The Chris Abraham Show

The Trickster as 47th President by Chris Abraham

Donald Trump was always easy to sneer at. He was a tabloid punchline long before he was the gold-plated game show boss my mother adored. The Apprentice was her favorite. I rolled my eyes. He was tacky, vulgar — a human golden toilet. We told ourselves he’d never be more than that. Yet here we are: he’s the 47th President of the United States. The only non-consecutive two-termer since Grover Cleveland. But Cleveland never danced to the Village People’s YMCA more often than the cover bands. Trump does it at every rally. He does the stiff-hipped monkey dance, gives you the same punchlines, the same nicknames, the same red meat, and when the haters turn it into an obscene meme — he grins and does it again.

Most presidents beg you to respect them. They want the hush when they walk in. They correct you if you use the wrong honorific. They bristle when mocked. Hillary carried her résumé like a holy relic: “Respect me, I’ve earned this.” Biden snaps “Come on, man!” every time the mask slips. Obama, the professorial jazzman, stayed cool until the press poked too deep. Bush Sr. was so polite he looked weak next to Bubba’s sax. Nixon taped his own paranoia. Carter lectured the country into a mood swing. Ford fell, Chevy Chase made him fall forever. But Trump? He lives for your laughter. He wants the jeers. He wants you to call him Donnie, DJT, a clown — because then you’re in the tent. He’s the trickster who cannot be shamed. He turns every insult into merch. Every meme is another ticket sold.

This is the piece the Beltway never got. They think “dangerous demagogue” means barbed wire camps and midnight helicopters. But America doesn’t do Pinochet. Trump’s coup was the vacuum: the working middle he stole while the party of labor became the party of brunch. The union dads who went from FDR to Lock Her Up. The old Dixiecrats who realized they’d rather be insulted by a clown than scolded by the class valedictorian. He didn’t bring tanks — he brought the carnival.

They call him a “wannabe dictator” because he never quite becomes one. Four years in office, and no mass roundups. Now he’s back — pushing 80 — constitutionally capped at one final term. They insist the sequel will be the real nightmare. But here he stands, arms wide, the same routine, the same golden hat. The same monkey dance. If he were truly the next Mussolini, he’s the worst at it in modern history.

People want a trickster who won’t flinch. The whole country is a hazing ritual: your tribe tests if you can be mocked, if you crumble. The presidents who survive know how to laugh it off. The ones who can’t — they fade. Trump is the bar comic who never breaks under hecklers. He keeps selling you the same show. He knows the final trick is mortal — the lights go out in 3.5 years. But until then, the moral is the same:

Never underestimate the man who never asks you to respect him. In America, that’s the oldest magic trick there is.

What We Forget When We Remember Ourselves

Every Fourth of July I get this itch — not to dunk on the country I love, but to scratch at the paint and see what’s underneath. To lift the floorboards, find the roaches, and point out that this grand old house we celebrate didn’t get built by one guy with a hammer.

The American story is the greatest solo act ever told. Lone hero, lone cowboy, lone genius. We love it. We teach it in schools, we wrap it around our boots and our beers. Independence Day itself is practically a national tattoo that says: “We did it alone.”

But the truth is that independence was born out of interdependence. You don’t have to be a cynic to admit it — just an adult.

Start with the Revolution. The French didn’t show up with baguettes and hot air balloons; they showed up with a navy that made Yorktown possible. The decisive siege that ended the war? French ships blocked the British from getting supplies or reinforcements. Admiral de Grasse’s fleet outnumbered the Royal Navy at the Chesapeake. Rochambeau’s 5,000 troops fought alongside Washington’s. And yet how many stars-and-stripes parties this week will have a single French flag? We remember the ragtag farmers; we forget the ships and the loans and the French sailors buried far from home.

