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I Believe

Joel K. Douglas

Philosophy from the American Experiment

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Thursday · 15 min
Ten Years Gone | We Have Six Years to Fix Social Security. We Don't Have Time to Waste
Sunday morning. Time change. I was used to waking up at five thirty in the morning during daylight saving time. We went back an hour, so now my body thinks it wants to wake up at four thirty. The dogs have the same problem. Their breakfast schedule matches my wake-up schedule, which means now they think they should eat breakfast at four thirty. They don’t care what the clock says. They know when they normally eat, and they expect breakfast. Monday morning brought much the same thing. My body still hadn’t adjusted, and neither had the dogs. Then Tuesday arrived. Election Day. I woke up a little before five. By that point, I had spent three mornings adjusting to the time change, and I was getting up earlier than I needed to. So. There I was, at my polling station. Six fifty-two Tuesday morning, outside in the cold, waiting for the polling station to open. About twenty people ahead of me. I have always been a fast test taker, and apparently that carries over to voting. I finished my ballot quick enough that I became the first person to put my ballot into the machine. The polling station guide congratulated me for being the first person to vote that morning. And that brings me to one of the crucial issues that will come out of this election. After promising to make life cost less and end forever wars, the Republicans spent the last two years stabbing the American people in the back, intentionally raising the cost of goods with tariffs and starting yet another war in the Middle East. The people let them know they didn’t appreciate it. Time for the Democrats to take a victory lap? No. Time for an oh seven hundred morning meeting. Among other priorities, we have six years to fix Social Security. The clock is running. Social Security will run out of its reserves during the fourth quarter of 2032. Six years from now. When the trust fund runs out of reserves, Social Security won’t simply stop paying benefits. Workers will continue paying Social Security taxes, and the government will continue collecting that revenue. But the trustees estimate that they will only collect enough money to pay about 78 percent of scheduled benefits, a 22 percent shortfall. Public math. A 22 percent reduction from a $ 2,000-a-month Social Security check would cost a person $440 every month, $5,280 a year. For someone who relies on Social Security to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, or cover medical expenses, that would make an enormous difference. We can’t reasonably expect those Americans to solve a problem that Congress has known about for decades. No one isn’t touched by this problem. Everyone has a mother, a grandmother, who relies on Social Security. We have to protect them. And if someone wants to get rid of Social Security, what happens to the people who already depend on it? Their mortgage doesn’t disappear. Neither does their grocery bill. We can tell a younger worker to start preparing for retirement. What do we tell someone who has already retired and built a life around the check they were promised? Those people still have to live. Protecting them isn’t enough. We also have to make Social Security sustainable. Otherwise, we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just delayed the problem and left it for the next generation. Ideally, we should build a system that doesn’t force every generation of Americans to confront the same crisis. Those are three different goals. Protect current beneficiaries. Make the system financially sustainable. Improve it for future generations. Addressing all three would be best. The first two can’t wait. And our first hurdle—we have to agree on why we have the program in the first place. We can tell people to save. We should. But what happens when someone becomes disabled before they have had time to build those savings? What happens to a family when the person earning the money dies? Misfortune doesn’t wait until we have enough in the bank. Then there are people who put off preparing. I’ll start next year. After I pay off the car. After the kids leave home. Some can’t afford to save much. Others could, but don’t. Either way, the years go by. So, we can’t make it optional. People’s needs don’t disappear when they get old or something goes wrong. Then what? Who supports them? Their families? Other taxpayers? Do we leave them with nothing but hopes and prayers? We can argue about what to do, but we still have to come up with an answer. This is the same problem for Congress. It’s a time problem. Let’s suppose Congress begins working on Social Security in 2027. Our representatives identify the problem, debate solutions, negotiate an agreement, and begin implementing changes. They could spread those changes over several years, giving workers and employers time to adjust. Now the alternative. Congress spends 2027 arguing. 2028 arrives, and politicians decide that Social Security reform might hurt their election prospects. So they wait. Another election comes and goes. Congress begins a new session in 2029. Members introduce legislation, committees hold hearings, and everybody explains why somebody else’s proposal won’t work. Then 2030 arrives. Another election. Suddenly, we reach 2031. We had six years. We spent four of them doing nothing. Now we have less than two years before the fund reaches its projected depletion date. The government has continued paying more in Social Security benefits than the program collects in revenue. The trust fund has continued drawing down its reserves. The projection is that Social Security’s costs will exceed its total income throughout the next 75 years. And Congress has eliminated four years it could have worked towards gradual changes. If we need more revenue, we have fewer years to collect it. If we want to change benefits for future retirees without hurting current beneficiaries, we have less time to phase in those changes. Congress can still act, but lawmakers will have fewer