On Trump, Putin, and the Veiled Axis from Kyiv to Caracas“
In recent weeks, I’ve watched with growing unease as foreign policy decisions under Donald Trump unfold with a peculiar symmetry—one that echoes, benefits, or subtly enables the strategic priorities of Vladimir Putin. While these choices are framed by officials as matters of diplomacy, security, or immigration control, the pattern that emerges—when traced across geography and timing—is harder to dismiss. It suggests not only a convergence of interests but also a convergence of silence, of things not said, not questioned, not confronted.
A sharply argued opinion piece in The Washington Post by Marian Da Silva Parra, a scholar at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, called out the administration’s expanded travel bans for what they are: policies that punish Venezuelan dissidents and effectively strengthen Nicolás Maduro’s grip by allowing him to portray his opponents as foreign threats. But what is more telling than the piece itself is the fact that it appeared only as an op-ed, not as a subject of sustained front-page reporting. For all its substance, the critique is offered through a medium that functions more like commentary than alert.
At the same time, U.S. support for Ukraine is being retracted and reissued with increasing hesitation. Aid deliveries were quietly paused and only resumed after public pressure following the July 4 missile strike on Kyiv. Multilateral sanctions coordination has reportedly faltered, and new diplomatic pressure is being placed on Ukraine to accept a ceasefire—one the Kremlin has shown no real interest in reciprocating.
These are not isolated gestures. They land, again and again, in Moscow’s favor.
This invites a broader question: Are we witnessing the quiet shaping of a two-front geopolitical shift—from Eastern Europe to the Western Hemisphere—where American policy, whether by intention or inertia, now facilitates Russia’s global posture? Or is this merely the result of domestic calculations with unintended consequences abroad?
There is, to be clear, no proof of deliberate collusion. But outcomes matter. A weakened Ukraine. An emboldened Maduro. A distracted and demoralized press. A public fed more performance than substance. The effect is less of a conspiracy than of a stage being set—unexamined, unchallenged, and disturbingly aligned with a worldview in which democratic resistance is treated as destabilizing and authoritarian consolidation as order restored.
In such a climate, perception is not a matter of optics. It becomes the only terrain left to navigate what official language refuses to name.
What follows does not simplify or announce itself. It moves inward—through observation, thought, and the tension between clarity and disappearance. The soliloquy keeps to its own course: neither performing nor explaining, but sustaining an interior gaze. To read it is not to be guided, but to remain with it—where thinking becomes presence, and language measures what endures.
Soliloquy
Once upon a time, there lived within the writer a creative energy—its force and passion for self-expression—that sustained him. It was not summoned; it simply endured. So arresting was this presence that he could not discipline it into routine or mold it into a pattern for physical endurance. He could not pause it for walks or for any activity not already part of the act of creation itself. He resorted to standing while writing, walking while reading, sleeping while thinking.
His experience was never an affliction to be named or cured, but a life to be lived on its own terms—a creative testament to the fullness of being, not a clinical footnote to someone else’s definition. Choosing not to be defined by it honored both its agency and his lifelong work. It was a condition to be understood alone, even if shared in writing—yet never in search of validation.
Within the boundaries of personal insight, it revealed itself as a form of devotional absorption, one that brought dignity even in moments of physical strain and aging.
His refusal of validation was not an opposition to authority, but a denial that any external pressure should exist.
Some said there was nothing unique in anyone, that all expression merely reflected what had been learned. The writer did not disagree, yet he knew there was more to being than what one received—even from experience itself. Perhaps no one was unique, but each voice was distinct—formed from the sum total of an existence that could not be equated. From a random mixture, an ineffable summation, something emerged: something irreplaceable and irreproducible—not because it exceeded others, but because it belonged only to the one who bore it.
He feared madness—not as spectacle, but as the slow drift of meaning into isolation. The force within him was real, yet not entirely satisfying unless it discovered truth—truth that resonated not only within his own logic but in the logic of others. How else could one know oneself if intelligence remained solitary? Without echo, thought became a sealed chamber: intricate, yes, but airless. He did not seek certainty; he sought correspondence. It was not solitude he feared, but becoming untranslatable.
Life now appeared transient, precarious—timeless in sensation, yet embedded in time. It moved furtively—through failings, disappointments, and sudden moments of radiant clarity. Nothing could be reproduced. But he had come to accept that—not because it was lost, but because even memory altered what it held. What repeated was not the moment, but the act of noticing—the deepening of attention. And so he did not live to preserve what was, but to remain present as it changed. There was no going back, only going further—more attentively, more awake.
For him, inspiration didn’t strike—it settled. It arrived not with answers, but with permission to begin.
There was no ritual. No dramatic turning point. Only the canvas, the scent of oil, the shifting light across the floor. One day folding into the next, until the work became its own weather—sometimes clear, sometimes stormy, but always present.
He believed in attention, not mastery.
What moved him wasn’t how the painting was achieved at any given moment, but when deconstructed he had to reclaim it, not out of skill, but out of necessity—when the hand moved before thought, and something more honest than intention began to lead. And when it happened, it asked everything of him.