Move forward to WWII. Our national myth goes something like: we parachuted into Europe, kicked Hitler in the teeth, handed out chocolate bars, and went home heroes. Did we matter? Of course we did — but the Soviet Union lost upwards of 20 million people grinding the Nazi war machine to a pulp on the Eastern Front long before we waded onto the beaches at Normandy. Stalingrad alone saw two million casualties. Eighty percent of German military deaths happened over there, not over here. The Red Army did the bleeding; we did the liberating — and the remembering, mostly just of ourselves.

And what about the ideas we cling to? Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — the French didn’t just send ships, they sent the Enlightenment. Franklin didn’t hole up in London when he wanted revolutionary inspiration; he lived in Paris. Jefferson, Adams, the whole founding crowd were drinking deep from Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Our DNA is part Parisian salon, part colonial farm. But we tell the story like we invented the ideals out of thin New England air.

This is not about tearing down the Fourth of July. I’ll watch the fireworks too, maybe get misty when the rockets glare. But while we’re celebrating our freedom, I’d like to remember who else paid the bill. Because the American experiment, the thing that survived King George, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and whatever comes next — it never stands alone. It never did.

Civil wars, revolutions, world wars — none of them happen in a vacuum. They’re proxy fights, alliance fights, dirty trades of blood and treasure. America stuck its toe in Afghanistan to break the Soviets. France stuck its whole boot in our revolution to break the British. Someday, if we ever break ourselves in another civil mess, do you think the world won’t come poking around? Mexico, China, Russia, Europe — everyone will have a stake.

History is not a lone genius with a patent. It’s a crowded lab. It’s the professor taking credit for the breakthrough while the grad students wash the beakers. And if we keep forgetting the beaker-washers, the next time we need a partner, they might just stay home.

So raise your flag. Cheer the myth. But spare a thought for the French sailor in the Chesapeake, the Soviet grunt at Stalingrad, the philosopher in a Paris café who gave our founders their slogans. A Declaration of Independence, sure — but one signed with borrowed ink.

It’s the Fourth of July and Congress just crammed through the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster Bill — 870 pages of fences and tax cuts, border walls and missile domes, detention dollars and pork for the same contractors that keep the monster fed. Some people scream it’s our Declaration of Independence from decline. Others swear it’s Auschwitz 2.0 with better branding. Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s neither. Because none of this started with Trump — he’s just the cold sore on America’s lip. The infection was always there: the old gag reflex that kicks in when people sense the melting pot is being replaced by a stone soup no one wants to stir.

I stand outside the gas station at one in the morning, Virginia blacktop still warm, Budweiser 40 in hand. This is my classroom. The drywall kings gather here, the guys who taught me Spanish because they never needed my English. They don’t want the flag or the anthem. They want the hustle: twelve-hour days, cash under the table, eighty percent wired home so a mother can pour a concrete floor, buy a motorbike, build a block house on a farm that gave them nothing. They know the deal. They know if they slip out before ICE comes, they can sneak back when the White House flips. They know America needs them invisible — cheap labor to keep the fruit cheap, the lawns clipped, the lettuce crisp.

It’s not freedom. It’s not a cage either. It’s the same old handshake: your sweat for our cheap comfort. Meanwhile the polite kids on social media rage about fascism and concentration camps, but they never show up in the parking lot. They never see the wire transfer slip through Western Union, the way it props up whole villages better than any World Bank loan. They don’t see that for every real refugee, there’s ten who are hustlers, opportunists, or just poor bastards dropped off at the gates when some country empties its prison or asylum ward to keep the homeland clean.

I love these guys. I love that they’d marry me off to a cousin in Huehuetenango if I asked. I love that they’ll stand in the lot and laugh about drywall dust in their lungs and the cousin’s boat they’re gonna buy when they go home kings. They’re not here for the American dream. They’re here for the ten-year lifeguard gig. It’s the Bulgarian pool boy hustle all over again, just longer, dirtier, and no one’s honest about it. The monster that eats this labor calls it liberty. The monster that locks the door calls it security. It’s the same monster.

