Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

The 2024 election was a disaster for the Democrats. They have never been held to account for any of it. That would ordinarily be the job of the legacy media, but they’ve long since abandoned any pretense of objectivity. They are part of the “resistance,” and friendly fire is not in the job description.
Do I sound bitter? I suppose I am. I once believed in not just the Democratic Party but the Obama coalition. I was a loyal, devoted soldier who believed we were all fighting the good fight, even before Trump won. We were the side that cared about climate change, women’s rights, the poor, and the marginalized.
It took me decades to go from being a cynical 18-year-old in the 1980s who didn’t think there was any point to voting to a person who believed my vote could change the world.
That cynicism would be polished off over time, as we headed into the 1990s with political correctness and therapy culture on the rise. We wanted to fix ourselves. We wanted — needed — to fill the void left by the doom spiral in the aftermath of the “Me Generation” and their counterculture revolution.
It was Bill Clinton, by way of Aaron Sorkin, who ultimately pulled us out of it and primed us for a spiritual revival under the euphoric, history-making win of Barack Obama. I believed in hope and change. I believed in a new America.
I believed my friends on Facebook who treated me with respect and love every time I fired off an impassioned plea for votes. I believed all of the women who made those signs for the Women’s March, the Climate March, and the Gun Control March. I, too, thought Trump’s win meant America couldn’t handle the first black president and the Confederacy was back for another round.
What I know now is that none of it was real. We were not the New Puritans leading the country into the promised land. We were like every other political party, seeking absolute power and total control. Any truthful autopsy would have to start there.
The Democrats have been lying to themselves and lying to their voters about what these last ten years have really been about: the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election. Democracy becomes a problem for a party that no longer believes in it if the wrong people win.
From Real Clear Politics podcast Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon:
Any honest autopsy of the 2024 election would have to start back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was anointed by Obama, who leapfrogged Biden, meaning Biden would finally get his shot in 2020. They should have thought that one through because it would come back to bite them four years later when they pushed him out of office.
They practice top-down democracy, in which party leaders attempt to steer voters in the right direction rather than allowing candidates to make the case to the people. The problem with the Democrats is that they needed someone like Donald Trump to blow through their carefully laid plans.
The shame of what the Democrats did in 2024 is almost as bad as what they did in 2020 to orchestrate Joe Biden’s win. Both of these elections were rooted in the mass delusion that Donald Trump wasn’t just a political opponent but an existential threat, so anything goes - even censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, or pushing out a duly elected president.
That delusion gave them unlimited power in their minds, which made them the most corrupt political party in my lifetime, taking what never belonged to them, pushing “resistance theater” throughout American society, and coming up mostly empty anyway.
A real autopsy would require cleaning house on all of it, admitting everything. It would require admitting to their voters that they knew they were lying about Trump to cover up their own failures.
After all, wouldn’t it have been easier just to offer the people something better rather than treating Trump like a supervillain that could not be destroyed by ordinary means?
No, because their biggest problem is that their only vision for the future is to reach back into the past. They still want to undo the Trump presidency rather than learn from it. They are fighting to bring back the utopia we all built under Barack Obama, and that has been the Democrats’ fatal mistake.
Barack Obama’s grip on the party means they can’t move forward.
A real autopsy would have to talk about Obama’s ongoing influence and control of the party. Why do you think he’s making appearances with Zohran Mamdani and James Talarico?
He sees them as the party’s future because they are Obama clones, more or less. You don’t see him out there boosting Gavin Newsom, just as you don’t see many leaders on the Left rising to take Obama’s place. They must all be shadows of him, which is why it was Kamala Harris in 2024, Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Obama couldn’t lose. He was treated like a god and king. He was never going to let Trump win this ten-year war. He couldn’t hand the country over to the guy who dared question his birth certificate, the guy they called a “racist” and a “rapist,” but more than that, he represented the undoing of the Obama Coalition and the worldwide movement it inspired. There was no way the Democrats were ever going to let that happen.
By 2016, they had control of almost everything, from institutions to universities to culture, so why not use it? Exiling and disenfranchising Trump voters was all done in the name of Barack Obama. You see, it had to be racism that gave rise to Trump because Obama couldn’t fail.
Isn’t it so much easier to blame America? To blame it on sexism and racism? Isn’t that what they tell themselves now about 2024? America wasn’t ready for any woman, especially a woman of color? Isn’t it easier to see it that way rather than address the real problem with the utopia we all built: it shuts too many people out?
