I didn’t, anyway.

.Me, two weeks post-partum c-section, wearing baby girl, and high heels, to deliver a sermon. Because, if not me, then who? The answer: Literally anyone else.
I just didn’t know how to…not.

It came in slow pieces, like most things that take root deep. It came in the way I learned to read a room before I could read a book. In the way I watched moods shift like weather rolling over the ridge, learned when to speak and when to stay still, learned how to smooth things over before they broke.

People called it backbone. Grit. Dependable.

And it is those things.

But it can also turn into something else.

I met with a counselor the other day. I loved her immediately. And, she picked it up in this first session. Didn’t take her long. I hadn’t even finished explaining myself when she said it plain: you try to fix everything for everyone.

Yeah, I do. and it’s really, really exhausting.

I thought I knew what that meant. I thought co-dependency was my momma not being able to make a decision without my advice. I thought it was other people’s problem.

She handed me a book. Too Much by Terri Cole. I read the introduction and had to put it down.

It was my biography.

Not a metaphor. My actual life, laid out in someone else’s words, on someone else’s pages, in a book I’d never heard of until forty-eight hours ago.

I am tired in a way that doesn’t show. Because I’ve been, well, I don’t really know how to put it in the right words… I’ve just been “there”. For so many people. Like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dam. I also learned a new term: High-functioning co-dependency. Ew. I don’t like labels, and that didn’t feel too good to learn about and see myself right in those words. It doesn’t look like falling apart. It looks like holding everything together so well that nobody thinks to ask what it’s costing me. It looks like being the steady one. The faithful one. The one who shows up, even though it’s not convenient for me.

It looks like me being the mediator of the family at five. Me, co-signing on loans while still trying to wake from post-surgery anesthesia. Me, being a school assistant and staying until 8 p.m. to print out and verify the report cards, because the assistant principal (whose job it was to do), had a church deacon meeting to get to…meanwhile, I hired childcare I couldn’t even afford, so I could prove I was faithful. Me, in active labor, and too worried about the church service I was in charge of to acknowledge I needed to be at the hospital (and almost gave birth in a car).

It looks like me turning my own writing into a workshop for the world’s problems.

I didn’t even realize it until the other day… when I stopped mid-article and thought, what the heck am I doing?

What started as a front porch — a place to sit with my own thoughts and watch the world go by — turned into something else entirely. I have been lining up arguments like fence posts, hammering them in straight and true, hoping someone would finally see what I see. Hoping they’d wake up.

And when I realized that’s what I have been doing, I felt it like a dull ache. And wanted to delete everything. Shut it down.

Somewhere along the way, I had tied my sense of purpose to whether anyone reading my articles got it.

Folks can feel that. They’ll sit with you when you’re telling a story. They’ll lean in when you’re speaking from your own lived ground. But the moment it feels like they’re being talked at, they back up.

Nobody wants to be handled. Least of all me. I’ve got a stubborn streak that’ll make a two year old look as sweet as a slice of lemon pound cake.

I’m not going to stop telling the truth. I’m not trading my backbone for silence.

But I’m laying down the need to carry it for everyone else.

I’m letting my words be an offering instead of a tool. Telling the story as it is, rooted in my own soil, and leaving space for folks to come to it or walk on by.

I’m sitting down on the porch instead of standing at the gate.

Pouring sweet tea.

Speaking plain.

Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, that’s enough.

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I have taught more than one child how to read.

That sounds peaceful. Like I’m sitting in a sunlit corner with a stack of books and a mug of coffee, raising little scholars.

No.

It looks more like sitting across from a five-year-old who is doing exactly what you told them to do… and watching their face fall when it doesn’t work.

Here’s the truth some of us say out loud, and some are afraid to address:

The English language does not play fair.

Ah, but children…a root in wisdom often discarded. Children see it immediately. You probably did, too, once upon a time.

Every single one of my babies and students has asked some version of the same question:

“Why is it like this?”

Not whining or complaining. Just asking an honest question. And also sometimes asking “did you notice if you say the word ‘bear’ over and over, it starts to feel weird?!”

And I’ve sat there, fully grown adult, responsible for their education, and had no honest answer that didn’t sound ridiculous when spoken out loud.

Because they’re right. It doesn’t make sense.

The other day, my son asked me a simple question:

“What’s a bill?”

And I opened my mouth… and immediately regretted it.

“Well… it depends.”

There’s a dollar bill. A duck bill. The bill of a hat. The bill that shows up in the mail that Momma and Daddy have to pay. And then there are bills that turn into laws. Sometimes.

I just sat there for a second after I said it. Because what kind of answer is that?

A child asks for meaning, and I hand him a pile of unrelated definitions and call it language.

We tell them:

“Learn your sounds. Sound it out. You can do this.”

And they believe us. Of course they do. Children still trust that the world is built on something solid. They trust us and every single thing we say to them.

Then they meet words like:

Tough. Though. Through. Cough.

Same letters.

Four completely different outcomes.

And suddenly you’re explaining to a child who just learned phonics that the rules they worked so hard to understand… don’t actually apply when it matters. So, then we go into dialogue about “some words just don’t play by the rules”…. and know they’ll just have to memorize the rule breakers.

Because i before e, except after c…. but, in this case, it doesn’t follow the rule… and sometimes sneaky e isn’t sneaky…and sometimes two vowels don’t actually walk together…

Sigh.

You can see the moment it hits them.

Not confusion. Betrayal.

Then come the silent letters.

“Knight.” “Write.” “Island.” And at some point, you hear yourself say: “That letter is just… there.” Just there. Not working. Not helping. Not even pretending to contribute. Just sitting in the word like it pays rent.

But, you explain it in a weird house of mirrors type of way, because you learned in a house of mirrors that English language rules are sometimes… rules. And sometimes not.

And you catch yourself mid-sentence thinking, this is absurd.

Because it is.

So we pivot.

We stop saying “sound it out,” and we start saying:

“Just remember it.”

Sight words. Memorize it. Recognize it. Don’t question it.

Which is a strange thing to call reading.

Because that’s not decoding.

That’s coping.

Meanwhile, my kids who are learning other languages look at me like I’ve lost my mind.

Because in these other languages, once you learn the sounds… you can read.

No tricks. No ambush. No guessing games dressed up as literacy. Just…consistency.

Imagine handing a child a system that keeps its word. I have to leave that sentence alone, or less I will off on a whole ‘nother tangent.

The deeper I got into this, the clearer it became: English isn’t one language. It’s a pile. Quite literally.

Layers of history stacked on top of each other with very little concern for the poor soul who would eventually have to learn it. (Just ask any ESOL teacher… God, be with them.)

Germanic roots. French influence. Latin trying to clean things up after the fact. Scholars adding letters because they thought words should look more “educated.”

And here’s the thing about Latin — it actually plays by the rules. It’s consistent. Phonetically predictable. The language that English supposedly borrowed from for respectability turned out to have far more integrity than English ever gave it credit for.

Which is part of why, when I looked at the chaos of English and started asking why, I didn’t decide to avoid Latin until middle school.

I decided to run straight toward it.

If my children were going to understand why English is the way it is — why the spelling is frozen in one century while the pronunciation kept moving, why half our vocabulary looks one way and sounds another — they needed to see the foundation. Not as an abstraction. As a living thing.

Latin isn’t a detour. It’s an explanation. Thank you, Sweet Jesus.

And before anyone comforts themselves with, “Well, maybe some kids just struggle…”

No.

I have watched bright, intuitive, pattern-seeking children slam straight into this wall.

Children who can reason, build, question, and connect ideas faster than most adults.

And they still hit words like:

“Queue.” “Colonel.” “Definitely.”

And fail.

Not because they’re incapable. Because the English language system is grossly inconsistent.

Then, just when you think you’ve survived spelling, English quietly introduces another level:

Phrasal verbs.

Look up. Look into. Look over.

Same words. Completely different meanings. No clear logic. No reliable pattern. Just exposure and repetition until it sticks… or it doesn’t.

