You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi
One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency. Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it. Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:
As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now. In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times. I’m just that curious.
However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged. With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future. There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles. Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research. And the “highlight” of all “highlights:” a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead. Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships. It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.
I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:
“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.”
Yes, reread that. Defends. Urinating. In food. A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!
How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one. Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.” But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains. Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?
Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three. My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration. Where do we go, indeed!
Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant. Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better. The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity. Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world). But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.
And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters. In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes: “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.” She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.
What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall. Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise. You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country. You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans. You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs. The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse. We are in desperate need of nuance.
Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do. I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers: 1+1=2; a2+b2=c2; plug in “x” and find “y.” No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview. No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity. No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.
Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy. Always has been; always will be. Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!). Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).
Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education. If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good. Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure. What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.” But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard: messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.
References
Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.
Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. New York: Villard Books.
Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters. New York: Harper Perennial.
Light a Candle 