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“I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing,
And the sun came out to dry me.”

— Robert Frost (1874–1963). Four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. The quote is from his “One Step Backward Taken.”)

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I’m not a genius. But I’m smart enough.

I’m not ancient. But I’ve lived long enough.

I’m focused on silver linings. But I’m realistic enough.

And yet, these days, I find myself asking:

“And how shall I begin?”

I’m mouthing that lament every day as I process the news, trying to understand what’s true. And what isn’t.

Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t fallen for the “Fake News” malady that plagues the House that should be the Whitest and most transparent in the land. But isn’t.

I’m simply responding to the struggle of grappling day after day with headlines that cause major whiplash.

My pain was most severe on April 8, 2026, the morning after the President of the United States had threatened to annihilate an entire civilization—an outcome forestalled, for now, by a tenuous two-week ceasefire agreement with Iran.

I awakened. I inhaled. I sighed.

Then news processing began. The headlines seemed to argue with one another.

● Trump Warns Iran ‘Whole Civilization Will Die’

● Trump Threatens ‘Power Plant Day’ and ‘Bridge Day’ for Iran

● Trump Sets 8 p.m. Deadline for Tehran

● Ceasefire Reached After Two Weeks of Escalating Threats

● Hegseth Declares ‘Decisive’ Victory Over Iran as Ceasefire Holds

Each headline carried its own emotional voltage. Each belonged to a different reality. Each demanded interpretation before the mind had time to absorb the implications of the last.

I moved back and forth between them, as though scanning the horizon for bearings that refused to hold still.

What I am experiencing is not ignorance but overload. The difficulty lies in the troubling acceleration of interpretation in a profession once defined by the discipline of waiting long enough to get things right.

Consider libraries. At their best, they do not merely gather books. They impose order. They create sequence. They distinguish catalog from commentary, reference from rumor, scholarship from speculation. They allow ideas to ripen because they provide intellectual space in which ripening can occur.

Headlines, by contrast, now arrive like weather systems colliding over open water—pressure against pressure, temperature against temperature, narrative against narrative–producing turbulence before the mind has even had time to locate north.

I am not longing for a simpler past. The past was never as simple as memory sometimes pretends. Newspapers got things wrong. Governments obscured truth. Voices were excluded. Perspectives were limited. The so-called consensus often reflected who had access to presses, pulpits, and broadcast towers.

But there was, nonetheless, a sense that information moved in a sequence that allowed thought to follow. Now information and interpretation appear simultaneously, each insisting on priority. The result is not merely disagreement. Disagreement can be healthy. Disagreement sharpens thought.

The result, instead, is compression. Compression of time. Compression of context. Compression of reflection. We’re asked to conclude before understanding has had the opportunity to unfold.

And then we have the words themselves. Not paraphrased. Not filtered. Not softened by summary.

Right now, words published by a sitting President of the United States appeared in the public stream as casually as any other post competing for attention:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will…”

Those words burn on my brain.

And what about his words a few days earlier on Easter morn:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Those words burn, too.

What startled me was not only the language itself, but also the velocity with which language of this magnitude seemed to be absorbed into the ordinary churn of the news cycle.

A threat invoking the destruction of a civilization. A deadline—8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time—as though annihilation could be scheduled between dinner and the evening weather. Profanity directed at a sovereign nation. Religious language pressed into rhetorical service. Exclamation points doing the work once reserved for deliberation.

Then the headlines moved on. Analysis fractured into familiar alignments. Interpretations multiplied. The moment was processed, categorized, debated, defended, reframed, condemned, contextualized, and gradually folded into the ongoing river of competing urgencies.

But I could not quite fold it away. Some language does not dissipate simply because the news cycle advances. Some language lingers. Some language tests the boundaries of what we are willing to normalize simply because normalization has become the adaptive response to informational overload.

What’s gnawing at me right now is this. More and more, I find myself falling back on something older than any alert that lights up my phone.

My moral compass.

I’m landing there not because I distrust journalism. Not because I imagine that complex geopolitical realities can be reduced to tidy conclusions. Not because I believe that every headline must conform to my preferences.

I’m landing there simply because, even in a world of incomplete information, some things remain legible.

I know that truth matters.

I know that language matters.

I know that threats—especially those uttered from positions of immense power—matter.

I know that rhetoric capable of conjuring the annihilation of entire peoples is not merely strategic vocabulary to be shrugged off between weather reports and stock updates.

I know this not because a headline tells me so, but because a lifetime of reading, thinking, teaching, and living has taught me that words shape worlds.

Facts help us understand events. Conscience helps us understand consequences. Evidence tells us what is unfolding. Moral proportion tells us what should give us pause.

My moral compass is not a substitute for evidence. But neither is evidence meaningful without some internal measure capable of recognizing when rhetoric crosses thresholds that once would have prompted gasps of disbelief around the world, followed by sustained collective stillness.

I know that complex geopolitical realities rarely yield simple judgments.

I know that leaders sometimes speak forcefully for strategic reasons.

I know that journalists, working in real time, must report language even when its implications remain uncertain.

But I also know this. The casual invocation of civilizational destruction should not feel ordinary. The language of annihilation should not feel routine. Deadlines for devastation should not feel like programming notes in the daily schedule of global life.

Even in a fractured informational environment, some lines remain visible. Even in a world of interpretive disagreement, some language retains moral weight independent of partisan affiliation. Even in an age of competing narratives, conscience still recognizes disproportion.

The compass may tremble, but it need not spin.

And so I return again to the question with which I began:

How shall I begin?

Perhaps I’ll begin:

● By trusting that the habits of mind formed over decades—habits shaped in libraries, classrooms, conversations, and careful reading—remain capable of distinguishing urgency from alarmism, disagreement from distortion, complexity from confusion.

● By trusting that patience remains a form of intelligence.

● By trusting that moral proportion is not an antiquated instrument, but a necessary one.

I am not a genius. But I am smart enough to know that understanding rarely arrives prepackaged in a headline.

I am not ancient. But I have lived long enough to know that normalization can occur gradually enough that we scarcely notice the shift until the boundary has already moved.

I am focused on silver linings. But I am realistic enough to know that clarity sometimes requires effort equal to the confusion that obscures it.

I will continue. Reading. Comparing. Pausing. Listening for what rings true beneath what merely rings loud.

I will begin again each morning with the quiet but stubborn conviction that truth and responsibility do not cease to exist simply because their presentation has grown more chaotic or their interpretation more divided.

The world may move quickly, but the compass, if we are willing to hold it steady, still points True North.