So here’s where I’ve landed after walking multiple children through this: English is not difficult because children struggle.

Children struggle because English is difficult.

There’s a difference.

Here’s the part that stops me, in order to marvel at the beautiful human brain and it’s plasticity. Because despite all of it… they learn. They wrestle with it. They question it. They get frustrated, and then they try again.

And somewhere in the middle of all that mess, something clicks.

Not because the system suddenly becomes clean. But because they adapt. Their brains build pathways where none were clearly given. They do the work anyway.

I’ve watched one of my children spend twenty minutes on a single word — tracing it back, asking questions, refusing to just accept “that’s how it is.” And eventually, something in her face shifted. Not relief. Something more like recognition. Like she’d caught the language doing something it thought she wouldn’t notice. But, she noticed.

So if your child is sitting there, staring at a word that refuses to behave (and deserves detention or suspension)… and asking questions you don’t have neat answers for…

Good.

Let them ask.

Let them push back.

Let them notice the cracks.

Because we don’t need to train children blind mastery of a broken system.

The goal, simply, is this: To raise a child who can look at something that doesn’t make sense… and have the courage to say so.

And then decide what to do with it anyway.

I write through the lens of a home educating mother. But, I once was part of the public, then the private education system. There’s not much different in private or public.. it’s the same system but takes thousands from your pocket, to make you feel better about your child’s surroundings. And that is usually, largely, false. I do not write to make an attack on teachers… the ones who truly give their life in service to educating children live a life akin to a mother of a newborn. Late hours. Sleepless nights. And no, teachers, in fact, do not receive a summer “break”. I have hurt and alienated former colleagues by what I write. These are the ones in the trenches, the greatest of educators who lose sleep over your child, trapped within a system that is utterly and grossly broken. They are my heroes. They, and your child, deserve more than the absurd box of public education. This is why I write.

Share this with a teacher, or a homeschooling parent you love, please. It is not easy, but it is a journey of pure love.

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American’s chatter online with supreme confidence, and half the time, I get the feeling no one really knows what they’re arguing.

It sounds like this:

“They just passed a bill. This is ridiculous. Impeach!”

Sometimes this statement is correct, and sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes the “bill” in question is not even a law.

Which brings us to a useful starting point:

A bill is not a law.

Not yet.

So… What Is a Bill?

A bill is simply a proposal for a new law or a change to an existing one. That’s it.

It is an idea written down in legal language and introduced in Congress. It has no power. It enforces nothing. It changes nothing. Until it survives the process. And the process is where things start looking like an episode of Jerry Springer.

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Step 1: Someone Writes the Thing

Every bill starts with a member of Congress. Before we move on, let’s make sure we all know a few terms: In the House: a Representative; In the Senate: a Senator

They (and, more realistically, their staff, lawyers, and policy teams) draft the bill. This is where the idea gets turned into actual language. Not slogans or campaign promises. Real, enforceable text.

Then the bill is introduced.

It gets a name, a number (like H.R. 4393), and is officially entered into the system.

At this point, it is still just paper with ambition. And typically tied to a load of catchy (or corny) acronyms.

Step 2: Committee (Where Bills Go to… Reflect on Their Lives)

Once introduced, the bill is sent to a committee. Committees are smaller groups of lawmakers who specialize in certain areas:

• Judiciary

• Finance

• Agriculture

• Homeland Security
  …and so on

This is where the real filtering happens.

Committees review the bill, hold hearings, debate its details, and make changes (called “markups”).

Well, most of the time. Sometimes they just ignore it.

Most bills never leave committee. They don’t get voted on. They don’t get debated on the floor. They simply… stop existing in any meaningful way.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Congress isn’t doing anything,” it’s often because thousands of bills met their lonely death right here.

Step 3: The Floor Vote

If a bill survives committee, it goes to the floor of its chamber.

That means:

• The House of Representatives votes on House bills

• The Senate votes on Senate bills

(See how those terms I mentioned earlier are important to know?)

Lawmakers debate the bill (usually accompanied by great theatrics), propose amendments, and then vote.

If it passes:

• It moves to the other chamber (House → Senate or Senate → House)

If it fails:

• It’s done. Finished. Over.

No dramatic music. Just a vote and silence.

Step 4: The Other Chamber (Yes, Again)

The second chamber repeats the process:

• committee review

• possible changes

• debate

• vote

And here’s where things get messy. The House and Senate often pass different versions of the same bill.

Which means…

Step 5: Reconciling the Differences

If both chambers pass different versions, they have to agree on a single, identical text.

This usually happens in a conference committee, where members from both chambers work out the differences. Once they agree, both the House and Senate must vote again on the final version.

No shortcuts. No “close enough.” Exact same wording, or it doesn’t count.

Step 6: The President

Once both chambers pass the same bill, it goes to the President.

The President has three main options:

1. Sign it → it becomes law

2. Veto it → it goes back to Congress

3. Do nothing

That third one has a twist:

• If Congress is in session and the President does nothing for 10 days → it becomes law

• If Congress adjourns during that time → it dies (this is called a pocket veto)

If the President vetoes the bill, Congress can override it, but only with a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

Which is difficult. On purpose.

Why This Takes Forever

At this point you may be thinking: “This is wildly inefficient.”

Correct.

It is not designed for speed. It is designed for deliberation.

Every step is a checkpoint:

• committees slow things down

• two chambers must agree

• the President must approve

Because the system assumes something very simple: If a law is going to affect millions of people, it should be difficult to pass.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

When you hear: “They passed a bill”.

A useful follow-up question is: “Where is it in the process?”

Because a bill can be:

• introduced

• sitting in committee

• passed in one chamber

• being negotiated

• vetoed

• or actually signed into law

Those are very different realities.

And yet, in everyday conversation, they are often treated as the same.

A Final Thought

Those of us old enough to remember Schoolhouse Rock, there is an episode where a cartoon bill sits on the steps of the Capitol explaining how hard it is to become a law. (“I’m just a bill, up on capitol hill….” you’re welcome.)

It turns out that cartoon was not exaggerating. The system is slow. It is layered. It is pretty frustrating to watch. But it is built that way for a reason. Because in a country where laws carry real power, the process of creating them is supposed to require time, agreement, and more than a little persistence.

If nothing else, remember this:

A bill is just an idea.

Becoming a law is the hard part.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
The greatest compliment you could offer is sharing this article with a friend.

If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

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Have a topic you’d like me to research or just want to drop a note, I’d love to hear from you. Email hello@quietlybecomingjess.com

As I am packing away our Easter decorations and baskets until next year, I was thinking about the tradition my Momma handed to me, and I to my oldest daughter’s who are momma’s now.

My Momma did not buy Easter baskets. She built them.

Every year, the same hand basket reappeared—the one that had always been mine—transformed. She filled it herself, deliberately, with trinkets and treats chosen specifically for me: a small jewelry box, a hair ribbon, a tiny perfume, a Cadbury Crème Egg tucked just so. Then she wrapped the whole thing in iridescent cellophane and tied it at the top of the handle with a wide grosgrain ribbon, the kind that holds a bow with authority.

It was so perfectly assembled that I couldn’t bring myself to open it.

While my sister tore through hers—chocolates scattered, Easter grass shed across the carpet, toys liberated immediately—I would sit beside mine and simply look at it. If I found a small gap in the cellophane, I would ease my hand in carefully, take one thing, and leave everything else exactly as she had arranged it.

That basket was not a container. It was a statement.

A statement of care that is visible. That someone who loves you so completely, notices what you love. And curates an Easter basket just for you.

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The Other Handbasket

There is another kind of handbasket.

“Going to hell in a handbasket.”

By the late 1800s, the phrase had settled into something familiar: things moving in the wrong direction, and quickly. PDQ, as my fourth-grade teacher used to say. “Pretty Daaaarn Quick,” she’d answer, just barely holding back what she really meant.

I am looking around at the world and feeling it’s going straight to hell in a handbasket PDQ with a lot of know-it-alls trying to play God.

Of course, people have attempted to play or outplay God since…forever. It’s just a bit on the nose these days.

