Who Heals America
On punk rock, what I've searched for on YouTube late at night, and the savior that may not exist
I have often wondered, and even researched lately, what can heal America. My readers come from all over the world. 66% of the 120k are in the USA, so it’s something I think about a lot. I have lots of late night conversations with my little AI friends and we talk about all kinds of things, but lately it’s often about what or who could heal this fractured nation, whether it would be Jesus, God, Olivia Rodrigo, or some weird kid staring at his shoes at a bus stop in Toledo wondering why he can’t grow a goatee.
People seem to think I write about money. Well, yes, I write about money and capital, in the same way that Bruce Springsteen writes about America. In the same way that Jack Antonoff writes about America. We’re all from New Jersey, and we’re all annoying m*****f*******. But I write about it for the same reasons I wrote (and played) punk rock for a decade, to unpack the way that energy moves from point a to point b, and who gets it and who doesn’t, and why.
Something changed on or around November 8, 2016. It doesn’t matter what political party you belong to, or who you voted for. People just feel different. I’ve noticed a perpetual sense of exhaustion in American society. It began sort of softly at first, in the first year or two, and then it deepened sharply during the pandemic. I thought people would finally sleep hard again in 2021 or 2022 but it just didn’t really happen. It’s like people “sleep” at night, but they wake up feeling like they’re still sort of asleep.
I sit up at night on my couch watching YouTube videos about all of the great American cities that have collapsed into ruin (Cleveland, New Orleans, Rochester, the list goes on), looking for patterns, and I’ve learned many things. Don’t build an interstate, don’t build suburbs, etc - it’s sort of a little late for most of these warnings about urban decline. But I’ve searched for a different kind of history lesson. I’ve looked for societies that have managed to heal themselves. The examples are few and far between.
The closest thing I could find was perhaps post-war Germany, but that’s a messy analog. They spent 15 years after the war in a workaholic haze (the Wirtschaftswunder period) and didn’t even begin to confront truth and reconciliation until, say, 23 years later (the 68er student movement, kids confronting their parents “Mom and Dad, what did you do during the war?”). Structurally, healing wasn’t really addressed until probably 40 years later. (the president finally says out loud what everybody knew, Germany acknowledges their guilt).
Something like what happened in Indonesia in the 1960s doesn’t count as healing. When you impose order by murdering somewhere between 500,000 and a million people, between half a percent and possibly two percent of your entire population, that is not healing in any sense of the word.
So if killing your way to order doesn't work, what about the other direction? If we pray, will the nation heal?
Well, has it ever worked before?
I looked for examples of nations praying their ways to collective healing and I was not able to find any. The closest thing I could find to this was in South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They designed it as a spiritual process, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The sessions opened with prayer, and the framework was built on Ubuntu, the idea that my humanity is bound up in your humanity, and the Christian theology of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
So, perpetrators confessed publicly, victims testified. Their intended goal was actually healing, not just justice. Like, on the surface, this sounds awesome.
Here’s what actually happened.
It completely sh*t the bed. The spiritual reconciliation? Sure, it was real but the material conditions didn’t change at all. White South Africans kept the land, wealth, and all of the economic infrastructure.
I guess they did some “soul work,” but I haven’t read much about any redistribution. Basically it was forgiveness without restitution. So, as far as documentation goes, this was the most sincere attempt at prayerful national healing in modern history and outcomes-wise it was complete f******* b***s***.
The top 10% of South Africans own 85% of the wealth. The bottom half owe more than they own. Neither of those numbers changed after the TRC. So maybe the “soul work” worked, but it didn’t change anything. I am not saying this to make you cynical or because I am cynical. Quite the opposite. I am a realist.
People make big, big changes not when they are sad but when they are big mad.
People make big changes like getting divorced or walking into a 12-step meeting when they are s*** outta luck and totally out of options.
And that is called a crisis.
When you have a nation of about 349 million people, there are 170 million working Americans. Conservative estimates say AI’s about to vaporize somewhere between 10 and 15 million of those jobs in the next few years. It’s not in some far away year like 2040 or something. It’s now.
I’m not being irreverent. Yeah, I sell software and have kids and also need to eat. But I also need to know how we get through this, and I don’t think that’s a partisan question.
One thing that I do know is that OpenAI has about 19-24 months of cash runway left. Anthropic has a rosier picture, they could maybe break even by ‘27. We don’t exactly know where this AI thing is going. Frankly, we don’t know where the USA is going either. I think there are about four paths, and none of them are that f****** great. If my kids asked me, I would be honest with them. But I wouldn’t be a total downer. I would just tell them what I would do.
Like, I grew up in the 80s. I grew up watching Red Dawn. That was some bleak shit. I think I was seven the first time I saw that. The entire town got taken over by the Russians in the first five minutes. So these scenarios are pretty chill by my standards.
Gilded Age Again: Pressure builds for about another 10-20 years (nearly one generation), but structural inequality becomes so damn bad that reform movements (whether the government agrees or not) make quick hard change. 100-120 years ago this looked like labor uprisings, dead workers, muckraking journalism, and decades of grinding political fights. Back in the 1920s, it only addressed the dollars and cents and not even racial issues.
Germany Path: Society has to break down so, so completely that it is impossible to deny present reality. In a scenario like this society will be completely numb for almost a generation (i.e. 15-25 years) and then it can address what actually happened (25 years of deep, slow painful reckoning). This is a multi-generational timeline and it is deeply painful.
Indonesia: Rule of law, imposed by force. Already happening to some degree. Total compliance, no healing. Minneapolis Jan 2026 is pretty close to this.
Genuine Recovery/Kid From Toledo: My background is sales, and in sales, you’re not gonna believe this but we don’t bet a lot on things that have never happened. This is the thing that's never happened. This would look like enough individuals doing their own work - things like recovery, therapy, genuine spiritual practice, whatever you want to call it. This would make the culture shift from the bottom up without a single catalyzing crisis. It would be slow, and invisible and there would be no headlines, no leader, no movement. Just a lot of people getting honest one at a time. I would love this. On a municipal or community level I will do everything in my power to make this happen. I am not a cynical guy.
So, that’s the thing. Tribalism isn’t just morally exhausting.
It actually destroys capital. It misallocates resources - it takes the wrong stuff and puts it in the wrong place. It makes LPs freeze and not write checks. It makes fund managers hedge politically instead of investing in a smart way. It breaks the thing that makes energy move from point A to point B. You don’t want that.
So that is why I write about Jesus, God, Olivia Rodrigo and that kid at the bus stop in Toledo.