In 2017, I visited the House of Flowers in Belgrade, Serbia, the mausoleum that holds the remains of Yugoslavia’s once-indomitable leader, Josip Broz Tito, and his wife, Jovanka. The site feels less like a tomb and more like a time machine. Inside, the relics of Tito’s rule transport you to a moment when Yugoslavia stood proudly at the helm of the Non-Aligned Movement, commanding respect as a bridge between East and West.
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More than 120 million people have been displaced from their homes due to war, climate change, political instability, and oppression in the past few years, a figure that has doubled in the last decade. Millions more are living in vulnerable situations as stateless individuals, frequently unable to exercise even their most basic rights.
The disconcerting speeches of Hegseth and Trump to an assembly of silent, stone-faced military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025, revealed three intertwined visions of how armed force should be used to ensure security in our moment. All are familiar, but all three are becoming obsolete. Hardly extinct, but completely outmoded by current and future conditions. A fourth vision of what the mission could be for both our own and our adversaries’ militaries includes a radical consideration of looming climate effects upon military mission and strategy.
During some of the large anti-war demonstrations during the 1960s some of the protesters gave flowers to the troops faced off against them. In the 1967 March on the Pentagon it was the 503rd Military Police Battalion, and elsewhere the National Guard was deployed. An iconic photo from 1967 shows a young man placing a flower into a soldier’s gun barrel during the protest. Let’s bring that custom back when the US military occupies your town in 2025, but this time let’s include a note along with the flower.
Words fail me – but they’re all I have, or so it seems as I sit here at a table in my new apartment. They ain’t enough! Not as I read the news and feel . . . something . . . rise, politically and socially, and presume to be the American future.
Thirty years later we have reached THE EXACT OPPOSITE POINT, where our own government is handing over these lands to extractive industries to mine for coal and cut down old growth forests. The Secretary of the Department of Interior, a former official in the oil and gas industry, is said to have chortled,
A president bent on consolidating power can disguise a bloodless massacre as efficiency. Loyalists are promoted, independent thinkers pushed aside, while a compliant military command is cultivated to support a coup. Generals are trained to analyze data, detect patterns, and anticipate threats from abroad. If they cannot recognize this pattern emerging from within, they will have turned a blind eye to the peril now stalking the Republic.
The Power in Money and Politics
Hiring the hit men
There are none as blind as those who refuse to see