I look around me most days - at my relatives, at my phone, at the television murmuring to itself in the background - and what I notice is not malice so much as confusion. A kind of ambient bewilderment. Capitalism, in its infinite cleverness, has built us these beautifully personalized reality tunnels that feel flattering and familiar, like a room where the lighting is always just right for your face. Inside them, we are shown the world not as it is, but as we are most likely to nod along to it. And over time, this has left people not energized or informed, but quietly sad, betrayed, and oddly angry without being entirely sure why.
Most people now encounter ideas the way they encounter ads. Passively. Through a feed. Through a voice that sounds confident enough to be mistaken for wisdom. They weigh information not with their conscience, or their lived sense of right and wrong, but with the vague feeling of whether it agrees with the version of themselves the algorithm has been nurturing.
So someone like Joe Rogan will say something about how Democrats would have won Michigan if they weren’t obsessed with trans bathrooms and insisting gender was a social construct. And a guy who looks like me hears this and feels a real tightening in his chest. A resentment. Not because he has ever actually met a trans person and been wronged by her, but because the story he’s been handed gives his frustration somewhere convenient to land.
But what he doesn’t do is sit across from one. He doesn’t look her in the eye, introduce himself, and ask her what she’s carried.
If he did, she might tell him that for most of her life she walked around with a generalized self-hatred she could never quite explain. That she drank too much. That she tried to outwork it, out-joke it, out-discipline it. And that one day, in her forties, sober for the first time in a long while, she realized the thing she had been fighting wasn’t weakness or indulgence or ideology. It was the daily strain of living in a body that felt like a stranger. So she did the thing that finally made her feel okay in the world.
She might say, calmly, “SOME people might be asking for special treatment. But I’m certainly not. All I’m asking for is the basic right of human acceptance.”
And you think: she’s not trying to convert anyone. She’s not asking to be celebrated. She just wants the medical care that doesn’t make her feel sick or alien in her own skin. She wants to work, to love, to find some ordinary happiness. She wants to walk through a revolving door without the person behind her muttering “Jesus Christ,” as though her existence were a personal inconvenience.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, you have liberals who sincerely believe that Trump supporters are all bad people. That half the country is irredeemable. A write-off.
But there was this one time I got a flat tire late at night. I pulled over to the side of the road, hazards on. A truck slowed and stopped behind me. Being from New Jersey, my first instinct was to prepare for a confrontation. I rehearsed a couple of lines in my head, just in case. Something defensive.
Then I remembered I was in Texas.
The driver got out. A country guy. Ball cap. Boots. He looked at me like someone who had found a neighbor in mild trouble, which is exactly what he had done. He asked, in a thick, unhurried accent, if I needed a hand. No suspicion. No lecture. Just help.
He pulled a better tire iron than I had out of his truck as I cranked the jack. We changed the tire. He waved. Drove off. A Trump bumper sticker bobbed gently on the back of his truck as he disappeared down the road.
I do not recall this happening to me in New York.
And this is what gets lost when we live entirely behind avatars and pseudonyms, inside apps that reward cruelty with attention. We forget that understanding something - really understanding it - requires more than being right. It requires synthesis. Context. Empathy. The willingness to be unsettled by another person’s interior life.
We are bound together whether we like it or not. Most people are not villains. They are products of a long, winding river of causes - family, geography, fear, love, habit, trauma - over which they had very little control. That doesn’t make every belief correct. But it does make every person worthy of compassion.
We are all, in the end, made of the same stuff. Carried by the same current. Trying, clumsily, to feel okay in this world.
But we live now inside a constant fog of opinion, produced not by argument or evidence but by repetition. Our information no longer arrives because it is important, but because it is likely to be consumed. What we see is selected for familiarity, emotional response, and compliance, with no regard for how the world really is, or the humanity layered beneath the symbols we come to despise.
It leaves people anxious, reactive, and eager for explanations that restore a sense of order. Governments are not immune to this atmosphere. They are human beings, just like us. When a public is conditioned to think decisiveness is the same thing as courage, foreign policy follows the same logic. Whole countries - dense with history, contradiction, family memory, petty bureaucracy, jokes, rivalries, bad roads, broken elevators, stubborn rituals, and ordinary private lives that have nothing to do with us - are flattened into cartoons we can recognize at a glance.
Venezuela becomes not a place where people wake up late, argue with siblings, stand in line, fall in love, and make compromises they hate... it collapses into a single word, a single problem, a single test of resolve. Once a nation learns to see the world this way, intervention appears as a reflex, justified in advance by the language used to describe it. What follows is not a story about Venezuela alone, but about how power, fed by distortion and certainty, repeats itself while insisting each time that it has never done this before.
And before we quickly run through it, I’ll just say that for all the talk of “no US casualties” in the Venezuela op, does anybody listening know whether any Venezuelan civilians were killed? How many? Maybe we’ll come back to that. Just wondering if anyone is aware.
Regarding our involvement in Venezuela, it is just another link in a long chain. The United States today repeatedly treats other societies as instruments for managing its own anxieties.
Yet the founding fathers said this:
“The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
~George Washington
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none.”
~Thomas Jefferson
“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
~James Madison
“Nations go to war not because they must, but because power seeks justification.”
~Alexander Hamilton
We know what they all said.
But MAGA, you’re touting this as a foreign policy victory.
And you are lost. You’re not evil. You are lost.
The founders did not arrive at such caution through theory alone. They learned it the hard way. They had seen war up close, not as abstraction but as hunger, debt, disorder, and the quiet unraveling of civic life. They knew that war does not simply end when the fighting stops. It lingers... in institutions, in habits of power, in the willingness of a government to do tomorrow whatever it justified doing yesterday.
They understood something we often forget: that unnecessary war is not just violence abroad, but corrosion at home. It centralizes authority, dulls moral judgment, and teaches a nation to explain away what it once would have forbidden. This is why George Washington warned against entanglement, why Jefferson spoke of restraint, why Madison feared war as the enemy of liberty. They were not idealists, but veterans of chaos who knew that force, once normalized, rarely stays where it is aimed.
They avoided unnecessary war not because they were weak, but because they had earned wisdom through blood and trauma. They had already learned how easily power convinces itself it’s afraid - and how eagerly fear asks to be armed.
Yet Americans today like to believe that when we intervene in other countries, it is always for the first time. This one is different, we say. This one is urgent. This one is regrettable but necessary. We line these moments up like snow globes on a shelf, each sealed, each shaken once, each containing its own tiny moral weather system. If anything goes wrong inside one of them, we can always say it was unforeseeable, or tragic, or complicated. What we resist, almost instinctively, is the idea that these are not separate stories at all, but chapters in the same book. Latin America keeps trying to hand us that book. We keep setting it down, unopened, insisting we already know how the story ends.
In Part 2, we’ll walk through the history of US interventions in Latin America in the 20th century. And maybe there’s something we can learn from those.
END OF PART 1