The Culture of Silence and the Climate of Fear
The Vanity Fair story about how Democrats fear Kamala Harris running again is telling. Or rather, not telling.
They are too afraid to use their real names. It is still considered blasphemy inside the Democratic Party to criticize her, as she has attained Obama-level status. She campaigned for Obama back in 2008 and was once called the “female Obama.” Harris rode the coattails of making history.
Winning was easy for her. She was pretty and tough. She made the Democrats look good and won every single race as her star began to rise: District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President, next in line behind a very old Joe Biden.
Probably, he would have stepped aside and handed her the presidency had he won a second term. Either way, Harris was not the best choice for Vice President, and the Democrats knew that at the time.
The 100 people who signed a letter urging Biden not to choose Harris for “cosmetic reasons” were then shamed back into silence lest they be called racists and misogynists. The so-called autopsy vindicates Harris, which is all part of the same game. She is too big to fail and too popular to be cast aside, especially now after the redistricting fight has put Democrats back in “Jim Crow 2.0” mode.
A real autopsy would have to confront this: how they continue to fall back on the same blame game: it’s those racists over there. It’s not our fault. We haven’t failed our voters. We have to stop them. We have to keep fighting this war against them, our fellow Americans.
How can they even begin to confront who they are and what they’ve become? How can they reckon with all of the madness they’ve put the American people through for ten long years?
The January 6th show trials, the lies about Kenosha being a “Civil Rights” protest, the mocking and celebrating of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the raiding of Mar-a-Lago, the censoring of dissent via the FBI on social media, Russiagate, the collapse of a once-thriving culture, impeachments, indictments, and the unending No Kings protests.
If they want a real autopsy, they should talk to people like me, once loyal supporters who were chewed up and spit out by a political party that could not tolerate even simple questions about “cancel culture” mass hysteria, or the rising intolerance in the Left writ large, or why someone’s career would go up in flames just for voting for Trump. And forget about asking whether toddlers should wear masks or pre-teens should take medication that sterilizes them for life.
I walked away from the party in 2020. I couldn’t believe what I watched them do, what I helped them do, to drag Joe Biden over the finish line. I knew he was too old. I knew Kamala Harris was a ticking time bomb. I knew it would all blow up in our faces eventually. But lying was so much easier, especially with a full-court press serving as a propaganda front.
They have been lying for so long that they don’t even know how to stop. The biggest lie was that Trump was a “fascist.” They’re still telling that lie. They’re still scaring Americans into manic desperation every day. The lies are what drove me away. I couldn’t live with them. The truth matters, especially if you’re cutting up the body to find out what killed it.
The lies began in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and loyalists like me couldn’t face the truth about why she lost. It was one lie piled on top of another, and no one had the courage to face down the social media mobs to set the record straight. Any dissent was met with strict reprisals. Before long, everyone settled into a climate of fear and a culture of silence as the new normal.
Their problem goes back to the Art of War. If you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you will succumb in every battle. They should first try to understand themselves. If they could just see who and what they are, and why America would choose Trump a second time, they’d be halfway there.
Then, if they could understand Trump, who he really is, rather than the character they invented, they’d finally come back to the real world with the rest of us.
The Democrats are in love with the dream Obama sold, not the reality of what America became with the Democrats in power. There are too many truths left to face. There are too many ghosts haunting them. There is no point in performing an autopsy on a body with nothing inside but smoke mirrors.

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[A crosspost with Hollywood Woketopia, my other Substack]
Every so often, a moment in culture arrives, a Sydney Sweeney ad, or Project Hail Mary.
Every time, we hear that the Woke fever has finally broken. Hollywood cares about the people again. Right?
The same reason Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee in 2028, the same reason the Democrats are still selling the lie that any kind of attempt by Republicans to even out the redistricting is “Jim Crow 2.0,” is proof enough that on the Left, Woke is not going anywhere. It is who they are now. Not all of them, but the most powerful among them.
Early on, when Mark Halperin and others were insisting Gavin Newsom would be the nominee in 2028, I said there was no way the Democrats would get behind a white guy, no matter how passionately he genuflects to the Woke (“Anti-woke is anti-black!”). I know the Democrats. I was one. I helped build the modern-day party of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. I know what fires them up every day, and it isn’t just taking back power; it’s foisting their religion upon the rest of us.
