Harold Michael Harvey Presents Timely Article: The Breaking Point - When Neglect of Deployed Service Members Become a Failure of Leadership...

 

Photo: AI-generated image depicting the USS Abraham Lincoln out to sea.

THE BREAKING POINT

When Neglect of Deployed Service Members Becomes a Failure of Leadership

For as long as the United States has maintained a standing military, the nation has asked young men and women to bear burdens that civilians rarely see and seldom understand. We call them heroes. We honor their sacrifice. We speak reverently of the Commander‑in‑Chief’s solemn duty to protect them. But history shows that the distance between rhetoric and reality can be vast, and that the cost of that distance is often paid in the minds, bodies, and lives of the troops themselves.

Today, that cost is being paid aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed in the Strait of Hormuz, where sailors are reporting conditions that no modern fighting force should endure: mental‑health breakdowns, hygiene failures, exhaustion, and a level of strain that threatens both readiness and human dignity. Their suffering is not an isolated hardship. It is part of a recurring pattern in American history, a pattern in which young service members bear the cost of leadership failures they did not create and cannot fix.

This moment forces a question that Americans rarely ask aloud: When does neglect of deployed service members rise from policy failure to constitutional breach?

I. The Commander‑in‑Chief’s Duty of Care: A Constitutional Obligation

Article II of the Constitution grants the President command authority over the armed forces. But authority without responsibility is tyranny. The Commander‑in‑Chief’s role carries a corresponding duty to ensure that troops deployed in the nation’s name are properly supported, adequately equipped, mentally and physically protected, given clear and lawful missions, and treated with dignity.

This is not ceremonial language. It is the bedrock of American civil‑military ethics. When sailors aboard the Lincoln report that they are living in conditions that degrade their mental health, hygiene, and safety, the Commander‑in‑Chief’s constitutional obligations are implicated directly.

The President’s duty is not simply to command the military. It is to safeguard the people who make that command possible.

II. History’s Warning: Neglect Is Never Accidental

The crisis aboard the Lincoln echoes earlier failures that scarred generations of service members.

Vietnam

Troops were sent into an unclear mission with shifting objectives, inadequate support, and psychological trauma that lasted decades. The nation asked them to fight a war it could not explain.

Iraq (2003–06)

Young soldiers and Marines were sent into IED‑heavy environments without proper armor or equipment. They welded scrap metal onto Humvees because leadership had not prepared for the war it launched.

USS George Washington Suicides (2019-2022)

Sailors trapped in shipyard conditions so demoralizing that multiple lives were lost. The Navy called it “unfortunate.” Families called it preventable.

Post‑Vietnam Veterans

Returned home to inadequate mental‑health care, homelessness, and stigma. PTSD was not formally recognized until 1980. The nation abandoned the very people it had sent into harm’s way.

In each case, the pattern was unmistakable: young service members paying the price for leadership that failed to meet its obligations.

The Lincoln is not a new story. It is the latest chapter in an old one.


III. The Strait of Hormuz: Strategic Drift and Human Consequences

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most volatile choke-points on earth, a place where geopolitical tension, naval risk, and operational stress converge. Deploying a carrier there without clear mission parameters, predictable rotation schedules, adequate mental‑health infrastructure, and humane living conditions creates conditions that are not merely difficult. They are dangerous.

History teaches that when troops do not know why they are deployed, how long they will remain, or what success looks like, mental‑health strain becomes inevitable. Strategic drift becomes human suffering. And the burden falls on the youngest, least powerful members of the military hierarchy.

This is not “the hardship of military life.” It is an avoidable harm.

IV. The Invisible Burden: Who Pays the Price for Leadership Failure

The sailors aboard the Lincoln are not abstractions. They are nineteen‑year‑olds on their first deployment, young parents separated from their children, working‑class Americans who enlisted for opportunity, and service members who believe in the mission even when the mission is unclear.