Any one watching—anyone but him—would have seen very little. A trace. A pause. A slight adjustment. But inside, something in him was listening—not to himself, but to the world, the material, the echo of a form not yet known.
He didn’t make work to be remembered, though he carried each piece like a child of his. He made it to stay alive. And when he encountered a finished painting years later, it stirred him physically. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was the smell of pigment, the sound of bristles, the grief of something nearly realized—lost, then found again.
Some days, the work moved with a kind of ease. Other days, it refused. He learned not to chase either.
He always began without knowing what he was after. A shade. A flicker of transparency. Astroke that unsettled the surface. Often the brush would stop midair, suspended while he waited for the next move to reveal itself. Sometimes nothing came. Those pieces sat untouched for weeks—a quiet unease in the corner of the room.
He lived alongside their silence.
The studio was never clean, but always ordered. Rags folded. Jars fogged with old turpentine. Walls bearing soft outlines of past canvases. The mess wasn’t careless. It was lived-in—not careless, just lived-in. Notes of Goethe’s pyramidal harmony hung besides mineral samples, sketches, color wheels, torn letters from art dealers. Not for revelation—but for proximity.
Not every piece held. Some failed completely. Others, losing urgency layer by layer, failed gradually, He kept those too—not as records, but as reminders. Where the hand had gone quiet. Where the work had ceased to ask. Yet they became platforms—spaces for later returns, for deeper entry.
His days had no fixed schedule, though a rhythm formed over the years—a long devotion, interrupted, resumed, endured.
Now, he arrived late morning from the City. The studio held the faint scent of wax and turpentine, laced with something older—dust, fabric, memory. He opened a window if weather allowed. Not for light but for air. For movement. For the slow turning of the fans like breath.
He made tea. Sometimes he played Bach, or a pianist, whose fingers pressed deeper into the keys than others. Other mornings: National Public Radio. A poet, a scientist, someone trying to say the impossible in ordinary words. He liked the trying more than the saying.
He painted standing—rarely seated. Some days he moved constantly between easel, sink, and mixing table. Other days he barely moved at all. Just watched.
Lunch was simple. Bread. Fruit. A little cheese. Sometimes eggs, lentils, soup across several days. He didn’t eat out much—not out principle, but because it broke the thread.
If tired, he would lie on the couch at the back wall. Twenty, thirty minutes. No more. And when he woke, the light had shifted again—slanted, softened, more forgiving. The canvas looked changed. As if it had waited for his absence.
Late afternoons were often the best. A second wind, free of pressure. There was a looseness in the air, born from knowing no one would knock or call. He spoke to the work then—not aloud, but inwardly. This tint? Too warm. This stroke? Too sure. Let it break. Let it breathe. Let it speak without saying.
Sometimes the medium resisted. A brush faltered. A gesture collapsed. He didn’t fight. He gave it space. If he stayed patient, it found its rhythm again.
Not everything reached completion. Some works remained open—not abandoned, simply finished enough. Others came suddenly, like music that plays without lifting the fingers.
By evening, he cleaned his tools. Never rushed. He wiped the palette. Rinsed the jars. Hung the rags to dry. It was a kind of thanks. Not to the painting. To the day.
Then lights out. Door closed. Nothing declared. Nothing completed. Yet something always moved forward.
Grief, too, remained. It lived in the room like dust—settled in corners, clinging to stretchers still bare, woven into old white sheets.
His sister’s illness came slowly, then all at once—while Adagio in G Minor played low across the studio. He painted through it. Not to escape, but because stopping would have undone him. In the silence between strokes, he could feel her breath weakening. Sometimes he imagined she could see the work from wherever she was. That each finished piece carried a word he hadn’t dared to say aloud. She would have understood. She always had.
Later, when his former lover died—alone, unexpectedly, in Berlin—he stopped painting altogether. The studio felt still in a way he couldn’t enter. Even the canvas turned away from him. When he returned, it was with a muted palette. Dry. Indifferent. The first brush stroke broke in two. He left it. And continued.
Desire, too, had quieted. Not vanished. Just softened. In youth it had been urgent, irrepressible. Now it hovered—an echo that came and went. He didn’t shame it or perform it. He lived beside it, the way one lives beside a field once burned, now slowly greening.
Grief didn’t interrupt the work. It deepened it. Not in theme—but in texture. Some of those paintings seemed familiar to others. But he knew what they held—the weight of holding steady while coming apart inside.
Even now, some colors recalled a bedside. A winter walk. The sound of someone no longer breathing. A flat grey. A blue once brilliant, now tempered between longing and restraint.
He wondered sometimes about that tension.
But when he painted, stillness returned.
Seventeen years ago, when chemotherapy ended, the days grew quieter.
There was no triumph. Just a slow return to rhythm—different now. The body had changed. So had the mind. He couldn’t paint for hours without fatigue. The gestures once fluid were heavier, more tentative.
He didn’t resist it.
The studio remained, but the center of gravity shifted. Where once he reached for a brush, now he reached for a pen. At first, just notes. Fragments. A way to hold the day together. Then came sentences. Paragraphs. Not about himself, not directly. About time. Memory. Presence. Writing became a solace. A way to shape what the body could no longer carry. A place to move, still, with care.