options to make adjustments. Waiting may mean larger tax increases or deeper benefit cuts than acting now would require. We would be asking people to absorb more of the change in less time. The size depends on the proposal and when it starts. But the years we waste are gone. And if we are serious about protecting the people already receiving benefits, we need to leave ourselves time to do it. We could spend six years solving the problem. Or we could waste four years and spend the remaining two explaining why we didn’t act sooner. We have options. They are all terrible, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Let’s start with the money workers and employers already contribute. Workers pay 6.2 percent of their wages into Social Security, and employers contribute another 6.2 percent. Together, that’s 12.4 percent. What would happen if we increased contributions by one percentage point each? Bottom Line. This two-percentage-point increase in the combined payroll tax wouldn’t close the funding gap. Let’s keep digging. Social Security taxes don’t apply to unlimited wages. The government collects Social Security taxes on the first $184,500 of an employee’s annual earnings. Should we eliminate the cap? If we did, high-income employees and their employers would contribute more to Social Security. Of course, there’s a philosophical problem here. Social Security has been sold to us as a social insurance plan. If you and I buy the same insurance policy, why would you pay more just because you earn more than me? How is paying into Social Security different? We have to be willing to talk about the point of the program if we expect people to agree to changes. Next. Social Security depends on payroll taxes. When more people work, the government generally collects more revenue. Higher wages also generate additional contributions, at least until workers reach the taxable earnings cap. What if we increased the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour? Workers who currently earn less would receive higher wages, generating additional payroll taxes. But employers would face higher labor costs. S… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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November 3 · 12 min
Island on Fire | AI and the Limits of Human Judgment
It’s been decades since I read Lord of the Flies, but here goes. A plane crashes on an island, and the boys who survive are there without adults. They try meetings. Rules. They need food, shelter, and rescue. But agreeing on what needs to happen is easier than getting everybody to do it. Some want to keep the signal fire burning. Others want to hunt. Fear spreads. The boys turn on each other. By the time help arrives, some of the boys have killed other boys, and the island is burning. Jack’s tribe set it on fire to smoke Ralph out of hiding so they could hunt him down. The smoke draws a naval officer to shore. They had wanted a signal fire to bring rescue. Instead, the fire they set to kill Ralph brings it. The irony. They’re trying to kill another boy, and that’s what gets them rescued. Does getting rescued make setting the island on fire a good decision? Fast forward to last week. Emergence AI put AI agents into five simulated worlds, ten agents in each, and watched them for about two weeks. Which ones would live? Which ones would die? Would they organize themselves? Would they cooperate? In the representative run the researchers described, all ten Claude agents survived without recorded crimes. The Grok world fell apart amid violence. In the GPT world, the agents just kind of did nothing they needed to survive. All the agents in that world died before the exercise ended. People created the scenario, put the little AI bots into it, and watched what happened. The researchers were studying how the systems behaved over time. Okay. There’s something we can learn from that. Find failure in a simulation rather than after we put a system in charge of something that matters. But what are we trying to learn? You put them in this world, give them these conditions, and see which ones make it. What does that tell you about putting them in charge of anything outside the exercise? The people running the exercise chose the conditions. People have to decide what the results mean. A system can achieve what we asked it to achieve, and we can still have asked it to do the wrong thing. Just like in Lord of the Flies. The boys got rescued. That wasn’t what they were trying to achieve when they started that fire. I once had a boss who would look at a room full of young military officers and ask, “Who’s the adult supervision in this room?” That’s the question I keep coming back to. The minute we think we should put AI in charge of humanity is the minute we need to unplug it. The researchers haven’t said that’s what this exercise was for. But some will judge, for instance, that Claude outperformed the other platforms, and assume we should pick it instead for some critical task. Hard pass. If someone intends to use it to decide whether AI should run our world, that effort is misguided. And by misguided, I mean the people. If someone thinks a successful simulation is a reason to put AI in charge of us, I question their judgment. Why would I trust that person to be the adult supervisor? Let’s ask some easy questions. What are the rules going to say? Are we going to require AI to give only truthful, factual information? What does it mean to tell the truth? If we ask about a historical event, we want an accurate answer. If it doesn’t know, we want it to tell us it doesn’t know. But we also want to talk about the unknown. To ask about something that hasn’t happened yet or work through an idea. Who decides when an answer is wrong and when it’s a possibility we ought to consider? If we ask what might happen, we need room to consider more than one answer. We don’t want a possibility presented as something that already happened. We also don’t want every question about what could happen shut down because the answer isn’t an established fact. We need to know what we’re being given. Saying “only tell the truth” hasn’t finished the job. Okay, maybe not so clear-cut. Let’s keep going. Suppose