They serve in an institution that relies on their labor but rarely hears their voices. Their suffering is often invisible to the public, and too often ignored by leadership.

The question is not whether military life is hard. The question is whether the hardship they are experiencing is necessary, or the result of leadership neglect.

V. The Constitutional Question: When Does Neglect Become a Breach of Duty?

The Constitution defines impeachable offenses as: “Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“High crimes and misdemeanors” does not mean criminal violations. It means abuse of power, dereliction of duty, betrayal of public trust, and failure to execute the office faithfully.

So, we must ask:

If the Commander‑in‑Chief knowingly or should have known, yet allows deployed service members to live in conditions that degrade their mental health, hygiene, and safety, at what point does that neglect become a constitutional violation rather than a policy failure?

Legal scholars have long argued that gross negligence, reckless disregard for troop welfare, systematic failure to provide humane conditions, and ignoring known mental‑health crises can constitute a breach of the President’s constitutional obligations.

Whether Congress chooses to act is a political question. But the constitutional argument is legitimate and unavoidable.

VI. The Breaking Point

The crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln forces a reckoning:

When leaders fail the people who depend on them, the people suffer, and the Constitution provides mechanisms for accountability.

This is not about politics. It is about stewardship. It is about whether the nation honors the people who serve it, not with slogans, but with humane conditions, clear missions, and leadership that treats their lives as sacred.

The sailors aboard the Lincoln deserve more than sympathy. They deserve leadership that meets its constitutional obligations.