It wasn’t the end of painting. Just a pause. A migration. Writing required its own attention, its own patience. And he recognized in that a familiar devotion.
Sometimes, the canvas still called. It would rest untouched for weeks. Then one day, without announcement, he would begin again.
The two practices lived side by side. Some days the brush. Some days the page. No hierarchy. No regret. Only the quiet persistence of a life still unfolding.
There is no final piece. No last word.
He understands now: a life is not made of things finished, but of gestures continued—marks made in good faith, even when no one is watching. A sentence begun. A color mixed. A canvas turned to the wall—not in shame, but because it had said enough.
He no longer asks what comes next. That question no longer troubles him.
If anything remains, it will not be the name, or the archive, or even the objects themselves. It will be the integrity of attention—the way he returned, again and again, to meet the moment as it was.
Not to make something lasting. But to live, briefly, in truth.
*
Ricardo F Morin Tortolero
Bala Cynwyd, Pa., June 14, 2025
Editor:Billy Bussell Thompson
Author’s Note
This piece, like much of what I’ve made in recent years, exists because of those who have sustained me.
To David Lowenberger—whose love and steadfastness give my life its rhythm. Without him, continuity itself would falter.
To José Luis Montero, my first art teacher, whose presence early on became a compass I’ve never stopped following.
To my parents, whose quiet influence shaped my regard for form, devotion, and care.
And always, to my friend and editor, Billy Bussell Thompson, whose voice lives quietly in mine.
Writing, silence, and the art of understanding in stillness
*
Ricardo Morín Triangulation 4 22″ x 30″ Graphite on paper 2006
To my sister Bonnie
*
Ricardo F. Morín
June 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Author’s Note
This reflection was originally drafted before The Ethics of Perception, Part I, yet it belongs to the same inquiry into attention, understanding, and ethical relation.
There are moments when the truest form of intimacy is silence. At other times, it’s the quiet labor of reaching for the right word—however incomplete—that brings us closer. Expression, in this light, is not just a vehicle for communication, but an act of care.
To speak, to withhold, to write, to listen—each choice carries a particular weight. Intimacy lives in these gestures: not in grand declarations, but in the ethics of how we reveal ourselves—and how we receive what another dares to offer. What follows is not a theory, but a reflection on how intimacy appears in expression—and in its absence.
I. Prelude: in the pause between words
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when something becomes intimate. It isn’t always a touch, or a glance, or even a confession. Sometimes, it’s just a pause—a shared pause—between one word and the next, when both people sense that something true is either about to be said or has just been said, without quite naming it.
Once, sitting face to face, I watched someone I cared for stare silently out the window. I said nothing either. There was no gesture, no disclosure, no clarifying words. And yet the silence didn’t feel empty—it felt full. In that stillness, something passed between us—not a message, not even an understanding, but a kind of permission:
To exist without explanation. To be present without having to perform.
That moment stayed with me not because it was dramatic, but because it was unplanned. I hadn’t expected it, and I couldn’t have recreated it. I only knew, afterward, that I had been in the presence of something rare: an intimacy that asked nothing more than to be.
And yet, not all intimacy is born in silence or in someone else’s presence. Some comes later, through writing—in that long interval between feeling and saying. Some is only possible thanks to the quiet distance that makes reflection possible.
II. What we mean when we say “intimate”
The word intimacy often evokes physical closeness: the realm of touch, proximity, lovers, secrets shared in the dark. But what if intimacy were less about closeness than about permission? The permission to be undefended. To move slowly. To be unclear—and still be trusted.
To be intimate with someone is not merely to be known, but to be seen— seen without the pressure to explain yourself quickly or justify what you feel. It’s an opening, and it’s also a risk: the risk of being misunderstood, and the deeper risk of being understood too well.
Some forms of intimacy unfold face to face. Others require distance. Some happen through dialogue. Others need a single voice, speaking on one’s own in a quiet room.
That’s where writing begins— not as performance, but as a long conversation, uninterrupted.
III. The varieties of intimacy
Intimacy shifts with context, with time, with the shape of the self we bring to another. It is not one thing— not just closeness, or tenderness, or vulnerability— but a set of ways we allow ourselves to be known, and sometimes, to know another.
There’s the intimacy of the body— perhaps the most visible and least understood. It belongs to touch, proximity, the instinctive draw toward another’s presence. But this form can deceive: physical closeness without emotional resonance is common— and easily faked. Yet when body and emotion align, there’s a wordless attunement: a hand resting on a shoulder for just the right amount of time; a breath falling into rhythm without intention.
Then there’s emotional intimacy: the slow courage to say what one feels— not just when it’s beautiful or convenient, but when it’s awkward, incomplete, or raw. This kind of intimacy isn’t given—it’s earned. It may take years, or a single night. Trust lives here—or breaks.
There’s also intellectual intimacy: what arises in conversation when ideas flow without anyone guarding their ground. It’s rare. Most social spaces reward speed, the need to shine, or the safety of politeness. But sometimes, with someone equally curious, thought expands in the presence of the other— not in agreement, but in response. There’s nothing to prove— only the pleasure of discovery. That’s intellectual intimacy. It creates a different kind of closeness— not of feeling, but of perception.