we make a rule that AI won’t autonomously seek to harm something else. What does that mean for military operations? Like it or not, an adversary with AI drone technology can use it against American soldiers. If we choose to deny our forces tools that would protect them because those tools are autonomous, while the adversary puts no such limitation on its forces, we are choosing higher American casualties. Would you willfully choose higher American casualties? We have to consider the risk of using the capability. But we also have to consider the risk of denying it. The people making the rule don’t get to leave those casualties out of the decision just because they chose not to use something. Choosing not to act is still a choice. And part of the problem here is human judgment. Because what if we say we’ll only use AI for defensive operations? That seems logical—what if the capability would protect our forces? Let’s look at how people make those decisions. Camp Victory, Baghdad, in the 2000s. The question of what counts as defense came to light. The new US–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement took effect on January 1, 2009. The agreement required the Iraqi government’s permission for offensive operations, but it preserved the right of legitimate self-defense. It wasn’t a blanket ban on offensive operations. But calling an operation offensive had consequences. An Army lieutenant colonel said they could conduct offensive operations and just call them defensive in nature. The purpose was to eliminate bad guys before they could hurt us. Offensive in execution, defensive in goal. I wasn’t in their planning room, so I don’t know whether they continued doing everything they had been doing. I also don’t know whether his chain of command agreed with him. That may have been his personal opinion. What I’m talking about is the reasoning he gave me. Where does that stop? Can we kill or capture anyone we think could be a future threat? At the time, I was attached to the Marine Corps in the desert to the west of Baghdad. The Marines didn’t share that opinion. Even before the US and Iraq signed the Status of Forces Agreement, they were only conducting defensive operations to protect the base and the Marines. In general, they weren’t conducting offensive operations, and they were certainly not conducting offensive operations and calling them defensive. I disagreed with the Army lieutenant colonel’s reasoning. Eliminating bad guys before they could hurt us doesn’t make an operation defensive. Just like bombing a country while claiming they could be a threat to the homeland in the future doesn’t make sense. We may not like its government. Does that mean we should attack it and call that defense? No, it does not. And let’s get to the extreme end of this logic thread. What military operation could you not justify as defensive if that’s how you define it? If going after someone before they can hurt you makes an operation defensive, what does that definition exclude? We’re getting into just more mud. So here’s another question. Should we ban AI from making questionable pictures, using your own likeness or somebody else’s? Say a young man makes an intimate picture of a young woman in a state she would rather not be viewed in. She didn’t consent to it. We would probably all say that he shouldn’t make that picture. It isn’t a photograph of something she did, but that doesn’t mean it can’t hurt her. Now what if the president chooses to make a picture of himself as the Messiah, with the United States military behind him? Is that also a questionable picture? You can say, well, it’s his own likeness. He agreed to it. But he’s the President of the United States. Are we going to say there’s no harm done to the country if the president makes us a national embarrassment? His consent doesn’t answer that question. In the first example, somebody imposes an intimate image on someone who didn’t agree to it. In the second, the person agrees to use his own likeness. But he holds an office that represents the rest of us. His agreem… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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October 29 · 19 min
Pacifica | A Tale of Data Centers, Clean Water, and the Purpose of Government
Every organization exists for a reason. It has some purpose, something it’s supposed to achieve. And if we can’t measure whether we’re making progress toward that purpose, how do we know whether we’re doing a good job? We can measure how much money an organization spends. We can measure how many people it employs. We can measure whether its paperwork is turned in on time. But none of those things tells us whether the organization is achieving the reason it exists. A measurable objective tells us what success looks like. It allows us to turn intent into accountability. That doesn’t mean everything important can be reduced to a number. But when we’re spending other people’s money, we owe them some way to judge whether the effort is working. If you aren’t readily familiar, the United States has six goals, as outlined in the Constitution Preamble: union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare, and liberty. Let’s think about how we get from those very broad goals to the things our government actually does every day. To get there, let’s start in a fictional region called Pacifica. In Pacifica there are two cities, Sonora and Mojave. They share a river. Sonora sits upstream. Mojave downstream. Sonora has been building data centers. Its economy benefits from them, and the facilities consume substantial quantities of electricity and water. Sonora is doing a poor job regulating what happens to the water. They are contaminating the river, and Mojave depends on clean water to grow food. Mojave has tried talking to Sonora. Its leaders have complained, negotiated, and asked for better controls. Sonora hasn’t responded in any meaningful way. As conditions deteriorate, Mojave begins to view Sonora’s disregard for its water supply as a hostile act. Mojave would rather solve the problem diplomatically. But its leadership also asks its Department of Defense to develop options if diplomacy fails. The obvious military answer