And the nation deserves an answer to the question their suffering raises; an answer that cannot be delayed, deflected, or softened. How long can a democracy tolerate neglect of its most vulnerable defenders before it admits the truth that such neglect is not merely a failure of leadership, but a failure of duty so profound that it threatens the very integrity of the office entrusted with their lives?

~~~~~~

Ongoing Contributor Harold Michael Harvey Presents Power Without Mercy - A Message for ALL!

 

POWER WITHOUT MERCY

When a Superpower’s Strength Outgrows the Mercy That Should Restrain It

Harold Michael Harvey

Reposted from Substack with permission by the author

I have been quiet too long. Silence can be a kind of complicity, a way of letting the powerful believe their actions carry no witness and provoke no moral accounting. But there comes a moment when the weight of events presses against the ribs, when the news scrolls like a ledger of avoidable suffering, and when a citizen, any citizen, must speak.

We are living through such a moment now.

For months, the United States has waged what many have called an undeclared war against Iran. The headlines arrive with the rhythm of a drumbeat: schoolchildren killed in airstrikes; senior Iranian leaders targeted and assassinated; peace negotiators bombed while carrying proposals meant to stop the bloodshed.

In the Strait of Hormuz, American and Iranian vessels face each other in a tense maritime standoff, each side daring the other to blink. Oil tankers idle like hostages. The world holds its breath.

And over it all, the American President issues threats that echo across continents, threats to “annihilate” an ancient civilization, one whose poetry predates the English language, whose cities were old when Rome was young, whose memory stretches back to the earliest chapters of human time. These are not the words of diplomacy. They are the words of a nation forgetting its own history, its own fragility, its own moral obligations.

Meanwhile, the American stock market rises and falls like a fever chart. A single mention of ceasefire sends it soaring; a single threat sends it plunging. Oil prices convulse. Working families feel the tremors in their grocery bills, their heating costs, and their commutes. The global poor, who have no voice in these decisions, pay the highest price. A blockade in the Persian Gulf becomes a tax on a mother in Detroit, a farmer in Kenya, a bus driver in São Paulo.

This is what power without mercy looks like. It is not a strength. It is not leadership. It is a form of blindness.

Nations, like individuals, reveal their character in moments of crisis. When a country possesses overwhelming military might, the temptation is always to use it, to believe that force can solve what diplomacy cannot, that threats can replace negotiation, that fear can substitute for respect.

But power without mercy becomes reckless. Power without accountability becomes dangerous. Power without imagination cannot see the humanity of others.

We have seen this pattern before in American history: the belief that overwhelming force can bend the world to our will. It has never worked for long. It has always left scars on foreign soil, on American soldiers, on our national conscience.
The Guest House*

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning, a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor. 

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

For some new delight.

 The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in. 

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

~ by Rumi 

Iran is not merely a geopolitical adversary. It is a civilization. Its poets Hafez, Rumi*, and Ferdowsi shaped the spiritual vocabulary of half the world. Its cities, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tehran, carry the architectural memory of empires and revolutions. Its people have endured invasions, dynasties, sanctions, and isolation, yet they remain rooted in a cultural lineage older than the United States by thousands of years.

To threaten such a civilization with annihilation is not only morally indefensible; it is historically absurd. Civilizations do not vanish because a modern nation wills it. They endure. They outlast the empires that try to dominate them. They survive the bluster of presidents and the ambitions of generals.

Every blockade in the Strait of Hormuz sends shockwaves through the global economy. Every drone strike reverberates through markets. Every threat from the White House becomes a tremor in the price of oil, a tightening in the budgets of families who have never heard of Hormuz and never asked to be part of this conflict.

This is the hidden cost of American foreign policy: the way it reaches into the pockets of ordinary people, destabilizes fragile economies, and turns distant conflicts into local hardships.

War is never contained. It leaks into everything.

I have watched these events unfold with growing unease. I have listened to the pundits, the analysts, the retired generals. I have waited for someone to say plainly what seems obvious: that a nation cannot claim moral leadership while threatening to erase another civilization; that a democracy cannot bomb peace negotiators and call it security; that a superpower cannot kill children and call it collateral. Bombing the infrastructure of Iran at will only goes to prove the Iranian point that they need a nuclear weapon to deter outlandish aggression from the United States. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, this invasion would never have happened, certainly not with the impunity displayed by the Americans.

So, I break my silence. Not because I have all the answers. Not because I speak for any party or ideology. But because conscience demands it.

A nation as powerful as the United States must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. Our strength should be measured not by the reach of our weapons but by the restraint with which we use them. Our greatness should be judged not by the fear we inspire but by the mercy we extend.

Power without mercy is not sustainable. It corrodes a nation’s soul. It erodes the trust of allies. It fuels the resolve of enemies. It destabilizes the world.

We must demand better from our leaders, from our institutions, from ourselves. We must insist on diplomacy, accountability, and a renewed moral imagination. We must remember that the world is not a chessboard but a shared home, fragile and interdependent. The Artemis crew told us as much on their voyage around the backside of the moon. The crew described a universe abounding in darkness, but Earth stood out as a living, breathing, colorful rock in the cosmos. How blessed we are to live on a planet bustling with life. We should at least respect what we have by living peacefully with those who inhabit this oasis surrounded by darkness.

I have been quiet too long. But I am speaking now. And I will continue to speak until mercy returns to the vocabulary of American power.

Author’s Note

I’ve been away from this space longer than I intended. Life pulled me toward the work that pays the bills, necessary work, steady work, but work that leaves little room for the writing that asks more of me. Like many writers, I live in that tension between calling and survival. Some seasons allow both. This one did not.

But even as I tended to the work that keeps the lights on, this piece kept pressing on me. I carried its sentences through long days. I felt the weight of the moment growing heavier, the cost of silence growing sharper. Eventually, the pull to  speak became stronger than the reasons to stay quiet.

So, I’m here again, doing the work I’m meant to do.

If this piece resonates with you, if you believe independent writing still matters in a world this volatile, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be candid: it doesn’t take a crowd to sustain this work, but it does take a committed circle. Thirteen new paid subscriptions would give me the breathing room to keep showing up with the consistency and depth these times demand.

Whether you read freely or choose to support the work, I’m grateful you’re here. Thank you for giving these words a place to land, and for helping ensure I can keep writing when the moment calls for it.

