Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Equality Isn’t a Pie

Apparently, we’re having the conversation again.

You know the one. The conversation about women’s rights, equality, civil rights, who deserves what, who had it harder, who is supposedly taking something away from whom, and the apparently revolutionary concept that maybe—just maybe—every human being should be treated like a human being.

And somehow, after all these decades, we still have people who hear “women should have equal rights” and translate that into “women should take over the world and men should live in caves.”

Because apparently equality is a zero-sum game.

Apparently, if someone else gets more rights, dignity, opportunity, representation, or freedom, there must be a corresponding deduction from my personal account.

Congratulations! Someone you don’t know just received equal pay. Your freedom balance has been reduced by 14 points.

That’s not how this works.

Gloria Steinem wasn’t arguing that women should become the new ruling class. The women’s movement wasn’t fundamentally about replacing one hierarchy with another. It was about challenging the idea that gender should determine what opportunities you’re allowed to have, what you’re allowed to do with your life, what you’re paid, how you’re treated, or how much control you have over your own existence.

And that’s really no different from what Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for.

He wasn’t asking America to give Black Americans some special collection of rights that white Americans didn’t have. He was asking America to stop pretending that the rights it claimed were universal somehow came with an asterisk.

Equal rights means equal rights.

That’s the part that seems so remarkably difficult for some people to understand.

If I’m a middle-aged white guy—and I happen to be one—my rights don’t become smaller because a Black woman has the same rights I do.

My freedom doesn’t diminish because a gay man can marry the person he loves.

My citizenship doesn’t become less valuable because an immigrant becomes an American.

My voice doesn’t become quieter because another person finally gets a microphone.

And my manhood certainly doesn’t become threatened because a woman doesn’t need my permission to determine what happens to her own life.

Rights aren’t a pizza.

There isn’t a finite number of slices sitting on the table with a bunch of minorities standing around waiting for their piece. If somebody gets another slice, I don’t suddenly have less pizza.

That’s the bizarre psychological trap we’ve created around equality: the assumption that fairness must mean somebody is losing.

But that’s only true if the original arrangement was inherently unfair.

And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable part.

If you’ve spent your entire life benefiting from a system that automatically gave you certain advantages because of the color of your skin or the sex you were born with, equality can sometimes feel like discrimination.

Not because you’re actually being oppressed.

Because you’re no longer receiving the automatic head start.

There is a difference.

And here’s another inconvenient historical fact: many of the people who have fought for equality weren’t asking for domination. They were asking to be included in the promise America had already made.

Life, liberty, equality, justice.

Those aren’t supposed to be members-only benefits.

And this is where the whole conversation gets particularly strange when people wrap themselves in Christianity while simultaneously arguing that equality somehow threatens them.

Because the guy they’re supposedly trying to follow wasn’t exactly a wealthy white American businessman.

Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew living under Roman occupation.

He spent an extraordinary amount of his time talking about compassion, humility, helping the marginalized, caring for the poor, loving your neighbor and treating other people as you would want to be treated.

He didn’t spend much time explaining how important it was for the people at the top to make absolutely certain nobody below them accidentally received the same rights.

Which makes the modern interpretation of Christianity occasionally fascinating.

Apparently Jesus said, love your neighbor.

And somewhere along the way, we translated that into:

Yes, but only if your neighbor looks, thinks, votes, worships and lives exactly like you do.

That’s quite an editorial revision.

The truth is, equality doesn’t require me to surrender anything that was legitimately mine.

It requires me to surrender the idea that something belongs to me simply because someone else was denied it.

That’s a completely different proposition.

I don’t lose my humanity when another person gains theirs.

I don’t become less free because somebody else becomes freer.

And I don’t need to be afraid of equality unless the thing I’m afraid of losing is inequality.

That’s the uncomfortable question worth asking.

When someone says, “If they get equal rights, what happens to me?”

My answer is pretty simple:

Nothing.

You still get to be you.

You still get your rights.

You still get your freedom.

You just don’t get extra rights because you happened to be born with less melanin in your skin or with a particular collection of chromosomes.

And honestly, as a middle-aged white guy, I’m perfectly comfortable with that.

Because I’ve never believed my rights were valuable because somebody else had fewer.

I’ve always thought they were valuable because they’re supposed to belong to everybody.

That’s the whole fucking point.

Equality isn’t about taking something from me.

It’s about finally admitting that it was never mine to own in the first place.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Magic Is Just Science We Haven’t Explained Yet

I’ve always liked the idea that magic is just science we haven’t explained yet.

