07/03/26

Good morning! It’s Friday, July 3rd.

National Independent Beer Run Day

Don’t mind if I do!

And now, the news.

Special Episode – Happy Birthday America, Sorry Your Party Sucks

-via Home of the Heroes, Armed car stops missile, AMA Journal of Ethics, NPR,

This episode is coming out on July 3rd – my Grandpa’s birthday. He would have been 99 this year. 

I don’t mean to brag, but I won the lottery when it comes to grandparents. 

Also, numbers-wise too. Because, as my entire personality would suggest, yes, I am a child of divorce. 

Three of my grandfathers served in this country’s military. 

My Grandpa, the one whose birthday is today, served in World War II by lying about his age. He said he was older than he was.

Then he served in the Korean War. He was part of the Frozen Chosen, the name given to the 1st Marine Division that spent 17 days in the frigid cold of a North Korean winter, surrounded by about 120,000 Chinese troops in temperatures so cold that their weapons were literally frozen. Rendering the guns as useful as mallets, and batteries for their jeeps and radios even less useless as temperatures dipped as low as −30°F and even −54°F.

When he came home, he served as a recruiter during the Vietnam War but, after watching boys he recruited to war come home in flag-covered coffins, he volunteered to return to a deployable, full-time operational role. 

He volunteered, during Vietnam, to return to active duty. Because he couldn’t send boys overseas to die while he stayed home. We never talked about how he felt about the war. I don’t know that he would have told me. I don’t think his decision was about the war, but about the lives.

And in the middle of all of that, he was also a husband and a father.

He then married my grandma, an immigrant who couldn’t have been a prouder American if she tried. She immigrated here to Los Angeles as a baby, decades before I would move here. By coincidence, but also - I am nothing if I’m not my grandmother’s granddaughter.

(I can already hear my mom right now wishing she could interrupt this prerecorded episode to note that she, too, lived in LA on her own. Long after her mom did, and long and long before I got here. Love of this city is hereditary, I guess?)

My grandma was very proud of my grandpa’s service. As well as her own. Being the spouse of an active servicemember is a service unto itself. 

They were both very proud to have served this country in the ways that they did. 

I am very proud of them for their service.

After my parents got divorced, the day-to-day raising of the Kim was done by my mom. As you can imagine, this personality as a teen? It was a lot. Luckily, her best friend stepped up. 

The thing about my entire personality suggesting that I’m a child of divorce was a joke. It really all comes from being raised by my mom and Carmen. 

Carmen who, and I didn’t even know this until years after she died, was one of roughly 100 volunteers that went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to register Black voters with a group called The Medical Committee for Human Rights. A group that was created to help administer medical aid during the Freedom Summer.

She spent the summer of 1964 registering voters and providing medical care for protestors who were beaten.

Carmen, who told me, nineteen years ago, in one of our last conversations, to just do something. Do something that matters.

It can’t be easy to be the parent of a kid who just calls you up at work one day and says, “I got into a film school you didn’t know I applied to, can I go?” (By the way – it was a for-profit school. I got the degree, but the school did eventually get shut down.) A kid that says, “I went to LA with Noelle and found a cool apartment – I’m moving to LA next month.” A kid that regularly says, “mom, I have an idea.”

But as obsessed as you might think I am with my grandparents (and, you’d be right)… she was raised by them. 

To see this country as a possibility, and understand, and actually get excited about, the fact that it takes a lot of work to get there. 

And then she had the audacity to raise me with those same beliefs.

So really… this is all her fault. 

Today would have been my grandpa’s 99th birthday but tomorrow will be our country’s 250th and when I say patriotism looks different for everyone and for me it looks like demanding the best from a country whose days must be ahead of it because they are certainly not behind it because a “best” that does not include everyone is not the best this country can do… understand that I am not being glib. Or cheeky. Or whatever. I’m saying it from the deepest parts of a patriotism that does, in fact, love this country. 

That loves it in that way we are meant to actually love things - pushing for it to be the best it can be.