They think it’s the opposite, that it’s the Right that is foisting their “Christian Nationalism” upon them. While it’s true that a faction of the Right has unmasked to become the very thing Rob Reiner warned about in his movie, God and Country, they aren’t the majority. Perhaps that’s true on the Left. But look around. Their religion is the dominant culture in America.
When news got out that Christopher Nolan had cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” whose face launched a thousand ships, it ignited yet another culture war.
How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020. It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged.
And if that weren’t enough, Nolan brought back Ellen Page from Inception, now recast as Elliot Page, the male, as an act of affirmation and yet another test. These are Orwellian 2+2=5 and force people to choose between ignoring it and going to see a big-effects movie in IMAX, or not buying a ticket and boycotting the film.
Elon Musk took the bait, becoming the villain Hollywood needed to turn seeing The Odyssey into a righteous and political act. You can see them now: the bearded male feminists buying tickets ten times in a row. “Take that, Elon Musk!” The ladies of Blue Sky will go in groups, then fawn over how beautiful Lupita Nyong’o is and overuse the male pronoun for Ellen/Elliot Page. “Wasn’t he great?”
The game is becoming exhausting by now, as Hollywood demands the hard-working American public be impressed by them, lectured by them, and corrected by them. All audiences really want is the one thing Hollywood seems unable to accomplish: entertain them.
It isn’t that Nyong’o isn’t pretty. She is. It’s that Helen of Troy was white, famously so, even if Greek. Nyong’o is a unique beauty, not a universal one, a reality the Left wants to force, because Hollywood doesn’t care about its audience. They want to look good.
Probably the worst thing about the game Hollywood plays with the movie fans they helped raise is that Lupita Nyong’o is held out as a sacrificial lamb. She isn’t pushing any ideology, unlike Ellen/Elliot Page. They are putting her out there and expecting her to absorb criticism about herself, including whether she is pretty enough.
I met her once, back in 2013 in Telluride, before her career took off. She was too young to know how to act like a celebrity. She was so nice, I was won over. She would win an Oscar that year and become a big star in Hollywood.
Is it fair to put her in this position just so they can feel good about themselves? No. Does it change anything? No. There is still such a thing as truth and reality, even if that is the thing that is unfair.
The Woke Code and the Hays Code
The Hays Code (1930-1968) represented an era wherein decency and morality were mandated in all Hollywood films.
The Christian conservatism/morality mandated by the Hays Code reflected less a separation between art and governance and more a united effort toward a utopian society of goodness, especially as we moved through the last Fourth Turning, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time where the world saw true evil in Hitler and Stalin, not to mention the nuclear bomb.
That isn’t all that different from what the Woke Code is now. It’s roughly the same kind of thing: rigid rules to depict an ideal society. The difference is that Christian advocates have been replaced by progressive activists, and the villain is the white male patriarchy.
What is different now, amid our current Fourth Turning, is that the Woke Code includes only half of America. To the Left, they would rewrite this narrative to say that Hollywood depicted mostly White America, and that is what has changed. But really, if you respond to the box office, as Hollywood doesn’t anymore, you will always default to the majority. It isn’t rocket science — beautiful, sexy women and masculine men and a great story.
The end of the Hays Code was entirely due to economics. Television became so popular in the 1950s that there wasn’t much of a need to go to the movies if all you saw was the same kind of buttoned-up themes you could see on TV. That’s true now, too. Movies, then, had to break out of the Hays Code and become much more subversive, leading into the 1970s, which saw some of the best films ever made.
While it’s true that The Odyssey will be eligible to win Oscars under the new rules, it’s also true that the criteria could have been met in a way that didn’t make audiences play this same exhausting game that has alienated them from everything Hollywood puts out. The casting of Nyong’o and Page is less about Oscars and more about status.
Perhaps Nolan was under pressure to cast a non-white woman as Helen, or maybe he wants to be seen as a good person using his wealth and fame to make change, as the most famous white male directors reach for things money can’t buy, like Martin Scorsese making Killers of the Flower Moon, Steven Spielberg making West Side Story with a real Latina, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Peak Woke Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another.
No film has better exemplified Hollywood in the Trump era than this one. It says it all. ICE as the Gestapo, check. America is run by a cabal of wealthy white Nazis, check. A woman of color must save herself, check.
