When I first found Irreverent Warriors, it was exactly what I needed. I had found my people again. Veterans who understood dark humor, grief, moral injury, and the strange language of coming home. We talked about suicide prevention, PTSD, isolation, and loss because those conversations save lives.

They matter.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed something happening inside me.

The more immersed I became in trauma, the more trauma became the lens through which I viewed everything else.

Every event was about who we had lost.
Every conversation was about who was struggling.
Every mission was about preventing the next tragedy.

The work was meaningful.

It was also heavy.

Then one day I caught myself disappearing into that heaviness. I realized I wasn’t just helping people carry their pain, I was carrying all of it with them.

That’s when something clicked.

Healing isn’t just helping people survive.

It’s helping them remember how to live.

There is a reason the best moments at an Irreverent Warriors hike aren’t always the opening speech or the serious conversations. Sometimes they’re the terrible jokes, the spontaneous adventures afterward, the road trip, the baseball game, the coffee stop, the bookstore, the ridiculous group photo that nobody planned.

Those moments aren’t distractions from healing.

They’re the evidence that healing is happening.

Trauma narrows your world.

Recovery expands it again.

That’s why balance matters.

Veteran organizations have an incredible mission. They answer the phone at two in the morning. They show up when someone feels alone. They create belonging where isolation once existed.

But eventually we also have to ask a different question.

What are we helping people stay alive for?

Not just alive.

Alive enough to laugh again.
Alive enough to fall in love.
Alive enough to create something.
Alive enough to travel.
Alive enough to write.
Alive enough to build friendships that aren’t centered around pain.

Purpose isn’t found only in preventing death.

Sometimes it’s found in celebrating life.

I don’t think burnout happens only because leaders work too hard.

I think it also happens because we forget to feed ourselves with the same joy we’re trying to help other people rediscover.

You cannot pour hope into other people forever if you stop experiencing hope yourself.

So go on the hike.

Then go paddleboarding.

Go play softball.

Start a garage band.

Take photographs.

Write something.

Learn to surf.

Drive somewhere with no destination.

Laugh until your stomach hurts.

Volunteer.

Then go live.

Because the goal was never to make trauma your identity.

The goal was to help you build a life so full that trauma becomes only one chapter instead of the entire story.

Maybe that’s what recovery actually looks like.

Not forgetting what happened.

Not pretending it didn’t change us.

But refusing to let it be the only thing that defines who we become.

Everywhere I went, I seemed to collect people from different worlds. Veterans. Writers. Musicians. Therapists. Baseball players. Hikers. History nerds. Neurodivergent weirdos. The kind of people who can spend three hours discussing philosophy, then immediately derail the conversation with a poop joke.

I never seemed to fit neatly into one group.

For years, I assumed that was the problem.

I thought everyone else had found their people while I kept wandering between rooms, picking up pieces of myself in different places.

Then I found Irreverent Warriors.

At first, I thought it was just another veteran organization.

A hike.

A community.

A chance to reconnect with other veterans.

What I didn’t realize was that it was quietly solving a problem I hadn’t been able to name.

Most organizations are built around a single purpose. A hiking club is about hiking. A therapy group is about therapy. A professional organization is about work. A support group is about support.

Irreverent Warriors somehow refuses to stay in a single category.

The hike is just the vehicle.

Somewhere between the parking lot and the last stop, people end up talking about grief, leadership, divorce, military service, parenting, music, history, relationships, politics, movies, books, and whatever ridiculous inside joke happens to emerge that day.

The serious and the ridiculous coexist.

Nobody seems particularly interested in separating them.

(Photo: Riss Tripp)

One minute someone is talking about a friend they lost.

Ten minutes later the group is laughing so hard somebody almost falls off a bench.

And somehow both conversations feel equally important.

That’s what finally clicked for me.

Irreverent Warriors isn’t powerful because it’s a veteran organization.

It’s powerful because it’s one of the few places where people are allowed to be whole.

I think a lot of us, especially people with trauma histories, spend years dividing ourselves into categories.

The professional version.

The wounded version.

The funny version.

The caregiver.

The veteran.

The parent.

The person we were before.

The person we became afterward.

We scatter ourselves across different rooms and different relationships.

One group gets the serious conversations.

Another gets the humor.

Another gets the intellectual side.

Another gets the grief.

Another gets the stories.

Over time, it can start to feel like you’re living in pieces.

Not broken.

Just scattered about.

Then you stumble into a place where all those pieces are allowed to show up at the same time. Not only show up but actually snap together.

That’s what Irreverent Warriors feels like to me.

Not because everybody is the same.

Actually, it’s the opposite.

The group works because everybody brings different parts of themselves.

The history nerds.

The storytellers.

The leaders.

The comedians.

The quiet ones.

The loud ones.

The people who need to talk.

The people who just need to listen.