Nope, I’m not talking about war. Or protests. Or the lying media. I am talking about the unadulterated attempt at interfering with things that do not belong to us.

We are editing the genome. Engineering the weather. Designing consciousness. Negotiating death.

And doing it all with a confidence that would have looked, to any generation before us, either magnificent… or insane. I’m going with insane.

We have developed extraordinary power over life. And almost no shared understanding of what a life is actually worth.

Who Gets to Measure What a Life Is Worth

I don’t have to answer that question in theory.

I live it.

My husband and I have eight children. It’s the lens through which I see everything.

Some are gifted. Some struggle. Some are quiet, observant, and reserved. Some are bold, loud, natural leaders (we are honing our bossiness into leadership over here; some days are harder than others). Every one of them is different.

Every one of them is whole. Beautiful. A creation.

And every one of them matters, not because they are perfect, but because they are not.

I have anxiety. Depression. I am a trauma and abuse survivor. And I know, without a doubt, that I love deeper because of what I’ve walked through. People say that I have helped them, by sharing my story.

My husband carries a truckload full of trauma-filled rucksacks from war. And still—he doesn’t hate the world. He loves it more. His stories of cultures I once might have shunned as much as tossing the baby with the bathwater, those stories have taught me the beauty of a people on the other side of the world.

These are not defects. These are the places where depth is formed.

History agrees with me by the way.

Einstein struggled in school. I’m pretty sure I read where he was dyslexic. It has been quoted somewhere that he was a difficult student. Einstein didn’t simply tweak physics. He basically told humanity, “Your common sense? Cute. Completely wrong.” Then he gave us the unsettling realization that reality isn’t fixed or intuitive, but flexible, relative, and far stranger than our instincts can handle.

Beethoven lost his hearing. That paired with his intense personality and falling hard for the wrong woman, he gave us proof that human suffering can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into something so beautiful it outlives us all.

Helen Keller lived in a world without sight or sound. In her day, it would have been termed “deaf, dumb, blind, and mute”. She gave us proof that a human mind and spirit can break through almost unimaginable isolation and still reshape the world with clarity, conviction, and stubborn, defiant hope.

They were not mistakes.

They were human beings whose lives carried weight and meaning—not because they were optimized, but because they weren’t.

So when I hear talk about improving the human blueprint, I don’t hear progress.

I hear a quiet question underneath it all:

Which lives are worth keeping? And who the hell thinks they have the authority to decide?

Three “Playing God” Arenas

Before Life Begins

We are already answering that question.

Through IVF, genetic screening, and emerging gene editing technologies, we are selecting between possible lives, deciding which embryos are given the chance to continue, and which are not.

It is framed as “compassionate”. Preventative and responsible care. Give me a KitKat, please. I need a break.

Let’s be honest, it introduces something you should probably pay attention to:

Hierarchy.

We begin selecting for health. Ability. Intelligence. Preference. And filtering out anything that doesn’t meet the standard.

We are not fully designing human life yet, but we’re sure closer than we have ever been. And we are already deciding which lives are allowed to begin.

At the Beginning of Life

The question of abortion sits here—not as an isolated issue, but as part of the same continuum.

It is framed as freedom. Autonomy. “My body, my choice!”

If you’re offended by this point, perfect. Keep reading. Grab a support stuffy if needed.

At what point does our autonomy extend to deciding whether another human life continues?

I have conceived.

I have carried children who are here, living and breathing and filling my home with noise and life. My body has brought them into this world sometimes peacefully, sometimes urgently, and in one instance, a full code-blue and unmedicated c-section.

And…I have babies waiting for me in heaven. Grace. Micah.

There are nights I still lie awake, quiet tears falling, thinking about them. Wondering what they would look like. Who they would be. And thinking about how I want them to be the second heavenly beings my arms wrap tightly around. After I have jumped into Jesus’ arms and see my Savior face to face.

When ending a life shifts from something unthinkable, to something normal, everything changes. It stops being about crisis and becomes a framework where life itself is conditional.

It’s not the right time. But.. this will ruin my goals. I didn’t expect this. The details vary but the logic does not.

It wasn’t logical to me when I woke up one fall morning at 16 years old so nauseous I couldn’t think… and adults in my life suggested “don’t throw your life away”. Excuse me? No. Actually, get away from me. I am having a baby. And I will still become.

It turned out to be the best surprise gift in the world, against all odds.

She’s now 26, recently stepped away from a successful marketing career, and in the throes of sleepless nights with baby number two.

And She’s the answer to a prayer I was repeating … God, how could you love me? So, he showed me what it felt like to love a child.

At the End of Life

And then, at the other end of the same line, we have Medical Aid in Dying. It is spoken about as compassion. I am an empath to the point it can be self-destructive. But empathy and compassion do not give us authority over life and death.

I understand the desire to ease suffering. I truly do. But there is a line here that cannot be softened by language. We were never meant to decide when a life should end. That’s why we arrest murderers.

But, we are already watching the assisted suicide line move. It’s happening in Canada like ordering a Starbucks skinny latte. But, it’s happening in the U.S., too.

In Canada, it began as something very limited, in only specific circumstances. And, as things tend to do, it has expanded—beyond what many people were originally told it would be.

And alongside that expansion, there are real conversations happening—openly questioning whether long-held boundaries, like the requirement that a person be fully dead before organ donation, should remain.

Not hidden conversations, discussed on open platforms. As if the person speaking has any authority. Again, playing God. Even if those ideas are not widely practiced, the fact that they are being seriously considered is a big red flag.And we wonder why we don’t have more organ donors.

The boundary, the no-go zone, the trust in medical ethics, is no longer a fixed point.

The Scale Problem

What happens at the level of an individual life does not stay in a frozen state discarded to be used for who knows what. Or the plastic bucket under an anesthetized woman in stirrups. Or in a tidy cremation box. The logic begins to scale.

If life can be evaluated, ranked, selected, managed, it doesn’t stop at the embryo.

It moves outward. Population becomes something to regulate. Birth rates become something to influence. And children, our most precious and priceless gift, children become variables.

We see it in the propaganda. Children are framed as burdens, costs, obstacles.

We see it in systems. Weather manipulated, environments engineered, data and algorithms used to predict and shape behavior.

Control.

And eventually, nothing is specific anymore. No one is being held as a beautiful creation, no one is being known. Everything becomes abstract, optimized, and managed.

What Remains Real

And then—Easter arrives. The same way it always has. Uninvited. Unmoved. Unconcerned with our ambitions. A quiet reminder that authority over life and death was never ours to begin with.

I spent mine the way I always do. Surrounded by my children. Filling baskets. Cellophane. Grosgrain ribbon. Care. Each handbasket specific. Each one chosen for the person who will receive it.

Because that is the most honest argument I know how to make. Not in theory or policy. But in practice, in the living of life created by God, not a lab or a code.

The world may be going to hell in a handbasket.

But mine will be lined with iridescent cellophane, tied with a proper bow, and filled to the brim with things chosen for the specific, irreplaceable, unoptimizable person who will receive it.

Because that is what’s real.

And it always will be.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
The greatest compliment you could offer is sharing this article with a friend.

If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

Support my work

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There truly is a special kind of arrogance that only the government can perfect: the assumption that if something isn’t approved, documented, filed, and stored in a database somewhere, it doesn’t quite count. Preferably on triplicate.

Connecticut’s H.B. 5468 is built around that exact bureaucratic bullmalarky.

Parents, particularly those of us who have claimed the freedom to teach our own children instead of passing it to the government, should be paying attention. But, not only us homeschooling families. Oversight and overreach into your home and the choices you make for your children should raise the eyebrow of any parent.

My family doesn’t live anywhere near Connecticut. We (thank God) live in a hands-off homeschooling state. But, that does not matter.

Any added governmental reach into the sacred role of a parent’s primary decision making for any homeschooling family in any corner of the United States keeps all of us alert.

