I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen with an open heart. This isn’t an attack. It’s a plea from a friend who is worried we’re fighting a war with the wrong weapons.
I see the passion. I see the desire for a better, more just, more compassionate world. I share those goals. But I also see some of the tactics being used, and I have to be honest: I’m worried they are failing. I worry that we are not winning the hearts and minds we need to win. In some cases, I think we are hardening them.
We believe that freedom is the ultimate goal, and I am with you. But true freedom is not the license to do whatever you want, whenever you want. That is the freedom of a child. The freedom of an adult, the only kind that can build a society, comes with a heavy and non-negotiable price: personal responsibility. It is a yin and a yang. You cannot have one without the other.
This is a lesson I learned the hard way. The military, for all its flaws, is a powerful and effective teacher. It takes people from every corner of this country, from every walk of life, and it does one thing with brutal efficiency: it breaks them down. It strips away your individuality, your ego, your comfortable beliefs. And then, from that common ground of shared misery, it builds you back up as a team.
You are punished together. You succeed together. And in that process, you discover your true strengths, your real limits. You learn that your own survival and success are inextricably linked to the survival and success of the person to your left and right. You learn to be a part of something bigger than yourself.
After an experience like that, it’s easy to get complacent. We find a rhythm. We allow ourselves to get lazy, to act against others; we forget that where we are took work and discipline. Someone must always be responsible and able to call out others who lose their way. If no one does, laziness sets in, and with that, the work and discipline begin to falter. Things that should be done, need to be done, fail.
An example given to me years ago came from law enforcement—another complex and often flawed institution. But the lesson it taught about complacency is universal. It was about two police officers who regularly went to a house for a call about a person under the influence of alcohol making threats to a spouse. It became a rhythm: when he drank, he would threaten her, she would call the police, nag at them until they made him go to bed, he was always compliant.
One day, they arrive to take care of the old guy, joking with each other. They ring the doorbell, hoping he doesn’t smell like piss, and are greeted with a chest full of buckshot and noses full of cordite. His wife was dead; he had become tired of the nagging, it appears. He ended the night with a final shot.
The lesson? “Complacency kills.”
Life does what it does; it hits you. Tragedy strikes. And some of us adapt, improvise, and overcome. Some of us don’t. Some of us fall into the trap of addiction, chasing the dragon’s tail of a temporary relief that is always better than the punishment of our own minds. We become destitute, alone, convinced that life has beaten us down for good. The answer to that kind of despair is not coddling. The answer is a compassionate but firm hand that says, “Get up. The fight is not over.” It is a dose of tough love.
And this is where I see our strategy failing. I see us looking at the other side, at the people we see as our opponents, and meeting their anger with more anger. Their dogma with a different, more articulate dogma. In effect, we are trying to bully a bully. It will never work. A bully does what they do because it was done to them, and they learned that it was an effective tool for survival. Our attack only proves their point: that the world is a hostile place, and they need to fight back even harder.
We are not teaching them. We are validating them.
The mission is not to defeat them. The mission is to win them over. It is to show them a better way to channel their strength, their anger, their legitimate fears, into something more productive. It is to give them a new, more honorable mission.
But we can’t do that if we aren’t honest about the battlefield. I know that when we see a man with a gun, our first thought might be of the violence it represents. And when we hear a certain southern accent, it can be a painful echo of deep-seated bigotry. Those reactions don’t come from nowhere; they are rooted in real history and trauma. But I also wonder if, in that instant reaction, we lose the chance to see the person behind the symbol: the guy who finds community and fun in the simple, mechanical act of putting lead down range, or the person whose potential ignorance may be a product of a lack of educational opportunity, not a malicious choice.
And this is the hardest part. We cannot help our neighbor fix their fence if our own yard is a mess. When we demand tolerance while being intolerant of their views, when we call for compassion while showing them none, we become hypocrites. And there is nothing in this world that is weaker than a hypocrite in a firefight.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean we stop fighting to dismantle unjust systems. That work is essential. But the integrity of that fight—our moral authority to demand change from society—is built on the foundation of our own personal integrity. We cannot effectively demand systemic accountability if we don’t practice individual accountability.
The work begins with us. It begins with me, every day. It’s the hard, necessary, and often thankless work of self-regulation. Of integrity. Of taking pride in the ownership of our own actions.
So I’m asking you to join me. Let’s stop screaming into the void. Let’s stop trying to win the argument and start trying to win the person. The real work is in the quiet, one-on-one conversations. It is in the relentless, compassionate deconstruction of our own biases. It is in building a life and a community so strong, so integrous, and so genuinely appealing that they will have no choice but to peek over their fortress walls and wonder what they’re missing.
Let’s stop burning the olive branches to keep our troops warm with anger. Let’s start using them to build a bridge. It’s the only way we get to the other side of this.