Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every once in a while, I try to explain racism to someone who genuinely seems unable to understand what the problem is with it.

And honestly, I don’t know how to do it without making my own fucking head hurt.

So let’s try something completely ridiculous.

Not because the subject is funny, but because sometimes the only way to explain an irrational idea is to construct an equally irrational one and follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Imagine that tomorrow morning, humanity collectively decides that eye color determines human worth.

Not personality.

Not character.

Not intelligence.

Not what you’ve accomplished.

Your fucking eyes.

And because green eyes are among the rarest eye colors in the world, we decide that green-eyed people are obviously the superior form of humanity.

Why?

Because they’re rare.

And apparently, in this hypothetical universe, rarity equals superiority.

Congratulations.

We have invented Eye Color Nationalism.

Green eyes are now the gold standard.

If you’re green-eyed, you’re automatically considered intelligent, trustworthy, sophisticated, beautiful, hardworking and morally superior.

Nobody has actually tested any of this.

There are no studies proving it.

There is no scientific basis for it.

But look at those eyes!

They’re green!

Clearly, God, evolution, or some mysterious cosmic accounting department has selected these people for greatness.

Brown eyes?

Too common.

Blue eyes?

Nice try.

Hazel?

Confusing.

Gray?

Suspicious.

Green?

Ah. The master race.

And now we build an entire society around this completely arbitrary characteristic.

Green-eyed people get the best schools.

They get preferential treatment when applying for jobs.

They get the nicest neighborhoods.

They get more political representation.

When a green-eyed person commits a crime, everyone says, “Well, that was an individual.”

When a brown-eyed person commits the same crime, suddenly we’re having a national conversation about the behavioral tendencies of brown-eyed people.

See how quickly this becomes insane?

Now imagine that we start teaching children this nonsense.

Generation after generation grows up hearing that green-eyed people are superior.

Eventually, green-eyed people begin to believe it.

Some become genuinely convinced that their green eyes are evidence of superior intelligence.

Others become convinced that brown-eyed people are naturally lazy.

Blue-eyed people are supposedly emotional.

Hazel-eyed people can’t be trusted.

And gray-eyed people are apparently communists.

Nobody remembers where these beliefs came from anymore.

They’re just traditions.

They’re part of the culture.

They’re what we’ve always believed.

Then somebody finally asks:

“Wait a minute. Why are green-eyed people superior?”

And the answer is:

“Because they’re green-eyed.”

“Okay, but what does that have to do with their intelligence?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“What does it have to do with their character?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“What does it have to do with whether they’re a good person?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“Well, look how many successful green-eyed people there are.”

And now we’ve arrived at the really interesting part.

Because if green-eyed people have spent generations receiving better schools, better jobs, better housing, better healthcare, better opportunities and greater social acceptance, eventually you’re going to be able to point to those outcomes and say:

“See! Green-eyed people really are more successful.”

No shit.

You’ve been stacking the fucking deck for them.

That’s not evidence of inherent superiority.

That’s evidence that opportunity produces results.

And here’s where the thought experiment gets even more absurd.

Imagine two newborn babies.

They are born on the exact same day.

They have healthy brains.

They have the same potential.

Neither has committed a crime.

Neither has done anything good or bad.

Neither has demonstrated intelligence, laziness, courage, cowardice, honesty, dishonesty, kindness, cruelty, ambition or apathy.

They are fucking babies.

Now imagine that one baby has green eyes and the other has brown eyes.

And somebody looks at those two infants and says:

“I already know something important about these human beings because of the color of their eyes.”

No.

You don’t.

You know what color their eyes are.

That’s it.

You haven’t discovered their personality.

You haven’t unlocked their IQ.

You haven’t examined their moral character.

You haven’t received a divine notification informing you of their future behavior.

You know what color their fucking eyes are.

Yet somehow humanity has repeatedly taken completely arbitrary physical characteristics and tried to turn them into hierarchies of human beings.

And here’s the part that should make anybody’s brain hurt:

What if we reversed the colors?

What if tomorrow we decided brown eyes were the rare and desirable ones?

Suddenly brown-eyed people are exceptional.

Blue-eyed people are suspicious.

Green-eyed people are overrated.

And every argument we previously made about the inherent superiority of green eyes suddenly becomes applicable to brown eyes.