Cory Booker once said: "If America hasn’t broken your heart, you don't love her enough."

This country has broken my heart.

But it has also patched it right back up.

We are a nation born of protest. We threw tea into the harbor, marched on Washington, and three times now we’ve declared, in nationwide protests, that there are No Kings in America. Each of those No Kings protests has only grown larger than the one before it.

We’re the country that invented the lightbulb, created the concept of preserving parkland simply so that families can go see big trees on summer vacations, and voted Kelly Clarkson the first American Idol.

We are a great experiment. 

Our founding was not perfect. We are a country on stolen land and built by stolen people. 

The Founders were not perfect. 

They held that “all men were created equal” and then continued to enslave those whose equality they’d just protested about. 

But they looked at the possibility of this nation with a beautiful optimism that we have to hold onto now. Even now. In the hardest time.

They built systems based on an ideal version of America. And yes, it was a hyper-exclusionary version, but still – they were creating this beautiful system of government and the best thing they did was they left room for improvement.

They didn’t know what they didn’t know, but at least they knew they didn’t know everything. 

Two hundred thirty-nine years ago, after 116 days of debate at the Constitutional Convention, as the delegates prepared to sign the Constitution, a document that would inspire future democracies around the world, Benjamin Franklin looked at George Washington, who’d been sitting in a chair carved with a sun. 

He said that, as they’d been having their debates in that hot and small room for 116 days, he often looked at the chair and wondered if the sun was rising or setting. 

But on that September day, he said, “I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

There was something else he said too. A more well known quote. As he was exiting the convention, a woman called out to him: “well doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

To which he replied: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it. 

It requires work. It requires participation. It’s a decision we make every day. Every election, yes, but every day. 

We are a pluralist nation. It’s right there on our dollar bills and every single coin - E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. 

On January 6th, 2021, between 2000 and 2500 people entered the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. 

They stole documents. They desecrated and defected. Some went out of blind rage. Some went with a plan. Some went hunting - carrying guns and other weapons, the still chilling calls of “where are you Nancy” and “hang Mike Pence.”

And on that day, for the first time in history, one single Confederate battle flag made its way into our nation’s capital. 

In July of 1864, during the Battle of Fort Stevens, Confederate soldiers were within six miles of the Capitol building. 

Six miles. 

A Confederate flag never made it into that building, beyond an exhibition, until that day. 

The day we very narrowly lost our republic. 

And yet, despite the literal insurrection that happened, Congress resumed the business of vote certification just 2 hours and 20 minutes after the Capitol was cleared of the rioters. Why? To show that they don’t get to stop the business of democracy. 

“If you can keep it.”

This democracy, this experiment, has never been promised. Assured. Safe. 

It’s a fragile little thing we have here. 

But it is also the most magical.

So look – I’m gonna tell the underground missile silo story again. Because I think sometimes it’s important to remember that this country is silly, and magical, and never without options.

25 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, an underground missile silo in Wyoming, at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base, had a computer malfunction and suddenly the computer panel’s blinking away and it appeared, by all indicators, that the Minuteman III missile, a missile with a nuclear warhead, was about to launch into the sky. A classic computer malfunction just... with a nuclear missile.

So the Air Force started trying everything they could to keep the missile from going off. Because of how it was a NUCLEAR MISSILE.

While the maintenance team was trying to figure out what’s going on with the computers and what may have triggered the false “go,” someone else had an idea… let’s park a tank on it.

We’re talking about a 90-ton blast that’s about to happen, and this person’s like... okay, well, have we tried parking on the door?

This is a quote from the AP: “The theory, according to the spokesman, is that the cover is blown aside so rapidly that a vehicle parked on top of it with the brakes off will be left basically hanging in thin air like yanking a tablecloth out from under dishes, and then the vehicle will drop straight down in the hopes of keeping the launching missile from going anywhere."

No bad ideas in a brainstorm, I guess.

The first time I heard this story, it was from Rachel Maddow’s episode right after Trump was elected the first time. 