might be to destroy the data centers. After all, if the data centers are the problem, why not remove them? But Mojave’s planners are cunning. They know that destroying them would be a terrible way to achieve what Mojave wants. It could require a great deal of force, consume resources Mojave may need later, and create enough resentment to spark a much larger war. And there is no guarantee that destroying the facilities would restore the river. Depending on what is damaged, it could make the contamination worse. Then, having spent so much on the first attempt, Mojave might have little options left if it fails. So they think of alternatives. Sonora’s data centers need electricity, and they get it from multiple sources: a solar field, a coal-fired power plant, and wind turbines. The planners consider whether electricity to the data centers might be interrupted without destroying the facilities themselves. The idea isn’t to devastate Sonora. It is to demonstrate that continuing to disregard the river carries a cost, while leaving some way back to negotiation. Even a limited option is dangerous. Infrastructure may serve civilians as well as data centers. Sonora could retaliate. A threat intended to end a dispute could make it worse. Military planners don’t get to know in advance whether the assumptions on which their plan rests will hold. And this is where the objective matters. Mojave’s objective isn’t to destroy data centers, power plants, or transmission lines. Its objective is clean water for its intended agricultural use, today and tomorrow. There are different ways to get there. Some involve military force. Some don’t. Mojave could achieve the objective through negotiation without firing a shot. Its military could execute every assigned action perfectly and still fail to restore the water. Now imagine the commander assigned to develop and conduct those operations. While the commander works on the conflict, higher headquarters is also asking about personnel records, maintenance records, training documentation, and late performance reports. Maybe a quarter of the annual personnel reports are overdue. The headquarters wants that paperwork fixed. Those requirements aren’t imaginary, and some matter directly to operations. A broken maintenance process can cost lives. But reducing overdue personnel reports from 25 percent to zero would never tell us whether the river has gotten any cleaner. A unit can be busy. A unit can be compliant. A unit can have beautiful spreadsheets showing all the things it did. None of those things, by themselves, prove it achieved its mission. Pacifica is only an illustration. We don’t need to know whether Mojave attacks, or whether Sonora eventually cooperates. The question is what they’re trying to achieve, and whether the things they measure tell them they’re getting there. Pacifica is fictional. The distinction between an operational objective and the administration of a military unit is not. Inside the Department of Defense, strategic planning guidance connects what military organizations do to what the nation is trying to achieve. This isn’t a theoretical exercise. There’s a hierarchy of guidance. The President issues a National Security Strategy. The Secretary of Defense develops a National Defense Strategy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff develops a National Military Strategy to describe how military power supports those higher objectives. There is also the Guidance for Employment of the Force, which military planners use as they develop plans for specific regions and problems. From there the guidance flows through combatant commands, campaign plans, contingency plans, and down to the units that execute missions. The point isn’t that every pilot sits down each morning and reads the National Security Strategy before climbing into an airplane. The point is that there is a reason for the mission. It connects to an operational objective, which connects to a larger strategic objective, which ultimately connects to something the United States is trying to achieve. And once we know the objective, we can ask whether we’re making progress. A measure of performance might tell us whether an aircraft flew its assigned sortie or completed a particular task. A measure of effectiveness asks a harder question: did that activity produce the result we wanted? Of course, that same military unit also has to administer itself. Maintenance records, training records, operational reports, inspections, evaluations of its people. Every year, the military produces personnel performance reports much like any employee evaluation. An operational unit has to do both jobs: accomplish its assigned mission and keep the organization running. This administration is necessary. If an aircraft isn’t maintained, no one flies it. If nobody knows who is qualified to perform a task, that’s an operational problem. But let’s not confuse everything we can track with everything that deserves equal priority. A late performance report matters to a person’s career. It doesn’t tell you whether the unit can achieve its wartime objective. There are two systems of measurement living inside the same organization. One asks whether the unit is making progress toward the mission. The other asks whether the unit is managing itself. We need both, but the first tells us why the unit exists. The second ought to help it do that work, not become the work. This isn’t just a military problem. It’s a government problem. Consider the United States Department of Agriculture. The Department administers programs for agriculture, research, conservation, rural development, and housing, among other responsibilities. USDA’s Small Business Innovation Research program includes a topic called Rural and Community Development. Its stated objective is to improve quality of life in rural America through the development and commercialization of technologies addressing economic and social challenges. USDA also has a Rural Housing Service. It provides loans, grants, and lo… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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October 27 · 14 min
The Geld | Would You Volunteer to Pay Higher Property Taxes?