The biological reality didn’t change.

The people didn’t change.

The eye colors didn’t change.

Only the story we told ourselves about them changed.

And that’s the point.

**The hierarchy was never actually contained in the eye color.

We put the hierarchy there.**

That’s what makes racism so profoundly fucking stupid.

Human beings take a visible characteristic—skin color, ancestry, facial features, whatever—and attach a completely unrelated set of assumptions to it.

Then we spend centuries defending those assumptions as though they’re laws of physics.

But skin color doesn’t contain a personality.

It doesn’t contain a work ethic.

It doesn’t contain an IQ score.

It doesn’t contain morality.

It doesn’t contain criminal intent.

It doesn’t contain kindness.

It doesn’t contain courage.

It doesn’t contain ambition.

It doesn’t contain the contents of someone’s fucking soul.

It’s a biological characteristic.

That’s it.

Just like eye color.

And here’s another thing that people sometimes miss.

Even if you could demonstrate a statistical difference between two enormous populations—and that conversation would require considerably more nuance than a fucking meme—you still haven’t told me anything meaningful about the individual standing in front of you.

If I tell you that men are, on average, taller than women, that doesn’t mean every man is taller than every woman.

If I tell you one population has a particular statistical characteristic, that doesn’t give you permission to assign that characteristic to every individual member of that population.

That’s called stereotyping.

And we already understand this concept.

We understand it perfectly when it applies to almost everything else.

We don’t look at a random person and say:

“You’re from Arizona, therefore I know your personality.”

We don’t look at someone wearing a baseball cap and say:

“Ah. I have determined your entire moral character.”

We don’t meet a 6-foot-4 man and immediately conclude:

“Obviously, this man is good at basketball.”

Because that would be fucking stupid.

Yet somehow, when it comes to race, human beings have repeatedly decided that this is an acceptable shortcut for understanding other human beings.

And then we get offended when somebody points out that the shortcut is bullshit.

Racism is essentially the intellectual laziness of replacing a human being with a category.

Instead of learning who someone actually is, you decide you already know.

Instead of judging an individual by their behavior, you judge them by their ancestry.

Instead of asking, “What kind of person is this?” you ask, “What category does this person belong to?”

Congratulations.

You’ve replaced a human being with a filing system.

And what makes this even more absurd is that none of us chose the characteristics we’re supposedly being judged by.

Nobody walked into the delivery room and said:

“Excuse me, doctor. I’d like to order the melanin package, please.”

Nobody selected their parents.

Nobody selected their ancestry.

Nobody selected the geographic location of their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Nobody picked their genetic lottery numbers.

And yet we’re perfectly willing to construct elaborate hierarchies around things people never had the opportunity to choose.

That isn’t meritocracy.

That’s assigning people grades for an exam they weren’t allowed to study for and didn’t even know they were taking.

And if your response is, “Well, my group is better,” I have a very simple question:

Better at what?

And according to whom?

And based on what?

Because the moment you start answering those questions, you eventually discover that you’re not really talking about race anymore.

You’re talking about culture.

Economics.

History.

Geography.

Education.

Opportunity.

Family.

Environment.

Politics.

Individual behavior.

And suddenly we’ve arrived at the uncomfortable truth:

People are complicated.

Which is precisely why racism is so attractive to people who don’t want to deal with that complexity.

Racism gives you a shortcut.

It allows you to take billions of individual human beings and shove them into a handful of boxes.

Good box.

Bad box.

Smart box.

Dangerous box.

Deserving box.

Undeserving box.

It’s wonderfully convenient.

It’s also fucking stupid.

Because human beings are not categories.

They’re human beings.

There are brilliant people and idiots in every population.

There are saints and assholes in every population.

There are criminals and doctors, heroes and cowards, geniuses and morons, generous people and selfish people in every imaginable demographic.

The distribution of human character does not conveniently stop at the boundaries of someone’s skin color.

And perhaps that’s the part that makes my head hurt the most.

If racism were actually some brilliant system for identifying human worth, you might at least understand why someone would be tempted by it.

But it isn’t.

It is an extraordinarily primitive attempt to make an impossibly complicated world easier to understand.

And the price of that simplicity is treating actual human beings as abstractions.