Stranger still is narrative intimacy— the kind that forms not between two people in the same room, but between the one who writes and the one who reads, separated by silence and time. It isn’t immediate— but it isn’t less real. A voice emerges from the page and seems to speak directly to you, as if it knew the contours of your mind. You feel understood—without being seen. You may never meet the person who wrote those words, but something in you shifts. You are no longer alone.
These are not rigid categories. They overlap, interrupt, evoke one another. One may deepen another. Physical presence can create emotional safety. Intellectual closeness can open into unexpected tenderness. And still, each has its own rhythm, its own grammar— and its own risks.
In that complexity, intimacy ceases to be a condition. It becomes a practice: something we learn, lose, revise, and sometimes write when no other form is possible.
IV. Writing as intimacy with oneself (and with another)
Writing, too, is a kind of intimacy— not only with others, but with oneself. Especially when it’s honest— when what’s written is not just clever or correct, but true. That kind of writing doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t argue. It reveals.
We write to bring something forth— not just for an audience, but to hear ourselves think, to see what we didn’t yet know we felt. In writing, we become witnesses to our own consciousness— both its lucidity and its evasions.
We follow a sentence not only for its logic, but for the feeling it carries. And when that feeling falters, we know we’ve lost the thread.
So we begin again, and again— trying not just to explain, but to say something that feels just.
In that sense, writing is an ethical act. It demands attention. It requires patience. It invites us to inhabit our own experience with precision— even when that experience is fragmented or unresolved.
And if we are lucky— if we are honest— something in that effort will reach someone else. Not to impress. Not to convince. But to accompany.
V. When intimacy fails or is refused
Sometimes you reach out—carefully, sincerely—and receive silence, indifference, or a response so misaligned it makes you feel naïve for having tried. Other times, the failure is subtler: a conversation that scatters just as something real begins to take shape—or a listener who hears your words, but not your meaning.
Those moments stay with us. Not because they’re dramatic, but because they remind us how precarious intimacy can be. It can’t be forced—just as humility can’t. Both require a quiet letting go—a willingness to offer something without knowing how it will be received. We can prepare the ground, make the gesture, risk the truth—but the rest depends on the other: their timing, their capacity, their willingness to meet us there.
There’s also the experience of being misunderstood—not just in fact, but in essence. You try to say something that matters, and the other person responds to what they think you said—or to a version of you that never was. It’s a blow— that mismatch between what you tried to share and what actually landed. The desire for intimacy becomes exposure without connection—a wound instead of a bridge.
Sometimes we avoid intimacy not because we don’t want it, but because we fear what it might cost. We’ve been made to feel clumsy—for caring too much, or for being too visible. Or we’ve shared something intimate, only to have it treated lightly—or analyzed without feeling. After that, we grow cautious. We speak less—or in fragments—or not at all.
It’s in the wake of such rejections—large or small—that writing ceases to be mere expression. It becomes repair. Writing allows us to recover what was lost in the moment— to name what never reached its destination, to finish the thought no one waited for, to say it again—this time without interruption, without assumptions, without fear.
And while writing cannot undo the failure of a shared moment, it can offer something else: coherence. A record. A form of truth that endures—even if it wasn’t heard.
In this way, writing becomes a quiet act of insistence—not against the world, but on behalf of the self. It’s a way of saying: What I tried to share still matters—even if it wasn’t received.
VI. The gesture that remains
In the end, intimacy is not a state but a gesture— repeated again and again— toward understanding, toward presence, toward a shared sense that may arrive… or may not.
Sometimes that gesture is a word spoken at the right moment. Sometimes it’s a silence held just long enough for the other to speak. And sometimes it’s the act of writing—solitary, patient, unfinished— offered not to a crowd, but to a single imagined reader who, one day, might need what you are now trying to say.
Writing, at its core, is a form of listening. Not only to others, but to the self that doesn’t rush, doesn’t perform, doesn’t need to persuade.
To the self that waits— that wants to be known not by what it manages to say in quick response, but by what it keeps trying to say with care.
That’s why I return to the page: not because it guarantees connection, but because it keeps the door open. Because in a world that demands speed, certainty, and charm, writing makes room for something slower and more faithful: the long, unfinished gesture of trying to reach someone— perhaps even oneself— with something resonant.
And when intimacy happens—on the page or in life— it’s never because we found the perfect words. It’s because someone stayed. Someone listened. Someone let the moment open—without rushing to close it.
That’s what I’m doing now: writing not to end something, but to leave it open— so that something of greater consequence might enter.
There are wounds that remain because we have not yet forged a moral consensus:
“…E pluribus unum”
Participants carrying American flags in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, Alabama, 1965. Photograph by Peter Pettus; gelatin silver print (reprint from 1999–2000). Archival public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
A stark visual of power confronting protest—where public dissent meets State’s militarization, June 2025. Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images via NPR.
The image underscores a defining moment in our civic life: when expressions of dissent are met not with dialogue but with the politicization of militarized force on behalf the executive’s brand. It echoes a troubling pattern—where calls for justice and inclusion are conflated as partisan threats, and the defense of plurality is treated as provocation.
