Violence is not merely an outcome; it is a policy choice.
When a government chooses force early, often, or visibly, it sends a message not just to its adversaries, but to its own people and to the world. That message is not strength. It is fragility masquerading as resolve.

Choosing not to care does not remove us from the system. It simply leaves its direction to those most willing to exploit it. In that sense, stewardship is not an elevated moral posture. It is a practical one. It is the recognition that something will shape the future, and the question is whether it will be shaped by neglect, extraction, or deliberate care.

Normal is over. Not because everything has collapsed, but because the stories that made compliance feel responsible no longer persuade. The gap between what we are told and what we can plainly see has grown too wide to ignore.

Today, courts can only act when a case is brought by someone with standing and sufficient resources. That requirement guarantees delay and excludes most Americans. A pre-enactment constitutional review would reverse the burden. Instead of forcing citizens to suffer harm to prove a law is flawed, lawmakers would be required to demonstrate constitutional validity up front.

Student debt exists because we have shifted the cost of workforce preparation onto individuals while the benefits flow outward to employers, industries, and the broader economy. It functions as a private tax imposed on people for producing public value.

A country cannot call itself advanced if its people have to navigate a maze simply to stay alive.

Fixing governance is not a partisan project. Everyone suffers from friction. Everyone benefits from functionality. In an age of polarization, improving the machinery of public service might be one of the rare places where consensus is possible.

There’s a question I keep coming back to as I write about Stewardship: What does America look like after years of leaders who take the well-being of ordinary people seriously? Not growth curves, record high stock markets, or the billionaire of the week. What does America look like at ground level?

This moment in American politics feels heavy because the drift and decay are visible. That is also what makes it the right moment to assert the expectation of moral orientation. Outrage is reactive. Outrage burns out. Orientation endures.

If this past week has shown us anything, it is that progress cannot rely on the institutions of the compromised and captured. The people’s will and focus may falter and shift with the headlines, but the Steward’s duty remains

Voting matters, but it is only the floor, not the ceiling. A Steward citizen participates in strengthening the civic process, not merely “winning.” They attend local meetings, write to representatives, volunteer in campaigns, and serve on boards. They converse with their family and friends who may be taken in by the disinformation, propaganda, and apathy of the day, to guide them towards the truth. All with an ethic of contribution over conquest.

Democracy, like any public resource, works only if enough of us show up to maintain it.

Stewardship, as a political concept, rather than religious or ecological, came to me during my studies in the mid-2000s. It was during that time that I called together my first Steward’s Circle. We discussed all that was going right, wrong, and weird with the world.

The same desire that can drive us to fill the streets, must now drive us to fill the rooms: meeting halls, libraries, and community spaces where the long-term work begins.

Every steward must understand that their strength comes from the four interlocking forms of power that sustain public trust and enable genuine leadership: personal power, relational power, communal power, and institutional power.

Helplessness is not inevitable. It is taught, and it can be unlearned. Each of us carries the capacity to become the stand for something larger than ourselves: our community, our country, our common good. And once enough of us remember that, the tide turns.

Today’s false declaration about “Antifa” is tomorrow’s precedent for labeling anyone who dissents. That is the pattern, and it must be broken. The lesson is plain. Beware of rulers who need enemies more than they need citizens.

The signs are multiplying. Comedians lose platforms when their satire cuts too close. Journalist are pressured into silence when their stories lack the “right” editorial angle. Broadcasters face direct threats to their licenses. Citizens are encouraged to report on coworkers and neighbors, with bureaucratic reprisals and doxxing used as weapons of intimidation.

In the aftermath of violence, the parties rush to script their stories. Who is to blame? Whose narrative wins? Whose outrage is more justified? Each side crafts its lines, and the public consumes tragedy as entertainment.

Politics is not theater. Lives are not props. Violence is not a script. To turn the nation’s wounds into partisan spectacle is an act of desecration. Not restricted to the victim of the moment, but a desecration to the very sanctity of human life and the values of the American people.

The once-beautiful house that I was born into is leaning badly. One party accelerates the collapse. The other fails to stop it. Neither can be trusted with the task of rebuilding.

In government, there are few things more disastrous than bad data. When leaders base decisions on false, incomplete, or manipulated information, policy misses the mark, people are misled, and the country veers off course. What I mean by ‘bad’ isn’t that it is inconvenient for a particular party or ideology. I mean objectively inaccurate, wrong. Data that is objectively wrong produces wrong outcomes, no matter what the intentions behind it.