So if you genuinely don’t understand why racism is a bad idea, try this:

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that your eye color determines your place in society.

Imagine being told you’re inferior because your eyes aren’t green.

Imagine watching someone with green eyes receive opportunities you never received.

Imagine being told that the statistical differences created by that system prove green-eyed people are naturally superior.

Imagine being judged before you speak.

Imagine being distrusted before you do anything.

Imagine someone deciding you’re inferior before they’ve learned your name.

Imagine your accomplishments being discounted because of what you look like.

Imagine your failures being treated as evidence against millions of people who share your ancestry.

Imagine being told that the circumstances of your birth somehow constitute evidence about the quality of your character.

Then imagine somebody finally looking at the whole thing and saying:

“Wait.

This is fucking ridiculous.

They’re just eyes.”

Exactly.

They’re just eyes.

And skin is just skin.

We’re the ones who decided otherwise.

And if you can understand the absurdity of inventing a hierarchy based on eye color, then congratulations.

You already understand racism.

Because the fundamental problem isn’t that somebody picked the wrong color.

The fundamental problem is believing that a person’s physical characteristics give you permission to decide what kind of human being they are.

Rarity isn’t morality.

Scarcity isn’t virtue.

Genetics isn’t a résumé.

And the circumstances of your birth are not evidence of your worth.

We’re all just human beings who happened to be born with different combinations of genetic lottery numbers.

The truly insane part isn’t that we are different.

The truly insane part is that we looked at those differences and decided some people deserved to be treated as less human because of them.

That’s the part that should make all of our heads fucking hurt.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Great Mask Rebellion

I’ve been listening to campaign ads lately, and apparently we have reached a point in American politics where being against masks is considered a qualification for public office.

I’m sorry, but as someone who spent years working in medical and hospital environments, I genuinely do not understand this one.

Of all the hills available to die on in American politics—taxes, healthcare, infrastructure, education, immigration, the economy, climate change, foreign policy, the national debt, or perhaps the small matter of keeping the government functioning—you picked masks?

You’re running for office and your big selling point is:

“I opposed masks.”

Congratulations?

Do you want a certificate?

Because here’s the thing that seems to have been lost somewhere between the campaign consultants and the Facebook memes: masks did not become a medical technology in March of 2020.

Hospitals were using them long before COVID existed.

Surgeons wear masks.

Dentists wear masks.

Nurses wear masks.

Doctors wear masks.

People working around infectious diseases wear masks.

People who are performing procedures where bodily fluids might be flying around wear masks.

And, remarkably, none of these people were doing it because the World Health Organization had secretly joined a global conspiracy to ruin your Fourth of July barbecue.

They were doing it because germs exist.

This is not exactly cutting-edge science.

So I would genuinely like to ask some of these candidates who are still proudly advertising their opposition to masks a very simple question:

Would you like your surgeon to wear one?

Because if your answer is yes, congratulations. You have just admitted that masks have a legitimate medical purpose.

Would you like your dentist to wear one while they are six inches from your face with a drill in your mouth?

Would you like the dental hygienist to wash their hands before sticking their fingers into your mouth?

Would you prefer the nurse drawing your blood to use a sterile needle?

Would you like the person inserting a catheter to understand the basic principles of infection control?

Would you like the medical staff handling an open wound to wash their hands?

Of course you would.

Nobody walks into a hospital and says, “Hey, before you operate on me, could everyone please remove their masks? I want to make sure we’re exercising our constitutional freedom from fabric.”

Because suddenly, when you’re the patient, infection control looks pretty damn reasonable.

And that’s what makes the political obsession with masks so strange.

There is a difference between debating the effectiveness, timing, enforcement, or appropriateness of a particular public-health policy and turning “I refused to wear a mask” into some sort of modern-day Medal of Honor.

You can argue about whether mandates were appropriate.

You can argue about whether particular restrictions went too far.

You can argue about whether governments communicated effectively.

Those are legitimate political and policy arguments.

But somehow we’ve turned basic infection-control equipment into a symbol of political oppression.

A piece of cloth became a culture-war battlefield.

And now, years later, politicians are still bragging about which side of the mask aisle they stood on as though they stormed the beaches of Normandy without a face covering.

I worked around medicine long enough to understand something very simple:

Healthcare workers don’t wear masks because they’re afraid of freedom.