All of it is held together by a hapless white man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who represents the film’s beating heart. He’s the only good white guy, which is how those in Hollywood who make these kinds of choices would like to be seen. One Battle is actually a movie about them.
Had Nolan cast a blue-eyed blonde woman as Helen of Troy, all hell would have broken loose. When you go against the rules of the Woketopia, you aren’t just getting hit on X with lots of angry tweets by loyal fans who continually feel betrayed; they bring out the big guns - agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker, for instance. If you obey the rules, then you are praised. The problem is that it all feels so artificial, so pre-planned, so inorganic.
I used to write the Oscars report for Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center (who fired me after they found out I voted for Trump), counting the number of female nominees and winners. The statistics were always grim.
Every year, it was bad news. As things began to change for women after the Academy announced its DEI mandate in 2020, that change was forced. If before merit had made too many white men winners, now we were seeing something a little closer to gender parity. So then the line moved back, and it became not just about women but women of color and trans women.
Now, it’s all about Marxism disguised as art. If life isn’t fair, movies will make it fair. It isn’t just because the Oscars have it written into their new rules, and it isn’t just because activist groups like GLAAD breathe down the neck of every Hollywood studio, counting heads and making reports. It’s that this is a deeply felt belief system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I have no doubt The Odyssey will make money. It’s a Christopher Nolan film, after all. Who doesn’t want to go see a giant visual effects epic filmed entirely on IMAX? If you can ignore the elephant in the room, the performative casting, you might have a great time. But if you were hoping that Woke is over, well, I think that was its own Hollywood fairy tale.
It’s why Kamala Harris was the nominee in 2024 and why she will once again be the nominee in 2028. This is how the ruling class in America wants to be represented. They want to force change, and they do that by elevating minority groups to high-status positions as symbols for the mostly white people who run things.
Culture, like the Democratic Party, will have to be built anew. That, more than anything, explains why AI is about to completely consume the business, becoming the subversive counterculture revolution Hollywood never saw coming. They can do it all and more without the millions of dollars necessary to mount a production.
AI artists don’t have to be held to the same rigid standards. They can be purely about bringing in eyeballs by showing what people most want to see, rather than what Hollywood wants them to want to see. In other words, they can make the women as beautiful as they want, and no one can cancel them for it.
I spent my life in movie theaters gazing up at the big screen and watching some of the best films ever made. The only way that makes sense is if you are escaping real life and finding your way into a fantasy world, and maybe for the Woke, seeing Lupita Nyong’o cast as the most beautiful woman in the world is its own kind of fantasy fulfillment.
After the movie comes out, we’ll have to see whether it works or not. At the moment, it feels like just another test to decide who gets to stay and who has to go.



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Jenny Holland has been running a similar track to mine for the last five years or so, but she got there before me. We both were more or less red-pilled by Steve Bannon. Here, we had a conversation for about an hour and a half. I hate doing video because I have a face for radio. But Jenny looks great so I thought I would put it up anyway. Also, I think my camera’s focus was off a bit - but the audio works great.
I don’t have a timecodes but the transcript should appear.
You can find her Substack here:
And her YouTube is here:

I will be driving across the country starting this weekend so I will be dropping some travel pics and whatnot. Hope you have a great weekend. And, as always, thanks for being so supportive and such a great community.


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“Now you know why they call me Dirty Harry, every dirty job that comes along.”
Just as audiences didn’t know how much they needed Dirty Harry until he showed up on a movie screen in 1971, residents of Los Angeles had no idea how much they needed Spencer Pratt until they saw him face off against two of the leading candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman.
Bass and Raman couldn’t even answer simple questions, like whether illegal immigrants should be able to vote or whether there should be homeless encampments outside elementary schools. And every time the camera cut to Pratt, his reaction was always the same: “ You have got to be kidding me.”
He spoke truths no one in the Democratic Party ever could or would because they don’t have to. They are never asked hard questions they don’t already have answers to, and they are never challenged as directly as they were by Spencer Pratt.
They’re also protected by the legacy media, by Hollywood, by late-night comedy. As long as they properly virtue signal and obey the rules of Woketopia, no one ever holds them accountable for the problems in a city overrun by crime, drugs, and homelessness. Until now.
Pratt wiped up the floor with Bass and Raman, so much so that they have now dropped out of a debate by the League of Women Voters that would have been held on May 13th. Now, it’s been canceled because someone, somewhere, told them they'd do better if they employed the Biden basement strategy: stay out of sight and let the system win the election.