Somewhere along the way, all of those pieces become useful.

The longer I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that what I missed wasn’t the Army.

It wasn’t the uniforms.

It wasn’t the schools.

It wasn’t even the military itself.

It was something much harder to describe.

It was the feeling of being surrounded by people who understood the ecosystem.

People who shared the language.

People who understood why you could be laughing and grieving at the same time.

People who knew that humor isn’t the opposite of pain. Sometimes it’s how we carry it.

The military gave me some of that.

Baseball camp gave me some of that.

Certain friendships gave me some of that.

Irreverent Warriors gave it back.

Not because it recreated the past.

Because it integrated it.

It made room for all of it.

The veteran and the civilian.

The grief and the joy.

The storyteller and the investigator.

The person who still has questions and the person who has learned a few answers.

For years, I thought healing meant becoming one person.

Now I think healing may be something entirely different.

Maybe healing is finding places where more of yourself is allowed to exist at the same time.

Maybe that’s why Irreverent Warriors feels different.

It isn’t asking anyone to pick a lane.

It isn’t asking anyone to become less complicated.

It simply creates enough room for the whole ecosystem to show up and come together in symbiosis.

Because what we actually have now is a system of constant add-ons. Fees layered on top of taxes. Registrations layered on top of ownership. Compliance layered on top of consent. It’s death by a thousand fees instead of cuts, each one justified as reasonable, necessary, or “not technically a tax.”

Let’s clear that up, shall we?

A fee is a tax.

A tariff is a tax.

A registration cost is a tax.

If money is taken from you under threat of penalty, enforcement, or exclusion, the label doesn’t matter. Renaming it doesn’t make it more honest. It just makes it easier to sneak through.

Which brings me to The Lorax.

People like to remember The Lorax as a cute children’s environmental story. It’s not. It’s an instruction manual for how unsustainable systems get built and defended. The Once-ler doesn’t begin as a villain. He begins as an innovator. He sees a resource. He invents a product. And that product is a Thneed.

A Thneed is the purest scam imaginable. It’s marketed as something everyone needs, even though nobody actually does.

That’s the trick that keeps repeating.

Capitalism doesn’t just sell products. It sells lack. It convinces people they’re missing something. That without the thing, they’re behind, irresponsible, or failing to keep up. Once that lie lands, everything else becomes easier to justify. Fees feel normal. Paywalls feel inevitable. Opting out starts to look like deviance instead of choice.

“Nobody needs a Thneed” isn’t just a funny line. It’s a warning. Because once you accept fake necessity, real necessity gets monetized next.

And no, this isn’t anti-capitalism. It’s anti capitalism without guardrails. Systems that exist only to extract don’t stabilize. They overconsume. They don’t correct themselves. They expand until the damage is irreversible.

Eventually you run out of things to tax. So you start taxing behavior. Movement. Use. Participation. You turn ordinary life into a series of toll booths and call it governance.

I didn’t land here because I don’t understand bureaucracy.

I landed here because I understand it too well.

I’ve worked in government. I’ve served in the military. I’ve lived inside public systems long enough to know the difference between structure that serves people and structure that serves itself. I’ve seen how accountability erodes when no one is required to explain outcomes, only procedures.

That’s why my politics have shifted over time. Not toward some freedom-fantasy ideology, but toward autonomy.

I’m autistic. Autonomy isn’t a preference for me. It’s foundational. Without it, I can’t regulate, function, or safely engage. Systems that respect autonomy, I can cooperate with. Systems that rely on coercion, obfuscation, and endless micro-penalties create friction that isn’t just annoying, it’s destabilizing.

This is also why sustainability matters, whether people like the word or not. Not as a moral performance. Not as a purity test. As reality. Because without it you’ll end up paying a fee just to breathe.

Why? Because things that aren’t sustainable disappear. Trees. Fisheries. Labor. Trust. Institutions. If extraction outpaces regeneration, collapse isn’t political, it’s inevitable. That’s true whether we’re talking about forests or people.

Do some people take environmentalism to absurd extremes? Of course. Humans overshoot. I love turtles. I also love a straw that doesn’t disintegrate in my drink. Those two things don’t need to be mortal enemies.

But pretending sustainability itself is optional because it’s inconvenient is immature. Conservation isn’t about virtue. It’s about continuity. Freedom doesn’t exist in scorched systems. Autonomy doesn’t survive when everything essential is either depleted or paywalled.

That same logic scales up.

Borders become revenue streams. Detention becomes profitable. War becomes marketable. Harm stops being a failure and starts being a business model. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s incentivizing. And systems built on those incentives don’t shrink deficits or solve problems. They compound them, because too many people are paid to keep the problem alive.

The Once-ler didn’t stop because it was wrong.

He didn’t stop because the damage was obvious.

He stopped when there was nothing left to extract.

