So, what happened? Well, not to get too specific, but I’ve spent the last three years pouring myself into a venture I thought might be The Thing: the endeavor that would secure my family’s future, ultimately bringing us financial independence and allowing me to spend more time doing the things that are important to me. Like working on my book. Or this blog.

Like the pursuits that help me stay sane, but don’t do anything to keep a roof over our heads, or gas in the car, or food on the table.

So I gave it everything I had. I poured my sweat and blood, sometimes literally, into this endeavor I hoped would be The Thing. And I quit doing pretty much anything else. I didn’t even finish the last megapost I promised you. I haven’t written a word here, or on my book, or pretty much anywhere except what was necessary to move this great endeavor forward.

And my family went into it right beside me, investing dollars and sweat and blood and tears to try to make a go of it.

And now it looks like that endeavor is coming to an end. And we’re not financially independent. And we need to figure out what to do next.

That’s the hard news. If I look at it the way I would have three years ago, it would be easy to think of it as a failure. Hell, more than that: a big-F-word Failure, a life-defining exclamation point to the phrase I’m just not good enough.

But I’m not the same man I was three years ago, and I don’t see it that way. Not anymore.

The way I see it, I stepped up. We all did: stepped up to do something really hard, spent three years working together, sweating and bleeding together, learning a thing or two about ourselves and each other.

And the things we learned are so much more important than whether we succeeded or failed. Because one of the things we learned is that we can do it: we can set our sights on a goal and work together to make it happen. Even when the goal is difficult. Even when we might have to risk our future to make it happen.

So whatever the result, whatever comes next, we know we can face it together.

We know this isn’t the end. It’s just another beginning. We have some ideas. Some of them will be hard. Some will require us to take risks—of time, of money, of effort. Many of them are scary to think of.

So now we choose a path and start forward. Without a clear vision of what the future will hold. Without knowing what changes might lie ahead to make our efforts easier or harder, simple or impossible.

But, hell—isn’t that the kind of thing this site is all about? It’s hard to move forward without taking some kind of risk. And if I can toot my own horn just a little bit, that’s going to take some courage.

If this site is useful to you, maybe you’ll come back. I’ve set a goal to post here 26 times this year, so I’ll be back with personal updates, as well as the same kind of content I created for you before.

Happy New Year, and I hope to see you again soon!

In the meantime, you might want to check out a couple of sites I’m enjoying these days:

• Tim Urban, the undisputed heavyweight champion of long-form blogging, makes his digital home at Wait But Why. His series on how we got here, The Story of Us, is worth a read. Pack a lunch.
• Braver Angels is bringing people with differing views together to get us talking again. Their podcast is a great way to get a feel for how both sides can discuss an issue without shouting over each other.

Now, go do something that scares you.

• COVID-19 is serious, and taking reasonable precautions against it has upended our lives and our economy, but reasonable precautions seem to be a pretty good defense;
• The economic impacts of those reasonable precautions are a bigger concern, but I’m in the camp that thinks ignoring the virus is the bigger threat;
• BLM and Antifa are largely nonviolent movements whose violent sides have been overplayed (and often incited) by agitators who seek to capitalize on any chaos they can trace to them;
• The Proud Boys and groups like them are so far outside U.S. mainstream culture right now that any long-term damage they can do seems pretty limited;
• An unbalanced Supreme Court is problematic, but the near-universal lack of courage among our national leadership right now seems likely to dampen any harmful rulings the Court might seek to impose;
• Even President Trump seems unlikely to win a second term, and if he does, it looks like he’ll face opposition majorities in both the House and Senate.

I’m certainly not about to start crowing about a return to anything like normalcy, if such a condition can be said to exist in a country that’s constantly trying to walk the line between oligarchy and mob rule. It’s clear that what was normal last year won’t be normal next year–but what was normal last year wasn’t normal ten years ago, and that wasn’t normal a decade before that, and that wasn’t normal two decades before that. And none of it was normal fifty years ago.