It was a monologue about how we are still a great country. And even though this night is hard, this moment is not forever.

At the end of it, she said: “If history’s any guide, what we do in this country is we improvise, America. We do what we can. Look around, make a quick inventory of the resources we’ve got at hand. Somebody figure a way to MacGyver this thing. We’ve got to do what we can. We always have.”

This is America, and in times of crisis – under, over, or around, we find our way through. 

250 years ago, fifty-six delegates to the Second Continental Congress, on behalf of these United States of America, declared certain truths to be self-evident. Among them were yes, that all people were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But one of those truths was this: that governments, that this government specifically, in fact, derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. 

WE are the deciders.

250 years later, we have the exact kind of president the founders spent years debating how to best create a system that would prevent. 

They asked the same questions we’re asking now: What happens if a president tests constitutional limits? How should the system respond to a leader who prioritizes personal power, rejects institutional norms, or commands intense personal loyalty?

They worried then, as many of us worry now. 

But he is not forever. This moment is not forever. Under, over, or around. A car over a missile silo.

250 years. 

The experiment of democracy isn’t over. We’re still in the Repetition & Duration Phase. We can't rely on a single test. “We told King George to suck it; America is settled now.”

Experiments require multiple trials and long periods of time. Some periods and trials feel longer than others.

This moment, this section right now, is that Minuteman III missile. 

And we can’t just let it go off.

We’re going to do the work because this moment is not just this moment; it’s every moment we’ve ever had and every moment we will ever have. There are generations after us, and we have to do the work of making sure they have the best possible future. For them, and for us.

And today, on what would have been my grandpa’s 99th birthday, I can’t, in good faith, sit here and say – welp. We tried. 

My grandpa was a smirker. Like, he laughed, sometimes, but he was more of a smirker. I liked to give him a hard time sometimes. It was our way.

He was a Republican. Like, a proper Republican. He voted for Trump the first time, but I don’t think he would have the 2nd time. And I know he wouldn’t have, after the insurrection. January 6th was the only thing I’ve ever been glad he wasn’t alive to see. 

So obviously we didn’t agree on a lot of politics. And sometimes, because I liked to give him a hard time, I would say the most outrageously liberal thing I could think of in the moment and then I’d look at him and say: you fought for my right to say that.

And he’d smirk. 

But he was proud. 

Because I was right. He, like the more than 41 million others who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces at some point in our nation's history, fought for our right to look at this country and demand, at every turn, the best for, and from, it. 

We haven’t tried everything. There is still work to be done.

Somewhere, someone’s moving their car around.

And so we’ve arrived. At 250 years of the United States of America. 

For all the pomp and circumstance, it’s hard sometimes to remember that it’s just an anniversary. 

There’s going to be a 500th. And 1000th.

More relevant, a 251st.

We’re here. 

And because we’re here, because we’re still here, we still get to do the work. It is the call of this moment and the honor of a lifetime to be able to look back and say – see this country? See how it still stands? Battered and bruised but still standing?

We did that.

I understand that optimism feels impossible these days. 

I’m so sorry to tell you this but… it is the only way.

The thing about tomorrow is that it’s unknown. No one knows what the future holds. And if that’s true, if tomorrow truly can be anything, then how about, just until proven otherwise, we take a lesson from the past 250 years and say that, although we have a lot of work to do, and I have a lot of notes… maybe tomorrow can also be amazing. 

Look at all we’ve already done.

Look at all that we CAN do. 

I know right now feels like it feels. I know right now is what it is. 

But we still have a democracy. We do. 

We can keep it. 

We always have. 

250 years. 

There was an America long before the one we’re in right now. There will be one long after it. 

The guy in charge right now? He is small, scared, and most importantly… temporary. 

We are the deciders. 

It is the most self-evident truth of all.

Happy birthday, Grandpa. I can’t guarantee you would have liked all of these episodes, but I like to think sometimes you would have listened to this podcast, if only you could download them on a flip phone.

I’m proud of you.