And so the fireworks explode over the Capitol dome while the remittance pipeline hums south. The fence stands half-finished, half-forgotten. The soup keeps boiling. Some bring their stones. Some just drain the broth. The gag reflex comes and goes. The cold sore flares. Trump didn’t invent this. He just shows you where it hurts.

There’s no fix in this. No “No Kings” chant makes the parking lot vanish. No shiny bunker-buster bill makes the drywall king plant his kids here for good. This is America’s liminal edge: a place where you stand barefoot on warm blacktop, Bud heavy in your fist, Spanish on your tongue because you needed it more than they needed yours. No solution, no ending, no plan. Just the yawp. Toro bien. Todo bien. Happy Independence Day.

The Secret Safety Net We Pretend Doesn’t Exist

You can live your whole life in this country without ever seeing the crawlspace you’re standing on. America has always flirted with the idea of a safety net — food assistance, cheap clinics, housing vouchers — but never enough to make it real in daylight. Try to codify a European-style welfare system here and you’ll run headlong into the one thing voters agree on: taxes feel like theft. Better dead than red, they used to say. They meant it.

So we build a workaround instead. We keep Dad’s “no free rides” sign nailed to the fridge, but Mom slips you a folded twenty when he’s not looking. The churches, the Peace Corps, the food pantries, the “private” non-profits — all humming on the hush-hush drip of federal dollars and tax breaks we pretend are charity. It’s a black market of democratic socialism. A secret fridge in the basement that keeps half the family fed without ever saying the word “entitlement.”

To the 30% — the Zohran Mamdanis, the real social democrats — this basement is roses. Proof America still has a heart, even if it beats in the dark. But to the other 70% — the Iron Dad bloc — it’s mold. Moral decay. The smell of other people’s laziness rotting the beams you paid for with your sweat. Same fridge, same kids on the futon. Roses for you, rot for them.

This is the contradiction that can’t last forever. The workaround lives or dies by the lease. If Congress won’t pass it, if the people won’t vote for it, it survives by executive order alone — one pen stroke away from erasure every four years. And the next Iron Dad always comes. Trump wasn’t the first to smell mold in the basement. He’s just the one who walked in with the crowbar and the mandate to rip it to the studs. And when the landlord — the people — say “Tear it out,” you don’t get to complain that you never filed the permit.

But don’t fool yourself: not every rose down there is real. When you push your mercy off the books, you hire mercenaries to run it. Just like soldiers cost pennies but Blackwater costs a thousand a day, your shadow social safety net runs on grift. CEOs who skim millions while calling it charity. “Community organizers” who bleed admin fees and grant padding. Plastic roses dusted with rosewater, all fed by tax dollars disguised as donations nobody voted for honestly.

So now the mother’s purse is empty. The fridge hums until the inspector unplugs it. The basement you pretended didn’t exist is a tear-down lot waiting for the bulldozer. And the only question left is this: do you want the roses in the front yard — real, alive, funded in daylight — or do you want the mold ripped out by force every time the next Iron Dad calls the inspector?

Vote for it. Pay for it. Tax yourself with your eyes open. Or stand barefoot on the dirt and pretend you’re free while you shiver. The basement was never free. And it never stays hidden forever.

Foreign aid is dead — long live foreign aid. On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development — USAID — shut its doors for good. An institution born under Kennedy to be America’s moral halo and Cold War firewall, it fed, healed, and built half the Global South for 60 years. Some say it saved 91 million lives; The Lancet says its closure could mean 14 million more deaths by 2030, a third of them kids. Bush calls that a tragedy. Obama calls it a colossal mistake. Bono writes a poem and cries. But the truth is harder to swallow: aid is a lifeline — but it’s also a leash. And America just yanked it.

This is realpolitik with a humanitarian face. Kennedy made foreign aid a Trojan Horse of goodwill and soft control. You keep kids alive, you keep regimes in your orbit. Bush knew it — PEPFAR, his AIDS relief plan, was moral triage and evangelical diplomacy. Obama, ever the grown-up, saw it as soft power’s last best card: stabilizing failed states while creating new markets. But even he knew it was a moral leasehold — borrowed time for the world’s poorest, funded by taxpayers whose mercy has an expiration date.