Because whether they were conscious of it or not, our founders conceived and dedicated a nation in a state of constant tension with itself, a nation that would be aware of its own weaknesses and striving to improve itself. The Constitutional Convention gave us a framework for a first-of-its-kind governmental system, a government that defined itself not by limiting the rights of the people it hoped to govern, but by limiting its own powers, defining (by the ratification of the Constitution in 1788) what it must do, and (by the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791) what it may not do. They gave us the scaffold and the tools to shape it, provided a few precedents to get us going, and wished us well.

Since then, it’s been up to us. We’ve been tested–sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by disagreements among ourselves–and each time we’ve managed to get through the trials with the scaffolding more or less intact.

And in the last half century or so, we’ve done our best to weaken the scaffolding until it seems to be nearing its load limit. From Johnson to Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, we’ve shifted away from government whose mission is to serve its people to government whose mission is to serve itself. Until it feels like a few more unprincipled presidents and senators and representatives might be all it takes to topple the whole thing.

That’s what scares me.

Not that Trump might kill our government. The Constitution is strong enough, I think, to withstand a hamfisted blowhard.

But what about the next one? What happens when somebody shows up with Trump’s disregard for precedent and process and consequences, but Obama’s oratory skills and Clinton’s charisma? A candidate who can surround themselves with ruthless patriots and charm us into making them Caesar by degrees? A candidate we don’t even identify as a threat until it’s too late?

Washington could have done it. It’s thanks to the precedent he set that few presidents since have had the opportunity to test the Constitution in such a way. And of those, none was equal to the task.

But in the win-at-all-costs political environment we’ve built for ourselves today? In the environment where moral is less important than legal, where can we spin it is a more pertinent question than should we do it? Where a catchy Tweet is more important than the good of the people?

So, yeah. That’s one thing that scares me.

Trump doesn’t appear to be a threat like I’ve outlined above. Neither does Biden.

But I won’t be dropping my guard any time soon.

Hard to plan for the long term when the short term looks so bleak.

Hard to remember which way the moral universe arcs when it seems to be bending back on itself.

Hard to trust the process when so many people seem to be finding ways to cut it short to enrich and empower themselves.

Hard to believe in the trustworthiness of our institutions, or the honor of our leaders, or the courage of a loyal opposition, when none of those things seem to matter. When it’s not clear they even exist anymore.

It’s not clear to me what’s going to happen in the next year, or six months, or six weeks. But for the first time in my life, I see the approaching election and I’m not comfortable about the results. Not because I don’t think my candidate will win, but because a nontrivial segment of the population seems okay with the idea of ignoring the results. Because people who should know better seem to think the results shouldn’t matter.

I believe our Constitution is still strong. But that’s mostly because I know and trust many of the people who are sworn to support and defend it. Those we’ve elected to lead them? Not so much. Those we might elect to replace them, assuming the nation chooses to abide by the expressed will of the people? Not much more.

Because courage–the whole reason I started this site–seems to be largely missing among our national leadership.

And I’ve begun to wonder whether maybe I haven’t been worried enough. Because even if this fall passes without incident, we’ve set precedents in the last few years that will change how our nation sets policy and makes decisions for generations.

A friend of mine lay it out in stark terms earlier today, suggesting that in the years to come, What did you do then? will be a common question. And it occurred to me that I kept my head down and got my job done and raised my kids and tried to weather the storm is not the answer I want to give.

Maybe we should all strive to have a better answer. As hard as that answer is to find, maybe we owe it to those who come after. They’ll be the ones asking the question, after all.

We have everything in our control.

At least, that’s what we’ve all grown up believing.

We control the weather, or at least the weather we experience: we set the temperature to something comfortable and close our shelters to all but the worst of the wind and rain. When hail falls, we come out afterward and shake our heads at the damage to our homes and cars, then file our insurance claims and go about our lives.

We control our own cycles of day and night: efficient electric lighting and unbroken access to information and entertainment mean we can stay up as late into the night as we want, and only the demands of work or school or family dictate when we have to rise in the morning.

We control where we live: fast, reliable transportation and near-ubiquitous access to pretty much everybody means we can live outside the town where we work, or in the middle of what used to be a swamp, or on the side of a mountain if that’s where we want to be and we have the resources.

We can build almost anything we can imagine, almost anywhere. We can cook recipes with authentic ingredients from anywhere in the world. We carry access to the sum of human knowledge in our pockets.