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This bill isn’t a framework or a safety measure, whatever its sponsors call it. It’s a philosophical position: one that places the state as senior partner in the education of your child. Not a resource. Not a support system. An authority to evaluate what you’re doing and decide whether it’s sufficient.

Under H.B. 5468, parents must register their intent to homeschool, report annually, produce evidence of learning, and retain records for years. Individually, each requirement sounds administrative.

Together, they amount to something else: a system in which your child’s education exists on the state’s terms, subject to the state’s judgment, validated on the state’s schedule.

This violates the very reason most of us chose to homeschool in the first place.

In fewer words: we don’t want you in our home or imposing what you think our children need.

Here’s the thing about that. Once the state requires proof, it assumes the right to judge that proof. And once it judges, it governs. That’s not a slippery slope argument, that’s just how policy works. A portfolio requirement today becomes a standardized metric next session. Oversight becomes enforcement. These systems don’t contract; they expand, and they normalize.

Connecticut has historically been a fairly hands-off state, recognizing the autonomy of parents as the decision makers for their children. H.B. 5468’s language builds a regulatory lens through which homeschooling parents are treated as suspect rather than respecting parents as the primary decision-makers for their child’s education.

The argument for bills like this is always the same: children falling through the cracks, safety nets, accountability. And those concerns aren’t fictional — there are genuinely at-risk children, and no serious person disputes that. But, broad systems built around fringe cases usually don’t stay confined to them. They become the default posture toward every family, including the ones who have done nothing to warrant scrutiny.

Which raises the question this bill is really answering: who does the education of a child ultimately belong to? What is being proposed does not violate The 14th Amendment. And yes, there are other states with more restrictive laws, inserting the state and limiting the parent.

However, this is a sizable leap for Connecticut, from one of the lowest regulation states to a moderately high regulated homeschooling state. Simply because The 14th Amendment isn’t being violated is not the same as overreach. A law can feel intrusive and still be 100% constitutional under current precedent.

When the state inserts itself into the parent-child relationship — even with good intentions, even incrementally — it doesn’t just add a layer of oversight. It reassigns authority. It says: your judgment is provisional. Subject to review. Contingent on our approval.

So let me give you insight from my ten-year-old son. I asked him how learning at home works for him. This is what he said:

“Well, for one thing, I learn more from you. I mean, you’re my mom. So, like, you know how to talk about things in a way I understand. Also, if I need to go to the bathroom, I can’t concentrate. If I asked to go to the bathroom, I wasn’t allowed until break time. And I wasn’t learning anything while I was told to wait until the lesson was over, because all I was thinking about was having to go pee. I hate being on a computer. Sometimes assignments were on the computer, and sometimes learning games on the computer was our “break time”. I just don’t like learning from a computer. I don’t really learn anything that way. I like how we take a break in between lessons, I get to go outside. That helps me focus after the break is over because I got my energy out. I mean, they used to talk about nouns and verbs and parts of speech, all the time. I didn’t understand anything though. When you’re teaching me those things, it’s different. I didn’t even know when you asked me about the people in the story and what they were doing, I was learning the parts of speech. I love when we do math together because if I can’t see it right away, you just talk with me and then I get it. Like before, if I didn’t understand, it was time to move on, and I felt behind. And just, not really smart. But. Homeschool is good for me because I understand the way you teach me, and I know that I am smart and I’m always learning.”

H.B. 5468 would require my son’s education to be validated by people who would have made him hold it until break time.

That isn’t just adding paperwork.

That’s redefining parenthood itself.

That’s a line worth holding.

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If you had asked the people who wrote the Constitution what worried them most, they probably wouldn’t have said taxes, trade, or even foreign threats.

The founding fathers had one concern as top priority to avoid:

Too much power in one place.

They had been ruled over and understood the cost, and were not interested in a repeat performance. This collective group had learned in earnest why limiting power must be the overarching goal of the idea of a free, sovereign America.

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A Fresh Memory of Concentrated Power

The American founders had just finished a brutal “disagreement” with a mad-hatter king.

The kind of disagreement that involves declarations, independence, and a notable increase in tea-related activity.

King George III represented a system where power was concentrated; laws, enforcement, and authority ultimately flowed from a single source.

This wasn’t a simple inconvenience, it was dangerous. It was a power that demanded absolute submission and affection. While Britain’s Parliament created the policies that enraged American colonists thousands of miles—and an entire ocean—away, Georgie-boy was a symbol of controlling power.

The Seven Years’ War left Britain with empty coffers. Broke as a joke. It seemed to make perfect sense to tax colonists. After all, the red coats were over here keeping things “in order”.

After dealing with the Intolerable Acts long enough, the colonists were fed up. And pushed back. Hard. And won our independence: the right to be a self-governing nation.

So when they sat down to design a new government, the founding fathers started with a guiding question:

How do you build a government strong enough to function… but not strong enough to take over?

Their Answer: Divide It

Instead of placing power in one person or one group, they did something clever. And very American.

They split it up.

This was not a casual process. It was deliberate and meticulous

The Constitution creates three separate branches of government:

• A legislative branch to make the laws

• An executive branch to enforce the laws

• A judicial branch to interpret the laws

Each branch has its own role. And just as importantly, none of them can do everything alone.

Why Three?

This idea didn’t appear out of thin air.

The founders were heavily influenced by a French political thinker named Montesquieu, who argued that liberty depends on separating government powers.

If the same person writes the laws, enforces them, and decides what they mean…you may find yourself on the losing end of all three.

So the founders took that idea and built it into the structure of the Constitution. A system designed to put the power in the hands of the people, with a restricted government.

As we’ve discussed on previous Saturday mornings, the whole point of the Constitution consistently points back to what the government cannot do. It doesn’t tell citizens what they must do; instead, it tells the government what it can and, more importantly, cannot do.

For example, the government can regulate public safety, but it cannot arbitrarily take away rights without due process. The Constitution’s principles and powers are designed to balance these interests, ensuring that government actions are legitimate and fair.

Checks, Balances, and Mild Suspicion

Separation of powers doesn’t just divide responsibilities.

It also creates what we call checks and balances. Not to be confused with balancing a checkbook, but in a way, it could be loosely viewed through that lens. You keep a close eye on your finances, to make sure nothing fishy happens.

Checks and balances means each branch keeps an eye on the others.

Congress passes laws, but the president can veto them. The president enforces laws, but Congress controls the funding. Courts interpret laws, but judges are appointed and confirmed through the political branches.

And if something goes too far, the courts can step in and say:

“This does not align with the Constitution.”

It’s a system built not on blind trust…but on structured skepticism. Very smart, very American.

Not Always Smooth

Now, if this sounds like it could occasionally lead to disagreement—you are absolutely correct.

Separation of powers is not designed for speed, it’s designed for deliberation. And sometimes for frustration. Laws can take time to pass. Branches can disagree. Processes can feel slow, really slow.

But that friction is not a flaw, it’s part of the design. Because the founders believed that slowing things down was often the best way to prevent bad decisions made too quickly.

A System That Requires Participation

One crucial detail:

This system doesn’t run on autopilot. It depends on people like you and me, the blessed American citizen.

Voters choose representatives, officials respecting constitutional limits, and courts carefully interpret laws. The Constitution provides the structure, but citizens provide the energy.

A Final Thought

If there is one theme that runs through the Constitution, it is this:

Power should never be too comfortable. It should be questioned. Divided. Balanced.

And occasionally required to explain itself. Preferably before doing anything too dramatic.

If you take nothing else from today’s civics manual, take this:

The founders did not trust concentrated power, so they made sure it would never be easy to hold.

Even if that means the rest of us occasionally have to wait a little longer for things to get done.

If you enjoy understanding why the system was designed this way, and perhaps appreciating a government built on equal parts structure and suspicion, you’re in the right place.

Coffee recommended.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
The greatest compliment you could offer is sharing this article with a friend.

If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

Support my work

This beautiful Sunday morning provided a bit of comic relief.

Before I begin, though, it is probably best practice to announce this is not just about this morning, but an untangling of the day, with a little nostalgia mixed into the recipe.

