As we gather around the warm glow of holiday lights, exchanging gifts and pleasantries, it’s hard not to feel the weight of what America has become. Yes, we have proven that we can win elections through sheer chicanery, fueled by dark money and disinformation campaigns that flood every corner of our media landscape. We’ve mastered the art of creating fiction—not just in Hollywood, but in the newsrooms and boardrooms that shape our national narrative. Whether it’s Bernie Madoff’s decades-long con, AIG’s collapse, or the latest crypto Ponzi scheme whose mastermind’s name slips the mind but whose fallout does not, the machinery of malfeasance is a well-oiled, profit-churning beast.
At the same time, we hold unparalleled destructive power in our hands. A fleet of nuclear submarines blankets the earth’s oceans, capable of reducing hundreds of cities to ash in mere minutes. It’s an unmatched deterrent, but also a chilling reminder of our capacity for annihilation. We’ve weathered other storms, too—hurricanes of ferocity previously unseen, tearing through coastlines and communities with unrelenting fury. We’ve survived pandemics that brought the global economy to its knees and revealed just how fragile our interconnected systems truly are. Yet, in each of these battles, scars remain, and those scars run deeper than we like to admit.
The attacks on our political system, corporate structures, and media institutions have left no stone unturned. Dark money flows like an invisible river, carving out distrust and division. Neighbors side-eye neighbors, family dinners turn into battlegrounds, and states rebel against federal mandates. Each segment of our society has been touched, eroded, and reshaped by the creeping cynicism of our age. It’s as though our national soul, once vibrant and steadfast, has been sold for short-term greed and social instability, wrapped neatly in the bow of ballooning, unmanageable debt.
But it’s not all gloom. In many ways, America stands at the pinnacle of human achievement. We are building technology that reshapes the world, achieving heights of innovation and profit that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Yet, there’s a hollowness to it all. These achievements feel unmoored from the values that once defined us. They are monuments to what we can do, but not to who we are—or who we should strive to be.
The current moment feels eerily like the quiet before the storm. Living here in South Florida, storms are a part of life, a rhythm as familiar as the tide. But some storms are different. I remember Hurricane Andrew vividly. The hours before landfall felt suffocating, as if the air itself had turned against us. The night sky wasn’t dark—it burned with an orange glow, as if the very heavens were alight. The wind was sharp, brittle, crackling with energy. There was a weight to that storm, a presence that couldn’t be ignored.
That same feeling lingers now, but it’s not a hurricane gathering over the Atlantic. It’s a storm of a different kind—a battle brewing on the horizon, ominous and unrelenting. It’s a force bearing down on an unsuspecting populace too distracted by the cacophony of disinformation, political strife, and underhanded schemes designed to siphon wealth from the many to enrich the few. The signs are there for those willing to look, but they’re easy to miss amid the noise of the moment.
And yet, amid the chaos, there is still beauty. There is still resilience. The human spirit persists, even in the face of overwhelming odds. The holiday season reminds us of that—of the importance of connection, of family, of hope. But hope, like faith, requires action. It’s not enough to simply believe things will get better. We have to make them better. We have to recognize the storm before it makes landfall and prepare, not just to survive but to rebuild.
This Christmas, as we string up lights and exchange gifts, let’s take a moment to reflect—not just on what we’ve lost, but on what we still have and what we can still become. America has fallen in many ways, but it hasn’t been defeated. The battle for its soul isn’t over. It’s just beginning.
The storm is coming, but so too is the opportunity to rebuild, stronger and wiser than before. Let’s make that our gift to the future—a nation not just fallen, but risen anew.