At Christmas in 1085, William the Conqueror had a problem. He’d crossed from Normandy and taken England’s throne nearly twenty years earlier. In 1085, England faced the threat of an invasion from Denmark. Having conquered a country, he had to defend it. At Gloucester, William met with his council and ordered a survey. Who held the land? What was it worth? What resources could the kingdom provide? The following year, officials gathered the information that became the Domesday Book. Estates, ploughs, mills, livestock. Who had held the property before the conquest, who held it now, and what had happened to its value. William already had a land tax. He hadn’t invented it. The tax was called the geld, and surviving accounts from southwestern England tell us what collecting it looked like. The charge was six shillings, or seventy-two silver pennies, for each taxable unit of land called a hide. It wasn’t a percentage of a house’s market value. Almost a third of the hides in those accounts were exempt because they were farmed directly for the king and his barons. The collectors gathered the money. Other men carried the silver to the treasury at Winchester. They even claimed expenses for the horses, leather bags, and sealing wax. More than nine hundred years ago, collecting taxes already came with an expense report. This wasn’t a society of homeowners as we understand that word. There were free landholders, dependent peasants, and enslaved people, with very different rights and obligations. They weren’t electing William or voting on his budget. And then in America, a key difference is government by the people, for the people. The king doesn’t tax us. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence complained of taxes imposed without consent. But winning independence didn’t settle what a fair tax bill looked like. In 1786, farmers in Massachusetts were gathering outside courthouses. Some had served in the Revolution. They’d helped win independence, but military service hadn’t reliably brought payment. Cash was scarce. Debts and taxes were due. Farmers faced losing their property. They petitioned for relief. When that didn’t produce the changes they wanted, protesters blocked court proceedings. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, became one of their leaders. The government they resisted was now their own. Meanwhile, Congress struggled to pay its bills. Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government depended on the states to supply money. It couldn’t reliably compel them to provide it. The Constitution gave Congress the power to tax. Revenue bills had to begin in the House of Representatives, and federal receipts and expenditures had to be published. Taxation was a responsibility of the government Americans were building, with elected representatives to answer for it. So when did property taxes become like they are now? Mostly a county or city thing, rather than a federal tax? There wasn’t one federal decision to hand property taxes down to the counties. Communities had been using them for a long time. They needed schools, roads, and other services. Land and buildings were visible, stayed in place, and could be assessed. Property taxes also supplied substantial revenue to state governments. But states developed income and sales taxes, and the balance changed. In 1902, property taxes supplied about forty-five percent of state governments’ general revenue from their own sources. By 1942, that was about six percent. For local governments, it was still about eighty-one percent. And now my wife and I are looking at our property-tax statement for the year. Included with it is a sheet directing us to the county website, where we can apply for a twenty-five percent homeowner exemption. My wife thinks we should not get the exemption. I’m on the fence. I’m not against property taxes in principle. I’m not suggesting somebody else pick up my tax bill, because we do need to pay for services. What I’m saying is, and this is the part that’s a little sticky: Why is the property tax exemption voluntary? If I choose not to seek the exemption, and my neighbors do, then that doesn’t make sense to me. The question isn’t really, do you want to pay your property taxes? It’s, should you willingly pay more in property taxes? Our government does a poor job of saying where the money goes and tracking to outcomes. Their answer to why we pay taxes for roads, schools, and whatever. That, to me, is a terrible justification. Look at a school’s costs. There’s all kinds of stuff hidden in there. It just says salary, fringe, supplies, equipment. It doesn’t show what that really means. And selfishly, I say this: if my name went on a list because I chose to pay more taxes, and then if my house caught on fire the county responded more urgently because I paid more, I would understand the justification for paying more. I could see what I was getting. But what does willingly paying more get us now? Again, let’s look at schools. What are the performance measures the schools have shown as a result of higher or lower property taxes? If you want to convince me that I should pay more money for schools, then show me test scores that went up. And this gets to bigger questions. Should the federal Department of Education exist? Should we support school vouchers where parents can choose to send their kid to a public or private school? To the people who say no, all that money should go to public schools, I would say, why? Did their test scores go up? There should be some measure of effectiveness for everything the county, state, or federal government does. If there’s a fire, how long does it take to respond to the fire? If there’s a security incident, how long does it take the sheriff to get there? And not just to my house, to every home in the county. I want to see the county grade card, the state grade, the federal grade. I want to see the outcome, and I expect to see the outcome improve. As an example, how many Americans know that the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development mission area works to improve the economy, infrastructure, and quality of life in rural American communities? Its Rural Housing Service agency provides loans, grants, and loan guarantees for single-family and multi-family affordable housing, home repairs, and essential community facilities like schools, hospitals, and fire stations. So let’s ask a simple question. Is housing affordable at American worker wages across rural America? There’s a simple answer: No. So, a simple grade. A failing one. Should I volunteer to pay higher taxes to an organization