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Time to Grow Out of 'Playing' War
By saying the quiet part out loud, Trump is revealing that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature.
Mar 14, 2026
Boys will be boys. Just ask the president.
At a gathering of Republicans a few days ago, Donald Trump talked nonchalantly about the recent sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate by the US Navy—in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf. A total of 104 crew members were killed and 32 more were injured.
The president proceeded to make this more than merely another brutal, pointless act of war. He turned it into a glaring—shocking—revelation of truth... about the American-Israeli war on Iran and, quite possibly about all wars: about war itself. He was upset at first, he told the crowd, that the Navy sank the frigate rather than capturing it. But when he expressed this to the military officials, one of them responded, “It’s more fun to sink them.”
And the crowd laughed. Uh... are we “playing” war or waging it, with that trillion-dollar annual military budget America has? No doubt we’re doing both, but normally the “fun” part of war—the dehumanization of the enemy, the abstraction of people’s deaths (including those of children)—is airbrushed from public discussion by politically correct strategic and political blather. But this is Trump, spouting the quiet part out loud—in the process, causing the global infrastructure of nation-states, borders, and militarism to tremble. Could it be that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature?
A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness.
In contrast, I quote from a recent essay written by my friend Laura Hassler, founder and director of Musicians Without Borders:
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.
She calls this worldwide awakening “Radical Empathy,” a term in widespread use, which means a deeply rooted sense of connection among people, well beyond merely sympathy and shared feelings. We are one planet, one people, and we will survive together or not at all.
“Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent,” she continues. “We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed...
“And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for radical empathy into a force for good.”
In other words, Radical Empathy isn’t simply emotional. You can say it’s spiritual, but it’s also political. It’s a movement: ever changing, ever manifesting in the moment, ever addressing conflict by reaching for connection and understanding. Yes, global nationalism still maintains the power to wage war. And war is everywhere these days. As Jeffrey Sachs noted in a recent interview, “World War III is here...” from Ukraine and Gaza and Iran to Asia to the Western Hemisphere. And the fighting across the world is linked.
But at the same time the world is changing. A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness. Finding understanding with your enemy—connecting with “the other”—can be incredibly difficult, especially in the midst of conflict, but Radical Empathy is making it a reality across the planet.
Laura Hassler’s organization, Musicians Without Borders, exemplifies this movement. The organization was founded in 1999, in Alkamaar, a city in the Netherlands. Laura, who was a choir director and organized music events, had put together a concert for the town’s annual honoring of the dead of World War II.
But as I wrote in a column several years ago:
The bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news, and Laura couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.
She decided, "We’ll perform music from the people suffering from war now—folk songs from Eastern Europe," she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence... and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.
One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: "This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!”
And they went to Kosovo. Gradually, Musicians Without Borders became global, working with local people in war-torn regions all over the world—people on both sides of the divide—to create music that transcends the war of the moment. The organization currently has long-term projects in the Balkans, West Asia, Eastern Africa, and Europe.
This is Radical Empathy, or at least one example of it—our complex force of hope even as the world’s leaders continue bleeding away the planet’s resources in order to play war. Radical Empathy transcends war. It’s who we are—when we find ourselves.
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An Invitation to Dance: How Bad Bunny Builds a Movement
Most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that.
Feb 27, 2026
When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, critics predicted backlash. He’d be too Spanish. Too political. Not “American” enough. The assumption was that in a country this polarized, cultural borders were fixed—and he stood on the wrong side of them.
Instead, one of the largest audiences in National Football League history tuned in. Streams surged. Album sales climbed. Millions of viewers who didn’t understand every lyric found themselves moving anyway.
Maybe nothing flipped overnight. Maybe hardened partisans didn’t suddenly renounce their politics. What happened was subtler—and more powerful. The borders didn’t collapse. They became more permeable. How did Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio pull that off?
His Music Is a Joyful Invitation, Not a Grievance
Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico has endured over 400 years of exploitation. And yet his music is uplifting; his community feels resilient, not defeated. Political messaging, especially among progressives, often starts with what communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio describes as, “Boy, have I got a problem for you.” Bad Bunny flips the sequence. He invites us to dance first. To celebrate music and food and love and family. It feels like the greatest party on Earth.
Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization.
When I told my husband to check out Debi Tirar Más Photos, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Album of the Year (the first Spanish language winner ever), he was reluctant. The next day, though, the album was blasting through the house. The music is so accessible because there’s something for everyone. Even within a single song, he moves across genres and generations. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was drawn to the salsa rhythms of “Baile Inolvidable.” But then the dembow pulse of “Tití Me Preguntó” had me moving too—despite years of thinking that I didn’t like reggaeton because it all sounded the same. Bad Bunny’s music loosened assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying.
He Uses Curiosity as a Teacher
Viewers who tuned in for the spectacle of the halftime show noticed people dressed as sugar cane plants, workers climbing electrical poles, empty white plastic chairs scattered across the stage. What did it mean? I know I wasn't the only one burning a hole on the internet that evening. People don’t resist information they discover themselves, especially if they’re being entertained.
Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization: the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy; environmental catastrophes; and gentrification driven by tax breaks for wealthy developers. The result: a diaspora in which 2 out of 3 Puerto Ricans now live off the island.
That’s not persuasion through argument. It’s softening through exposure.
His Call to Connect Counters the Us-Versus-Them Narrative Used to Divide Us
Bad Bunny’s music is more than about Puerto Rico. It’s about countering the fear and anger-mongering being used to pit us against each other. The deliberate cultivation of suspicion that someone else is taking what’s yours—when the real plundering is happening from the top.
His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.
Instead, Bad Bunny’s jumbotron message called on people to view each other through a loving lens instead of a hateful one. Former President Barack Obama praised the performance for conveying a simple message: There is room for everyone here. Contrast that to Turning Point’s All-American Halftime Show, the alternative created for those who preferred a narrower definition of who is an American.
Some observers have compared Bad Bunny to John Lennon who also insisted that love could be politically disruptive. Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t about changing policy; it was a call to picture the world differently. That imaginative shift is what unsettles power. Fear-based politics relies on narrowing who counts, on who gets to define the nation. Benito is all about expansion.
He Doesn’t Shrink to Widen His Audience
The NFL executives may have worried that Americans wouldn’t understand Bad Bunny if he didn’t sing in English, but he refused to change himself to accommodate a fractured country. He made the audience stretch instead. (Duolingo reported a 35% surge in Spanish learners following his show.) Understanding doesn’t always begin with translation. It can begin with proximity.
The anger directed at Bad Bunny, writes journalist Jim Heath, is about losing control over identity. “Latino culture is framed as divisive,” writes Heath, “only because its permanence challenges an older mythology about who America is.”
Changing Heart and Minds
We often assume persuasion begins with argument—that we must win debates before we can win anyone over. But most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that. His work is an invitation: to learn about his culture, to experience joy together, to recognize how much we share. Not to contort ourselves to fit in, but to widen the circle without losing who we are. And before long, we’re dancing beside people we were warned to fear.
His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.
That’s how movements grow.
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Reclaiming a Disposable Planet
Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. But what if you're missing something wondrous?
Feb 21, 2026
Hey, want to read a poem with me? Warning: It opens several disturbing doors, the least disturbing of which is the “crazy old coot” part, i.e., me. Once you start getting lost in the paradoxes of life, you need to watch out. They could start coming after you.
But more disturbing is the paradox itself, which is both environmental and spiritual. And it’s right there on my front lawn. The life I’ve been given—the lives we’ve been given—are partially disposable, apparently. Mostly I took this for granted, but suddenly one summer afternoon, as I was pushing my hand mower up and down the lawn, something shifted in me. I started feeling... reverence for garbage? Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. Doubting this could be a tad problematic.
The poem is called “Buddha’s Lawn.” I wrote it a decade ago. Back when I still had a lawn to mow.
I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?
Well, sorry (I apologize to myself.) I can’t help it. Once the door opens and a ray of awareness shines in, burst balloons, tossed straws, plastic grocery bags, discarded pop bottles, etc., etc., aren’t what they used to be. There’s an inner awareness that won’t go away. You might call it “litteracy”—an awareness of what happens next.
For instance, according to the Center for Biological Diversity: “In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of more plastic end up in the world’s oceans. Studies estimate there are now 15-51 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans—from the equator to the poles, from Arctic ice sheets to the sea floor. Not one square mile of surface ocean anywhere on Earth is free of plastic pollution...”
The analysis goes on:
Thousands of animals, from small finches to blue whales, die grisly deaths from eating and getting caught in plastic...
Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. It’s estimated that 60% of all seabird species have eaten pieces of plastic, with that number predicted to increase to 99% by 2050. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs full of plastic, reflecting how the amount of garbage in our oceans has rapidly increased in the past 40 years...
Dead whales have been found with bellies full of plastic.
I can’t dismiss this with a shrug... just toss the plastic in the trash and go on mowing my lawn, being normal. I start to stare with curiosity and wonderment at the litter. And this is where the old coot starts looking, or at least feeling, crazy, at least until his sense of awareness expands: “The word ‘garbage’ means a resource nobody is smart enough to use yet.”
Hmmm. Really? I quoted these words in a column I wrote in 2013. Called (I kid you not) “Reverence for Garbage,” it talks abouts the documentary Landfill Harmonic, about a Paraguayan village built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash was the residents’ primary means of survival. But they did something else as well. Inspired by a local musician, the residents also started making musical instruments out of the trash: “violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”
Real instruments were beyond expensive, far more costly than anyone there could afford. But children in the village learned to play the instruments hand-crafted from the landfill trash. And what was worthless became heavenly.
Is there a larger cultural takeaway pulsating in this story? Could it be that we value too little of our own planet? I wonder if maybe.. maybe... we should begin crumpling up our certainties and tossing them in the trash.
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