~~~~*I have read Rumi before and use his words here...I use it today to illustrate for each of us to ponder?What could happen if we lost all writers of song, poetry and literatureby destroying another civilization?What would happen if we lost all scientists, doctors, researchers...We would NOT be the world we are today...So why is it that people like this president are allowed to screw aroundAnd deny the rest of us what we need to reach our own dreams?God created each of us and gave these gifts, like Rumi, for all...Don't allow freedom to disappear...
It was 2011 when I first met this wonderful, knowledgeable, and prolific writer who has used his life to speak for good for all people. I am grateful that God brought him into my life! Because at this time in our country, I sometimes find myself unable to find words that speak clearly and objectively, with details sufficient to perhaps change somebody's mind about the crisis we are facing. Yet Michael presents words that touch my mind and soul in the awareness of a man who speaks with the words of God's Truth and Love. This is one of those articles that will/should be shared across the nation and the world and so I send it out to all of you who stop by Book Readers Heaven often... and hope you share it as well...
Because I know that our Merciful Father has once again used Michael to speak of what needs to be said... And I, again, thank Him for bringing Michael into my life so many years ago... Please take the time to share directly from this site or find Michael on Substack, LinkedIn and other sites on which he can be found... Support his work if you can! This is a time when our Black Brethren are being attacked daily in one way or another... the latest is the forced relocation of refugees who had been accepted when a crisis occurred and a call for help was made... This president has no code of honor that helps him restrain and consider just how the people will be placed in harm's way... Indeed, he routinely places millions in harm's way daily, doesn't he?
I, too, have found that I must speak of this crisis as much as possible. I had not seen this post originally shared in April, because of my own medical issues, but I'm so glad I was led this morning to think of Michael and have reposted it as per my agreement with him to be an ongoing contributor to this blog... 
Do you have something you'd like to share as well? Let me know and let's talk!
Gabby

Cascade House Announces New Book - Where In The Hell Is Heaven by Terry Bushell

 NEWS RELEASE...

Harold Michael Harvey, Publisher is pleased to announce

 the latest book to be published 

by Cascade Publishing Company:

Terry Bushell’s Where in The Hell is Heaven

The press announces its third major release of the

year, solidifying its reputation as a rising home

for

bold, boundary‑pushing new authors.

Cascade House is proud to announce that it has been selected to publish Where in the Hell Is Heaven: Faith Forged Through The Fire, the forthcoming work by author Terry Bushell. A fearless, unflinching exploration of faith, fracture, and the search for spiritual truth.

Bushell’s manuscript brings a fresh, provocative voice to contemporary Christian literature.

This marks Cascade Publishing House’s third major offering of the year, and the emergence as a go‑to destination for new, creative, and boundary‑pushing authors. With each project, Cascade continues to expand its editorial reach, championing writers whose work challenges assumptions, deepens public conversation, and refuses to settle for easy answers.

Publisher Quote —
Harold Michael Harvey, Cascade Publishing House

“Terry Bushell’s Where in the Hell Is Heaven is exactly the kind of
courageous, truth‑seeking work Cascade was built to champion! It refuses easy answers and speaks directly to readers who are wrestling honestly with their faith and their lived experience. We are honored to bring this powerful voice into the world. With this being our third major release of the year, Cascade Publishing House is rapidly becoming a home for new authors who are unafraid to push boundaries and expand the conversation.”

Where in the Hell Is Heaven invites readers into the raw interior of a
believer wrestling honestly with God, self, and the contradictions of lived experience. It is a book that does not comfort so much as confront, and in doing so, opens a necessary space for readers who have long felt unseen in traditional faith narratives.

Publication details will be announced in the coming weeks.

Media Contact: Cascade Publishing House
hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com

******

Harold Michael Harvey, Ongoing Legal Contributor and Friend Calls for Courage, Endurance, and Faith to Fight Once Again White Supremachists!