The Democrats and Hollywood have the same problem. They can’t tell the truth. Just as in 1971, when Dirty Harry sliced through the pretense like a hot knife through ice cream, so too has Spencer Pratt gotten our attention with his innovative campaign and simple, common-sense messaging, in an entertaining, imaginative way. True, AI might be the beginning of the end, but the way Pratt uses it has expanded the possibilities.
With the help of Charles Curran, whose studio is responsible for many of these, we can now see how useful AI can be for creating an effective, viral campaign ad without the heavy lift of an entire production company and millions of dollars in campaign funds. This is AI at a grassroots level, but in its own way, it’s also artful commentary, the kind we never see aimed at the Left.
AI, now in Pratt's hands, poses an unpredictable threat to the opposition, who will figure it out soon enough.
It is also a threat to Hollywood for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be politically correct or rely on partisan celebrities to approve of the messaging. AI also cuts through the noise, like Dirty Harry, like Spencer Pratt, because it represents freedom at a time of extremely oppressive micro-managing over all culture, and film especially.
Dirty Harry was politically incorrect, but it told the truth at a time when most people were too afraid to talk about the soft-on-crime policies in the wake of the counterculture revolution.
Too many rapes and serial killers on the rise, too many hippies, the Zodiac killer, the Manson murders - crime was everywhere, yet the culture of the time wasn’t exactly tuned in. If critics in the 1970s thought Dirty Harry was fascist, as Pauline Kael did, ordinary Americans - Nixon’s Silent Majority - felt seen.
And now, residents of Los Angeles, many of them too poor to afford homes in the gated communities of the rich and famous who fund Mayor Karen Bass, might feel seen in the passionate messaging of Spencer Pratt. His voice is urgent in a time of complacency. He sees the problems the Left ignores. He speaks the truth when everyone else parrots the comforting lies.
Los Angeles has been neglected for far too long, with the wildfires that burned down Pratt’s home becoming the tipping point. It was time for someone to rise up and say enough is enough.
They don’t know how to deal with a shooting star like Pratt. When the Democrats try to dismiss him as a fame-hungry reality star, he hits them with something moving and undeniable.
It’s true that Pratt was the enfant terrible of a mid-aughts reality show called The Hills. Not exactly the kind of leader people who shop at Erewon after doing hot yoga on La Brea have in mind for a leader. But his sincerity shines through. This is personal, and we can feel it.
He says Bass has the unions and the money, but he has the moms. He has Democrats and Conservatives backing him. They call him MAGA, but he really isn’t. He is the first politician who is genuinely attempting to run a non-partisan campaign and actually reach across the aisle, which is exactly the hero America needs right now, not just in LA, but everywhere.
It’s hard not to be won over by Spencer Pratt because he is so sincere. All of that manic bluster from the old days of The Hills has clearly been transformed by the trauma of his house burning down in a fire that the city should have been more prepared for, to put it mildly.
He is campaigning like he means it, projecting the kind of urgency many Los Angeles residents feel every day as they watch their government do nothing to change things. Why has no one ever even bothered asking these questions? Because they are too afraid.
The problems in LA have been ignored for far too long. The street takeovers that terrorize the working-class parts of the city.
Random attacks of violence:
Crime and drugs in parks that should be safe for families.
And of course, the 70,000+ homeless population, only a small percentage of which choose to be sheltered.
Whether you pay money or give food or try to help the people on the street, it almost always comes back to the same hard truth: they are mostly wild things of the street who do not want to follow the rules of shelters, either because they don’t allow pets or they don’t allow drugs and alcohol, or they can’t be inside anywhere without burning the place down.
And there are so many rich people in LA willing to give them money. Why would they give it up? And this you are not even allowed to think or say, lest you be condemned as heartless.
There are decent people in LA, people I know, who have spent their lives devoted to trying to help. They want the story to be that many of them can’t afford to live in a country run by billionaires. But the truth is harder to face. The truth is that many of them should not be on the streets because they’re a harm to themselves or to others. The truth is that many of them are extremely mentally ill or lifelong drug addicts.
It’s so bad now that reports have emerged that addicts are testing dogs to see if the drugs are safe. The dogs are chained. The dogs are fighting. The dogs are starving. For every dog that’s well taken care of, there are far more that are being horrifically abused, and Spencer Pratt cares enough to talk about it.