*
There is a deepening divide in our country—one intensified by the 2025 return of the Trump administration and the M.A.G.A. movement’s project to “reform” America by disrupting the constitutional principles that have long undergirded our democracy. This movement has emboldened some to claim they are under siege—particularly by Black Americans—whom they accuse of harboring irrational hatred. Yet this accusation ignores a deeper truth: those who make it often refuse to confront their own complicity in the conditions that produce widespread suffering and rightful indignation. They see themselves as blameless while dismissing the lived experience of others.
This dissonance reveals a persistent tribalism—a complex masked as patriotism, often directed at marginalized communities. It demeans empathy and stifles accountability.
Dissent, however, is the lifeblood of democracy. And while we may cherish this nation—its landscapes, its cultural richness, and its founding ideals—we must also confront the unfinished work of justice. To celebrate the Constitution while ignoring the legacy of slavery, segregation, and systemic inequity is to cheapen both our history and our future.
Nowhere is this more evident than in our criminal justice system. The need for reform is no longer a partisan position; it is a moral imperative. Communities of color remain disproportionately targeted, criminalized, and subjected to violence under the guise of law and order. Police departments across the country have repeatedly failed in their duty to protect those most vulnerable—those left behind by lack of opportunity, education, and support. When these conditions are met not with compassion but with brutality, we witness the most abhorrent face of cruelty.
One may love this country profoundly, but such love must be active—committed to fairness, not nostalgia. Justice and equality are not rewards for silence; they are the birthright of all who live here.
The Black Lives Matter movement is not a threat to American values; it is a call to fulfill them. It is not hatred to protest injustice. Hatred lies in silencing dissent, in trampling the rights of others while claiming moral high ground. Time and again, those in power have distanced themselves from the oppressed, especially those stripped of political voice or voting rights. This indifference persists until solidarity becomes unavoidable.
To relativize the murder of young Black men—or to remain silent—betrays a refusal to understand the long arc of racism in America. Gestures of inclusion cannot substitute for truth. Real justice requires not half-measures, but fullhearted resolve.
And now, that same machinery of suppression is turning with renewed force against immigrants, against LGBTQ Americans, and against the very principle of diversity.
—as demonstrated by the unnecessary militarization of one square mile Los Angeles in June 2025, where localized protests were amplified by the federal government as if they were a national insurrection—
The mobilization of troops to suppress peaceful protests—replacing law enforcement with military assault—, the criminalization of migrants seeking refuge, and the push to roll back gay rights—these are not isolated policies. They are symptoms of the same moral aberration of the executive branch as a political brand: the fear of plurality.
This fear has now targeted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives themselves. These programs, born out of civil rights struggles and meant to remedy historical exclusion, have become scapegoats. DEI is not a threat to merit; it is a framework for justice. It is not a matter of political orthodoxy, but about ensuring access, visibility, and dignity for those long marginalized. The opposition to DEI is not a neutral debate—it is a calculated attempt to suppress the very plurality that gives meaning to democracy.
—Often it reduces that plurality to a caricature. In partisan circles, the term “woke” has been weaponized to dismiss any effort toward inclusion or redress as absurd, elitist, or dangerous. What began as a call to remain alert to injustice has been twisted into a tool of mockery—less an argument than a reflex, deployed not to clarify but to silence.Yet justice does not lose its urgency because it is ridiculed.
Banning DEI offices, defunding inclusion efforts, or labeling diversity work as ideological indoctrination reflects not strength, but fear. Such actions undermine the foundational values of liberty and justice, replacing inclusive citizenship with enforced conformity.
The desire to reverse LGBTQ rights, to demonize racial justice movements, and to silence DEI are all parts of one piece. These are not isolated grievances; they are expressions of an intolerant worldview seeking dominance through exclusion—echoes of McCarthyism, the early 1950s campaign led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose televised accusations of communist infiltration turned suspicion into a weapon and captivated a fearful nation. These are not the marks of a strong republic, but the signs of a fearful and weakened society.
And yet, the Republican majority in Congress—those enabling Trump and embracing the politics of M.A.G.A. disruption—has further deepened the moral deficit—cut taxes for billionaires and dismantled the nation’s social and political infrastructure. They have fueled inflation through aggressive foreign tariffs and pursued a global posture that increases instability, all in service of enriching a narrow class of oligarchs at the expense of the common good.
To love this country is to reject that fear and the brittle cowardice that sustains it. To love our nation is to defend and embrace its pluralism. To love it is to confront its contradictions—not with cynicism, but with resolve.
We are not a perfect union, but we are still a union. The path forward is not backward. It begins where justice lives: in the search for truth, in compassion, in courage.
~
PostScript
Project 2025 and the Machinery of Conformity
Among the clearest examples of how fear of plurality has been codified into political strategy is Project 2025—an ambitious blueprint for restructuring the U.S. federal government, advanced by The Heritage Foundation and now actively endorsed by the Trump administration. Though its architects invoke the language of liberty and constitutional reform, its underlying goal is not democratic renewal but ideological consolidation.