They wear them because they understand that microscopic organisms don’t give a damn about your political ideology.

Viruses don’t vote Republican.

Bacteria don’t vote Democrat.

Influenza doesn’t check your voter registration before infecting your lungs.

And COVID certainly wasn’t sitting there thinking, “Oh hell, this guy voted for Trump. I better respect his personal liberty.”

That’s not how biology works.

And maybe that’s the bigger problem here.

We’ve become so accustomed to turning absolutely everything into a political identity that even basic medical precautions have become tribal symbols.

You don’t simply wear a mask anymore.

Apparently, you must declare what wearing a mask means about you as a human being.

Which is ridiculous.

Sometimes a mask is just a mask.

Sometimes washing your hands is just washing your hands.

Sometimes covering your mouth is simply a courtesy to the people standing next to you.

And sometimes the person who is about to stick a scalpel into your abdomen wearing a mask is actually a comforting thing.

Personally, I don’t want my surgeon making a political statement while operating on me.

I don’t need them standing over the operating table saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I refused to wear a mask during COVID, and I’m proud of it.”

No.

I would prefer:

“I’ve washed my hands, sterilized my equipment, put on my mask, and I’m ready to operate.”

Because there comes a point when political posturing collides with common sense, and common sense usually wins.

So to all the politicians still proudly advertising their anti-mask credentials:

You don’t have to convince me that you’re tough because you refused to wear a piece of medical equipment.

I’d actually be much more impressed if you could demonstrate that you understand why medical professionals use it in the first place.

Because if your entire political identity can be summarized as “Nobody was going to tell me to wear a mask,” I have to wonder:

What exactly are you planning to accomplish after you’ve finished being angry at the surgical mask?

America has some pretty serious problems.

The mask isn’t one of them.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Red Scare Called. It Wants Its Script Back.

Watching the Republican Party resurrect the McCarthy-era Red Scare is like watching a band that hasn’t had a hit since the 1950s insist that this next tour is going to change everything.

According to Vice President J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and plenty of conservative commentators, Democrats aren’t just Democrats anymore. We’re socialists. And socialism, as everyone knows from the Republican cinematic universe, inevitably leads to communism. Then come the bread lines, government seizure of your lawn furniture, and your third grader comes home quoting Karl Marx instead of learning cursive.

It’s all very dramatic.

There’s just one tiny flaw.

The things they claim socialism will destroy are the exact things they’ve been trying to dismantle for years.

Public schools?

Republicans have spent decades pushing vouchers, privatization, charter expansion, and gutting the Department of Education. They’ve insisted public schools are failing while trying to redirect public money elsewhere. At the same time, they want schools to reflect their religious and cultural values while claiming everyone else is indoctrinating children.

So Democrats are supposedly going to destroy public education…

…by funding public education?

That’s certainly one strategy.

Police?

Every election cycle we’re told Democrats want to eliminate law enforcement. Yet many of the same Republicans warning about that are eager to slash federal spending, oppose grants to local governments, and reduce funding for programs they don’t like.

Healthcare?

They’ve spent years trying to repeal or reduce government healthcare programs while insisting Democrats are somehow the threat to your healthcare.

Government services?

Infrastructure?

Scientific research?

Environmental protection?

Every budget seems to feature another proposal to shrink, privatize, or eliminate programs that millions of Americans rely on.

Then they turn around and warn that Democrats are going to take those very programs away.

It’s like listening to the arsonist lecture everyone about fire safety.

And can we please have a conversation about the word “socialism”?

Apparently everything Democrats support is socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialism.

School lunches? Socialism.

Libraries? Socialism.

Roads? Probably socialism.

At this rate, using a public restroom will require denouncing Che Guevara before you’re handed the key.

Meanwhile, I’d like to ask my proudly capitalist Republican friends one simple question.

What is insurance?

Seriously.

You’re required to buy auto insurance.

Many insist everyone should have health insurance.

Banks require homeowners insurance.

Businesses carry liability insurance.

Everyone pays into a giant pool of money.

Most people won’t use all of it.

Some people will need a lot of it.

The money from everyone helps cover the losses of the few.

Congratulations.

You’ve just described socialism.

The only difference is that instead of society benefiting, a corporation takes a profit off the top.