Rewind to this morning, which by now (supper) feels like a week ago already – and I find myself standing at my makeup mirror trying to hold in my laugh (which, really isn’t an easy thing after birthing several children).

In this rare moment, I do not have a child tethered to my leg or waist. Or tapping on me while simultaneously saying, “MommaMommaMommaMommaMommaMommaMOMMA”, before my brain registers that I am supposed to respond. Or sifting through my makeup bag and carrying off what I need to put on this face so that I don’t scare the fellow church attending folks that they have confronted the walking dead.

See, there is this very real – almost seems magical – but quite real and tangible thing that happens to mothers. Especially when they are in the middle of a task. Points double if she is tending to herself. Points multiply by one thousand million should Momma need to visit the potty for a tinkle. By a gazillion if she answers the phone.

Every child whether they be six or twenty-six years of age, suddenly needs Momma.

It is emergent.

Immediate.

Must attend STAT.

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On this Sunday, after I’d had my my face soaped up, felt an arm reach around me to turn the shower tap down from boiling to ice cold and had the first little person join, just because. (This repeated twice over, and now, I will be the one who makes us late to Sunday School, again.)

After I’d almost broken my nose, tripping over three pairs of feet while brushing hair, listening to last night’s good dream and the sad one – oh, and the scary one, the one that they couldn’t sleep after. (I’m not real sure how those dreams kept anybody awake because I was right there, hanging off a corner of the king-size and they all seemed to be sleeping real fine.)

After someone needed a second breakfast, then all needed second breakfast (yes, Hobbits. All of them); sometime after all of this, I…was….alone… at my bathroom vanity. Putting on my lippy-stips and trying to do something with menopausal hair that used to be so long and thick it broke ponytail holders and would give me a headache from the weight even if I tried.

“Hey! Whoa. Whoa. WHOA. Why are you getting into my things?! No – wait – stop! Why would you touch that?! It’s my brand new deodorant and I don’t need to open it until this one has run out. What in the – what are you guys doing over here in all my things?!”

A few simultaneous thoughts…

Number one, y’all know that is the yankee and not me due to the phrase “you guys”, ‘nuff said.

Number two, he has things that don’t get to be messed with. What a revelation!

Number three, back up deodorant so you don’t run out?! What are these tricks to the trade?!

Number four, this is why his vanity/counter/whatchamacallit is always pristine. And mine is… well. It just is. Kinda like my closet. And shoe rack. And Chester Drawrs.

Which reminded me of my Great Grandmaw Austin calling from the kitchen “y’all don’t be plunderin’ in my Chester Drawrs!”

This morning, our children were plunderin’ in Daddy’s things. I thought it was hilarious. His britches were gettin’ all twisted into a wad.

Then, that Grandmaw Austin memory made me remember that I didn’t know until my mid-twenties some man named Chester, did not, in fact, create bedroom furniture capable of storing folded clothing.

It also invoked the feeling of peace and humidity and happiness sitting with her on the screened porch, gently swinging and snapping peas from Paw Paw Austin’s garden. And watching him, in Liberty jean overalls, tending to his peppers. Those peppers. I remember thinking we were going to have to call the ambulance at dinner – his face bright red, sweat dripping across his brow, breathing becoming labored... just eating pepper after pepper.

By now, everyone is in our minivan, Bluey (yes, I do have a “Nice parking spot, Rita” sticker on the back), and I am not.

And as usual, once I fly out the door with a necklace and shoes in hand, I have to make two trips back inside for whatever I forgot.

On the way to service, I opened my email and read an article from about legal pet raccoons in Tennessee. He also mentioned a few of those dumb state laws we all inevitably have found and makes us chuckle.

In Gainesville, Georgia, it is illegal to eat fried chicken with any utensil other than your hands.

That made me smile and then frown and then smile again.

I have an aversion to eating fried chicken in public.

One Sunday afternoon, many Sundays ago, at the Country Club, I was harshly admonished by a parental figure over my fingers and a fried chicken breast.

I don’t care much for Country Clubs either.

But, on this Sunday, the sermon was on the Transfiguration of Jesus. It was good.

And, as many times as I have spoken on this breathtaking scene from Scripture, God does what God tends to do if we listen carefully.

As Peter, Matthew, and John woke up to a light-filled scene of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah talking – Peter did what Peter does and starts talking, too.

God envelops them all and says “This is my beloved Son. In whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” – (Matthew 17:5)

When I imagine it, I think about hearing God’s voice all around and also within the body and the mind. They dropped to the ground and covered their faces. Like many in the Holy Bible when encountering angels or God’s voice.

I cannot imagine how altogether overwhelming, frightening, and altogether incredible that moment must have been.

But then, Jesus touched them. “Look at me. Do not be afraid.” (v. 6).

Look at Him. Stay focused on Him. Do not be afraid.

Whether it’s a piece of fried chicken with a memory of disappointment or the latest unsettling news around the globe.

Look at Jesus. Do not be afraid.

Also the kind mainstream media creates sound-bytes for their flavor of the week (is anyone still truly listening to their malarkey?!).

Anyway, back to the report.

It’s 30+ pages of careful, understated language that basically says:

–the world is getting more chaotic (duh)

–the risks are stacking (uh, yeah)

–and we are entering a very different kind of era (no joke, Sherlock)

So let’s talk about it. Plainly. Like we do here.

First: the vibe check.

If I had to translate the entire report into one sentence:

We’re not facing one big threat—we’re facing a lot of medium-sized ones that are starting to overlap. That overlap is where things get dangerous.

At home: the threats are closer than we like to admit.

Except for the poor man who married me, who has a wife in his ear ranting 24/7/ Poor guy, having to hear his wife rant on and on, trying to convince him into making our land a fully self-functioning homestead. The man won’t even let me have a chicken coop on all this acreage — the audacity. A cow and some goats are apparently too much to ask for as well. I feel bad for him having to put up with such a wife.

Anyway, back to the report.

So. The report says the biggest risks inside the U.S. right now are:

- Drug trafficking (especially fentanyl)

- Terrorism (less organized, more individual)

- Cyber attacks

- And the long-term risk of advanced weapons

Let me pause on fentanyl for a second.

My half-sister died last year from an accidental fentanyl overdose. I never really even had the chance to truly know her. But, a coroner detailing the last moments of a person’s life due to fentanyl are gut-wrenching.

So when I read phrases like “transnational criminal organizations” and “synthetic opioid flows,” I don’t read that as abstract policy language.

I read that as: this is still happening, every day, to real families.

The report notes deaths are declining—but tens of thousands of Americans are still dying. That’s not a solved problem. That’s still a crisis, just a lowered volume crisis.

Terrorism has changed.

The era of massive, coordinated attacks isn’t the primary concern anymore.

Now it’s: individuals, radicalized online (ah, what a gift the internet has been, says no regular Josephine, ever), acting alone.

This means terrorism is harder to detect. Harder to prevent. And frankly, harder for a society to process.

Can we take a moment and try to wrap our minds around what we, as a society, have been trying to process in the past 6 months? No, we can’t wrap our minds around it. And, I have enough faith to understand it is likely not going to slow down.

The big four: who the U.S. is watching

You can feel it in the report—even when it’s written in diplomatic language:

- China → the long-term rival (tech, power, influence)

- Russia → the immediate disruptor (Ukraine, NATO tension)

- Iran → regional instability + proxy warfare

- North Korea → nukes + hacking for cash

None of this is new. The Usual Suspects (great movie, by the way; too bad Spacey’s legacy is what it is). But the intensity is new — it’s more intense than it has ever been on a global scale in my short lifetime and even in my history research.

And then there’s the part I keep coming back to (apologies in advance to my dear husband):

Technology.

AI. Cyber. Space. Quantum.

The report is very measured about it. Almost too measured.

But read between the lines and it’s clear:

AI is already shaping warfare (hello, AI has been shaping us for longer than we even acknowledge)

• cyber attacks can hit infrastructure at scale

• space is now a battlefield

• quantum could break encryption

• I’ve said this for a while now, and I’ll say it again here:

• AI is not just a tool. It is becoming a weapon.