Think about that for a moment. There was a time when lightning was terrifying. Thunder was the voice of gods. An eclipse was an omen. Disease was punishment. A woman who knew which plants could heal you might be considered a witch. A person who understood something the rest of the village didn’t could very easily be accused of possessing supernatural powers.

Why?

Because we have a deeply human need to explain things.

When we don’t understand something, we don’t like leaving the question unanswered. So we fill in the blank.

And historically, the explanation was often magic.

Today, we call that process science.

The difference is that science is willing to say, “I don’t know yet.”

That may actually be one of the most important differences between science and religion.

Science doesn’t require us to have an answer before we have the evidence. It starts with a question: What happened? How did this happen? What evidence can we gather? Can we test it? Can somebody else reproduce the result? And if we’re wrong, what would prove us wrong?

The Big Bang theory is a perfect example.

The Big Bang doesn’t say, “A magical explosion happened because science says so.”

It is an explanation, based on enormous amounts of evidence, for how the universe evolved from an extremely hot, dense early state. We can observe galaxies moving apart. We can detect the cosmic microwave background. We can measure the abundance of elements. We can observe the large-scale structure of the universe.

And after all of that, scientists still have the intellectual humility to say:

We don’t know everything.

We don’t know exactly what, if anything, preceded the earliest moment we can currently describe. We don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. We don’t have a complete explanation for the nature of dark matter or dark energy.

And that’s okay.

Because “I don’t know” isn’t a failure of science.

It’s an invitation.

Religion often approaches the same unanswered questions differently.

Where science says, “We don’t know yet,” religion can say, “God did it.”

And for some people, that’s enough.

The universe exists?

God created it.

Life exists?

God created it.

Humans exist?

God created them.

We don’t understand something?

God works in mysterious ways.

It’s an extraordinarily convenient answer because it cannot really be disproven. Whatever remains unexplained becomes another place for God to live.

And that’s where I have trouble with the argument that the universe must have been created exactly as described in an ancient religious text because we don’t yet understand every detail of its origin.

That’s essentially saying:

“I don’t understand this, therefore my preferred supernatural explanation must be correct.”

But that’s not an explanation.

That’s an assumption wearing an explanation’s clothes.

The irony is that humanity has been doing this forever.

The ancient Greeks attributed lightning to Zeus.

Norse mythology gave us Thor and his hammer.

People once believed illness could be caused by demons, curses, or supernatural punishment. People were executed for witchcraft because their neighbors couldn’t explain why crops failed, why someone became sick, or why something terrible happened.

Then we learned about electricity.

We learned about bacteria and viruses.

We learned about weather systems.

We learned about genetics.

We learned about chemistry.

The magic didn’t disappear.

Our understanding did.

That woman who knew which herbs could treat an illness wasn’t necessarily a witch. She may have simply understood something about plants that the people around her didn’t.

The person who could predict an eclipse wasn’t necessarily communicating with the gods. They understood astronomy.

The person who could navigate by the stars wasn’t performing magic. They understood the sky.

The phenomenon didn’t change.

Our explanation changed.

And that’s the part that fascinates me about the argument between creationism and science.

Creationism often seems to demand that we stop at the mystery.

Science says, keep going.

There is something almost beautiful about admitting that the universe is vastly more complicated than we are.

We’re a species that has existed for a microscopic fraction of cosmic history, sitting on one little planet orbiting one ordinary star, trying to understand an observable universe containing billions of galaxies.

And somehow we occasionally arrive at the conclusion that because we can’t explain everything, we must already have the answer.

Apparently the universe needs a celestial landlord with a white beard.

And somehow we’ve decided we know his personality, his preferences, what makes him angry, what he wants us to eat, who he’s disappointed in, what clothes he approves of, who he’s going to punish, and exactly what he thinks about human sexuality.

That’s quite a leap from “I wonder how the universe began.”

There’s nothing wrong with faith. People are entitled to believe whatever gives their lives meaning. Faith can provide comfort, community, morality, tradition and a sense of purpose.

But faith and evidence aren’t the same thing.

And saying “science can’t explain everything” is not an argument against science.

Science has never claimed to explain everything.

In fact, science is built around the realization that we don’t know everything.

Every answer creates another question.

Every discovery opens another door.

That’s not a weakness.

That’s the whole fucking point.

The history of humanity is, in many ways, the history of turning magic into knowledge.

Lightning became electricity.

Stars became nuclear furnaces.

Disease became biology.

