Trump's illegal February 28 attack on Iran in the midst of fake diplomacy has gone from four days in-and-out to no "winning" in sight. Less well-reported is Netanyahu's bloody land grab into Lebanon, Israel's violent expansion everywhere in the West Bank, and its continued encroachment of Gaza, where medical care, food, gas, and mercy for genocide survivors has been nearly eliminated. Trump's so-called Board of Peace is on pause.

Like most Americans, I need some copium.

Let us examine the silver linings of a US strategic disaster so stunning the White House is forced to rewrite history as it happens.

Many Americans now know that the US government lives for war, is owned by Israel, and is completely beholden to and integrated with the military industrial complex. Politicians and their friends brazenly demonstrate their uninhibited ability to invest on "insider" war-related information and soon-to-be announced policy. They happily trade service to constituents for re-election campaigns funded by a few generous Israel-backed donors. Confucius said, "the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." The Chinese philosopher was right, and we the people are beginning to become wise.

FoxNews and other state media face steady view-shrink and increasing ridicule. Global and homegrown media – other state's media, plumped by global independent media, fueled by AI and massive layered communications connectivity, and sparked by individuals able to share both fact and interpretation, from Lego cartoons, rap, vignettes of actual events and personal messages is literally everywhere we are, in real time. Boomers lament that people don't read, forgetting that our simplest values are at once innate and transcendent. We don't need to know the history of canines to understand that he who mistreats a puppy is our enemy. We don't need to raise sheep or goats to understand that he who kills the lambs and kids of his neighbor for fun and terror is our enemy. We don't need a psychology degree to understand that abuse of children by our governing elite and titans of finance is a crime requiring swift exposure and punishment. We don't need to understand global power shifts, imperial life cycles, European colonial history, the petroleum trade or state financial vulnerabilities to understand that the world has already changed course.

It is enough that most of us have memorized the Ten Commandments, and can recall most of the Seven Deadly Sins; some can repeat the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer. We consume more sheer data in a day than our grandparents did in a month, our great-grandparents in a year – yet understanding right and wrong remains simple, intuitive, automatic. We have not lost that capacity. Our exposure to the broader world increases our understanding of what we have in common, enhances our sense of humanity and nature, and strengthens our sense of being part of both. The data we have access to also helps us understand that the biggest enemy of nature and humanity is war and the state's war whores. We see that the US system of tyrannical cronyism demands we pay for the last war, this war, and the coming war. The only thing hypersonic in the US military inventory is the profiteering. Can we lament war in general, suffer its economic costs, pay its moral price, and yet continue to meekly submit to our warring, wasteful, destructive and arrogant government? Not for much longer.