Not in some sci-fi robot uprising way.

In a much more real way: Targeting decisions. Propaganda. Cyber attacks. Intelligence analysis

Faster. Cheaper. Scaled.

And once everyone has access to it, the barrier to entry drops.

The world itself is more unstable

A stat buried in the report:

There are more active conflicts right now than at any point since World War II.

Let that land.

(If you are younger, and that doesn’t land, send me a message hellp@quietlybecomingjess.com — the DOE failed you, and I will point you to some grounded historical documentation.)

Not all of them involve us. But instability has a way of traveling:

- through migration

- through markets

- through alliances

- through conflict spillover

So what does this all mean?

Here’s my typical Saturday morning civics translation:

We are not heading into one defining crisis.

We are heading into a period where problems stack, systems strain, and small sparks have bigger consequences.

At this point, I honestly don’t trust much outside of God and my family. But, I can trust what I feel in my soul — which is troubled. A shift happened and it hasn’t “un-shifted”. It’s simply begun a very small beginning of a snowball.

I hope I am wrong. I hope one day someone can point and laugh at me, and say that lady was crazy. That would be the best I could hope for at this time.

Final thought…

The report ends in a very government way—measured, careful, non-alarmist.

But the subtext is clear:

We need to be paying attention.

Not in a panic way.

Not in a doomscrolling way.

But in a grounded, informed, civics kind of way.

Because this isn’t abstract.

It’s the world we’re all living in, and the uneasiness we are all feeling—whether we read the report or not.

If you’re anything like me, reading all of this can make you feel a little… heavy.

But here’s the solid truth I come back to:

Scripture has always been honest about the world being unstable, imperfect, even dangerous—and yet it never points us to fear as the answer. It points us to steadiness. To a kingdom that isn’t shaken by headlines. To a God who is not surprised by any of this.

He gave us a roadmap to this very situation time and again.

There’s a line in Psalm 90 that says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Not panic. Not urgency. Just clarity.

Life is short and much more fragile than we like to admit, even when we feel strong. Life is more meaningful than we often live like it is; we take for granted sacred time that we will not regain in this life.

So if you’ve been putting off the deeper questions… if you’ve been meaning to come back to truth, or even just explore it honestly—this might be your nudge.

Not out of fear.

Out of invitation.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. No one has it all figured out. That is the whole point.

You just have to be willing to turn toward something more solid than everything shifting around us.

Start there. He will meet you. John 14:6 🤍

If you read this and feel a tug on your heart, but not quite sure what to do with that, please message me. I am always open to help, if I can.

If you read this and felt a need to unburden, ask for someone to pray alongside you, or simply have a clarification question, I will pray and help as I can.

hello@quietlybecomingjess.com

In the Deep South we only have one constant we can truly count on: summer. More specifically, the dog days of summer—the kind where the air feels like hot soup and stepping outside is like walking straight into someone’s mouth.

And the mosquitoes, or muhskeetahs as we call them, might as well be the official state bird. Around here we just call them skeeters, and a skeeter down here can drain you faster than the electric company in August.

Because of this, during the other three seasons we must collectively keep our entire wardrobe ready at any given moment. Fall and spring in particular require a level of clothing preparedness normally reserved for natural disasters.

Take fall, for example. You may have picked out the perfect cozy Thanksgiving outfit for the family portrait—boots, flannel, scarves, the whole Pinterest situation—but chances are everybody will be sweating while Mama is fussing for everyone to smile. Meanwhile we’re all standing there feeling hotter than that turkey in the oven.

And if you grew up in the South, you know Mama had that outfit planned weeks in advance—and the weather showed up like it hadn’t been consulted.

Spring isn’t any easier. Mama spends precious time picking out just the right beautiful smocked sundress with matching shoes, ruffled socks, and a half-gallon-sized hair bow. The child looks like a pastel Easter egg with legs.

Then Easter Sunday rolls around and the weather decides to take a hard left into blizzard conditions. Suddenly a cardigan, a sweater, or even a down-filled puffer coat must be applied to the ensemble, completely crushing all of Mama’s Easter egg hunt photo dreams.

Just like 48 hours ago my family was out back swimming in the pool. Today I am freezing my lily-white buttocks off because it is currently 44 degrees outside.

Now don’t get your knickers in a twist over that reference—it’s just Whiskey Jane from one of my favorite scenes in Young Guns Part II.

As we say down here, it’s not the heat—it’s the humidity that gets you.

Cold weather?

You can kiss my grits.

If you listen to American political debates for more than about five minutes, you’re likely to eventually hear someone say:

“Voting is a constitutional right.”

Sounds straightforward enough.

But, when you actually open the Constitution, you might just be surprised.

The Constitution does not begin by declaring that every citizen has an automatic right to vote.

Instead, it mostly tells governments how they are not allowed to restrict voting.

That may sound like a small distinction, but it explains a great deal about how elections work in the United States.

Let’s start with the original Constitution (1787).

The Elections Clause

Buried in Article I, Section 4 is something called the Elections Clause.

It says that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof…”

In plain English:
States run elections.

But the sentence does not end there.

It continues:

“…but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”

Which means that while states handle the details of elections, Congress has the authority to step in and change the rules for federal elections if it chooses.

This shared responsibility is part of the Constitution’s design.

The founders were suspicious of concentrated power, rightly so, and they solved many problems by splitting authority between different levels of government.

What the Amendments Added

Over time, the Constitution added several important voting protections.

The 15th Amendment says voting cannot be denied because of race.

The 19th Amendment prohibits denying the vote based on sex.

The 24th Amendment bans poll taxes in federal elections.

And the 26th Amendment sets the voting age at eighteen.

Notice the pattern.

Each amendment limits how voting may be restricted, rather than writing a single sweeping sentence that says “everyone votes.”

American constitutional law often works this way:
not one rule, but a collection of boundaries.

A Modern Example: The SAVE America Act

This brings us to a modern proposal in Congress called the SAVE America Act — short for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

The proposal would require individuals registering to vote in federal elections to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or certain government identification.

Supporters argue that the measure protects the integrity of elections by ensuring that only citizens are registered to vote.

Critics argue that documentation requirements could make voter registration more difficult for some citizens who may not have those records readily available.

Both sides are debating the policy. It passed the House and is currently stalled in the Senate.

But from a civics perspective, there is a different question worth asking.

The Constitutional Question

The constitutional question is not whether the law is popular.

It is whether Congress has the authority to set rules like this for federal elections.

And that brings us back to Article I, Section 4.

Remember:

Congress may “make or alter” regulations for federal elections.

Because of that clause, Congress has passed many election laws over time — including the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act.

Each of these laws adjusted how federal elections are conducted.

So when modern legislation proposes new election requirements, the debate often centers on how those rules interact with constitutional protections, particularly the amendments that prohibit discrimination in voting.

In other words, the Constitution sets the boundaries, and lawmakers argue about where inside those boundaries policy should fall.

A Final Thought

If there is one lesson from today’s civics manual, it’s this:

The Constitution rarely answers political questions with a single sentence.

Instead, it provides a framework — a structure of powers, limits, and responsibilities.

And then it leaves the details for generations of Americans to work out.

Sometimes calmly.

Sometimes loudly.

Often clear as mud, and occasionally while wearing powdered wigs.

If you enjoy learning how the system actually works — and perhaps discovering that the rulebook is both shorter and more complicated than expected — you’re in exactly the right place.

Coffee recommended.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
The greatest compliment you could offer is sharing this article with a friend.

If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

Support my work

My writing wanders through philosophy, culture, education, and whatever questions refuse to leave my mind. If intellectual curiosity appeals to you, you’re welcome to subscribe.

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Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher (121–180 CE). Italian bronze bust, late 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Every generation seems to rediscover the same promise: that somewhere there exists a system capable of revealing the hidden rules of power.

Today those promises often arrive through targeted advertisements, expensive book bundles, and private online communities. Yet the ideas themselves are rarely new. Many of the principles presented as modern discoveries were discussed centuries ago by philosophers, political thinkers, and historians.