And even then, the solution offered wasn’t repair. It was a story.

Nobody needs a Thneed.

Nobody needs to have their existence broken into billable components.

And any system that only listens when harm becomes profitable isn’t failing.

It’s functioning exactly as designed.

That’s why it needs guardrails. Before there’s nothing left to sell.

Every time someone invokes history to point out dangerous political patterns, the same deflection shows up on schedule:

“That comparison is ridiculous.”

“Nobody here is a Nazi.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

History is full of people who said exactly that.

Recognizing patterns is not hysteria. It is literacy.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with normalization. With dehumanizing language. With selective enforcement of laws. With the quiet reassurance that “this is legal,” “this is necessary,” and “this is temporary.” It began with neighbors looking away, officials just doing their jobs, and ordinary people convincing themselves that things weren’t that bad. Yet.

When people draw parallels between current tactics and historical authoritarian playbooks, they are not claiming we are living in 1939 Germany. They are pointing out the conditions that allowed it to happen. That distinction matters. History doesn’t repeat itself cleanly. It rhymes. And ignoring the rhyme scheme doesn’t make you rational. It makes you unprepared.

Fascism does not announce itself with a swastika and a press release. It arrives wrapped in patriotism, order, and “law and enforcement.” It recruits through tribalism. Us versus them. Good citizens versus dangerous others. It relies on the public’s misunderstanding of what fascism actually is.

Fascism is not just a political ideology. It’s a process. One that erodes norms, concentrates power, undermines independent institutions, and reframes cruelty as necessity. It thrives when people stop interrogating authority and start excusing it because it’s their side doing it.

And yes, there is documented evidence of how this works. Including in the United States. During World War II, Nazi Germany didn’t just wage war overseas. It dropped propaganda over German-American neighborhoods. It exploited identity, grievance, and fear. That history isn’t obscure. It’s archived. It’s taught. Or at least it should be.

This isn’t “liberals being liberals.” This is what critical thinking looks like. Comparing tactics, language, and power structures across time isn’t partisan. It’s responsible citizenship.

What’s especially alarming is how often the loudest defenders of “law and order” are the quickest to excuse behavior that blatantly violates it, as long as the right people are being targeted. You cannot claim reverence for the rule of law while defending actions that disregard due process, proportionality, and basic human rights. Law enforcement exists to uphold the Constitution, not to serve political expediency.

As someone with training in law enforcement, I find that especially troubling. We are taught to understand consequences, escalation, and precedent. We are trained to recognize when tactics cross lines, not to cheer them on because they align with our politics. We are supposed to know better, because we have seen the aftermath up close.

And before anyone reaches for the escape hatch: no, this does not mean everyone involved is a literal Nazi. That’s not the point. But “Nazi-adjacent” ideologies, aesthetics, and tactics do not materialize in a vacuum. If you don’t want to be associated with them, you don’t get there by semantic distancing. You get there by examining what you condone.

Ask yourself this honestly: if these same actions were taken against people who weren’t protesting, who weren’t politically inconvenient, who weren’t already dehumanized in the public imagination, would you still defend them? Or would you suddenly find your moral clarity?

The problem isn’t disagreement. It’s hypocrisy. It’s the reflexive defense of “our guy” no matter the cost. That kind of thinking isn’t strength. It’s immaturity. It’s middle-school tribalism with adult consequences.

You’re entitled to your opinion. You’re entitled to free speech. For now. But if we actually want this country to heal, to stabilize, to improve, then the constant divisive posturing has to stop. So does the willful ignorance masquerading as pragmatism.

This isn’t about teams. It’s about recognizing wrong when it’s wrong, even when it’s inconvenient. Especially then.

History doesn’t need you to agree with it.

It only needs you to remember it.

But as we moved through the galleries, I kept noticing the same themes coming up again and again, across centuries, across cultures. Power. Fear. Control. Innocent people getting caught in things they didn’t cause. It was almost unsettling how consistent it was, like physical proof that humans don’t really change as much as we like to think we do.

Then I came across these two pieces together: The Massacre of the Innocents and The Fall of the Giants.

I don’t care what the technical term is for them. They’re three-dimensional scenes frozen in metal. And they stopped me cold.

The titles matter. Especially The Massacre of the Innocents. There’s no wiggle room in that phrase. No abstraction. Innocents are named. What happens to them is named. You don’t have to know anything about art or religion to understand the idea: people who did nothing wrong were harmed because force was unleashed around them.

And right next to it was The Fall of the Giants.

Once I saw them together, I couldn’t unsee it. Cause and effect. You harm the innocent, and eventually the powerful fall. Not immediately. Not cleanly. But the balance always shifts. Karma, if you want to call it that. The scales correcting themselves.

Later that day, I read a CBS article about something that happened in Minneapolis during an ICE operation.

