Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
When You’re Old Enough, History keeps happening in Your Living Room
"When Good Looks Away, Evil Gets Organized - You Don’t Get the Best Option—You Get the Least Bad One" - YNOT!
You know, as you get old, you remember. I remember the moon landing. I remember sitting in my living room—I must’ve been six or seven—in my underwear, watching our color TV show those black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon. I remember “Mister Potato head” President Johnson. I remember Nixon. I remember how Nixon had to leave office. I remember the Vietnam War.
My dad worked at a factory in Miami—Aerodex—that rebuilt engines for fighter planes. My mom eventually got a job there too. I remember the Carter administration. That was a mess. Lines around the gas stations . I remember when the Ayatollah took over Iran. I remember the hostage crisis, every night on Nightline: day 100, then 200, then you just lost track. more. I remember the helicopter disaster in the desert—lack of planning, bad hardware, whatever it was.
And of course, the disaster of Cuba was always right there if you lived in Miami. People being killed, massacred, dying from hunger and starvation. Cubans sending tens of thousands of dollars back in the 1970s to their families so they could eat and get medicine. El paquete, as people called it. I remember families broken up. And I remember how so many Cuban homes had a bottle of champagne sitting there, waiting—the one they’d open when the regime finally ended. Fifty years later, the bottle is still closed.
I remember the Mariel Boatlift. And after that, the tragedy of socialism kept spreading—Nicaragua, Venezuela—and it kept trying to crawl into places like Peru and Mexico all with the help of the Soviet Union. And don’t think the nightmare of drug cartels didn’t get help along the way from ideologies and networks that were perfectly happy to burn societies down for “the cause.”
I remember Reagan standing there and saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And for a minute, it felt like the world exhaled. Then the wall actually did come down, and the Soviet Union cracked apart, and people started talking like history had finally learned its lesson. We acted like freedom was now on autopilot—like the bad chapter was over and the rest would be sunshine and good intentions. And then, not that long after, up comes Putin—an old-school, hard-eyed product of the system, rising out of the rubble like a man who never believed the story was finished. It was a reminder that empires don’t always die—they sometimes just change clothes.
And I remember Tiananmen Square—students, hope, bravery, and then the tanks, the silence, and that lone figure standing in front of them like the human spirit trying to stop a machine. The West watched it like a moral test, and China absorbed it like a lesson in control. After that came the long climb: factories, wealth, global power—and a kind of national confidence that didn’t come with political loosening, but with tighter grip. And then the rise of Xi: consolidation, centralization, the feeling of a system deciding it would rather be feared than questioned. The world likes to pretend progress is a straight line, but those scenes—Berlin and Beijing—teach you it’s more like a loop… and memory is the warning label we keep peeling off.
One thing you learn, if you live long enough and pay attention, is that there is good and there is evil. And evil coordinates. Evil shares notes. Evil makes plans. Meanwhile, good sticks its head in the sand and hopes evil is just a misunderstanding. Good asks, “How can people be that evil?” and then comforts itself with hope.
Well, I’ve been there. I’ve been to Africa, the Middle East. I’ve been to Somalia, Pakistan. I’ve been to places where you don’t have the luxury of pretending evil is just a theory. I’ve seen the enemies of decent people up close. Evil is alive in a lot of places.
And today, it feels like history is showing its face again. People are talking about the Iranian regime cracking—maybe even the beginning of its downfall. Another page in the story of man: not pretty, not kind, but better than the other option. Because in real life, you don’t get the option you want—you get the least-bad one.
And if this ends the way it should, people will be dancing in the streets of Iran again—the women, the men, and yes, the gay people too. Just regular human beings, finally getting to breathe like human beings. Which is a small miracle, when you think about how many powerful people have spent decades trying to convince them they don’t deserve to.
Maybe tomorrow we’ll live in a world with real peace—I hope so. But today we live in a world with an axis of evil, and today one part of that axis is being taken out.
