A reckoning with the nation we became. And the quiet courage it will take to rebuild something worth belonging to.
America is a terminal patient, still insisting it’s the doctor.
And the world is running out of ways to survive the treatment.
Today is June 14th—Trump’s birthday, Flag Day, the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, and the people’s uprising we now call No Kings Day. A convergence of symbols that once meant pride, service, and freedom now collapse under the weight of one undeniable truth: America is not just in decline. It is a global threat hemorrhaging delusion, and it does not want to heal. It wants to dominate, deny, and devour.
The international community knows it. Ask Ukraine, now abandoned mid-war after Trump halted aid and praised "peace through leverage." Ask Gaza, whose grief deepens as American weapons fuel devastation. Ask the scientists fleeing our universities, the global partners frozen out of trade deals, the children locked out of asylum, ask them what America looks like from the outside in. You’ll hear the truth in many tongues: menace, liability, contagion.
Here at home, the rot blooms in full daylight. State after state has criminalized dissent. A sitting president celebrates insurrectionists as patriots. The press is gasping under a boot. Women’s rights have been reduced to bargaining chips. And just last night, on American soil, two elected lawmakers were assassinated for doing their jobs. The response from the highest office? Silence. Or worse: subtle encouragement.
We are not witnessing a political pivot. We are living through a prelude to collapse.
What’s happening now is not a crisis of party, but a crisis of reality itself. Half the country believes the other half is disposable. Governance is no longer negotiation; it’s warfare. And some are now saying it out loud: that they’d rather live under a dictator they like than share power in a democracy they don’t. And the rest of the world is no longer watching with hope, it’s watching with a fire escape plan.
To the global community, America’s fall may feel inevitable. But here’s the real horror: it’s not falling. It’s metastasizing. Its disease—authoritarianism dressed as patriotism—is spreading. Through currency. Through culture. Through code.
And if we don’t name it, resist it, and reimagine something entirely outside of it, we’ll not only lose this country, we’ll lose the blueprint for any democratic future.
Let this be clear: No King’s Day is not a clever protest. It is a prophecy. A warning flare in the dark.
Because empires do not collapse with grace. They collapse with noise. With blood. With echoes that reach far beyond their borders. And we—the writers, artists, thinkers, the stubborn-hearted and justice-drunk—must be louder than the collapse.
Please understand that I don’t say this to be a downer. I’m not hoping for the worst. I’m naming it in case you’ve stopped seeing it.
What I want—what I need—is for the still-reachable among us to feel the magnitude of what’s happening. To sit with it. To let it rearrange us. Because clarity isn’t hopelessness, it’s the start of responsibility and accountability.
Other nations have survived collapse. Some came back different. Some came back better. Some rewrote their stories from the ash.
We still have a choice. We still have each other. And if this is the end of what America was, then let it be the beginning of what we’re brave enough to imagine next.
No king. No savior. Just us.
And if what we loved is gone, then let’s build something we can live inside without lying to ourselves.