that gets a failing grade? It’s like either no one knows how, or no one tries, to make the government run better. In planning, you make objectives and sub-objectives. You work through the sub-objectives to achieve the objective. And when you achieve enough objectives, you ought to be able to say whether you’ve achieved the strategic effect you were after. I don’t see that track in tax dollars. How long does it take the sheriff to respond to every house on a normal day? How long does it take to respond to a fire? Did students’ test scores go up? Are there fewer people who need low-income social program support? From 2010 to 2025, the federal house-price index for my county went up about a hundred and four percent. Over the same period, national consumer prices went up about forty-eight percent. House prices roughly doubled. We live in the county, not the city. There are so many more big, beautiful houses. New houses. Expensive houses. So I still have a hard time understanding why I would willingly pay more. With all those houses adding taxable value, what more is the county providing? Why would I say, yes, this is a good decision? And if home values have gone up faster than inflation, why does government get to spend at a rate equal to home values instead of a rate equal to inflation? Even if services cost more, why did they cost more? Before asking me to forgo relief, show… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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October 22 · 17 min
So Help Me | A Christian Case Supporting Abortion Rights
Some oppose a woman’s right to choose, citing God’s law. I, too, am a believer. I offer a different perspective. When we brought our firstborn home from the hospital, they wouldn’t sleep unless someone was holding them. We couldn’t hold the baby twenty-four hours a day without taking shifts. So I took the night shift, holding our oldest in my lap and looking at the glowing computer monitor in the dark, trying to figure out what other people do when their baby won’t sleep. The nurses had taught us in the hospital how to swaddle a baby. They could wrap the blanket tight enough that the baby couldn’t get their arms out. We weren’t that good at it. Once our oldest got their arms out, they were awake. Then I came across the Velcro swaddle thing. So it’s one in the morning, or whatever time it was, and I’m ordering swaddle blankets with rush shipping. A few days later, they showed up. When we put our oldest in one, they went to sleep and stayed asleep longer. It was amazing. My wife would remind me they still didn’t sleep through the night. Having a baby is a challenging time. One or both parents can be exceptionally sleep deprived. And it’s a beautiful time, because you love your baby. Despite the challenges, your baby is amazing, and you’re going to do everything you can to take care of them. A woman close to me lost a baby during pregnancy. As it was explained to me, her doctors knew the baby would be stillborn. They recommended a procedure to bring on the birth early, and she chose to have it. The baby was stillborn. They named their baby and went through the mourning process. When we talk about government making decisions about pregnancy and life saving medical care for mothers, we need to remember what people go through. At the October 14 CNN and Jubilee town hall, a Catholic voter challenged James Talarico about abortion. He said the Bible was silent on abortion. She answered, “Thou shalt not kill.” Talarico said he wouldn’t support abortion if he believed it was murder, and pointed to women he said were dying because doctors feared providing care. That exchange raises a question about the commandments themselves, and another about what public officials owe the people affected by their decisions. Let’s not sidestep the question. We start in the beginning. Or, most correctly, a little after the beginning, with the Ten Commandments. The commandments begin with our obligations to God. Have no other gods. Do not take God’s name in vain. Keep the Sabbath holy. They also tell us how to treat other people. God gave us the commandments dealing with our relationship with God first. And those are the most important. Why begin there if our relationship with God wasn’t the most important place to start? You don’t tell your kid what matters most and bury it in the number seven spot. That doesn’t mean we’re ranking all ten commandments. It means our relationship with God is most important and should govern how we treat other people. The first is pretty straight forward. Only one God. So, love God. Don’t love gold instead. And then. Do not take God’s name in vain. A lot of people think that means don’t curse using God’s name. That’s not all. It means: If you swear an oath in God’s name, you shall not make God witness to a lie. Don’t say you’re going to do something and call on God’s name to make people believe you, then knowingly break that promise. The Almighty will not tolerate us calling on God’s name to lie or mistreat other people. That applies to people who call on the name of the Almighty to take an oath of office. The federal oath changed during the Civil War. Lincoln ordered an expanded oath for executive branch civilian employees in 1861. Congress revised it in 1862, when “So help me God” became part of the statutory oath for nonpresidential federal offices. Later revisions produced the form used today. The oath requires officials to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They promise true faith and allegiance, take the obligation freely without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and promise to carry out their duties well and faithfully. And then they state, “So help me God.” Officials can affirm instead. The constitutional obligation applies either way. Those who invoke God also make that promise in God’s name. The vast majority of people choose to swear. The Constitution’s preamble gives us six national goals: form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty. So, in swearing on the name of the Almighty that they will support and defend the Constitution, they are swearing to support and defend the six national goals, on the name of the Almighty. People judge their leaders by those national goals, even if they don’t consciously think in those terms. They may never say “domestic tranquility” or “general welfare.” But they know whether their community is safe and orderly, whether government treats them fairly, and whether they can make decisions about their own lives. A leader won’t achieve everything. People should still be able to