 

Elaine Harvey, now 97, as an 18-year-old, rode her bicycle to register to vote.

Before I speak about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, I must begin where my family’s voting story truly begins with my third grandfather, Joseph Harvey, who registered to vote in 1868 during Reconstruction. He stepped forward in that brief window when America seemed willing to imagine Black citizenship as real and enforceable. But after Reconstruction collapsed, no one in my family voted again until my mother, an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia studying history at Fort Valley State College, cast her ballot in the 1948 Presidential election, culminating eighty years of silence, eighty years of fear, and eighty years of democracy denied

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling prohibiting the use of race in drawing congressional districts is not an isolated legal decision. It is part of a much longer American story, one that stretches from Reconstruction to Jim Crow, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the present moment. And if you know that story, you recognize the pattern immediately.

Every time Black Americans have gained political power, the system has found new ways to take it back. I know this not just from books or archives. I know it because my own family lived it.

In the late 1940s, my mother was an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia who wanted to register to vote. Her father refused to take her to town. Not because he didn’t believe in voting, but because he feared the Klan would burn his house down or slaughter the family if they saw him escorting a young Black woman to the voter registrar in the courthouse.

So, she rode her bicycle, alone, unprotected, determined, and teased by her siblings and cousins who did not yet understand the importance of voting.

When she arrived, the white registrar handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and said, “Read this.” He expected her to stumble. She didn’t. She recited it verbatim, without looking down.

“I said read it,” he barked.

She read it with perfect diction. He snatched the book from her hands before she could finish the first paragraph. Then he shoved a sheet of paper toward her and said, “Sign this.” She did, becoming the first member of the family to register to vote since President Hayes removed the federal troops from Georgia.

That was the price of Black citizenship in the American South: humiliation, danger, and the constant threat of violence. And yet she persisted.

Fast forward to 1970. I was an 18‑year‑old student at Tuskegee Institute. Between classes one noonday, my brother and I walked down to the Macon County Courthouse to register. I grew up hearing my mom recount those harrowing moments in the Crawford County, Georgia, Courthouse. I expected a fight. I expected a test. I expected the same hostility my mother faced.

But the registrar handed us an application. Five years had passed since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Five years, and the world had changed.

That fall, I cast my first vote for Johnny Ford, the city’s first Black mayor. That moment was not an accident. It was not a gift. It was the direct result of federal protection, the Voting Rights Act doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Without the 1965 Voting Rights Act, neither my mother nor her progenies would have been able to participate fully in American democracy. We were denied all the rights and privileges of being Americans. For generations, Black voters were packed, cracked, diluted, and erased through district lines drawn with surgical precision. Racial gerrymandering, when used to remedy discrimination, was not a distortion of democracy. It was a correction.

It was the only way to counteract a century of maps designed to ensure Black people could not elect candidates of their choice. The Supreme Court understood this in 1965. It was understood in 1982. It was understood in 1986. It was understood in 2023.

But in 2026, the Court declared that race cannot be used in drawing districts, even when race was the very tool used to deny Black political power in the first place.

At the same time, the Court continues to allow partisan gerrymandering, even though in the South, race and party are deeply intertwined. A map drawn to disadvantage Democrats will almost always disadvantage Black voters. The Court knows this. Everyone knows this. This reality is unlikely to change until the Republican Party changes its public policy initiatives towards Black and Brown people.

The result is a legal paradox with devastating real‑world consequences: You may not use race to remedy discrimination, but you may use the party to entrench it. This is not neutrality. This is not colorblindness. This is a rollback. The kind of rollback that Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, then President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, railed against when President Ronald Regan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Thirty-nine years later, the Supreme Court now has the numbers to turn back the clock and make America the exclusive domain of White men.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not simply reinterpret the law. It reopens the door to the very practices the Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate. It rolls back the clock on gains Black Americans have fought for since the end of enslavement.