It’s socialism with shareholders.

Or, as I like to call it, for-profit socialism.

Somehow that’s perfectly acceptable.

Pooling risk so your neighbors don’t go bankrupt after a tornado? That’s apparently the free market.

Pooling tax dollars so every kid gets a decent education? Suddenly we’re one step away from the Soviet Union.

Make it make sense.

The irony is that conservatives already embrace collective responsibility whenever it benefits them.

They just object when the collection isn’t generating dividends for a corporation.

We socialize risk all the time.

Insurance.

The military.

Police.

Fire departments.

Social Security.

Medicare.

Public roads.

Air traffic control.

These are all systems built on the idea that everyone contributes because everyone benefits from living in a functioning society.

That’s not communism.

That’s called civilization.

The modern Republican strategy seems to rely on Americans having the political memory of a goldfish.

“We have to stop the socialists before they destroy public education!”

“…also we’d like to eliminate the Department of Education.”

“We have to stop them before they destroy government!”

“…government is the problem.”

“We have to stop them before they eliminate these public programs!”

“…which we’ve been trying to cut for the last thirty years.”

It’s difficult to fear someone stealing your house when the person warning you is already loading your furniture into their truck.

This isn’t really about socialism.

It’s certainly not about communism.

It’s about finding a convenient boogeyman so no one has to discuss policy. Calling someone a socialist is easier than explaining why schools need less funding. Calling someone a communist is easier than defending cuts to healthcare or scientific research.

It’s political Mad Libs.

Insert “socialist” wherever an actual argument should be.

For a movement that constantly warns us not to rewrite history, they’re awfully fond of recycling it.

The Cold War ended over three decades ago.

The Soviet Union no longer exists.

Joseph McCarthy is long gone.

Yet here we are, dusting off the same tired script and pretending that every Democrat is secretly plotting a Marxist revolution through school board meetings, wind turbines, and free school lunches.

The costumes have changed.

The actors have changed.

But the script?

The script still reads like it’s 1954.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Big Tent Isn’t Supposed to Be an Echo Chamber

One of the more fascinating spectacles in modern politics is watching people inside the Democratic Party panic every time someone to the left of center wins a primary.

“A Democratic Socialist won!”

“And?”

If they’re a Democrat who won a Democratic primary, isn’t that exactly how a political party is supposed to work?

For years we’ve proudly described ourselves as the “big tent” party. That’s supposed to mean something. It means environmentalists and labor unions. It means suburban moderates and urban progressives. It means teachers, engineers, veterans, entrepreneurs, scientists, and yes—even Democratic Socialists. If the tent is only big until someone we disagree with walks inside, then maybe it wasn’t much of a tent to begin with.

What strikes me as odd is that some Democrats seem more terrified of debating someone who agrees with them 80 percent of the time than they are of a Republican who agrees with them almost none of the time.

Somewhere along the way, disagreement became betrayal.

It didn’t used to be that way.

There was a time—not all that long ago—when liberals, moderates, and conservatives argued like cats and dogs during the day and then sat down together because governing actually required solving problems. Democrats and Republicans negotiated budgets. They hammered out infrastructure bills. They compromised on tax reform. Nobody walked away thrilled, but the country generally moved forward.

Today that model barely exists.

One party has increasingly decided that compromise itself is weakness. Legislation becomes secondary to messaging. Outrage polls better than governance. If your political opponent proposes breathing oxygen, your first instinct is to ask what sinister agenda oxygen must have.

So where does that leave the people who actually want government to function?

It leaves Democrats talking to Democrats.

Frankly, that may not be the worst thing.

If Republicans have largely removed themselves from serious governing negotiations, then the coalition-building has to happen somewhere. Why not inside the Democratic Party itself?

Let the moderates argue for fiscal restraint.

Let progressives argue for bigger investments.

Let Democratic Socialists push ideas that make centrists uncomfortable.

Let centrists remind progressives that elections are won in swing districts as well as deep-blue cities.

That’s not dysfunction.

That’s democracy.

The irony is that conservatives have spent decades accusing Democrats of wanting everyone to think alike. Yet the Democratic coalition is probably the most ideologically diverse major political party America has seen in generations.

We’re arguing because we’re actually different.

Some members think universal healthcare should look one way. Others think it should evolve more gradually.