And then came the burn-it-down populists. Reagan once said the scariest words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Elon Musk put that on a T-shirt, ran USAID through his “Department of Government Efficiency,” and called it fraud. Trump shrugged and told the base: why send 17 cents a day to Sudan when you can buy votes at home? Musk called it a criminal racket. And the landlord foreclosed.

So here’s the raw question: is it better to live forever on a drip of pity — or drown free? AID is like AIDS meds: once you start, you can’t stop, or you die. In Sudan, five million lose healthcare overnight. In sub-Saharan Africa, PEPFAR’s cut means HIV deaths could spike again, kids orphaned by a policy pivot. Some will say America murdered them. But maybe they were already living on borrowed time.

You can rage at the empire’s moral hypocrisy. You should. But also ask: would you build your family’s survival on the grace of someone else’s Congress, someone else’s donor mood, someone else’s tax politics? Would you build your castle on soft ground? In Hawaii, they’d say: never build on leased land owned by a Queen’s trust. Because the trust can pull the ground out any day.

This is a story about the hard edge under the soft empire. It’s about the village that was saved — but never finished its own well. It’s about the landlord with the mercy kill switch. It’s about the moment the halo flickered out and the people left holding the bag realized they’d always been on the moral leash.

So if I sound like an asshole for saying it — AITA? Probably. But the ground is still soft. And pity, like funding, always expires.

Listen, think, argue — but ask yourself: what do you build when the lifeline’s gone?

We always thought the real cultural coup would come from the ivory tower, the professors, the think tanks. Or maybe from the so-called “gay agenda” — whispered about by people who never once sat cross-legged in a high school hallway while the real conspirators held each other’s faces and wept over a monologue. But the truth is, it was never the tweedy wonks or the closeted cabal that would rewrite how we think about men, sexy, or strong. It was the theater kids — the first to “hold space” before it was a therapy buzzword, the ones who touched shoulders, played trees, sobbed backstage, and built the soft rebellion that is slowly, persistently, shaping what we want and who we want to be.

This episode is my love letter and open-eyed critique of how “theater kid culture” gave birth to what I now call the flitty floof: a neologism for the soft-edged, touch-positive, self-aware energy that lives somewhere between a rock band peacock and your favorite protective dad. From Prince in purple lace and the hair bands of the ‘80s to the heroin chic boys of the ‘90s and today’s boulder-shouldered superheroes — it’s all part of the same swirl.

Why does Pedro Pascal calling himself your “slutty daddy” break the internet? Why do we keep trying to “make fetch happen” with safe Zaddies like Stephen Colbert? And why does our idea of the masculine ideal keep bouncing between the bear hug dad bod, the thick-glasses sexy nerd, the stoic Bud Light dad, and the hyper-jacked Hemsworth with a body that was once coded gay?

None of this is accidental. The flitty floof isn’t a slur — it’s my invented shorthand for the theater kid grown up, still holding space, still rewriting the script on what strong, soft, and sexy can look like. The point isn’t to force everyone into crop tops and massage circles in the cafeteria. The point is to remember that the soft permission the theater kids carved out — the freedom to flit, to floof, to drop the mask or wear it proudly — is an option, not a new closet.

From the tree people who auditioned for the wind to the boulder shoulder heroes who now must starve themselves into superhero suits — every version of manhood has always been a costume and a stage direction. The only thing that lasts is the courage to stand under the lights and decide which lines are yours.

Listen to hear me riff through Prince, hair bands, heroin chic, Zaddies, the old stoics, the metrosexual phase, the “male gaze” (and the “male gays”) — and how our hunger for what’s sexy and safe is always shaped by the kids backstage. This is not a takedown. It’s a thank you, a mirror, and a reminder: the theater kids still hold the pen, but your mouth is your own.

Curtain.