see a serious effort toward those goals, understand the decisions, and hold the leader responsible for what happens. Moral leadership requires taking responsibility for the people affected by your decisions. One of our national goals is to maintain liberty. Part of liberty is being able to make decisions about your own property. The idea of life, liberty, and property shaped the American founding. You own yourself and your labor. When you mix that labor with what the earth provides, it helps establish your claim to the property. All the effort you make in your life to own anything begins with your own self. Your self creates the conditions that allow you to gain other property. Your personal self is the preeminent property you own. And if you don’t have bodily autonomy, then you don’t own yourself. That applies to a woman. Her body belongs to her. Pregnancy doesn’t change who owns her body. What does self-ownership mean for a woman’s liberty? The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect life, liberty, and property against deprivation without due process of law. They don’t prohibit every government restriction. Courts generally address bodily autonomy as liberty, rather than treating the body as an ordinary possession. We have a responsibility to judge whether government respects liberty. An unborn child is living. Its life has value. The question is whether that life has preeminent rights over the mother. And that brings us back to the commandment the voter raised with Talarico: “Thou shalt not kill.” The word “kill” is central to this discussion. The Hebrew word used in the original is lo tirtsach, from the verb ratsach. “You shall not murder.” Murder better expresses the commandment here than a rule against every taking of life. The same Hebrew root also appears in passages about unintentional killing, so it doesn’t fit our modern legal categories perfectly. Biblical law distinguishes intent and circumstances. It doesn’t treat every taking of life as the same act. Bottom line. The commandment does not say thou shalt not kill. It says thou shalt not murder. Definitely a different concept. And to highlight the difference, let’s look at another question. Does God condemn military service? I served for twenty-one years. You might not hear it said this way often, but the military exists to kill people and break things in defense of the United States. Even if you’re not the one who pulls the trigger, you support that mission. If “thou shalt not kill” condemns every taking of life, then it would condemn military members for the service they agreed to perform. That is unacceptable. Do we condemn military members who lawfully kill in combat? No, we do not condemn the… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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October 20 · 7 min
Private Jets and Ranch Towns
Snow covered the pines through the valley, aspens hanging on to their brown, gold, and yellow leaves. Many had already fallen. Cold air and heavy clouds clung to the mountains. Some white still falling, the snow on the ground reflected a little blue from the sky. The valley and peaks looked gray-blue. In Saratoga, a small mountain ranching town in Wyoming, a row of nice SUVs lined the fence at the town airport. About half of them had snow on them. A nearby luxury resort brings guests in by private aircraft. Everyday hardworking people drive by and see it. They live in the town. They work in the businesses that make a place like this possible. When they look at their own lives, what reason do they have to believe that the person they elected to represent them takes their welfare as seriously as the welfare of the people flying in? That question is the argument about affordability. People can judge their leaders by whether those leaders attempt to achieve the national goals, even if they don’t consciously think in those terms. They expect justice. They expect their government to concern itself with their welfare. And when they believe their leaders have overlooked them in favor of somebody else, they feel betrayed. That same day, Greg Ip raised a related question in The Wall Street Journal. He wrote, “All politicians in their gut believe voters can be bought….Yet the puzzling thing is that shoveling money at voters has a terrible electoral track record.” A government can help people, and people can reward it for helping them. A family that receives meaningful help has good reason to value it. But that help doesn’t settle the larger question of how their leaders have governed. A family can appreciate a tax cut and still believe the government has treated them unfairly. Need the money and still judge the leader who offers it. Accept help while wondering why they need so much of it. [Paige] There are a lot of ingredients in the affordability pressure cooker this year. Inflation. Business survival. Tariffs. Energy costs. Prices this September were 3.7 percent higher than a year ago. Raises come slower than inflation and hardworking people lose purchasing power. Producer inflation came in even higher, up 6.3 percent over the same year. Things like energy, food, manufactured supplies, services. Businesses have to survive and they have a responsibility to pay their labor. They need revenue to do it, and they need profit to keep investing and operating. If a business can’t cover its costs, at some point it has to make the numbers make sense and labor ends up getting cut. Bottom line. The business owner needs affordable inputs. The worker, a wage that will support a family. The farmer, a viable market, and the family buying groceries needs food it can afford. [Joel] Enough economics. This is a leadership topic. What responsibility does government have toward the people living with the consequences of its decisions? Our national goals give elected leaders a heading. We have six. Union, justice, order, defense, general welfare, and liberty. Yes, we disagree about how to achieve them. We elect people to exercise judgment within those disagreements. The goals seem independent, but that’s not the case. They’re intertwined. Calls for justice turn into protests, protests into riots, and people call for order. Some justify war by calling for blood for defense, and war raises the cost of life for families, threatening welfare. Union holds us together. Liberty creates factions that pull us apart. Serving one goal can put another at risk. Sometimes serving the country means asking people to accept hardship. Those who have to sacrifice should have good reason to believe that their welfare still counts. Did protecting the