Inheritance became genetics.

The movement of planets became physics.

And perhaps someday, questions that currently seem almost incomprehensible will become ordinary knowledge.

Maybe we’ll understand exactly what happened at the beginning of our universe.

Maybe we’ll understand what came before the earliest moment we can currently observe.

Maybe we’ll discover something so strange that our current understanding of reality will look primitive.

And when that happens, I’d rather be the person saying:

“Holy shit. That’s amazing. How does it work?”

than the person saying:

“Don’t investigate it. I already have the answer.”

Because maybe magic really is just science we haven’t explained yet.

And perhaps the greatest mistake humanity can make isn’t believing in magic.

It’s deciding that we’ve already explained it.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s an old phrase that has always stuck with me: “If you know better, do better.”

It sounds simple. Almost obvious. The idea is that knowledge should change us. Once we understand that something is wrong, harmful, cruel, or simply unnecessary, we have a responsibility to do something differently.

But lately, I’ve started wondering about the first half of that sentence.

What if people don’t know better?

We live in an age where information is literally in our hands. We can learn about history, science, other cultures, other perspectives, and the consequences of our decisions in seconds. There is almost no excuse for ignorance when knowledge is more accessible than it has ever been.

And yet, somehow, ignorance has become something people defend.

People don’t just refuse to learn. They proudly announce that they don’t need to. They choose the information that makes them comfortable, surround themselves with people who agree with them, and dismiss anything that challenges what they already believe.

So perhaps the problem isn’t that people know better and refuse to do better.

Perhaps the more frightening problem is that they don’t want to know better.

Because knowing better comes with responsibility. Once you understand that your words hurt someone, that your assumptions are wrong, that your history is incomplete, or that your actions have consequences, you can’t pretend you didn’t know.

Ignorance can be innocent.

Choosing ignorance is not.

“If you know better, do better” was never really about being perfect. It was about being willing to grow. To admit you were wrong. To learn something new. To look at the world with enough humility to realize that you don’t know everything.

Maybe that’s what we’re missing.

Not information.

Humility.

Because before we can do better, we have to be willing to know better.

And these days, I’m not entirely convinced we’re interested in either.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is a strange American habit of treating rights as though they come with an asterisk.

We like to talk about our rights in very grand language. We have freedom of speech. We have the right to vote. We have the right to bear arms. We have freedom of religion. We have due process. We have all these beautiful constitutional promises that supposedly separate us from the old world of kings, emperors and authoritarian rulers.

And then, somewhere along the way, we quietly add: “Well, unless…”

Voting is a right—unless your state makes it unnecessarily difficult to register, limits when and how you can vote, removes you from the rolls, closes polling places in your neighborhood, or decides that your particular circumstances make exercising that right inconvenient.

Meanwhile, owning a gun is treated by some people almost as though it were handed down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai.

The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Fine. But apparently even that right has historically come with an asterisk. When the Black Panthers legally carried firearms into the California State Capitol in 1967 to protest proposed gun-control legislation, Ronald Reagan—then governor of California and a strong supporter of gun rights—supported legislation restricting the carrying of loaded firearms in public. The Mulford Act followed.

And there is the uncomfortable lesson buried in that history: sometimes our passionate defense of a “right” becomes considerably less passionate when the people exercising it are people we don’t particularly like.

Funny how that works.

We supposedly believe in freedom of speech, too.

The First Amendment doesn’t say, “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, unless the person speaking is saying something the president doesn’t like.”

It doesn’t say, “You may criticize the government, provided the government appreciates your criticism.”

It doesn’t say, “Freedom of the press shall be protected unless the press becomes annoying.”

Yet we increasingly hear political rhetoric that treats constitutional rights as conditional privileges. You can speak—unless you’re saying the wrong thing. You can protest—unless you’re protesting the wrong person. You can publish—unless the government decides you’re dangerous, disloyal, inconvenient or sufficiently irritating.

And that’s where the whole concept begins to fall apart.

Because a right that exists only when the person in power approves of how you exercise it isn’t really a right.

It’s permission.

And permission is something fundamentally different.

A monarch can give you permission to speak. An authoritarian government can give you permission to vote. A dictator can allow you to worship whatever god you want. A government can even allow you to own a firearm.

But if all of those things disappear the moment you challenge the person holding power, then what you possess isn’t a constitutional right. You possess a temporary privilege granted by someone who has decided you’re sufficiently obedient to deserve it.

That’s not liberty.

That’s compliance with better marketing.