Some want aggressive climate legislation immediately. Others worry about implementation and political feasibility.

Some emphasize economic redistribution. Others focus on expanding opportunity.

These aren’t signs of a collapsing party.

They’re signs of a living one.

The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate those differences. The goal should be to channel them into better policy.

The Democratic Socialist might have an ambitious vision.

The moderate might know how to get fifty-one votes.

Neither succeeds without the other.

That’s the part people seem to forget.

Politics has become obsessed with ideological purity, as if the perfect candidate exists somewhere in a laboratory waiting to be cloned. In reality, every coalition requires compromise. Every governing majority is built from people who don’t agree on everything.

The Democratic Party shouldn’t fear that reality.

It should embrace it.

Because if we’re truly the big tent party, then the tent has to be big enough for people who occasionally make us uncomfortable.

Healthy disagreement is not a bug in democracy.

It’s the operating system.

I’d much rather watch Democrats argue over the best way to expand healthcare, protect voting rights, address climate change, or strengthen the economy than watch Congress grind to a halt because one side has decided that solving problems is less important than scoring points on cable news.

Bring the democratic socialists.

Bring the moderates.

Bring everyone willing to govern in good faith.

Argue passionately.

Disagree honestly.

Then do the thing Americans elected you to do in the first place.

Solve the damn problems.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Great American Brain Drain

For generations, the United States didn’t have to convince the smartest people in the world to come here. They practically begged.

If you were a brilliant engineer from India, a physicist from Germany, a medical researcher from South Korea, or a graduate student from Brazil, America was the destination. This was where the money was. This was where the laboratories were. This was where governments invested in the future instead of pretending the future was some communist conspiracy.

We built the internet. We landed on the Moon. We decoded DNA. We pioneered organ transplants, microprocessors, GPS, advanced aerospace, and enough Nobel Prize-winning research to make the rest of the world collectively sigh and mutter, “Well…of course it happened in America.”

Why?

Because we believed science was an investment.

Today?

Apparently we’ve decided science is just another political party.

We’ve declared war on universities. We’ve declared war on renewable energy. We’ve declared war on climate science. We’ve declared war on vaccines. We’ve declared war on public health. Half the country now hears the word “research” and immediately assumes someone is trying to steal their gas stove.

Nothing screams “world leader” quite like being terrified of windmills.

Meanwhile, Congress seems determined to make sure every scientist watching C-SPAN is updating their résumé.

Imagine you’re a brilliant twenty-five-year-old virologist finishing your doctorate. You have job offers from Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the United States.

In one country you’ll be funded.

In another you’ll be celebrated.

In another you’ll have access to cutting-edge facilities.

And in America, there’s a decent chance you’ll spend the next decade getting subpoenaed by politicians who think YouTube comments count as peer review.

What a recruiting slogan.

Then there’s Dr. Anthony Fauci. Whether you agreed with every recommendation he made during COVID or not, the man devoted decades of his life to infectious disease. Long before COVID, he played a central role in advancing research that transformed HIV from what was almost certainly a death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease for millions of people.

That’s a career most scientists would dream of.

Yet here he is, years after the pandemic, still being dragged before congressional committees as though he personally invented viruses in his garage between episodes of Jeopardy!

The irony is almost painful.

COVID was caused by a novel virus.

And since “novel” has apparently become another dirty word, here’s a refresher from high school biology: novel means new.

New virus.

New disease.

New information.

Which means scientists do what scientists have always done.

They observe.

They develop hypotheses.

They test those hypotheses.

They collect more data.

Then—and this is apparently the scandal—they change their conclusions when better evidence becomes available.

That’s not incompetence.

That’s literally the scientific method.

If your doctor treated you today using only the medical knowledge available in 1957, you’d sue them before you even got home.

Yet somehow we’ve convinced millions of Americans that changing recommendations in response to new evidence is proof that scientists were lying all along.

No.

It’s proof they were doing science.

Masks weren’t magic. Vaccines weren’t perfect. Recommendations evolved because the evidence evolved.

Reality isn’t a campaign slogan. It doesn’t care what cable news says.

What worries me isn’t Anthony Fauci.

He’ll be remembered by history far more kindly than many of the people yelling at him.

What worries me is the message we’re sending to every young scientist watching.

