The Board of Epic Fury

I was texting with a friend of mine earlier. We were lamenting the fact that people who are having the hardest time with what’s happening [everywhere] feel absolutely untethered watching the people who are going on as though things are normal. We were not talking about friends who are trying to figure out how to keep living, how to maintain and refill the tiny pot of joy we carry in our hearts from day-to-day (we all have to do that), but instead the people who genuinely seem to be proceeding like nothing is happening.

To be clear, I hope young people are trying to have their lives and soak up all the fun they can. This isn’t their mess to clean up. I’m talking about the adults in the room.

I understand it might be a coping mechanism, but I don’t know how to be close to people who want to pretend the ground underneath us is solid. It’s never solid, things can always change in a day, in an instant, no matter how much you plan — but I don’t think it’s ever been less solid in my lifetime than it is right now. I mean that collectively. I often feel like I’m falling through space, trying to figure out what I can gather as I go to try to keep us all safe somehow. I know I wouldn’t be able to do that during normal times and trying now is futile, but not trying feels worse.

A handful of stardust is better than nothing. I’d rather be aware of the precariousness of the moment than in some kind of false reality. Which doesn’t mean I’m having an easy go of it.

Home for a little while. Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I had a tough time starting this essay because I’ve had a tough time since I went to bed last Friday night/early Saturday morning, knowing that the U.S. had started bombing Iran. There may be people feeling anxious now, wondering which way I’m headed. That’s the part that makes everything so painful.

Can’t I just feel utter despair because more innocent people are going to die and already have? More children? More babies? Also, I have zero faith in this administration and its motives. The president sandwiched his announcement of war between a charity event Friday night where he was filmed chatting and dancing — though I cringe to call what he does dancing — and a million-dollar-a-plate political fundraiser Saturday night, where he was on the patio for much of the evening, and said to be in “a jovial mood.”

You send service members to die, you know civilians will die, and you have it in you to be jovial? That is not a leader.

This is the guy who campaigned on “No new wars!” and said he’d stop the “chaos in the Middle East.” Not that I ever believe a thing that comes out of his mouth, but people who voted for him said they were tired of having their tax dollars spent on expensive, long, drawn-out wars in other countries — and wanted us to focus on problems here at home. America First! Remember that?

Remember this president standing in front of a mic and holding up cereal boxes, talking about grocery prices? It was laughable then because he’s never been a guy to buy his own groceries, and it’s laughable now because he could not care less about “kitchen table issues” — or any of us.

The price of eggs has not gone down, it’s gone up, and it’s about to go up more. I never put the price of eggs higher on the list of things that matter to me than ethics or empathy, though. I care about children and women more than the price of eggs, and I’d happily pay more for eggs to keep us all safe. I’d give up eggs altogether if it were that easy. And when I say women and children, I mean all women and children, and I mean everywhere.

Instead of “no new wars” and a president whining because he hasn’t gotten a Nobel Peace Prize (reminds me of the saying “bombing for peace is like screwing for virginity”), now we have a guy who says, “U.S. military service members have been killed. There will likely be more, that’s the way it is.” That’s the way it is?

Let’s go back a minute.

You might remember the case of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in 2022. She was the twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman who was traveling from Kurdistan to Tehran to see family, and was arrested by Guidance Patrols (morality police) on her way, because she was not wearing a hijab. Bystanders reported seeing her being beaten in the police van.

Police denied this and said she was transferred to a department in Tehran for “justification and re-education.” They said she suddenly had a heart problem or a stroke. Her family was informed she was in the hospital hours later. They could not understand how she could be in a coma, brain-dead, because she had been in perfect health. There were published pictures of Amini at the hospital, bleeding from the ear, with bruises under her eyes. Hacked medical scans showed skull fractures and skull trauma; it was clear she had received many blows to the head.

There were protests after Amini’s death, Iranian women on social media started taking off their hijabs and cutting their hair, people took to the streets, and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising was sparked nationwide. Iranian authorities, then led by President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, increasingly used the death penalty as a form of political repression.

