity, and joy is the easiest and most impactful way to create a culture built on interior value, over extraction and dominance.
We then move our discussion back into our geopolitical discussion. This is a conversation confronting America’s unresolved reckoning with white supremacy — as a structural force embedded in our institutions, narratives, and foreign policy. Walter names the current administration plainly as a white-supremacist project, while Nick challenges the dehumanization of Latin American lives that allows U.S. violence in Venezuela to be dismissed or justified.
Personal stories — living abroad, being welcomed into homes, learning languages, raising families — puncture the myths Americans are taught about the rest of the world. We dismantle propaganda with our humanity, insisting that people across borders are not abstractions but families, creators, parents, and children.
We close our discussion right where it started: intentionality. Fighting white supremacy, rejecting supremacist conditioning, and building a better future are not abstract goals — they are daily practices, modeled in how we parent, how we listen, how we create, and how we refuse to stay silent.
Thank you This Will Hold, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Will Fullwood, Anshul Kumar, Beth Cruz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Walter Rhein! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Actions You Can Take
Support Ukraine:
Call your public servants on important issues:
Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement:
Sign the Move-On Petitions:
* Investigate Presidential Use of the Autopen for Pardons and Executive Actions
* A Petition to End the Shutdown and Restore Representation: Remove Speaker Johnson
* Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification
Learn new skills:
* B. Cognition Labs — empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals
Nick’s Notes
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!
~Nick Paro
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