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Opinion
A Military Flyover Country Turns 250
As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and "freedom," also serve another grim reminder.
Jul 06, 2026
As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250 “Celebrations" over the holiday weekend, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th.
Military flyovers come at a devastating cost—economically, psychologically, and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s American State Fair closed after people were baptizing themselves in the religious tent to prevent heat stroke. But flyovers are not new and have been used as a propaganda tool for military recruitment during NFL games and summer festivals. The militarization has been so normalized for so long.
This past weekend, thousands of people cheered on the flyovers, but many did not. The sounds of war shook windows, terrified children, animals, and those suffering from PTSD. Washington DC is made up of 700,000 people without statehood, leaving it little power to push back at the military occupation of the city, let alone the military playground.
In passing, I overheard folks sneering “Here’s where all our money goes,” and another asking “Is this what Iran sounds like right now?” These flyovers, an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a “show”. The bombs did not drop on the occupied city of Washington, D.C., as they do from some of the same jets that fly over places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran. My children know they can cover their ears, cuddle in close to me, and wait it out. The planes will pass, the ground will stop trembling, and we can return to their bedtime routines. But for children just like them in my home country of Iran, for their families, for our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Lebanon, and so many other places devastated by Western imperialism, those same sounds mean something entirely different. They mean bombs falling on schools, neighborhoods erased in seconds, families torn apart before they can say goodbye. They also cuddle in close to their loved ones, but they do so knowing it may be the last time.
As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and "freedom," also serve another grim reminder. We, in the diaspora, are forced to fund our own oppression twice over: first with the bombs dropping on our families abroad, then with that same taxpayer money reverberating back to our doorsteps here. Hovering over our neighborhoods and our children's heads, and terrorizing our communities instead of feeding, healing, and sustaining them. We must not allow ourselves to grow desensitized to the reality of what our tax dollars could be funding instead of the spread of surveillance, destruction, and devastation. And we must make it clear that we will never mistake the roar of engines overhead for the promise of peace, whether that is abroad or here.
Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.
The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?
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This President From Hell's Destruction Will Last a Very Long Time
The worst that’s happening right now is nothing compared to what could happen in the years to come.
Jul 06, 2026
I know, I know. Recently, Donald Trump has been obsessed with water, at least the algae-green water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that he wants to be a beautiful, pristine blue. But consider that an irony indeed, since when it comes to the planet he now oversees, water is going to be a problem and a half, algae or not.
Phew, in fact, I’m already sweating and I’ve just been reading about the heat in Europe right now, a region which has been warming twice as fast as the global average for quite a while. And mind you, I’m thousands of miles away (although still in a distinctly hot New York City about to soon get hotter still)!
If it were me, the headline during Trump’s recent algal week in the news wouldn’t have been in question anywhere on this planet (of ours?). I’m thinking, of course, about the recent days when the mid-June temperature in Paris, France, hit a wild record of nearly 115 (yes, you read that right!) degrees Fahrenheit and it was in the 106-113 degree range across the European continent. From England to Switzerland and Spain, temperature records of a remarkable sort were being set and then set again (and again!).
No one had ever seen anything quite like it. In the third week of June, it was so hot, in fact, that across Europe at least 40 people drowned just trying to stay wet and cool and four toddlers died trapped in overheated cars. And yet, crisis as it might have been, think of it as just the beginning on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. With at least two and a half more years to go of Donald J. Trump, a fossil-fuel maniac of the first order who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” you can count on this planet becoming ever hotter ever sooner. And count on another thing as well: in the coming years, today’s weather and temperature headlines, however disturbing they might seem right now, are likely to prove all too mild.
In short, we humans—Trump in his wildly pro-fossil fuel views and acts being just the most obviously mad of our leaders—are all too literally hard at work heating this planet of “ours” toward the boiling point. Of course, no one should be surprised that this American president has proven to be an arsonist first class, a fossil-fuelized maniac of the first order. (Or do I mean second class and second order, since this is indeed his second time around?)
Once upon a time, in another age, Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency would have been just a sign of the descent of a great imperial power. But on this planet of ours at this very moment, he represents so much more than that with his bizarre urge to further fossilize-fuelize our world in every way imaginable. Think of him, in fact, as the eerie personification of the decline not just of the United States, but potentially of everything. Yes, the works!
And keep in mind that, on this ever-changing planet of ours, the keys to imperial power no longer lie in war, as Trump and crew made all too clear recently in Iran, and Vladimir Putin has made even more strikingly clear in his never-ending war with Ukraine, the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. And, of course, it continues to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere (just as Israel recently did in Gaza and Lebanon). It’s estimated that the first four years of that conflict have indeed already put 311 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
On Planet Earth today, it’s not complicated. No matter who (if anyone) wins any war, everyone loses. Yes, every last one of us from the almost 82-year-old me to—especially—my grandchildren who, barring a genuine surprise, will inherit what could only be thought of as the planet from—yes!—hell.
And that’s why, for the first time in human history, taking up the keys to global imperial power should no longer mean becoming the greatest military powerhouse around, something that—to give its leaders credit—China has grasped in a significant way. Now, don’t get me wrong, China is indeed arming itself in a traditional (if I can even use that word) fashion, including with the nuclear weapons that are the fastest way we humans have discovered to do ourselves in on this planet. But its leaders have also grasped that, as the heat rises ever more radically, the need for green power will only grow in an astounding fashion.
