Reflections From the Road
These essays are also available in video form on my YouTube channel.
Travel, Perception, and the Size of the World
Most people know the world indirectly. Their impressions of other societies arrive through headlines, political arguments, films, and the stories people repeat about places they have never seen. Over time, those impressions begin to feel like knowledge. The picture becomes familiar enough that it no longer feels provisional.
Equal Protection and the Problem of Delayed Justice
The Fourteenth Amendment arose not from theory, but from failure. It came from the recognition that a nation could abolish slavery yet still maintain a power structure so unbalanced that freedom existed primarily as mere rhetoric.
The Weight of Power
They left before dawn, walking east with what they could carry. The road out of their village was lined with others doing the same. Old men pushed carts, women balanced bundles on their heads, and children gripped sleeves so they would not get lost. Smoke rose behind them. Somewhere back there, soldiers were moving from house to house. The sound was distant but steady, the end of something familiar and the beginning of something nameless. They did not call it the Nakba then, not yet. They just knew they could not go home.
The Republic We Forgot
Imagine a country where the government decides what your pastor can say. Where your neighbor’s opinion becomes law. Where certain books disappear because they make someone uncomfortable. You might call that tyranny. And you’d be right.