A Tale of Two Cities
Los Angeles is two cities. In one, the wealthy make movies and drive through their protected, gated parking lots, then retreat to their homes in gated communities in the hills. Sunset Boulevard is a showcase for that mask of extreme wealth, like Malibu, Beverly Hills, and the Platinum Triangle.
Spencer Pratt’s home was in the wealthy enclave of the Pacific Palisades, which burned to rubble during the wildfires. By all rights, he should be protecting the wealthy, who were his neighbors. He’s a guy who went to Crossroads, after all, the school where celebrities send their kids.
That isn’t what he’s doing. He’s speaking now for the everyday resident of the city, whether rich or poor. He wants to clean up the streets. He wants to fix what’s broken. He wants the streets, parks, and schools to be safe for kids and families, and he wants to save the dogs. Do we hear any of the Democrats talking about this?
In 2009, a 17-year-old named Lily Burk drove to downtown LA to run an errand for her mother and to practice her driving. She attended one of those expensive private schools in North Hollywood and had a promising future.
She was abducted by a registered sex offender with a rap sheet who’d left a treatment facility that day. He demanded that she get him money from the ATM, but she only had a credit card. He smashed her face against the dashboard and slit her throat. Half an hour later, he was drinking beer and smoking crack on Skid Row before the police even found Burk’s body.
I remember that story. I remember how awkward it was to talk about because the perp was black and Burk was white. But for me, it was a wakeup call, and I instilled in my daughter the message: do not be a guilty liberal. Protect yourself. Be afraid, no matter what. But it was a secret that passed between us, one we could never say out loud. That is what it is like to live as a progressive in LA.
The problem of crime and homelessness in LA is like the problem of illegal immigration. No one talks about those who are murdered, but that is the baseline of what American citizens deserve. These are crimes that could have been prevented if only we could tell the truth and our politicians had listened.
Dirty Harry was a hit. Audiences were hungry for his brand of justice, where the bad guys get what’s coming to them because Harry Callahan cuts through the bureaucracy and enacts his own brand of justice.
America, then as now, was shifting away from the wild days of the hippie revolution and toward a more secure, safer America by 1980, with Ronald Reagan. Dirty Harry was only the beginning.
Spencer Pratt might not win. LA is as blue as it gets. I don’t live there anymore. I wish I did, just so I could vote for him. But in a way, it doesn’t really change what his presence in politics has meant to so many of us - especially those of us in California who know the game and have gotten so sick of playing it.
We need more heroes who can speak the truth. Spencer Pratt has arrived just in time.


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My mom doesn’t read this Substack. We sit on opposite ends of the great divide. But she doesn’t hold my political shift against me, even if she doesn’t understand it. When I visit her, I often find CNN or the BBC filling up the silence. The same messages drone on and on: Trump is bad, the world is coming to an end, it’s all terrible. And there’s my mom, absorbing it like a sponge. It’s a wonder she talks to me at all.
We get along because we studiously avoid any mention of the Orange Man or politics. She is always on one side, and I am almost always on the other. If it does come up, and she makes an off-handed comment, it’s like someone lighting a match near a gas leak. We can’t talk about it at all, none of it, and so we don’t.
I’m grateful that politics doesn’t define her to the point that she would go “no-contact” with her own daughter. No one in my family went that far. I guess I’m lucky. I think they think I caught a crazy bug, and one day I will go back to normal. So we just tread water until things change.
My mother’s life wasn’t what she wanted it to be, although whose is? She was a bright light who looked like an adult by the age of 12. At 14, she was pretending to be 16 to compete in beauty pageants.
Here she is, at number 1.
It wouldn’t last long, just a few short years. But it must have made her parents proud to see her star rise that fast. She never knew her biological father and still doesn’t, but those genes are partly what made her such a stunner.
Not long after, she would meet a man, get pregnant, and drop out of high school. That would never become a marriage and a family. Eventually, she’d start working nights at Pandora’s Box in Hollywood, where she met my dad, a Jazz drummer.
My dad would split, and she’d be a divorced mom with four kids before the age of 25. She was still too young to understand what she’d done to her life by having us, but over time, it would start to sink in, everything she gave up to raise us instead of chasing her own dreams. It wasn’t easy for her, that’s for sure, but we had what was kind of like a little farm, with goats, chickens, and ponies on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon.