Project 2025 does not merely aim to reduce government. It seeks to dismantle the administrative State, eliminate civil service protections, and replace career public servants with partisan loyalists. Under the guise of “draining the swamp,” it proposes a purge—not to restore constitutional balance, but to empower a narrow executive elite. This is not conservatism in any meaningful sense. It is executive authoritarianism draped in populist garb.
Even its rhetoric of “taking back the country” belies its intent: not to restore pluralist democracy, but to impose uniformity—cultural, political, and moral. DEI initiatives are to be dismantled, public education reshaped to reflect a singular ideology, and dissent within the government neutralized. These are not reforms; they are instruments of control.
Such a project is not an aberration but a culmination: the weaponization of nostalgia, grievance, and fear into policy. And what it reveals is a deep contradiction—that those who most loudly invoke the Constitution now seek to rewrite it in practice, replacing the promise of We the People with the dominion of We alone.
This was not theoretical when we arrived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood earlier this week. Outside the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters, we encountered a protest in full confrontation—two factions opposed, one defending reproductive rights, the other cloaking rage in the language of moral authority. The louder of the two, a group of conservative mothers, shouted not in debate but in contempt—hurling not argument, but condemnation at the very idea of moral disagreement.
It was not a defense of life. It was a campaign to control how others live.
What I witnessed outside the Heritage Foundation was no isolated outburst. It was the local manifestation of the national project unfolding within. The Foundation no longer merely comments on politics; it builds the scaffolding for an authoritarian turn already underway. In synchrony with the Trump administration—whether openly acknowledged or not—Heritage is not offering policy recommendations. It is designing a machinery of conformity.
This machinery does not tolerate pluralism. It redefines dissent as insubordination, diversity as decadence, and governance as loyalty to a singular will. It is not a restoration of constitutional order, but a calculated repudiation.
And what Project 2025 proposes is not mere administrative change. It is a blueprint for ideological capture: of language, of law, and of public life itself. It replaces We the People with a command from above: Only us.
This is the wound that will not heal—unless we confront it.
On the Way to Union Station
As we were leaving Capitol Hill, heading toward Union Station to return home to Pennsylvania, the streets were marked by the symbols of looming celebration. Barricades had gone up. Military vehicles lined the avenues.
Preparations were underway for a military parade featuring tanks, troops, and martial fanfare. Officially, it was to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary. But the timing—Saturday, June 14, Trump’s birthday—along with the pageantry and presidential framing, made it difficult to see the event as anything but an orchestrated spectacle. The symbolism blurred the line between honoring military service and appropriating it for personal glorification. It felt less like a birthday—and more like a coronation.
Crossing one of the barricaded intersections, a Black man in a sleek motorized wheelchair passed us on the right. Without prompting, he looked at us—two men walking together—and said with calm finality, “Beware, Judgment Day is coming soon.”
We said nothing. He kept rolling forward.
It was a quiet moment, but not a small one. A judgment—clearly moral, likely biblical—delivered without confrontation, but not without intention. It was an indictment, as casual as it was chilling. Even someone visibly vulnerable had absorbed and echoed the nation’s reflex toward condemnation. The extremes no longer live just in platforms and policies. They are seeping into the pavement.
I turned to my husband and asked, “How long can all this hatred last?”
He didn’t look away. “We may not live to see the end,” he said. “But it will pass.”
Ricardo Morín Buffalo Series, Nº 12 46″ x 60″ Oil on canvas 1979
For those of us who have lost someone,
whose presence now rests in memory
and whose absence shapes who we are.
May this story preserve something of their enduring trace.
*
Julian tried to put into writing what he had dreamed.
—
He wondered:could writing remain faithful to the one who watches, trembles, and longs to understand?
—
He dreamed he was offering his mother a bowl of viper’s broth. The serpent’s head and torn fragments of its body were still writhing, as if unaware of their condition: alive, though undone. He held the bowl with both hands; it had been handed to him by an old woman seated at the far end of a wide, shallow circular pond. The pond seemed to contain more than water—perhaps time, or memory, or fate. Around him loomed shadows—blurred figures repeating the same ritual, or perhaps none at all.He could not tell.
—
The path to his mother was arduous; the ground was slick with a substance he could not name.The air was dense, weighted by an oppressive silence that made each step slow, burdensome.The viper twisted in the broth, struggling to flee.Even so, he kept the bowl steady.He believed—in some quiet corner of himself—that if his mother drank, healing might be reached, or understanding, or peace for them both.
—
When he reached her, he knelt.He spoke gently, urging her to drink while the broth was still warm.“Hold the spoon carefully,” he whispered.“Just small sips.”But she turned her face away.She would not drink.Whether out of fear, pride, or rejection of what was offered, he did not know.The viper shuddered, and his heart tightened in anguish.
—
He awoke unsettled, exhausted.The dream still veiled his perception.His breath was strained, shallow in the thick air of the room.Why couldn’t he find calm?What, exactly, kept him awake?
—
He wondered if it had been a premonition—a latent fear of his own decline.Was the writhing snake a vision of his mind losing its serenity?Were the slow gait, the unstable ground, the trembling hands a rehearsal of his own fading?Or was it grief—that quiet interloper of the soul, forever hungry, never sated?