Come to America.

Where your funding might disappear because an election changed.

Where decades of research can be canceled because it contains words politicians don’t like.

Where your expertise will lose an argument to a podcast host with a webcam.

Where Congress treats Nobel-level researchers like hostile witnesses but welcomes corporate lobbyists with open arms.

That’s not exactly the sales pitch that built Silicon Valley.

It’s certainly not the sales pitch that built the NIH, the CDC, NASA, or the national laboratories.

There was a time when the brightest minds wanted government service because it meant serving humanity.

The CDC existed to stop outbreaks.

The NIH existed to cure disease.

NASA existed to push humanity forward.

Civil servants weren’t trying to become celebrities. They weren’t trying to maximize shareholder value. They were trying to solve problems that affected millions of people they would never meet.

Imagine that—a career built around helping strangers.

How quaint.

Instead, we’ve entered an era where expertise itself is viewed with suspicion.

Scientists are “elitists.”

Professors are “indoctrinators.”

Researchers are “activists.”

Meanwhile, the loudest voices often belong to people who think spending twenty minutes on social media somehow makes them equivalent to someone who spent twenty years studying immunology.

It’s hard to compete with that level of confidence.

The tragedy isn’t that America will stop producing brilliant scientists.

We always will.

The tragedy is that they may decide to build the next breakthrough somewhere else.

Science doesn’t require an American passport.

Innovation doesn’t owe allegiance to a flag.

Talent goes where it’s welcomed.

Investment goes where it’s valued.

Discovery goes where curiosity isn’t treated like a political liability.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha may inherit an America that still insists it’s the greatest nation on Earth while quietly importing fewer great ideas because we’ve made it abundantly clear that evidence is optional and expertise is negotiable.

We used to compete to attract the smartest people in the world.

Now we’re competing to see who can make them leave first.

That’s not making America great.

That’s making America irrelevant.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

 It’s funny how many expressions we use every day without ever stopping to ask what they actually mean.

There are some phrases that have become so ingrained in our language that nobody ever stops to ask the obvious question.

What in the hell does that even mean?

Take this month. Every August you’ll hear somebody say, “Ah… the dog days of summer.”

Really? According to who? Was there a committee of Labradors that got together and decided August belonged to them?

As a kid I pictured exhausted dogs lying under porches trying to survive the heat. It seemed reasonable enough. Dogs pant. August is hot. Mystery solved.

Turns out, that’s not it at all.

The phrase actually goes back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks and Romans. They noticed that the star Sirius—appropriately nicknamed the Dog Star—rose in the sky during the hottest part of the summer. They believed its appearance somehow contributed to the unbearable heat. Whether it actually did is beside the point. The name stuck.

Thousands of years later we’re still talking about the “dog days” even though most of us have absolutely no clue that a star is involved.

Language is weird like that.

It’s full of verbal fossils.

They’re little pieces of history we carry around every day without realizing we’re hauling around centuries of forgotten context.

Why do we “hang up” a phone that hasn’t had a hook in decades?

Why do we “roll” the window down in a car when there’s nothing left to roll?

Why do we “dial” a number on a screen with no dial?

Why do we save computer files with an icon shaped like a floppy disk that an entire generation has never actually held in their hands?

We keep using the words long after the original objects disappear.

The words survive.

The meanings quietly evolve.

Sometimes I wonder how many sayings I repeat simply because everyone else repeats them. I understand what they mean in conversation, but if someone stopped me and asked where they came from, I’d probably shrug and make something up.

It’s a reminder that language isn’t nearly as logical as we’d like to believe. It’s more like a giant attic. Every generation tosses another box up there. Some boxes get opened often. Others collect dust until someone stumbles across them and says, “Wait… why do we say that?”

I kind of like that.

Every odd expression is a breadcrumb left behind by people who lived centuries before us. Sometimes it’s astronomy. Sometimes it’s sailing. Sometimes it’s farming. Sometimes it’s technology that’s been obsolete longer than some of us have been alive.

We inherit all of it.

So now when someone says we’re in the dog days of summer, I’ll nod knowingly, fully aware they’re talking about an ancient star named Sirius and not a bunch of overheated golden retrievers.

Although, to be fair, if you’ve ever been outside in August, those golden retrievers probably have the right idea.