Editor’s Note: Kristi Noem was finally kicked to the curb, but another scarecrow is already coming on board. And all kinds of pundits are trying to frame the attacks on Iran as some kind of policy or doctrine when it is nothing but ego and posture by one man and a few hopefuls for the crown. We are all along for the ride now. See Obama’s speech at the Jesse Jackson funeral. Stay involved, but stay awake.

There is an old saying about the perils of shooting first and asking questions later, while another cautions to measure twice and cut once. Both exist for good reason. They capture something essential about the human tendency that loves action of any kind. Maybe it makes us feel more alive. We are a very mobile, curious, and creative species, but we do many things without thinking, and these wise idioms exist to warn us.

This week, that tension arrived not as a philosophical exercise but as a live event, and the weight of it is still settling.

We do not know where these coordinated military strikes on Iran are headed. The stated objectives included preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, dismantling its missile program, and, as events unfolded, what appears to have been the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In a matter of hours, a conflict that had been building through weeks of diplomatic posturing and Truth Social warnings became a war. And across social media, people lined up quickly to voice their support. Almost every elected Republic official did the same thing, though their constitutional job is to first do the opposite.

This is what I want to sit with this week. Not the geopolitics of what we are dealing with, but the psychology. How does so much of the public get behind an action whose outcomes are entirely unknown? How does opinion rally around a decision before history has had even a single day to evaluate it?

Maybe its a genetic survival to strike first or appear big. A tribal instinct to group together.

History might suggest a need to continue evolving beyond this.

The impulse to project strength, to cut off the head of the snake, rarely survives intact. Cut one head off and more tend to grow back. This is not a new observation. It is ancient wisdom relearned at great cost in nearly every generation.

What is alarming is how completely the structures designed to prevent unilateral action have been bypassed. The Constitution was written by people who had lived under unchecked executive power and were determined to build something different. They created separated powers specifically to slow things down, to make war hard, to require people to converse. Not because the founders were naive about threats, but because they understood the consequences of letting any one person act on impulse without accountability. We appear to have quietly adopted the Russian model we once criticized: where one man acts and everyone else explains it afterward.

This is extremely dangerous.

If we don’t have any moral ground to stand on, it allows any foe or friend to act unilaterally based on their own rationale.

We took an act of war without a defined endgame. There is more hubris than critical thought in this. If we don’t demand accountability, it gives too much weight to those who see enemies in every direction and collateral damage as acceptable. The American model of leadership is not preserved by unilateral military action, but by the hard, slow, sometimes boring work of deliberation and patience.

We haven’t even discussed the children.

On the first day of strikes, a girls' elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, was hit. We have not confirmed responsibility. Secretary of State Rubio said the U.S. "would not deliberately target a school."

And yet the school is gone. And the children are gone with it.

There is no version of the phrase "collateral damage" that absorbs this. There is no American parent that would stand for this here. Once the killing of children becomes something filed under unfortunate outcomes, once we treat it as a cost of doing business in the business of war, we surrender a piece of our moral identity that does not come back easily. We can see what that looks like in Russia (this appears to be the model of choice by our current regime), where the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Ukraine has become a deliberate instrument of war.

The question we have to ask honestly is: what is the difference between what we condemn there, and what is happening here?

The answer our leadership offers is intent. We didn't mean to hit a school. A country like Russia does. But basic human decency does not grade entirely on intent. And the outcome is 175 dead girls by our action.

The head-of-the-snake approach tends to create more problems than it resolves. Khamenei is gone, but Iran's regime is not extinct. The Iranian people are not free. The region is on fire.

Chaos creates opportunity for small things to become big problems. An assassination, the sinking of a ship, or a blockade. Almost anything can set things off. Putin and Xi are watching carefully, taking notes on what unilateral action looks like when the United States does it, and assessing what that permission structure means for their own plans in Taiwan and the former Soviet Union.

History has a way of eventually telling the truth about whether a decision was made with wisdom or with fear, with clarity or with deflection, out of genuine security interests or out of hopeful posterity.

The outcomes of this decision will take years, perhaps decades, to fully understand. But here is what we already know: somewhere in Minab, 175 families are burying their daughters.

Think before you act.

I have never quite understood or accepted that access to healthcare depends on employment. No other advanced nation does this, and as this very interesting article points out, is one reason middle-aged Americans are struggling more than others. While the old conservative notion of doing more with less, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, is still out there, what has not taken place is an equal demand to ensure people are paid fair wages, that they have access to healthcare beyond an ability to pay, that moms and dads can take care of their babies and kids without going broke.

All the problems facing America have one source: while the nation has gotten richer, the average working American, especially the Gen X level, is just getting by. If you have adult children, you can see how it is transferring to them as well. We can do better, but we won’t until we stop falling for the current concept of leadership.

We are nothing in the concept of space. The Earth can hardly be seen from deep space, a pale blue suggestion against an indifferent void. Videos like this, a rocket launch filmed from 400 kilometers up, the thin glow of our atmosphere hugging the planet below, show just what a world we live in and the remarkable ingenuity it took to get there.

There is so much to be proud of. Millions of years of evolution, billions of years of chance, all threading together toward this moment. And yet we waste it on trivial pursuits and a 15-mile mentality. We are literally part of the stars. The iron in your blood was forged in a dying sun. We are the universe looking at itself, and somehow the best we can manage is arguing over which patch of dirt belongs to whom.

We should be working together to protect the place we live and to explore the rest of the unknown side by side. That idea feels almost naive to say out loud right now. But naive and impossible are not the same thing. That future is a direction, not a fantasy. Whether we choose it depends entirely on whether we can evolve past the part of us that still thinks in tribes.

Evolve being the keyword.

And Now….

I love the longer days. I immediately think of summers and picnics and fireflies. Keep up your reading and your progress. Continue to practice your gratefulness.

Always strive to be a good human.

My daughter and I got to see the phenomenal Marina last year in Atlanta. This song New America from her is as relevant today as when she released it.