Lately, we can even control our own truth, choosing what to listen to from the infinite messages bombarding us every day and what to ignore or deny.

But every once in a great while, the world reminds us how small the scope of the things we can really control is. Because while we have quite a lot of control over how we experience the world, we have very little over the world itself. Or over our fellow humans.

It’s tempting, at times like these, to seek to control the world around us, to lash out and demand that others do what seems like the right thing. Because it hurts, and we want to make it better, and if everybody would just do the right thing, we could all get through this the way we imagine. And it doesn’t work, because everybody else is scared and hurting too, and not one of them has the same mind or set of experiences we do, and they’re wishing we would just do the right thing as they imagine it and they don’t want to listen to somebody who can’t see such a simple truth.

So everybody is trying to control everybody else, and nobody is willing to be controlled.

So what is to be done?

We can keep on the way we are going: shout louder and louder and just don’t stop shouting, because somebody will have to listen eventually. It’s how we’re wired, and it just feels natural to most of us. Except that with all of us shouting all the time, none of us is listening.

Or we can just go about our lives, shut out as much of the shouting as we can, and just do the right thing as we understand it. That’s probably more productive than shouting, and it might allow us to reach more people. Because they are more likely to follow our good example than our shouted advice.

Or we can listen. Try to hear the truths people are trying to share with us, rather than shouting our truth at them. Then maybe we can figure out together what is to be done. Because what we all want is to feel like we’ve been heard.

And in the end, that’s the only thing we can control: our own choices.

Maybe we can let that be enough.

It’s fashionable right now to dwell on the sins of our fathers.

It’s a well-deserved shift of focus, and probably overdue after two centuries of myth-making. But it’s easy to overdo it.

I was part of a conversation yesterday in which a high-school freshman started a comment with something like “The Founding Father I hate the most is…”

I have to admit I don’t even remember which Founding Father she named, or why she hates him most. I was so stricken by her choice of phrase the rest of the sentence didn’t even register with me, and the conversation soon moved on. I think I was the only one who found her words distracting, or maybe the only one who took them seriously, and I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours considering them. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so much energy on them another time of the year, but this Independence Day it seems appropriate.

The Founding Father I hate the most. As if the Founding Fathers were a band of despicable criminals, as if they were more worthy of our revulsion than our reverence. As if the evil they did–and I don’t think any of them would deny they did evil–outweighs the good they did in laying the foundations of a great nation.

I don’t know where she got those words. A teacher, a peer, a web site. Maybe they sprang from her own mind. What I know is that few Americans would have said such a thing out loud thirty-odd years ago, when I was her age. It’s hard for me to accept this approach as better; I wonder if it’s not just our old mythology flipped on its ear, shifting focus from the Founders’ greatness to their failings without any effort to understand the bigger picture of their world, their times, the great experiment they committed their lives and ours to. The same stories, or at least overlapping stories, but with the Founders as ravening demons rather than larger-than-life demigods.

We certainly shouldn’t ignore their failings. Many of them spoke of all men being created equal while themselves owning slaves. Many of them named themselves We the People as they furthered a policy of relocation and genocide against the Peoples who were here before. Many of them held their wives and mothers in great esteem, but chose not to give them a voice in the new world they were creating. And none of them seems to have given more than a passing thought to those who loved differently, or who saw themselves as something other than the story their bodies told.

Serious failings by our standards, and nontrivial by their own. And in spite of them, they gave us the bones of a system that has grown to become today’s United States of America. We weren’t the first nation to call ourselves free, or to conceive of government by the consent of the governed, and we were far from the first to choose representatives to make policy on our behalf. But our Founders were the first to define a system of government by limiting their own power, and then they set the example for the rest of us by abiding by those limits and defining others as they went along. And they created, whether by unparalleled brilliance or blind luck, a system that has continually sought to make itself better by improving on the shortcomings of what came before.

It’s almost as if they knew they couldn’t have everything now, couldn’t even conceive of everything, so they focused on what they could build and left it to us to continue their work.

It’s almost as if they were so busy protecting what they had already built that they couldn’t allow themselves to reach for more.

It’s almost as if, far from being demigods or demons, they were imperfect humans working within the constraints of the world they knew even as they strained against those constraints.