And so, in its imperial rise on this planet, and despite the way it, too, continues to burn coal, oil, and natural gas in a staggering fashion, it’s become the Earth’s great green power. It’s now selling the equipment to produce solar and wind power in a distinctly record fashion globally. As the Guardian reports, “the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth” in 2025 and “clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies.”
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been trying to ensure that, in our future, the United States will indeed be a lost country on this planet. (Fortunately, he’s been unable to stop the remarkable growth and roll-out of green energy here, too.)
In the meantime, all too sadly, the casualties are rising. And make no mistake, this is indeed war (even if of a different kind than anything we’ve been used to). Under the circumstances, don’t you think it strange indeed that Americans would have elected Donald Trump a second time to be our arsonist-in-chief?
And here’s the thing all of us need to try to grasp: the worst that’s happening right now is nothing compared to what could happen in the years to come. And mind you, nothing makes me sadder than imagining the world my grandchildren may find themselves in when they grow up.
Someday, Donald J. Trump will undoubtedly be remembered as the president from—yes, it’s an all too appropriate and accurate word—hell. He will have been our arsonist-in-chief on a planet that, all too sadly, as in Europe recently and despite everything now being done, could be going to hell in a handbasket.
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Fascist Trump Plays the Communist Card
Of course advocating for core progressive issues like universal healthcare is not being a commie, but the president is throwing the commie label at the wall to if it sticks.
Jul 06, 2026
Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”
He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.
So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?
He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.
He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
Oh, please.
For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).
But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.
So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.
Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.
It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”
McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”
Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”
The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.
It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.
On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.
As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.
McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.
At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.
During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.
After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.
So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.
The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.
New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.
Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).
I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.
So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.
To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.
Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.
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God No Longer Blesses War: Ask the Children
What if I were under the rubble right now? What if I had I just learned that my daughter is 12 years old again and the girls’ school she attended in Iran—in Minab—had just been bombed by an American plane?
Jul 06, 2026
Writing a column is like sitting atop a large hill, looking down lovingly—and angrily—at the surrounding world, embracing it in a moral perspective and sharing your analysis of what you see. Primarily, this means telling people what’s wrong.
Today, as I climbed up the hill—this is called research—something felt different, troubling. Where I used to feel enthusiasm, I felt hollow: bereft of self-confidence and certainty. I’ve been writing a weekly column for nearly half of my life, first at a local paper in Chicago for 10 years, then the current column, syndicated until recently by the Chicago Tribune, for the last 27 years. What’s going on here?
I was no longer atop that hill. Suddenly I had nothing to say. The doubt I was feeling—that I had anything relevant and valuable to add to our collective grasp of the world—overwhelmed me.
I had decided to write about what I almost always write about... war. Both current and eternal. Indeed, I had begun scrolling the internet, looking for provocative points of view. I googled the words “terrorism vs. waging war,” seeking to learn what I already knew: that the “official” world has declared a distinction between the two terms as definite as the distinction between “evil” and “good.”
Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough.
My first pop-up response was an AI Overview: “Terrorism and waging war differ fundamentally in their targets, legal frameworks, and combatants. Terrorism targets civilians to induce fear for political or ideological goals. Waging war is typically an armed conflict between states or organized groups, where lawful combatants target military objectives.”
Of course, of course. Terrorists represent evil, plain and simple. They kill real people, always for selfish reasons. But war is official. It’s state-sponsored and legal. It’s registered with God, for God’s sake. And while there’s always an evil side—the enemy—the winners, the good guys, are simply doing what they must. Civilization couldn’t have evolved without it. And that’s how we organize history: from one war to the next. This is the official understanding, which we’re spoon-fed as we grow up.
I see beyond this official certainty and have devoted my life to dismantling it. But the AI Overview explanation, seemingly such an easy target for my ruthless analysis, had an unexpected effect. I felt stabbed with a sense of depression so sharp I could hardly move, let alone write. All I could do was go back to bed, cover my head with my pillow, I wanted to hide.
But the emotional pain didn’t stop. It continued piercing me. I got back up. I saw no relief. I was terrified that old age had set in. Oh my God, am I too old to write anymore (a month and a half away from age 80)? I was ready to give up, blow the column off... spend the rest of the day secretly crying.
Instead, I started writing—cluelessly. I had no idea where my words might go. I was no longer atop a hill. I didn’t know where I was. But an awareness started clutching me. What if I were under the rubble right now? What if I had I just learned that my daughter is 12 years old again and the girls’ school she attended in Iran—in Minab—had just been bombed by an American plane?
A hole had suddenly opened in my life. No, those imaginings aren’t real—not for me—but they are for some of us. Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough. And beyond the realization is simply a dark emptiness. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t even cry.
All I can do, right now, is reach deeper into my soul, to bless every human I encounter, and to publicly share the largest cry I can make for change. The cry tears loose from a poem I wrote a decade ago, which I also shared in a column I sent out last December. It’s called “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side:”
I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.
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