My mother’s bicycle ride. My walk to the courthouse in 1970. The election of Black mayors, councilmembers, legislators, senators, and representatives across the South. All of it was made possible by federal protections that the Court is now dismantling piece by piece.

We have seen this pattern before: Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, The Civil Rights Movement, Shelby County v. Holder, and now Louisiana v. Callais.

The arc of voting rights in America is not a straight line. It is a struggle, a push-and-pull between progress and retrenchment.

The Court’s ruling does not erase the courage of those who fought for the vote. It does not erase the memory of my mother standing in that courthouse, or the registrar who tried to break her spirit, so she would not teach children she would later have the importance of voting. It does not erase the pride I felt voting for Tuskegee’s first Black mayor.

But it does remind us that rights won can be rights lost, and that the work of democracy is never finished.

If the Court will not protect the franchise, then the people must. If the law retreats, memory must advance. If the arc bends backward, we must bend forward.

Because the story of Black voting rights in America is not just a legal story. It is a family story. It is a community story. It is a story written in courage, danger, persistence, and hope. It is a story we must continue to tell, especially now.

May the courage of those who came before us, from Joseph Harvey in 1868, to my mother on her bicycle in 1948, to every Black voter who stood in a courthouse line with danger at their back, guide us in this moment. May their steadiness become our strategy, their endurance our inheritance, and their faith in democracy our mandate. The struggle did not begin with us, and it must not end with us. May we walk forward carrying their light.

~~~~

When you wake up each morning and there is only more and more news about the devastation happening in the United States and across the world because of rich power-hungry white men, there can be no different response for me than to wonder - How are they getting away with this madness! How can you have a constitution that has existed for hundreds of years, yet allow, little by little, the corruption of the people who have worked behind the scenes to gain control, using private money of those who want only one thing--to be more powerful, and to do anything they want... 

You know folks, up until 2015, I thought I did anything I wanted... But my needs and desires are minimal... Having a good book to read and a cat or two to provide warmth and comfort was sufficient for it was in accordance with what God has provided for us throughout our lives. Sure it was hard growing up, with only my mother working to provide for 4 children. But we made it through...

And there was always somebody worse off than we were... 

I met Marian Davis when I was in the 7th grade and we became friends right away. She was the first Black individual I got to know personally. That she was Black was never an issue--and it was like that all of my life, up until a man whose father had taught him to hate had run for political office and immediately started lying to people... I had already interacted with a number of white men in power who were more concerned about being "in command" than in my getting my job done... It was a lesson that immediately prepared me to question just how a man such as the obvious racist was actually elected into the president's position!

But nothing could have prepared us for what has occurred since the first day of his second term! Not even the MAGA group who voted him in and are now facing, along with the rest of us, just how much he actually meant when he said he wanted to make our country great again...

You know what I mean...before Black people could vote and/or hold public office... And, soon, I'll predict, the'll be trying to do it to women as well... I was an Affirmative Action female and saw what happened to women at that time... There was also the stirring of resentment from white men when a Black man was hired for a job he had applied for. Key was that they didn't care why the affirmative action, equal pay for equal work, and all the other laws that came into existence which required them to "work to earn promotions" rather than the good ole boy process that was the rule at that time...

The thing is, folks, is that there is more hate than any of us ever imagined. There are many who have no background in any form of religion, but there has been a major change for many who claim they are Christian, while, at the same time, are willing to turn against those who are different in some way. It's wrong and we who learned and listened to the call to Love Our Neighbors and did so, can't imagine why all of this is happening... Especially when they use religion as a reason for their violence and other criminal goals of more and more money than they could ever spend...

In any event, clearly the Supreme Court has also joined the move to control by illegal actions, such as granting immunity for anything and everything done by the president while in office--what nonsense! Just the one thing, the destruction of a historically preserved White House to please one man makes it quite clear that the United States government is out of control...