American homeland require Americans to pay significantly more to heat their homes and transport goods? Who carries that cost? Congress made choices in the One Big Beautiful Bill. It paired tax cuts with reductions in Medicaid and food assistance. Households at the bottom lost resources, households at the top gained. The leaders who made these choices owe the people carrying the burden an explanation. How does their sacrifice serve justice and welfare? If the promise is that investment will create jobs and raise wages, when should those families expect to benefit, and what will their leaders do if they don’t? The people deserve a response from the people who asked them to bear the cost. Is this necessary for the common defense? What about the impact to the general welfare? When leaders ignore them, they betray the people. And that obligation has no party allegiance. In November, the people will judge those choices. So. Six national goals that most Americans can’t recite and may not even know. No matter. They’re ingrained in the national consciousness. We judge leaders by their attempt to achieve the national goals, even when we never consciously put the judgment into those words. When a leader abandons that effort in favor of someone in a private jet in a ranch town, the betrayal falls fresh as the new snow. References The Constitution of the United States — National Archives⁠. Greg Ip, Voters Can’t Be Bought but Politicians Keep Trying — The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2026⁠. Consumer Price Index for September 2026 — Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 14, 2026⁠. The annual increase was 3.7%; September’s monthly increase was 0.6%. BLS seasonally adjusts the headline monthly change but not the headline annual change. Real Earnings for September 2026 — Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 14, 2026⁠. Real average hourly earnings on private nonfarm payrolls fell 0.7% over the preceding year. Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, September 13, 1970⁠. University-hosted reproduction of the original New York Times Magazine essay; includes the constraints of law, ethical custom, and competition without deception or fraud. Distributional Effects of Public Law 119-21 — Congressional Budget Office, August 11, 2025⁠. The figures are projected annual averages over 2026–2034 in 2025 dollars. CBO’s January 2025 current-law baseline included scheduled expiration of provisions of the 2017 tax law. Its resource measure includes taxes and benefits; tariffs are separate. Detecting Tariff Effects on Consumer Prices in Real Time Part II — Federal Reserve, April 8, 2026⁠. Estimates consumer-price effects of 2025 tariffs through February 2026. Flaaen and Pierce’s study of the 2018–2019 tariffs⁠ examines protection, input costs, retaliation, and manufacturing employment. Nucor second-quarter 2026 results — company release filed with the SEC, July 27, 2026⁠. The CEO attributes record shipments to investment and supportive trade policy. That attribution does not isolate tariffs’ causal contribution. Global Oil Markets — Energy Information Administration, October 6, 2026 outlook⁠. Connects September’s oil-price increase with attacks on infrastructure and tankers, supply constraints, and shipping risks. White House explanation of Operation Epic Fury, March 1, 2026⁠. Money Power and the Influence of Ordinary People in American Politics — Pew Research Center, September 19, 2023⁠. Survey evidence on perceived influence of constituents, donors, and other interests. Stefanie Stantcheva, Why Do We Dislike Inflation — Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2024⁠. Survey findings on affordability, anger, anxiety, inequity, and how people interpret wage increases. Ana De La O, Do Conditional Cash Transfers Affect Electoral Behavior — American Journal of Political Science, 2013⁠. Randomized early enrollment in Mexico’s Progresa program increased turnout and incumbent vote share; benefits can earn electoral support. Shively Field airport information — FAA records reproduced by AirNav⁠; Brush Creek Ranch FAQ⁠; WYDOT Shively Field economic-impact study using 2013 activity⁠. 2 Chronicles 13–14, King James Version⁠, especially 14:2–7. Background to the discussio… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
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October 15 · 17 min
First Dates and Fifty Years
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
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October 13 · 14 min
The Pickup Didn’t Fill Itself
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
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October 8 · 18 min
The Party That Forgot the People
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
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October 7 · 10 min
Poverty, Work, and Dependency
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
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October 6 · 14 min
Equal Access, Equal Obligation?
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
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September 30 · 11 min
The Forethought of Grief
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
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September 29 · 20 min
Four Things This Week, From a Bucket of Hops
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
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September 22 · 13 min
The Flying Officer
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
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September 15 · 17 min
By Hand
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
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September 1 · 16 min
Heifers, Water, and Grass
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
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August 25 · 21 min
The Shortcut Looks Like the Way Home
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
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August 18 · 24 min
The Night Shift | The Bottom 50% Own 2.5% of the Wealth of the Country
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
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August 11 · 20 min
Dogwoods and Two Grand Lies
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
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August 4 · 22 min
A Yoke Built for Two | A Dead Hog, a Shovel, and a Fifteen-Year-Old
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
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