A family was driving home from a basketball game. Kids in the van. They weren’t protesting. They weren’t involved. They were just trying to get home. An enforcement action happened nearby, and a tear gas canister or flash bang went off close enough to injure the children.

Depending on who was reporting it, the details shifted. But the basic fact didn’t: children were hurt during an enforcement action they had nothing to do with.

Then I did what I probably shouldn’t have done and read the comments.

They shouldn’t have been there.

Just stay home.

Wrong place, wrong time.

And that’s where something clicked for me.

That reaction isn’t really about the situation. It’s about self-preservation. It’s about telling yourself, That wouldn’t happen to me because I would make better choices. It pushes the discomfort away. It keeps the world orderly. If you follow the rules, if you stay small enough, if you don’t cross paths with power, you’ll be fine.

But that’s not how it actually works.

People don’t get a warning when enforcement actions happen. You don’t get a push notification saying, “Avoid this neighborhood tonight.” You don’t get to opt out of public space. You’re just living your life, until suddenly you’re not.

This isn’t about pretending force is never justified. In that same situation, there was a separate incident where an agent shot someone who reportedly attacked them. That’s different. Agency matters. Provocation matters. Self-defense matters.

That distinction matters.

What’s disturbing isn’t that force exists. It’s how easily we excuse harm when it lands on people who had no role in what was happening at all. Families. Kids. Bystanders.

I’ve seen what that does to children overseas, in war zones. Ask veterans what stays with them years later, and a lot of them won’t talk about combat first. They’ll talk about the kids. The fear. The confusion. The way a single moment of chaos imprints itself and never fully leaves, even when no one “meant” for it to happen.

We all know, on some level, that hurting children is different. It’s not just sad. It’s destabilizing. It erodes trust in a way that doesn’t repair easily.

Which is why the apathy scares me more than the event itself.

“Just stay home” sounds reasonable until you follow it to its conclusion. It means normal life has to shrink so force can operate freely. It means innocence becomes conditional. It means being present becomes blameworthy.

That’s not a new idea. That’s what those pieces in the museum were showing — not as symbolism, but as history. This is what it looks like when people convince themselves that harm is acceptable because it’s happening “for a reason.”

You massacre the innocents, and eventually the giants fall. History shows that part, too.

The question isn’t whether we’ve seen this before. We have.

The question is whether we recognize it while it’s happening — or only after, when it’s safely framed behind glass

It is rhythmic. Predictable. Comforting, even.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Marching isn’t thinking. It’s movement without destination. And that’s the part we forget when politics becomes nothing more than a metronome, ticking back and forth between sides that insist they are opposites while moving in perfect synchronization.

Authoritarianism doesn’t require chaos. It thrives on order. It feeds on repetition. It prefers people who keep step without asking where the road leads.

Left versus right.

Right versus left.

The argument itself becomes the engine. People mistake constant opposition for resistance, as if arguing with each other is the same thing as questioning power. But the cadence never breaks. The march continues. Only the chants change.

The danger isn’t disagreement. The danger is unquestioned obedience wrapped in identity.

History is very clear on this point. Tyranny doesn’t usually arrive as a sudden command to abandon morality. It arrives as a request to suspend it. Temporarily. For safety. For order. For the greater good. It asks you to trust the system more than your conscience and reassures you that responsibility belongs elsewhere.

Just follow the law.

Just do your job.

Just keep moving.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Law and order are not the enemy of humanity. But law without humanity becomes brutality, and order without conscience becomes submission. A functioning society depends on tension between these forces, not the elimination of one in favor of the other.

Moral maturity lives in that tension.

The most dangerous lie authoritarian systems tell is that questioning equals disloyalty. That restraint is weakness. That obedience is virtue. Once that equation is accepted, cruelty no longer needs justification. It only needs authorization.

And the scariest part? People will enforce it themselves.

They will police tone before power.

They will demand compliance before compassion.

They will mistake certainty for truth and alignment for ethics.

Left, right.

Left, right.

The march continues even as the ground shifts beneath it. Even as values invert. Even as humanity becomes optional.

Those who break cadence are labeled disruptive. Unpatriotic. Naive. Emotional. But every meaningful course correction in history began with someone stepping out of line long enough to ask a forbidden question:

Why are we moving this way at all?

Refusal to march blindly is not chaos. It is sovereignty. It is the insistence that systems exist to serve people, not the other way around. That authority must answer to morality, not replace it.

The goal is not to abandon law.

The goal is to refuse its weaponization.

The goal is not to reject order.

The goal is to prevent it from hollowing out conscience.

Left and right are directions. They are not destinations.

And any movement that demands silence, obedience, and moral suspension in exchange for belonging is not asking for loyalty.

It’s asking for surrender.

Breaking cadence is not betrayal.

It’s how humanity stays upright when the world insists on turning itself upside down.