Editor's Note: More observations made while in Japan, and consideration of 9/11 25 years out. Travel remains the greatest education and a reminder beyond any situation you grow up in, or anything you are told to believe.
The shadow of 9/11 is still with us today. For 25 years, we have fought battles across the globe and with ourselves.
Where has it left us?
While I believe the aftermath was never adequately addressed or resolved, I want to focus on one consequence that resurfaced in the news this week: the toxic exposure endured by first responders, recovery workers, residents, and others near the World Trade Center. That’s the part I keep thinking about, because its something we can learn to proactively address. We now know that sufficient data did not support early assurances about air safety, and that 9/11-related illnesses have killed thousands in the years since. The toll will likely continue to grow as illnesses emerge over time.
I do not want to minimize the sheer horror and loss from that day. What I wish to explore is that we are too often willing to accept danger, defer costs, and trust that someone else will deal with the outcomes that we leave behind. Perhaps it’s a conservative instinct, but I find myself considering more and more what I leave my kids to deal with. I think we’ve done our part to get them ready, but what is it they have to get ready for? Compared to my youth, I feel like the problems haven’t necessarily changed or gone away.
They’ve simply evolved, and when it comes to dealing with pollution, may even have gotten worse.
Recycling was foreign when I was a kid. You threw stuff away with no regard for where “away” was. We’ve made some progress there. Almost everything has some recycling content, though recycled material use as a norm is nowhere where it should be. In place of public policy, it’s on the consumer to decide. And we are in love with our personal conveniences. Plastic bags were far less common when I was a kid. Now they are ubiquitous.
Every time I recycle, I think about how much plastic I use. The plastic clamshell the strawberries came in. The bag inside the cereal box. The shrink wrap around the paper towels. The lid on the coffee cup. I stand at the bin and think: all of this existed for my convenience for a few days. And now it is going to exist, in some form, for years to come.
A bit of recycling and being a conscientious consumer has been enough for most of my life, but while I’m looking at the last quarter of life, it doesn’t feel fair or adequate.
About 9% of plastic gets recycled, and plastic pollution has been found in the soil beneath your feet, the sand at the beach, and (good grief) in breast milk. This is with current recycling programs and public awareness.
Let me offer another model from our recent travels in Japan. We bought items everywhere. At 7-Eleven, in the grocery store, and at the ballpark. You can find anything to buy in Japan. There are stores like a Super Walgreens that are eight floors tall. There are vending machines on almost every corner.
What is not everywhere are plastic bags, unless you bring your own, or pay a few yen each time you buy something.
Why wouldn’t we charge a penny or two each time someone wants a bag here? It’s our convenience we’ve loved, but it’s also our mess we are leaving.
Think about it. You could bring your own bag. If you don’t need a bag, you don’t pay for it. If you want one, you pay a token fee for it.
Imagine the number of green jobs in cleaning up communities, and designing alternative materials that prevent problems down the road.
It’s a small thing, but if you consider millions of transactions each and every day, it really adds up.
Ireland put a fee on plastic bags in 2002. Japan has required many retailers to charge for plastic bags since 2020.
We have been hiding external costs and running from such a simple issue. This is the pattern. We defer the bill. We call it freedom, or economic growth, or letting the market decide. What we are actually doing is spending on behalf of people who cannot yet vote, cannot yet speak, and are in some cases not yet born. Every civilization that has thought carefully about its own continuity has landed on some version of the same conclusion: you do not get to consume without cost. You pay for what you use, or the next generation pays for what you took.
There is nothing radical about this. It is basic accounting. It is the polluter-pays principle, the backbone of U.S. environmental law since 1980.
The world was here before us and it will be here long after us, and the only meaningful question is what condition we leave it in. Right now, the answer includes a lot of polyethylene and a lot of continually growing risks.
We could change that for pennies.
If there is one lesson that should not be lost in remembering 9/11, it is that small failures add up. They accumulate. We still pollute and poison when we have every moral reason and technological capability to do better, whether in normal daily life or in the aftermath of a catastrophe.
There’s an old saying: Love your Mother, meaning the Earth.
I would put it another way: Love your Kids. Hold them as long as you can, and prepare a world that is safe when you’re gone.