How old ghosts, new lines, and our hungry machines keep us replaying the same pain

Some family stories hum so loudly through the floorboards you never need to tell them out loud. My pop-pop thought he could outrun a ghost when he moved my nana to the end of a dead-end road in Spring Lake, New Jersey — hoping she’d stop drinking if she couldn’t walk to the bar. But the bottle came anyway. The phone line was always there. She’d drink and call people she thought were betraying the family. That’s how ghosts work: you can trap the body, but the pain finds the switchboard.

I grew up with the soundtrack of ice cubes knocking against cheap glasses. Gin, whiskey, hush. My parents carried their ghosts the way their parents did — from Ireland, Budapest, Prague, the Atlantic — each migration another attempt to bury the coal seam deeper. But buried carbon never disappears. It waits. And someone always knows how to stoke it when they need the heat.

This is what I mean by manufactured dissent. It’s not a conspiracy theory about trolls. It’s older than any algorithm. It’s the trick of pulling old grief — real, legitimate grief — back to the surface when it suits a bigger agenda. The trauma is genuine. The switchboard is what makes it dangerous.

Look at Ukraine: the Holodomor — Stalin’s forced famine that starved millions — never went cold. It shaped a whole nation’s suspicion of Moscow. That wound was waiting. The West didn’t invent it, but knew exactly how to stoke it: promise “Never Again,” promise safety, promise revenge. And the carbon burns twice — once when it happens, again when it’s hooked up to a pipeline.

Same story in Hawaii. The kingdom was stolen, the lands seized, the monarchy overthrown — real, raw memory buried under generations who mostly carried it in uncle-and-auntie stories, quiet anger, backyard beers. Now, that old coal seam is stoked again. Hashtags, TED talks, Duolingo lessons. Meanwhile, the rent climbs, the kids move away, and the ghost sells nicely for soft power points while the real problem festers.

This isn’t blame. It’s confession. I quit drinking in 2020, but the hum never left my house. It just moved from glass to fridge to late-night scrolling. The ghost wants you to dial out. Someone always wants to pick up the other line.

It’s the same with the Shoah. The Holocaust didn’t just scar history — it etched a commandment: Never Again. That moral line holds. But it’s also stoked, sometimes by the same people who’ll sell fear like fuel: politicians, arms dealers, settlers, true believers. The wound stays open because the machine needs it.

None of this means the grief should be forgotten. It means you need to see the switchboard. Not every ghost wants to be a billboard. Some want a grave. Some want a witness. Some want silence. The hinge is knowing the difference before someone sells you to yourself.

May you watch your floorboards. May you guard your line out. May you drink your own story, not the cheap boxed wine your enemies would brand for you. The ghost never dies — but you don’t have to keep stoking it for someone else’s war.

America’s exhausted — and not just from inflation, rent, or the nine-to-five that turned into a nine-to-nine. There’s another kind of exhaustion we don’t name out loud: the fatigue of paying for people you don’t trust, programs you think don’t work, neighbors you swear game the system.

It’s called poverty fatigue. Not the poverty itself — the fatigue of living shoulder-to-shoulder with it, funding it, hearing the stories: the lobster on EBT, the Cadillac Queen, the able-bodied guy who says he’s too sick to work but somehow does odd jobs for cash. Some of it’s myth. Some of it’s real. All of it sits in your gut when you see your taxes go up and your block stay the same.

This is not new. Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a fable with a shred of truth. It became moral fuel for a generation who felt they were scraping while others schemed. The resentment stuck.

I’ve lived in Germany and England. There, the safety net is a hammock. If you fall, you bounce gently — unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare, all catch you before you crack your teeth. In America, the net is a frayed fishing line six inches off the pavement. Fall, break your nose, then maybe the line snags your ankle before you hit rock bottom.

COVID gave Americans a glimpse of a higher net — stimulus checks, beefed-up unemployment. It didn’t last. But that brief taste burned the question in people’s heads: Why can’t it feel like this all the time?