At the end of December, 2025, protests erupted over the free-falling collapse of Iran’s currency. Shopkeepers in Tehran went on strike, more people joined, and soon there was a nationwide protest over inflation, mismanagement of funds, lack of social services, access to clean drinking water, air, education, health, housing, sanitation, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and pretty much every right a person needs to live with dignity.

Senior state officials labeled protesters “rioters” — hi, where have we heard this before? — and responded with lethal force. Thousands of protesters were arrested and detained, some as young as fourteen. They subjected many of those detained to “enforced disappearance” or “incommunicado detention” which does not sound all that different from what detainees are going through here in the states. In a speech on January 17th, the (then) Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said thousands of people were killed during the protests.

Here in the states, our own wannabe Supreme Leader told Iranian protesters he’d intervene if lethal force continued to be used against them. And this is where I start to lose my mind, because if anyone thinks this president cares about human rights violations or citizens being shot in the streets for protesting, may I please turn your attention to RENEE GOOD and ALEX PRETTI — human beings who would still be alive if this mad fake king had not sent his own private militia to wage war against the cities and states he is supposed to serve.

May I please turn your attention to the number of fatalities that have occurred inside ICE detention centers. May I please turn your attention to the conditions for children inside the ICE detention centers. Does any sane human being really believe this president would ever go to war to help people in another country get out from under authoritarian rule when he is exerting authoritarian rule over the people in his own country?

Two things can be true at once. No one [I know] is going to cry tears because Ali Khamenei is dead — and the POTUS did not send our military to Iran to help anyone. He only helps himself.

I don’t know what the real motives of this president might be, but there isn’t any evidence that Iran was about to unleash a nuclear weapon. You might recall we were told in June we’d wiped out any nuclear capability they might have had. Usually, it comes down to oil, money, positioning and power — not strategic leadership or professional military ethos. If you’re confused about whether this administration possesses either of the latter, allow me to present the Secretary of War and Sad Machismo, in a piece he performed called, “This Is Your Moment” — which they could lift verbatim as a pre-written SNL skit. It is embarrassing.

It could be simple. The president backed himself into a corner with all the military buildup he stationed in the area during the talks between the U.S. and Iran, and when they didn’t capitulate, he wasn’t going to be made a fool. Maybe he hoped this would be the thing to get the conversation off the Epstein files, or it might get his approval ratings up before the midterms. If you think no president could be that self-serving, please refer to the AI videos he posts of himself dumping feces on liberals, or beating up Canadian hockey players. This is not a mature individual with a fully functioning frontal lobe.

Can I not be worried sick because I know there isn’t a plan, this wasn’t done with congressional approval (again) and the people in charge of our government named the mission Operation Epic Fury like it’s a video game? It is to them. We are all NPCs in a game they’re playing, and they don’t care if our children die. We’re nothing to them. Service members, girls at school, who cares? Not them.

How about the very “American” beginning — bloodletting at an elementary school — am I allowed to feel sick about that?

How do we reconcile bombing a girls’ school at the same time we are told about the “high-precision airstrikes” and that they’re using advanced technology — because I don’t know what to do with that. Are they high-precision or not? Did they hit a girls’ school on purpose, or are they so incompetent they’re working off an old map?

We’re dealing with an administration that seems now to be floating the idea that this war is happening because Jesus Christ anointed the president to start this Holy War to set off Armageddon and set the stage for the Second Coming. Someone hold my beer because I can’t, friends. I’m not drinking beer, but maybe I should grab one. Two hundred different service members are reporting this now, that this is the message commanders are urging officers to share with their troops.

Today forty white men and a white woman gathered around the president in the Oval Office and prayed over him. I couldn’t really hear the prayer, but it must have been something like this,

Dear God, please protect this pedophile-protecting, adjudicated rapist who has cheated on all his wives, paid off at least one articulate sex worker with campaign funds, has 34 felony counts, lusts after his daughter, and is already responsible for the deaths of 6 service members and over one thousand Iranian civilians. Please protect him as he avoids accountability for the harm he has caused to so many people, including the woman who says he raped her when she was thirteen years old, while he steals money from the American people, and cheats and lies every day, and allows citizens to be executed in the streets for caring about their neighbors. Please, dear God, help him bring out the very best in himself as he detains all the brown people, and allows men to die in detention centers from infected teeth, and allows pregnant women to bleed out and lose their babies, and absolves detention centers from protecting detainees from sexual assault. Please send him grace as he spews his racist, bigoted views all over the airwaves. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

I mean…good luck to them. I am pretty sure there is no white man in the sky with a ledger, but if there is I promise he wrote down every last one of their names today, and when the time comes, they’re going to have a very short interview before they head somewhere really hot.