And voting to stop a political party from destroying our democracy is the only answer... 

I was hoping and watching for Michael to write about what is happening. I've added a number of videos for documentation, such as stopping an election that has already started, claiming it was an emergency...  His wisdom and strength speaks out for all of us... Thank you for sharing your family's history, about the fear of actually taking the advantage to vote... It is certainly understandable, especially seeing how this president has gone after any non-white people here and around the world...

Please remember that we are All God's Children!

Gabby

Looking Backward From a Murder to Test Power - Minnesota - Forward to War in Iran - Harold Michael Harvey With Response - Open Memoir

 

The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis has already become a national flashpoint, not only because of the violence itself, but because of what it reveals about the fragility of truth when power feels threatened.

My own experience in Hancock County, Georgia, nearly thirty years ago, taught me that this fragility is not new. It is woven into the American legal fabric, appearing whenever authority senses a challenge and the system feels compelled to choose between accountability and self-protection.

But if the first essay was about what happened, and the second about how the law bends, and the third about why escalation occurs, then this companion piece must ask a different question:

What must we do now?

Because the story cannot end on a note of outrage, it cannot end with analysis. It cannot end with grief.

This moment demands something more complex:  reform, accountability, and civic courage, not as slogans, but as commitments.

Reform is needed to change the structure that enables abuse. Reform is not a matter of tweaking policy. It is a matter of restructuring the conditions that allow violence, distortion, and impunity to flourish. Independent investigations must be just that, independent and non-negotiable.

When federal agents kill a citizen, the investigation cannot be controlled by the same agency that pulled the trigger. Minneapolis exposed the danger of allowing federal authorities to seize evidence, restrict access, and shape the narrative before facts can breathe.

Reform requires:

• independent state-level investigative
• automatic recusal of involved agencies
• transparent release of evidence

Without independence, justice is a performance, not a process. Local courts must be insulated from local power. Hancock County taught me that justice collapses when law enforcement and the judiciary share bloodlines, alliances, or political debts. Reform must address:

• conflicts of interest
• judicial selection processes
• small‑county vulnerabilities

A courtroom cannot be a family reunion. It must be a forum for truth.

The use‑of‑force standard must be rewritten for the 21st century. The legal standard of “reasonable fear” has become a loophole wide enough to drive a tank through. Reform must redefine:

• What constitutes a threat
• When deadly force is justified
• How officer perception is evaluated

Fear cannot be the sole arbiter of life and death.

Accountability is the most challenging work in a system built to resist it. Accountability is not punishment. It is the recognition that power must answer to the people it serves.

For instance, there must, of necessity, be narrative accountability. We must understand that before legal accountability comes narrative accountability; therefore, the willingness to confront falsehoods, distortions, and official stories that collapse under scrutiny.

In Minneapolis, the rush to label Renee Nicole Good a “terrorist” was not just rhetoric. It was an attempt to foreclose accountability before it began.

Accountability requirements include, but are not limited to:

• challenging official narratives
• elevating eyewitness accounts
• refusing to let the state define the victim

Truth must not be outsourced to those with the most to lose.

Also, narrative accountability must be followed closely by institutional accountability. Institutions, like all entities, protect themselves. They always have, and perhaps, always will.

Accountability requirements include, but are not limited to:

• civilian oversight with real power
• consequences for obstruction
• transparency in disciplinary processes

A system that cannot discipline itself cannot be trusted to discipline others. The inability to discipline itself is a guiding principle and trumps all others.

Lastly, there must be a sense of cultural accountability. Law enforcement culture must be confronted, not with hostility, but with honesty. The warrior mindset, the group loyalty, the reflexive escalation: these are not individual failings. They are cultural norms.

Accountability requirements include, but are not limited to:

• training that prioritizes restraint
• leadership that models humility
• a shift from dominance to service