Meanwhile, the Left drifted deeper into temple-and-lepers politics: defending the most marginalized, the truly destitute, the moral symbols of the kingdom of heaven. And that’s good — but they forgot about the plumbers, the line cooks, the Uber dads. They forgot the working class is the real populist block: huge in number, deeply skeptical, and always aware of who’s actually scraping and who’s skating.

Now enter Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Massive tax cuts for the rich and the working class: no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. Does it mostly help billionaires? Absolutely. Does the deficit explode? Sure. But it’s also the only bone tossed to the middle — the people who think they’ll never get a European hammock and are tired of carrying someone else’s weight.

The new wave — folks like Zohran Mamdani in New York — have made it explicit: democracy means democratic socialism. More programs. More net. More taxes. And the Right knows it, which is why you hear: “We’re a republic, not a democracy!” It’s not pedantry; it’s a gut check. They see the variable change — and they push back.

This is the part the Left misses: fatigue mutates. It turns into blame. Blame turns into votes. Poverty fatigue is real — and it votes. The same people who say blessed are the poor on Sunday want their streets back on Monday. They want to believe in the safety net — but they don’t trust Caesar to hold it up.

So when Trump stands there and says, “I see you — here’s something for you, too,” it lands. Because they’d rather be thrown a bone now than told the hammock is coming later.

Poverty fatigue is bigger than the budget line. It’s deeper than the think tank numbers. It’s moral, primal, petty, and American as hell. And it’s not going away.

Chris Abraham writes about the psychic costs of the safety net, the kingdom of heaven, and the busted street math we all do when nobody’s looking.

Reference Source: NPR Code Switch: Dispatches from the living memory of trans people of color

Identity, Stealth, and Staying Submarine When the Wolves Come Out

I heard a line on Code Switch that stuck with me: “I’m staying in my lane. I can’t speak for you.”
This is my lane. I’m not your hero or blueprint. I’m just a man with a few stories — potatoes in a rock soup — about how identity can be sanctuary, then trap, then survival trick when the world turns mean.

I first learned what I call the vampire door in Norwich, England, 1990. By day it was farmers and muddy boots. By night some of those same men slipped through the door of the town’s lone gay disco. A pint in hand, glitter on the collar, nod to the bouncer. An orbit under Donna Summer. Then cloak back up before sunrise.

It was a door you stepped through when you needed to be seen — and stepped back out when you needed to be safe. I carried that logic home with me: the door always swings both ways.

But I’d felt that door long before England. At GW in 1988, I was living blocks from Dupont Circle — one of the loudest, bravest queer neighborhoods in America. Back then D.C. was neon and sweat: drag races on 17th, basement bars, whole blocks that felt like portals. My friends and I — queer, straight, shape-shifters — learned fast: the bar at seven is family, the bar at eleven is the pack. If you don’t feel the shift, you don’t make it home.

Later I saw the same logic online. The WELL, The MetaNetwork — early “walled gardens” that needed a password, a vouch. Small. Sacred. Not because they hid treasure, but because meaning leaks when the wrong eyes peek in. That’s why I still love my Freemason lodge. Anyone can see the charity dinner — but when the doors close, there’s a man with a sword. Context is fragile. Leak the lodge, salt the garden.

People hear stealth and think it’s fear. Sometimes stealth is just strategy. Like a concealed-carry instructor once told me: “The best weapon is the one nobody knows you have.” Same for your identity. Don’t print it on a flag when you know the street outside is still 1950. Sometimes staying submarine is how you get to YAWP again tomorrow.

Walt Whitman’s YAWP is America’s big queer shout — but this country loves it embalmed. The living version it fears. The louder you glow, the more antibodies you summon. You become uranium: radiant, potent, and a perfect fuel for the machine that’ll spin you up and point you back at yourself.