Because I grew up in the era of blaming your parents for your bad childhood, we didn’t spend a lot of time thanking them for giving us life at all. We were too busy looking at what was wrong. But I can’t pretend it was all sunshine and roses either. It wasn’t. It was painful and explains why my life is the way it is now, at least partly.
Understanding what shaped my life is different from blaming my mom, who really did do the best she could under the circumstances. We felt guilt throughout most of our childhood for having taken her life away from her. She gave up everything, it felt like, but now I bet she can’t imagine her life without us.
Back in the 1970s, parents didn’t coddle their kids. We grew up like weeds. We had to learn how to survive, and it wasn’t shameful to punish your children or leave them to fend for themselves. Or teach them hard lessons. It’s just how it was.
I don’t remember being very close to my mom. She didn’t comfort me when I cried. If anything, she tried to toughen me up. I was too sensitive for her liking. But I do remember her holding me in the Pacific, taking me out into the waves to show me that I could do it, since I was too afraid. I remember feeling close to her then, and it’s one of the only times I've felt that way. I was still scared of the water, but I felt safe in her arms, and I’ll forget how warm and soft her skin felt as I clung to her through the crashing waves.
The truth is that we were lucky to have that life, at least in the early days before we left Topanga. We spent every morning until night living in the wild. We were always barefoot, always with our hands and feet in nature. I remember plunging into the mud during rainstorms, tasting different kinds of grass, watching the weather turn, and the smell of my pony’s fur after a long ride.
Ultimately, how things changed in the coming decades, after Columbine and 9/11, how kids were over-protected, I am grateful I got the harder, rougher childhood. It prepared me for right now, for living through this era of people mostly online, of coddled children, of dehumanizing each other and tribal warfare, of cancellations and assassinations, and overly medicated and emotional women who couldn’t handle the election of the Orange Man.
What I learned from my mom was hard work and resilience. The reason I work every single day, and have ever since I started working online over 20 years ago, is my mom. Her words have often echoed in my mind over the years, “Just do the next thing. Keep moving forward.” Then again, for both of us, work is something we understand. The complications of everyday life, especially relationships, not so much.
Just do the next thing is how you manage a messy life, or a broken life, or even a hard life - something most Americans know nothing about. If you can just do the next thing, you will be halfway there.
That reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Edge (written by David Mamet). They decide they have to kill the bear because most people die in the wilderness of shame. They collapse in helplessness because they can’t believe they were stupid enough to get themselves into a place where they might not survive. “They die of shame!”
“What one man can do, another can do!”
Doing the next thing means getting out of bed, making the bed, making coffee, walking the dogs, writing something, tweeting something. There is always something to be done, and doing that one thing pulls you along. It is the best way I know, other than praying, to live with the idea that one day I will die. Or one day my mom will die.
My mom had to do the next thing because she had no choice. She couldn’t waste a day lying around crying about a life she did not plan and didn’t want. It might be true that she didn’t realize how hard it would be to parent four kids, all on her own, before the age of 25. It might even be true that at some point, she realized she actually wanted to live a life of learning, of expanding her horizons, of becoming someone, like those early pageant days of promise.
To her credit, she never abandoned us. She left for long periods, especially during my middle school years. Sooner or later, she’d come back. She stuck it out with dental appointments and bought us bikes she couldn’t afford (that would then get stolen). She gave us a place to live and got us to school, much of the time. Perfect, no. But we survived.
My mom flourished in life by doing the next thing. She never gave up on herself. She went from welfare to working as a cocktail waitress and then a bartender, to earning her real estate license, to becoming a property owner who could leave pieces of it to all of her children and grandchildren.
I can’t think of a greater success story of anyone I know personally. She doesn’t really see it that way, I don’t think. My guess is that she still mourns the person she might have been all of those years ago, before things changed so dramatically. She doesn’t credit herself or pat herself on the back. She just does the next thing.

Even this morning, when I talked to her on the phone, with her back problems that have meant she can’t move around much anymore, she told me she walked around her yard, and everywhere she looked, there was something that had to be done. There is always another thing after the next thing.
Happy Mother’s Day to my strong, imperfect, glorious mom, who will never read this. I send it out to the universe anyway as an appreciation to all the moms, those who aimed for perfection and those who just did the best they could.
Hope your day is full and that you can count your blessings of all you have right in front of you right now.

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