Culture is the soil from which behavior grows. As an old farm boy myself, bad soil makes cultivation a waste of time and a no-hope proposition for a productive yield.

There is one overriding salient fact. Civic courage is the ingredient without which reform fails. Reform and accountability are structural. Civic courage is personal.

Reform is the willingness of ordinary people to:

• speak when silence is safer
• question when obedience is expected
• stand firm when power rushes toward them

I learned a lesson about standing firm when power rushes toward you in Hancock County when I turned around on that courthouse staircase. I am certain the Sheriff and his posse would have pushed me down that staircase and lied about having no choice but to send me tumbling down three flights of stairs.

The people of Minneapolis are learning it now as they demand answers amid federal resistance. Civic courage is not dramatic. It is steady. It is persistent. It is the refusal to let fear dictate the boundaries of justice.

There must be courage to follow the example of James Baldwin and bear witness, to be willing to tell no better than one has seen. The videos of Good’s killing exist because several people dared to record it. The truth survived because law-abiding citizens refused to look away.

There must be courage to challenge military action on U.S. soil. Reform begins when citizens challenge the systems that claim to serve them. It starts when lawyers file motions that anger sheriffs, when families demand transparency, when communities refuse to accept official stories that contradict what they saw with their own eyes.

Notwithstanding the above, the United States citizens must have the courage to imagine something better. Civic courage is not only resistance. It is imagination. The belief that a different kind of justice is possible. A justice not built on fear, not built on dominance, and not built on institutional self-protection. A justice built on truth.

There is much work ahead. The killing of Renee Nicole Good is not just a tragedy. It is a test. A test of whether we will allow the old patterns to repeat, the escalation, the narrative distortion, the institutional shielding, or whether we will insist on something better.

Reform is the blueprint. Accountability is the mechanism. Civic courage is the fuel. And if we commit to all three, then perhaps the next time power feels threatened, the reflex will not be violence, but restraint. Not distortion, but truth. Not impunity, but justice.

This moment, this precious liberty, demands nothing less.

You know folks, I will be eternally thankful that I met and became friends with Harold Michael Harvey through his books. He is one of the most knowledgeable, intelligent, and caring individuals I have ever known... He has much to teach each of us who come into his sphere of legal coverage--this time, it's murder... I refuse to call it anything but the real meaning of what has been happening during the last months in the United States... Discrimination, threats, DEI mandates, and more has already costs millions of lies. I, of course, include the very first act of selfishness when the USAID part of the government was eliminated and money transferred to destructive actions initiated by this president... The cruelty has been outstandingly obvious and aimed directly to those he hates most. We all know who they are, don't we?

I started with this first murder so that I could move forward from it to the set of almost 180 teachers and female students who were murdered in Iran. Let's be clear. I do not see those children any differently than those children who are being separated from their parents or used to capture their parents, or thrown into "death" camps for no legal reason. We have also lost citizens by this war that was called for No Reason... No Reason that is accepted by anybody other than those MAGA that still supports a man who...has...no...heart...

The first video shown above illustrates exactly what happens when he is caught--he lies... He claims that he knows nothing about the death of those children through the use of out-of-data maps for Iran! Yet, it is very clear to all of us that on another whim he decided to set another war in motion! A war that evolved since Trump, himself, pulled out of the Iran Accord that had been in existence during his first term...

People like DJT think that we do not remember all of his sins... We do... So don't even think that anybody else made the decision to add to the ongoing war between Israel and Iran/Hamas et.al. When he changed the Defense Department to War, we all feared what was to happen... And it didn't take him long to move into destruction in parts of the world as well as in the United States... 

I wonder, really wonder, did the Supreme Court Justices and others who supported Trump in his madness, know what was to happen? But then there is this...

And, of course, ending with another Last Word

So...why does Trump continue to support Putin who has supposedly been giving Iran the location of the Americans...who have been killed or are now in the hospital from injuries!?

May God Be With All His Children Everywhere!

GABBY