I, for one, refuse to make demons of our Founding Fathers. On balance, I think it’s fair to say they did a great deal more good than evil.

I pray, one day, somebody says the same of me.

Yesterday, James Mattis, retired USMC general and President Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, published a short statement condemning the president’s behavior toward protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In his statement, Secretary Mattis makes clear, after years of unimpeachable professional silence, what he sees as the military’s role in this time, and what he thinks of this president’s persistently and deliberately divisive leadership.

It’s a refreshingly frank statement, a respected public figure speaking his truth in opposition to injustice. It’s unsurprising because personal courage has been this man’s bread and butter for half a century. And unexpected because it’s beyond rare for a military leader, even a former military leader, to speak openly against a sitting president.

Which makes two other letters that were also released in the last couple of days even more unexpected:

1. The current Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, sent a memorandum to the Department of Defense on Tuesday. Its middle paragraph reads as follows:

Department of Defense personnel have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. I myself have taken it many times in my military and civilian careers, and believe strongly in it. As part of that oath, we commit to protecting the American people’s right to freedom of speech and to peaceful assembly. I, like you, am steadfast in my belief that Americans who are frustrated, angry, and seeking to be heard must be ensured that opportunity. And like you, I am committed to upholding the rule of law and protecting life and liberty, so that the violent actions of a few do not undermine the rights and freedoms of law-abiding citizens.

2. The current Secretary of the Army, Army Chief of Staff, and Sergeant Major of the Army released a joint statement that reads, in part:

Every Soldier and Department of the Army civilian swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. That includes the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. We will continue to support and defend those rights, and we will continue to protect Americans….

These two letters are less blunt than Secretary Mattis’s, but they present a clear reminder to the country, and to the president, that the oath a servicemember takes is to the Constitution, and not to the president.

They are the closest I have ever seen active military leaders come to speaking against a sitting president.

I’m ashamed to say, after some of the rhetoric I’ve heard in recent years, I was beginning to doubt whether our military would have the fortitude to refuse an illegal order from this president. As far as I know, it hasn’t come to that yet, but for the record, I don’t doubt anymore. And that makes me proud. Proud, and hopeful for the future.

Because it means the dream of the USA–the dream of Washington, and Jefferson, and Lincoln, and the Roosevelts, and Eisenhower, and millions of others whose names we don’t know–is harder to break than many of us feared.

Fear is a daily fact of life right now.

As we start the fourth month (for most of us) of the global pandemic, we know fear.

Fear of what we or our families might be exposed to in the days to come.

Fear of the conflicts within our family that we can’t get away from like we used to.

Fear of the health consequences of reopening our cities, states, or country too early.

Fear of the economic consequences of reopening too late.

Fear of what we’ll say if our employer requires us to return to the office before we’re comfortable.

Fear of how we’ll move forward if our employer has to close its doors, and we become part of the nearly 30% unemployed in our country right now. Or fear because it’s already happened to us.

Fear of the images on the news.

Fear that we’ll miss something if we don’t watch the news.

I could keep going all day.

But there’s another fear that’s all too real for all too many people: the fear that someone we love will leave to go about their normal life–and never return.

It’s a fear that became real for George Floyd’s loved ones a week ago when they learned he would never come home. And again when they watched the video of his death on the internet.

I haven’t watched the video. I have no idea what he did, or what he was accused of. I have no idea what kind of interaction, or what kind of history, he had with the police officer who killed him. I have no idea what kind of day that officer had had up to that point, or what he learned from the police academy or from his father or from his experience in law enforcement.

I know an African-American man was deprived of his life without due process, by a white police officer, in what has become a disturbing trend in the past fifteen years or so.

Of course, it’s been going on a lot longer than fifteen years. Something like three centuries longer. And that’s just on this continent.

But in the last decade and a half, cell phone cameras have become ubiquitous. And we’ve seen videos of many similar deaths. Enough that it’s fair to recognize that we have a serious problem: when a black man leaves his home, the likelihood that he will not return is nontrivial.

And this man’s death came at a time when we are all afraid, when many of us are out of work and have time on our hands and don’t have to choose between speaking out for justice and keeping our jobs.

So many of us showed up.