This is where Americans sometimes confuse having rights with being allowed to exercise them.

We love the mythology of American exceptionalism because it makes the story wonderfully simple. America is the land of the free. We fought a revolution against a king. We wrote a Constitution. We created a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

And then we spend an astonishing amount of time arguing about which people deserve the “of the people” part.

The real test of a constitutional democracy isn’t whether the government protects the rights of people who agree with it.

That’s easy.

The real test is whether the government protects the rights of people it absolutely fucking despises.

The protester.

The dissenter.

The journalist.

The political opponent.

The minority.

The unpopular religious group.

The person whose opinion makes you want to put your head through drywall.

That’s the point of rights.

If I only have freedom of speech when I’m saying something you agree with, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. You believe in agreement.

If voting is sacred only when the people voting produce the outcome you want, then you don’t believe in democracy. You believe in winning elections.

If the Second Amendment protects gun ownership only when the people carrying guns look, think and vote like you do, then you don’t believe in a universal right. You believe in a privilege for your tribe.

And if constitutional protections disappear whenever someone becomes politically inconvenient, then we’re no longer discussing rights at all.

We’re discussing power.

That’s the uncomfortable question America has never completely answered:

Where exactly do our rights come from?

Do they come from the government?

If so, the government can take them away.

Do they come from whoever happens to control Congress?

Then congratulations, your liberty has a six-year expiration date.

Do they come from the president?

Then we haven’t built a constitutional republic. We’ve built a monarchy with elections.

The entire philosophical premise of American constitutionalism is that certain rights exist before government. Government doesn’t create them. Government is supposed to protect them.

That’s why the Constitution is supposed to restrain government rather than merely instruct citizens.

And that’s why the phrase “you have that right, but…” should make every American uncomfortable.

Because sometimes the “but” is where authoritarianism begins.

It rarely arrives wearing a black uniform and announcing, “I am now your dictator.”

It usually arrives much more politely.

We’re just going to make this one exception.

We’re only doing this because of an emergency.

We’re only restricting these people.

We’re only silencing dangerous speech.

We’re only preventing the wrong people from voting.

We’re only enforcing the law against people who deserve it.

And eventually somebody discovers that “the wrong people” can be expanded to include anyone who gets in the way.

That’s how rights become privileges.

That’s how privileges become permissions.

And that’s how permissions become obedience.

The difference between a free society and an authoritarian one isn’t necessarily whether the government allows you to do things.

Authoritarian governments allow people to do plenty of things.

The difference is whether the government recognizes that there are things it is not allowed to take away from you simply because it doesn’t like you.

That’s the entire fucking point.

Rights aren’t supposed to be rewards for good behavior.

They’re not participation trophies handed out to citizens who stay on the approved path.

They’re protections precisely for the moments when you leave the approved path.

So perhaps the better question isn’t “What rights do Americans have?”

It’s this:

What rights are we willing to defend when we hate the person exercising them?

Because that’s where the rubber meets the road.

It’s easy to defend my freedom.

It’s considerably harder to defend yours when you think you’re an asshole.

But if I only defend freedom when it’s convenient, then I haven’t defended freedom.

I’ve defended myself.

And eventually, if we keep treating constitutional rights as privileges that can be revoked whenever someone crosses an invisible line established by whoever happens to hold power, we may wake up one morning and discover that the American promise didn’t disappear in some dramatic coup.

We simply gave it away, exception by exception, while insisting that everything was perfectly constitutional.

A right isn’t a right because the government lets you have it.

It’s a right because the government isn’t supposed to be able to decide whether you’re worthy of having it.

And if our rights depend on obedience, political affiliation, skin color, popularity, ideology or the current occupant of the White House, then maybe we should stop congratulating ourselves for living in the land of the free.

Because at that point, we’re not free.

We’re just well-behaved.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Here we are again, apparently living in a country where the definition of “not a war” is apparently whatever the president says it is while American ammunition stockpiles quietly look like the pantry of a college student who just discovered DoorDash.

We are told that what is happening with Iran is not a war. Absolutely not. War is such an ugly word. This is merely an extended disagreement involving aircraft, missiles, bombs, military strikes, exploding things and enough ammunition to make the Pentagon accountants start sweating through their uniforms.

But don’t call it a war.

Because if you call it a war, people might start asking uncomfortable questions.

Like: Where did all our ammunition go?

Well, according to Donald and his loyal chorus of political elk, this is apparently Biden’s fault. Naturally. Because nothing says 2026 quite like discovering that the United States has ammunition shortages and immediately blaming the previous president.