The advertisement appeared in my Facebook feed, between photos of friends and updates from news outlets. I suspect it landed in my algorithm because of my long history of reading philosophical and psychological works.

It promised something ambitious. Not simply advice, but a framework for understanding power—hidden dynamics that supposedly shape human behavior beneath the surface of everyday life. The book was described not merely as a book but as a system: a set of protocols designed to produce transformation rather than insight.

The price was unusually high for a book bundle, which made the claim even more intriguing.

I saved the post for a few days to avoid an impulse purchase. My reasoning was simple: if the system worked, perhaps the price reflected seriousness rather than marketing.

Curious about the growing genre of modern “power manuals,” I eventually purchased the bundle.

What followed was not simply a reading experience but a small window into how persuasion, publishing, and philosophy intersect in the digital economy.

Books promising hidden rules of power are not new. What is new is the ecosystem through which they now travel.

The Long History of Power Manuals

Advice literature about power has existed for centuries.

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) remains the most famous example. Machiavelli argued that political leaders must understand the realities of power rather than the moral ideals societies publicly profess.

Later writers expanded on this tradition.

Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647) offered aphorisms about reputation, perception, and social intelligence. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) explored how individuals navigated hierarchy in Renaissance courts.

Despite their differences, these works share a common premise:

The world contains patterns of influence that are not immediately visible.

Readers are invited to become perceptive observers of human behavior.

Modern books continue this lineage. Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game both attempt to identify recurring structures in human behavior and social systems.

Across centuries, the appeal of the genre remains remarkably stable.

People want to understand how power actually works.

Why Hidden Knowledge Is So Attractive

Part of the appeal lies in human psychology.

The human brain is naturally predisposed to detect patterns. Psychologist Michael Shermer calls this tendency “patternicity”—the impulse to perceive meaningful structures even when information is incomplete or ambiguous (Shermer, 2011).

In complex societies, this instinct can lead people to seek frameworks that explain social behavior.

Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow shows that humans strongly prefer simple explanatory systems even when reality is complicated (Kahneman, 2011).

A clear narrative provides cognitive relief.

Books that promise to reveal hidden rules offer exactly that.

They transform uncertainty into structure.

The Modern Persuasion Funnel

What has changed in the twenty-first century is how these books reach readers.

Rather than emerging primarily through traditional publishing channels, many contemporary self-help systems appear first through targeted social media advertisements.

These ads often frame the book as something more than a book.

Instead of presenting ideas for readers to consider, they present systems to execute.

This rhetorical shift matters.

Ideas can be evaluated through reading. Systems, by contrast, are evaluated through participation.

If the value of a system depends on behavioral implementation, criticism based on reading alone can be dismissed as incomplete engagement.

Pricing strategies reinforce the message. While most books cost between fifteen and forty dollars, some modern self-help bundles exceed one hundred.

Marketing theory describes this as commitment filtering: higher prices reduce casual purchases while increasing psychological investment.

These books are often accompanied by private communities where readers share interpretations and testimonials.

None of these strategies are inherently deceptive. They simply reflect the infrastructure of modern persuasion systems.

As Shoshana Zuboff argues, digital platforms increasingly operate through behavioral targeting and influence rather than broad public communication (Zuboff, 2019).

Ideas now travel through attention economies.

When a book becomes a system, criticism can be reframed as incomplete participation.

A Brief Case Study in Rhetorical Framing

An interesting rhetorical moment occurred after I contacted the author and expressed dissatisfaction with the book.

In response, I received an explanation that the work should not be evaluated as a book of ideas but as a behavioral protocol requiring extended execution.

Meaningful judgment, I was told, would require weeks of structured implementation. The response also suggested conditions under which criticism would be considered legitimate.

This type of response reflects a rhetorical pattern common in transformation-based frameworks. Many rely on what philosophers call a self-immunizing structure, in which criticism is reinterpreted as evidence that the framework correctly predicted the critic’s resistance.

By defining the system as experiential rather than conceptual, criticism based on reading becomes, by definition, premature. The response also implied that skepticism might itself reflect a cognitive pattern the book had anticipated.

A related rhetorical pattern appears in the way modern systems often invoke historical figures to establish authority. Stories about Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, or Sun Tzu are frequently presented as evidence that a particular framework descends from ancient wisdom traditions.

Yet the historical record rarely supports such direct lineage. Socratic dialogue, as described in Plato’s works, relied on what scholars call the elenchus—a method of philosophical cross-examination designed to test definitions and expose contradictions, often leaving participants in a state the Greeks called aporia, or productive uncertainty.

Socrates himself famously insisted that his wisdom consisted only in recognizing his own ignorance:

“I know that I know nothing.”

Ironically, Socrates also warned against rhetoric used to manipulate audiences rather than pursue truth—a concern that appears in Plato’s Phaedrus, where rhetoric divorced from knowledge is criticized as persuasion unconcerned with truth (Phaedrus 261a–266d).

When ancient figures are repurposed as narrative anchors for modern systems, the line between intellectual history and persuasive storytelling can easily blur.

These dynamics are not unique to a single author. Similar patterns appear across coaching programs, self-help systems, and ideological communities built around experiential commitment.

A Different Definition of Power

To understand the philosophical tension underlying many modern power manuals, it helps to return to one of the most influential Stoic thinkers: Marcus Aurelius.

Writing in the second century CE, Aurelius kept a personal notebook that would later become Meditations. The text was never intended for publication. It was simply a series of reflections written by a Roman emperor attempting to maintain clarity of mind while governing an empire.

One of his most famous lines offers a radically different definition of power:

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book XII

For Aurelius, power was not primarily about influencing other people.

It was about mastering one’s own reactions.

Another passage reveals his attitude toward criticism:

“If anyone can show me that I am mistaken… I will gladly change. For I seek the truth.”
— Meditations, Book VI

In Stoic philosophy, criticism is not something to neutralize.

It is something to welcome.

For Marcus Aurelius, power meant mastery of one’s own mind—not strategic control over others.

The Persuasion Economy

Modern power manuals operate within a very different environment from ancient philosophy.

Ideas now circulate through algorithmic platforms that reward engagement, emotional reaction, and curiosity.

Messages promising secret knowledge often spread quickly because they trigger powerful psychological responses: curiosity, exclusivity, and the promise of insight others lack.

Self-help literature has always existed at the boundary between philosophy and commerce.

In the digital era, that boundary has simply become more visible.

Sociologist Micki McGee argues that modern self-help culture increasingly frames personal development as an ongoing project of optimization (McGee, 2005).

Systems promising transformation therefore become both products and identities.

The Value of Critical Reading

Books about power will likely continue to appear for a simple reason:

Humans remain fascinated by influence.

But the most useful approach to these works may be neither blind acceptance nor immediate dismissal.

Instead, readers benefit from examining both the ideas and the systems surrounding them.

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius quietly reminded himself in a private notebook:

“You have power over your mind—not outside events.”

In an era filled with systems promising mastery over the external world, that quieter definition of power may be more radical than ever.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes—traditionally attributed to King Solomon—observed long ago:

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

Further Reading

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Public-domain translation by George Long (available via Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg).

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. HarperCollins.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford University Press.

Plato. Phaedrus. Public-domain translations available via Perseus Digital Library and Project Gutenberg.

Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain. Times Books.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game. Random House.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

A question for readers

Many books promise to reveal the hidden rules of influence or success.

Do you think these systems genuinely offer new insights—or are they simply modern packaging for much older ideas?

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The question appears almost casually in the middle of a political crisis.

A Roman governor stands before a man accused of treason. Religious leaders are demanding execution. A crowd is gathering. The situation is volatile.

And in the middle of it all, Pontius Pilate asks a question that has echoed across centuries:

“What is truth?”

Was is cynical? Arrogant? A dismissive shrug from a man who had spent too long in politics to believe in anything as pure as truth—a man who knew truth as negotiable.

I’m not sure Pilate was being cynical.

I think he may have been tired.