And the police, human beings who are just as afraid as the rest of us, reacted like people who are afraid. At least here in Dallas, they reacted with waves of admirable restraint punctuated by troughs of shameful excess, employing tear gas, rubber bullets, and shoving tactics that seem designed to provoke the crowd into doing something foolish.

Thankfully, no one seems to have done anything particularly foolish yet.

So far, only two people have been seriously hurt. With hundreds of people engaged over three days, that alone speaks of admirable restraint on both sides.

May restraint continue to prevail. May their voices be heard.

May our country recognize that saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean other lives don’t. It just means We are human like you, and we won’t be silent any more.

May the day come when an African-American man is no less likely to return home than his white neighbor. May that day come soon.

May that day come soon.

There are a lot of ways we can negotiate this crisis.

We can mock the president, blame him for acting too slowly, make fun of his off-the-cuff remarks that sound so unlike what we expect from a president.

Or we can mock those who see COVID-19 as a threat, refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing when we go out in public.

We can disregard those who see the shutdown as a threat to the economy, because after all, if too many people die, the economy won’t matter anymore.

Or we can disregard those who see reopening as a threat to public health, because after all, if the economy were to really and truly collapse, it could kill more people than the disease.

We can reject the science because the scientists didn’t vote our way.

Or we can reject the protests because the protesters didn’t vote our way.

We can find someone to blame.

We can find someone to make fun of.

We can find someone to hate.

Or we can look around us and ask, How can I help?

Because blame and mockery and hate feel good now. They make us feel powerful because they make others seem less powerful.

But finding a way to help–finding a way to make life a little better for those around us–that feels good in a way blaming and mocking and hating never can. Because when you stand up and help another person, you make two people better. And even if it’s not obvious in the short run, that’s where true power lies.

So next time you’re tempted to blame or mock or hate, maybe take a moment and ask How can I help? instead.

I am not a survivor of sexual assault.

And the words Me too are powerful beyond their application to any particular group.

See, most of us grow up knowing–knowing–that we’re supposed to have the answers. And if we don’t have the answers, we’re supposed to pretend we do. Because that’s how we lead. Because if they feel like we know what’s going on, if they feel like we know what to do, the people who depend on us will feel better. They’ll see we’re not afraid, not uncertain, and that’ll help them call up their own courage and carry on with us.

It’s true, particularly when the answers are knowable, or when we know they’ll reveal themselves with liberal application of confidence and elbow grease. Because we can fake confidence, and we all have plenty of elbow grease when we need it, and most of the time it feels better to stay busy, anyway. And if you work long enough and hard enough, you might fix what’s wrong, even if it’s by accident.

But sometimes, fake confidence and elbow grease aren’t the way to go. Sometimes, the people who depend on you are are scared, and you’re scared too, and nothing you can do will make it better.

Sometimes, all you can do is sit down next to them and say me too.

I’m scared too.
I’m sad too.
I’m confused too.

And I don’t know what to do about it, and I can’t fix it. But you’re not alone, and we’re going to figure out together how to move forward.

Right now feels like one of those times. Too many people know exactly what to do, exactly how to move forward, and they want us to shout damn the torpedoes and reopen everything so the economy doesn’t collapse, or they want us to shout victory or death and keep everything closed until we know we’ve gotten ahead of the curve.

And the rest of us are holding our breath, thinking we’re in the middle of something the world hasn’t seen in a hundred years, and wondering how anybody could possibly claim to know exactly how to move forward in the face of a virus nobody had ever seen until seven months ago.

We’re scared, and not just over whether we or our loved ones will get sick. We’re scared of what the world will look like in six months, of what kind of world we’ll have when COVID-19 is a memory. We’re scared we won’t have a vaccine in eighteen months, or it will only be available for those who can pay thousands of dollars for it. We’re scared that our kids will grow up in a world without handshakes or hugs. And we don’t know how to stop those things.

And a lifetime of training tells us we have to stand up straight and pretend to be confident and act like we know what to do. And our instincts tell us we’re full of bullshit.

Maybe this is a time to follow our instincts. Maybe we need to sit together, masked and gloved and at a proper social distance, and say me too. You’re not alone.

And then we can figure out together how to move forward.