—
He only knew he had tried to help, to steady, to offer comfort that could not be received.And in doing so, he faced not only the absence of his mother, but the shadow of his own dread—the question of who would walk beside him when his own farewell arrived.
—
But perhaps—he thought—there is something sacred in the attempt.In the offering, even when refused.In the slow advance—however uncertain it may be.
There’s a certain kind of person the world seems to admire—sharp-tongued, composed, deliberate. He moves through life as if he’s never doubted the sound of his own voice. His gestures are practiced, his opinions unshakable. It’s a performance of authority, and to many, it’s compelling.
But I’ve never fit that mold. I don’t hold myself like someone bracing for a fight with the world. I don’t presume to master a room. And more and more, I’ve come to believe that what makes a person is not how forcefully he presents himself, but how honestly he shows up.
Vulnerability has never been fashionable. It doesn’t draw applause or dominate the stage. But it’s where I’ve found the most truth. Not in being right, or revered, or untouchable—but in admitting how little I know, how often I’ve failed, and how much of life resists explanation.
We’re taught to act as if we’ve earned our place—through effort, through cleverness, through some innate worth. But I’ve lived long enough to see how much is assumed, how much is favored, how many doors open not because of merit but because of circumstance, appearance, proximity to power. The world flatters performance. It often mistakes loudness for depth, certainty for wisdom.
But beneath all that, we’re fallible—achingly so. We get things wrong. We hurt people. We retreat when we should have stayed, and speak when silence would have been kinder. We tell ourselves stories to survive, not always to understand.
And yet, that fallibility isn’t shameful. It’s not a flaw to be punished—it’s the most human part of us. The mistake is not in being wrong; it’s in pretending we’re not. Intimacy begins where performance ends—when we stop curating ourselves and let others see what is: our confusion, our fear, our imperfect love.
I’ve stopped wanting to impress. I want to be known. I want to know others—not through their accomplishments or their poses, but through the quiet truths they carry. I don’t need anyone to be flawless. I need them to be present, to meet me somewhere beneath the surface.
That, to me, is strength. Not the kind that commands a crowd, but the kind that sits across from others, unguarded, and says, “Me too. I don’t have it either.”
The world may never reward dishonesty with applause. But it will reward it with connection—with moments that feel real, human, and lasting. And in the end, I think that’s the only recognition that ever matters. Not the illusion of certainty or the performance of strength, but the willingness to return, again and again, to the quiet inside us—the one where we are fallible, open, and fully alive.
I sent Marie Arana’s moving tribute to my sister, Bonnie, who had directed several of Vargas Llosa’s plays in Madrid and had encountered him on more than one occasion. I knew this news would strike a deeply personal chord.
“It’s clear how deeply Vargas Llosa’s death has affected you,” I wrote to her.
“You felt close to him—not only as a reader or as a playwright, but as someone whose voice accompanied you through many chapters of your life. Your grief resonates with me, because I understand what it means to lose a figure who, though not family, becomes part of our inner landscape—someone who shapes our ideas, our convictions, even our way of seeing the world.”
She replied: “the death of such a brilliant mind—so present for decades—left a void that is hard to name.” That idea moved me deeply.
“It saddens me profoundly,” I wrote back,
“to consider the silence that now follows him. I understand why this hits you so hard—perhaps because Vargas Llosa stood for the very opposite: a luminous intellect, fiercely articulate. To imagine even he is gone… it hurts.”
“I’m with you,” I added.
“And even from afar, I hold you in this grief.”
Echoes Within Our Family
These reflections stirred memories of our own family—of our father, whose cognitive decline began after a traumatic brain injury. He slowly lost his speech, his clarity, his grasp of the world around him.
And our mother, who held on much longer, also slipped away eventually—her presence fading in slow motion.
Our paternal and maternal uncles, Calixto and Fredy, experienced the same kind of long, quiet departure. Years of silence. Gradual disappearances. Losses we didn’t always know how to name, but which marked us all.
It’s a pattern I can’t overlook.
I’ve done the research. (You may not know this.) Genetically, my risk for similar decline falls in a moderate range. Not a verdict, not a guarantee—just a presence. A shadow that walks beside me, saying nothing, revealing nothing.
Sometimes I wonder whether knowing this helps or hurts.
But I choose to know.
I choose to face it.
Because if ever I find myself on that road, I want to walk it with the same dignity I saw in our parents—even in confusion, even in silence—when their eyes could still recognize us with a flicker of tenderness.
And I want you to know that.
I want us both to remember.
*
Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero
April 17, 2025; in transit from Florida to Pennsylvania
The Trump political project continues to unfold not as a coherent ideological program, but as a sustained campaign of disruption—domestically and internationally. What emerges is not a defined worldview, but a pattern of destabilization that weakens institutions, inflames public division, and elevates loyalty over legality, spectacle over substance.
Tariffs remain a favored tool—not to establish long-term trade policy, but to provoke confrontation, bypass negotiation channels, and reassert executive dominance. These measures often target allies as readily as adversaries, create economic uncertainty, and undermine multilateral systems.