That’s how the pack does it now. Not clubs or chains, but money and legal twists. Look at Skrmetti: SCOTUS upholds Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Or Planned Parenthood: the Court says states can block Medicaid for everything — contraception, cancer checks, not just abortion. Sanctions turned inward. The message is simple: amputate the piece that makes us squirm, or starve.

The bar at seven is your found family. The bar at eleven is the werewolves. And the pack is bigger than a club — it’s donors, lawyers, ghost rules from 1950 still sitting in the court. You can’t extrapolate the sweaty Pride float to the rest of the country. The vibe shift is real. The pack is always circling.

So here’s my lane. I was never the hero. I was the shape-shifter who knew when to slip back through the vampire door before the vibe turned. Pretty enough to drink your Absolut — smart enough to leave before you asked me to explain.

I’m not telling you to hide forever. I’m telling you: visibility is power if you understand how the pack moves. Stealth is not shame — it’s strategy. Context is a garden. Spill it for clout, and you salt the soil. Your YAWP is holy. So is your cloak.

Stay submarine when you need to.
Always gone before eleven.

Enlightenment Isn’t Loud. It Mops Floors.

There’s a saying in Zen: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It sounds violent, but it isn’t. It’s a warning — against false idols, against ego, against brandishing your enlightenment like a badge. Because the real Buddha doesn’t announce himself. He doesn’t post about it. He certainly doesn’t go on speaking tours.

The real Buddha might be mopping the floors after the high school prom. She might be your mother, quietly cooking soup for the neighbor with cancer. He might be the hospice nurse who holds your father's hand when the morphine finally wins. No livestream. No accolades. Just presence. Just grace.

I’ve seen them. Not the floating monks — though I do believe some can levitate — but the ones who hover just above despair. The ones who carry the weight with silence and kindness. My teachers in Hawaii, Mrs. Kai and Mrs. Sakai, were Buddhas. They didn’t teach Buddhism. They taught everything that matters. With chalk. With laughter. With patience for a kid who didn’t always deserve it.

In Nepal in the ‘90s, I met a monk who tapped me on the shoulder and asked for the International Herald Tribune. It was folded in my back pocket, under a jumper — completely invisible. He hadn’t seen it. He knew. You don’t forget moments like that. You just tuck them away, like seeds, until they bloom.

The truth is: we miss most of the Buddhas. We’re too distracted. We expect enlightenment to glow like Times Square. But it doesn’t. It whispers. It blends in. You can sit next to it on the bus and never know. Our brains filter out the miraculous — and maybe that’s part of the mercy.

When I got my concealed carry permit in Arlington, the chief made me promise three things: Don’t announce it. Don’t let it print. And never, ever brandish. That’s how I think about real spiritual power. If it’s loud, it’s probably not real. If it demands attention, it’s probably ego. The Buddha doesn’t brandish. The Christ doesn’t post. The Tao doesn’t demand followers.

They serve.

But that’s the problem today. Everyone wants to be the vanguard. No one wants to be the janitor. Everyone wants to “lead the revolution” — once they finish their speaking engagement. Everyone wants to speak “for the trees,” as if the trees filed a request. But when it’s time to wash dishes, sit with the dying, or change a stranger’s wound dressing — they’re suddenly busy.

It’s all mañana. Once the utopia arrives. Once the revolution is over. Once the equity audits are done and the right words are found — then we’ll help. Then we’ll serve. Then we’ll be kind. But never now. Never dirty. Never humbled. Never barefoot in a borrowed kitchen, ladling stew for someone who smells like regret.

I don’t want that kind of progress.

Buddha nature is not theoretical. It’s incarnate. And it lives in the ones who do — not the ones who preach. It glows faintly behind the eyes of the ones who carry burdens and never mention it. It stirs in the hospice volunteers, the sandwich makers, the unknown caregivers, and yes, the sons who sleep on couches for a year while their mothers die slowly from cancer.

That doesn’t make me a Buddha. Far from it.

But I’ve seen the ones who are.

And they don’t need followers. They don’t need blogs. They don’t even need credit. They just cut wood, carry water, and vanish before the applause.