The explanation goes something like this:

“If Biden hadn’t given all those munitions to Zelenskyy, we’d have plenty!”

Except that’s not really how this works.

A significant portion of what Ukraine acquired from the United States consisted of older weapons and ammunition that were already sitting in American stockpiles. Ukraine didn’t magically empty America’s weapons closet and leave us standing there in our underwear. Those older munitions were used as part of a broader process in which the United States replenished and modernized its own inventories.

In other words, we sent old stuff, Ukraine paid for some of it, and we used the money and the opportunity to build newer stuff.

But apparently that doesn’t fit neatly into the “Biden gave everything away and now we’re defenseless” narrative, so naturally we skip that part.

And then there’s the even more fascinating question:

Why do we have to keep making so damn much of this stuff in the first place?

Think about the absurdity of it.

We spend enormous amounts of money developing incredibly sophisticated technologies whose primary purpose is to travel somewhere and destroy something.

Then we manufacture them.

Then we store them.

Then we maintain them.

Then we spend more money replacing them because they age.

Then somebody decides they need to be used.

Then we launch them.

Boom.

And they’re gone.

That’s the entire business model.

Imagine if every other industry operated that way.

Imagine spending $10 million developing the world’s most advanced toaster, manufacturing 50,000 of them, putting them in a warehouse, and then eventually throwing every single one into a volcano because the toaster’s primary function was to cease existing.

And then Congress comes back next year and says:

“We’re running low on toasters. We need another $40 billion.”

And everyone applauds.

This is the part of the defense conversation that seems to get lost behind the flags, the chest-thumping and the endless parade of politicians insisting that somebody else’s president is responsible for whatever happens to be happening today.

Yes, America needs a military.

Yes, America needs ammunition.

Yes, deterrence matters.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to maintain enormous stockpiles of weapons.

But somewhere along the way we’ve managed to create an economic ecosystem where spending money on things designed to be destroyed is treated as inherently productive.

And somehow questioning that gets interpreted as questioning the military itself.

It isn’t.

It’s questioning whether “we spent another $37 billion on things that go boom” should automatically be considered the pinnacle of fiscal responsibility.

Because here’s the truly bizarre part:

When Ukraine buys American weapons, that money can help replenish American inventories, modernize production lines and create jobs.

When America uses those weapons, they don’t come back.

They’re not reusable.

They’re not recyclable.

They’re not sitting somewhere waiting for their next shift.

They’re gone.

And then we get to buy more.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It’s the world’s most expensive subscription service.

Defense Plus: because apparently the previous missiles have expired by exploding.

And now, when our stockpiles get strained by actual military operations, we’re supposed to pretend this is some shocking mystery caused entirely by the guy who occupied the White House before the guy currently occupying it.

No.

Maybe the bigger question isn’t “Who used too much ammunition?”

Maybe it’s:

Why have we built a civilization where we devote extraordinary amounts of our collective wealth to creating increasingly sophisticated ways of turning perfectly good materials into very expensive explosions?

Imagine what that money could look like if we weren’t constantly preparing to destroy things.

Infrastructure.

Education.

Water.

Energy.

Research.

Healthcare.

Housing.

Technology.

Actual things that remain useful after you use them.

What a radical concept.

A missile can destroy a target once.

A bridge can serve people for generations.

A school can educate thousands of children.

A water system can provide an entire community with something it desperately needs.

A medical breakthrough can save lives indefinitely.

But apparently those things don’t make the same satisfying BOOM.

So here we are.

Arguing about whether Biden used too much ammunition, whether Trump has enough ammunition, whether Ukraine bought too much ammunition, whether Iran is technically a war, and whether the president can find a sufficiently creative synonym for “we are conducting military operations.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in a warehouse, an American taxpayer is looking at an empty shelf and thinking:

“Wait a minute. Didn’t we just spend billions filling that thing?”

Yes.

We did.

Then we built some more.

Then somebody used them.

Then we bought some more.

And we’ll probably keep doing it.

Because apparently the greatest achievement of modern civilization isn’t figuring out how to stop needing so many things that go boom.

It’s figuring out how to manufacture them faster.

What a world it would be if our national imagination was just as enthusiastic about developing things that don’t disappear when we use them.

Imagine investing billions in things where the objective isn’t:

“Congratulations, you successfully destroyed it.”

What a concept.

Maybe someday we’ll discover that the most powerful thing a country can build isn’t another weapon.

Maybe it’s a future worth defending.