Educational institutions face increasing censorship. From efforts to defund academic programs that address systemic inequality to pressures on universities perceived as ideologically oppositional, the aim is not reform but suppression—particularly of spaces that foster critical thinking, historical reckoning, or independent research.
Immigration enforcement continues to blur the line between legality and criminality. Lawful immigrants, including long-term residents, are deported under broad interpretations of threat, often to countries with which they have no substantial connection. The stated goal of targeting gang members or national security risks becomes indistinguishable from the broader effort to expel legal immigrants without criminal records. The result is an atmosphere of fear designed not merely to enforce policy, but to encourage self-deportation—a chilling effect that turns uncertainty into a tool of coercion. In the end, these actions serve more to fulfill campaign rhetoric than to implement coherent immigration reform, and they deepen the perception of instability rather than address root causes.
Administrative agencies are systematically weakened. Expertise is replaced with political loyalists, independent oversight is obstructed, and long-standing norms are bypassed. While the executive branch is not formally dismantled, many of its institutions are rendered ineffective, and thus leave the legislative and judicial branches to carry disproportionate weight in the balance of power.
Legal institutions are not exempt. Prominent law firms that engage in litigation related to civil rights, environmental regulation, or immigration increasingly face political scrutiny or reputational attacks. These pressures signal a broader effort to reshape the legal landscape to favor executive alignment over institutional independence.
Even the criteria used to define antisemitism are drawn into this broader reordering of public discourse. What was once a consensus-based framework to identify and combat bigotry is increasingly reframed to serve political ends. In some cases, criticism of state policies—particularly regarding U.S. allies—is labeled antisemitic, even when expressed within legal or human rights frameworks. Simultaneously, longstanding antisemitic rhetoric in extremist political circles is minimized or overlooked when it aligns with broader strategic aims. The result is a politicization of antisemitism that undermines both principled advocacy and genuine protection.
On the international stage, relations with powers such as Russia, Iran, and China are marked by strategic ambiguity. The stated goals often shift—oscillating between negotiation and provocation, between gestures toward peace and open confrontation. This lack of consistency, coupled with a failure to communicate clear diplomatic tenets, generates uncertainty among allies and adversaries alike. It weakens the credibility of U.S. foreign policy and destabilizes existing diplomatic frameworks.Ambiguity itself becomes the policy, which allows for maximal flexibility while offering minimal accountability.
What ties these disparate actions together is not a unified ideology, but a mode of governance: chaos as method, disruption as strategy. The erosion of institutional stability is not collateral—it is intentional.Through constant provocation, norm-breaking, and the redefinition of key terms, the Trump movement reshapes public expectations and challenges the very structure of U.S. democratic institutions.
This is not a matter of historical reflection—it is a live process, unfolding in real time, with consequences that stretch from the courtroom to the classroom, from border policy to global diplomacy.
*
Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero
April 17, 2025—in transit from Florida to Pennsylvania
Untitled 012by Ricardo Morín 22″ x 30″ Watercolors, charcoal, oil, white-out and ink on paper 2006
There exists a threshold beyond which suffering ceases to be endurance and becomes something else—something raw, incommunicable. It is not simply a matter of pain, nor even of despair, but of a silent depletion where the self finds itself at the precipice of its own dissolution. Yet, how does one define this limit?
It is tempting to believe suffering has purpose, that it can be transmuted into wisdom or resilience. This belief sustains us through its early stages. We endure in the name of meaning, in the hope that suffering refines rather than annihilates. But there comes a point where suffering becomes a force unto itself, severed from justification. It no longer instructs, no longer dignifies—only persists.
The problem of suffering is not only how much one can bear, but how much one should reveal. Silence often protects both the sufferer and the witness. There are pains too intimate, too profound to translate into language without reducing them to spectacle. To expose suffering in its entirety risks transforming it into something unrecognizable, stripping it of the dignity that private endurance affords. Yet, concealment can create its own form of exile, a loneliness where pain festers unseen.
Some attempt to navigate this tension by offering fragments—enough to acknowledge suffering’s presence without inviting intrusion. Others say nothing at all. This is not cowardice but a final assertion of control, a refusal to be defined by pain. To impose the expectation of disclosure upon those who suffer is to misunderstand the nature of their burden. The gravity of suffering is not only in the experience itself but in the impossible task of making it understood.
We live under the illusion that the mind and body will hold, that endurance is limitless. But suffering reminds us otherwise. There is a breaking point, whether visible or silent, sudden or drawn out.
It is not the same for everyone. Some withstand more than others—not through superior strength, but through a different alchemy of circumstance, temperament, and sheer chance. What remains constant is that all thresholds, eventually, are met. There is no single way to live with suffering.Sometimes, what brings relief is not endurance, but the quiet act of self-recognition.To speak, when one can.To remain silent, when one must.In the space between what cannot be said and what must be accepted, a simple truth may emerge: even uncertainty can sustain us, if we meet it with honesty.
And when that release is impossible, when suffering stretches beyond its own limits, only the silent acknowledgment of its presence remains—a weight that, sooner or later, must either be laid down or consume what is left.
Observations On Perception 