Regardless of thoughts on Governor Newsom, this is a good law passed. This will be the first of many to come, as we have finally found all the marbles that have been rolling and waiting to be picked up. I think of the lack of forethought given to letting our kids so easily be manipulated by billion-dollar corporations. Between commercialization and peer pressure, parents often give in. This is why public policy is so important. Tribal mentalities do not automatically see what is best, which is why you elect people willing to support public policy that sees the whole. It’s not replacing parents. Its leveling the field against the algorithms.
Bari Weiss
Editor-in-Chief, CBS News
Where to even begin what this woman, with the backing of the Ellison family has done to 60 Minutes and CBS.
Bari Weiss was handed the studio last October, when Paramount bought her website for $150 million and made an opinion writer with no broadcast experience the editor-in-chief of CBS News.
In December she spiked a 60 Minutes investigation into the Salvadoran prison where the administration had shipped deported men, without attending any of the five screenings. It aired a month later, largely unchanged. In May she replaced the show's executive producer with a former tech columnist she knew socially who had never run a television program, and fired the correspondents who objected.
In June she fired Scott Pelley, for cause, after he told her to her face that she was murdering 60 Minutes. Pelley says she asked him to make protesters in Minnesota look more violent than the video showed. CBS says her notes were only meant to make the piece stronger and fairer.
This week Guy Campanile, thirty-four years at CBS and the show's former managing editor, finally spoke. His account, obtained by the Guardian, is the plainest thing anyone has said about this. He and six colleagues were fired because they would not put White House talking points into their reporting and would not run interviews the administration arranged for them. In his words, "we were told to leave because we insisted on doing our jobs."
If you want to trust the news, you hire and follow real journalists. If you want to believe in merit, honor, fairness, authenticity, and honest, this should make you ill.
Know what you are watching and where it is coming from.
Politics. Texas will go Democratic. Republicans have held the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature for 23 years. Between rising costs and this administration’s demonizing of immigrants, transgender Texans, and other vulnerable communities, a state home to
nearly 5.8 million foreign-born residents will say no mas.
Society. AI Datacenters will be embraced, but it will only occur when a major community benefit is enacted, whether in lower utility bills, direct dividends, or direct health benefit.
Business. Drone manufacture is ramping up big time with some rules and regulations in place. However, an event, such as a home-grown terrorist attack, will change the entire scope of drones in America. While communities have struggled with policing on the ground, the concept of surveillance and security in the airspace over neighborhoods will be a new frontier.
Dana Briggs
U.S. Air Force veteran, Rockford, Illinois
Dana Briggs served in the Air Force. Then he spent decades doing the other kind of service, the kind with no pension and no parade: showing up to public events.
On September 27, 2025, he drove ninety miles to stand on a public street outside the Homeland Security facility in Broadview. Masked agents poured out and ordered the crowd off a public street. When Briggs asked why, he got whacked and hit the pavement. At seventy years old, got zip-tied, handcuffed to a hospital bed, and charged with a federal felony for the crime of having an arm.
The felony became a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor became nothing. A federal magistrate wrote that the government swung and missed, multiple times.
Then Briggs learned they had kept his DNA. So in May he sued. Not to clear his name, which was already clear. To keep the next seventy-year-old's cheek swab out of a permanent federal database.
That is what it means to be an American. A willingness to do things today to ensure a better tomorrow for someone else.
Know a public servant who deserves this space? Reply to this email and tell me about them. The clerk, the inspector, the caseworker. Especially the ones nobody thanks.
Contrasts
Marc Yacht
Ah, for blue skies and sunshine
Certainly just around the corner
Towering trees with fresh leaves
The new growth follow gentle clime
Better days after winter weather.
The days are cold and heartless now
Icy winds chill the neighborhood
Tensions divide, separate, evoke anger
Suspicion, and isolation prevail
A dark spirit floats among the frightened.
Yet, the pendulum remains in motion
Reaching the extremes as well as the center
Creating a shift in mood in either direction
Nothing new here awaiting better times
Hoping moderation will prevail.
Storms may peak in their violence
Sunshine may lay its hand on the land
Doors may be closed then open
Peace and joy will take their place
All is the same, nothing changes.
What did this one do to you?
Once we are back on the right track, we will be undergoing great change. For some, that is a scary proposition. It doesn’t need to be. There are very capable and competent people stepping up. A new generation.
Do not give in or give up. Above all else, try and be a good human. All will flow from there.
Extra bonus: My wife and youngest son traveled to see Jack Johnson last week, a favorite of ours since the Curious George on PBS Days. Here’s a fitting song to finish out.