I haven’t been okay, because I’m never okay when children die, and I don’t understand why anyone is. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-billionaires unless we’re talking about the kind who give their wealth away to make the world better. I can feel relieved for Iranians who are celebrating, but devastated about everything else, simultaneously.

There are no monoliths and you’ll get into trouble every time if you equate the leader/president/head-of-state of any given country with the people who live there. Just like we are wildly divided here, and of the 342 million of us who live in the states, “only” 77 million voted for the grifter-in-chief, while 74 million of us voted for Harris/Walz and some people stayed home and did not vote at all — and others, still, were not eligible to vote — so it is in other countries.

Which is only one way of saying someone in another country who hates Americans because they can’t stand the president (while understandable) is losing sight of a HUGE segment of our population who cannot stand this soulless skin-bag, either. For example, Tim Weiner, Pulitzer prize winning National Security reporter who said, “The greatest danger to U.S. national security today is the president of the U.S.”

They’re saying “Americans” but not including the tens of millions of us who long for the day when he is no longer degrading the office of the presidency. No longer ushering in the Vegas/Liberace Era of the White House. No longer ignoring Congress, violating the Constitution, running rampant over the three branches of government, Truth-Socialing at the Supreme Court, spitting on our checks and balances, and denying human beings due process. No longer etching his name on every conceivable building and hanging banners of his bloated face on the DOJ, no longer building ballrooms no one wants while people can’t afford healthcare or food, no longer using AI to insult the people he doesn’t like …

… all the while avoiding any accountability for the million times his name appears in the Epstein files or being deposed about any of it — but making billions for himself and his family, emoluments clause be damned. While Republican senators can’t find their spines, and too many Democrats and Independents don’t fight hard enough and billionaires are the only ones winning — believe me when I say, no one can stop you from ignoring us, but you will get the story of “Americans” wrong.

This is why it’s dangerous to comment like an expert about how the Iranian people feel. They, too, are not a monolith. There are Iranian people still living in their country, of course, and Iranian people living in the diaspora. The morning after war was announced, there were Iranian people celebrating because they were out from under a brutal authoritarian regime (though, if history serves, who knows what comes next), and Iranian parents wailing in the street outside the girls’ school in Tehran, trying to pull their daughters from the rubble.

I’m hollowed out by all the death, that’s okay, isn’t it? I’m especially enraged that children keep dying because too many angry, greedy, violent, ancient, authoritarian men have too much power, and there are enough women willing to be complicit that it continues with no end in sight. And yet, if anyone ever pays a price, it’s always one of the women they allowed into the boys’ club. Maybe one of these days those women will catch the drift? You’re never really in, honey. And you’re selling all of us out.

It will always be unfathomable to me that we would find ourselves on a floating rock in a vast universe for a blink of time — a planet that provides all the resources we need if only we’d share — and this is what we do instead.

We’ve gotten to this strange inflection point in the timeline where we are only supposed to extend compassion when the right children die, but I refuse that litmus test. I am devastated when any child dies because the adults around them have lost the thread. I don’t care if that child is in Iran, Gaza, the Congo, Sudan, Israel, or here at home, on a regular school day in the United States. If healthy, curious, trusting children are dying, look around. You’re going to find smug, unfeeling bastards who tell you there isn’t a way to stop it. Nothing can be done. Thoughts and prayers.

The leopard will always eat your face, and it will eat your babies’ faces, too.

We are not protecting children. We are not fighting for girls or women, anywhere. Every marginalized group in the world is in jeopardy. The most vulnerable among us have never been less safe. We’re putting the wrong people in power, here and abroad — parasites and predators instead of public servants — and if we want the endless death and destruction to stop, they all have to go.

It’s hard to win if you’re fighting the wrong battle, and there are no winners in a war.

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