Pilate was not a philosopher sitting quietly in a study. He was a Roman governor managing one of the empire’s most volatile provinces. The religious leaders were demanding action. The crowd outside was restless. The situation was spiraling toward something dangerous.

And in front of him stood a man he seemed to suspect had done nothing wrong.

It’s not difficult to imagine the exhaustion of that moment.

Sometimes the question “What is truth?” does not come from arrogance.

Sometimes it comes from fatigue.

And yet the moment carries a profound irony.

Truth was not hidden from Pilate. It was standing right in front of him.

Jesus had already spoken with startling clarity about himself:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Which makes Pilate’s question one of the most quietly tragic moments in the story.

Pilate asked the most important question in history.

The tragedy is that he asked it while looking directly at the answer.

Perhaps that is why the moment still resonates. The same question belongs to us.

We ask it when life becomes loud. When pressure builds. When decisions pile up faster than reflection. In those moments, truth can feel distant or abstract, something to debate rather than something to encounter.

But this moment between Jesus and Pilate suggests something deeper.

In that brief exchange, Jesus does not treat Pilate as a judge or an adversary. He addresses him as a soul—someone capable of receiving truth and light. In that moment, just between them, Jesus is more interested in the destiny of the man Pilate than in his own fate.

His invitation is simple: to receive the truth. To look again. To step outside the noise and see differently.

Pilate senses the mystery in Jesus’ words, but it unsettles him. And so he ends the conversation.

Even today, as in the past, we still ask the question:

What is truth?

But often, like Pilate, we move on too quickly to hear the answer.

Pilate’s story leaves us with a sobering possibility.

Sometimes truth is not distant or hidden.

Sometimes it is simply standing there—quiet, patient, and easily overlooked—waiting for us to slow down long enough to recognize it.

Truth was not hidden from Pilate.

It was standing right in front of him.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
The greatest compliment you could offer is sharing this article with a friend.

If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

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There is a curious habit among Americans.

We are a nation that loves opinions.

We hold them with enthusiasm.
We post them with confidence.
We defend them with the stamina of marathon runners and the fact-checking habits of someone who has just discovered the word “actually.”

And yet there is one small detail that rarely enters the conversation.

A surprising number of us are conducting these passionate civic debates without having read the instruction manual.

To be clear, this is not a criticism. Life is busy. Most of us are juggling work, family, bills, and whatever mysterious administrative tasks adulthood invents on a Tuesday afternoon. Civic literacy rarely appears on the daily to-do list.

And yet the system we live in quietly assumes that we know at least the outline of how it works.

Which is odd, when you think about it.

Because the instruction manual for the United States is not hidden in a government vault guarded by riddles and velvet ropes. It is not written in twelve volumes of legal code. It does not require a law degree or a ceremonial wig.

It is about 7,500 words long.

You could read it comfortably in the time it takes to watch half a movie or scroll through a moderately energetic comment thread.

It is called the Constitution.

Now, to be fair, most of us did meet it once. Somewhere around middle school it drifted past us wearing powdered wigs and speaking in dates. We memorized a few vocabulary words, circled a couple amendments, and then moved on to other academic priorities.

Around that same time, many of us also learned fascinating things like the structure of a cell and the square root of numbers we would never again encounter in the wild.

Curiously, we did not learn how to file taxes or balance a checkbook, but that is perhaps a discussion for another day.

The Constitution, meanwhile, quietly waited in the background.

Which is unfortunate, because it was never meant to be a museum artifact.

It is the rulebook for the national house we all live in.

And living in a house without knowing the rules can lead to some fascinating conversations.

Imagine a neighborhood where everyone passionately debates the HOA bylaws, but no one has actually read them.

One neighbor insists the treasurer controls the entire subdivision.
Another is convinced the landscaping committee has the authority to declare war.
Someone else believes the mailbox inspector holds absolute power over domestic and international affairs.

Meanwhile the bylaws are sitting quietly on the kitchen table.

The United States works a little like that sometimes.

The Constitution does not describe an all-powerful government that can manage every problem from the national capital like a particularly busy household manager.

In fact, it does something almost the opposite.

It creates a government with limited and specific powers, and then it divides those powers so thoroughly that no single group can get too comfortable with them.

Which is why the government has three branches.

Not because the founders loved organizational charts.

The founders had recently dealt with a king and found the experience… educational.

So they built a system where power is divided.

Congress writes the laws.

The President carries them out.

The courts interpret what those laws mean and whether they follow the Constitution.

It is less like a pyramid and more like three coworkers who have been instructed to check each other’s work indefinitely.

Congress debates and passes laws—often slowly, occasionally dramatically, and sometimes while the rest of the country watches with the same fascination reserved for weather systems forming offshore.

The executive branch runs the day-to-day machinery of government and enforces those laws.

The courts step in when questions arise about what the law actually means, or whether it fits within the boundaries of the Constitution.

Each branch has tools to keep the others in check.

Presidents can veto laws.
Congress can override vetoes.
Courts can strike down laws that violate the Constitution.

It is not always graceful.

But grace was never the goal.

The goal was balance.

History had already demonstrated something the founders took seriously: power, left unsupervised, tends to grow like a houseplant that has been given too much sunlight and absolutely no boundaries.

So they built a system where power constantly bumps into guardrails.

They also built something else that quietly shapes American life every day.

The Bill of Rights.

Contrary to popular belief, the Bill of Rights is not a list of privileges the government kindly hands out when everyone behaves.

It is a list of things the government is not allowed to do to you.

Take the First Amendment, for example.

It is one of the most quoted sentences in American life and possibly one of the most misunderstood.

People invoke it during workplace disagreements, grocery store debates, social media arguments, and occasionally when someone politely asks them not to shout during a city council meeting.

But the First Amendment does something very specific.

It restricts the government.

The key phrase appears right at the beginning:

“Congress shall make no law…”

The amendment is not a guarantee that everyone will like what you say.

It is a rule telling the government that it cannot punish you simply for saying it, with a few narrow exceptions involving threats, violence, or immediate chaos.

Which means the American tradition of loudly disagreeing with one another is not a malfunction.

It is the system working exactly as designed.

Freedom of speech, it turns out, includes the freedom to say things that other people find frustrating, irritating, misguided, or spectacularly incorrect.

The Constitution’s answer to speech you dislike is not government silence.

It is more speech.

Preferably thoughtful speech.

Occasionally sarcastic speech.

But speech nonetheless.

Another idea quietly woven through the Constitution is something called federalism, which sounds complicated but is really just a practical arrangement about who handles what.

Some powers belong to the national government.

Some belong to the states.

And some belong to the people themselves.

The Constitution gives the federal government certain enumerated responsibilities—things like national defense, foreign policy, and regulating commerce between states.

But it does not give the federal government unlimited authority over every corner of daily life.

That is why the Tenth Amendment gently reminds us that powers not given to the federal government remain with the states or the people.

Which is why laws can look different depending on where you live.

Education policies differ.
Taxes differ.
Local regulations differ.

It can feel a little messy at times.

But the founders were not trying to create a perfectly uniform machine.

They were building a union of states that shared national governance while still keeping much of life close to home.

Understanding that simple division of responsibility answers a surprising number of political arguments.

Sometimes the real question is not “Should the government do this?”

It is “Which level of government is actually responsible for this in the first place?”

And occasionally the answer is: neither.

Finally, there is one more distinction that helps keep civic conversations grounded.

The difference between rights, laws, and preferences.

A right is something protected from government interference.

A law is a rule created through the legislative process that people are required to follow.

A preference is something we believe society should do because it seems wise, kind, polite, or morally good.

All three matter.

But they are not interchangeable.

Not every disagreement is a constitutional crisis.

Sometimes it is a policy debate.

Sometimes it is a cultural question.

And sometimes it is simply two people discovering that they view the world from very different front porches.

The Constitution does not eliminate those disagreements.

What it does—quietly and remarkably—is protect our ability to have them.

Which brings us back to the small but slightly inconvenient requirement of a self-governing nation.

The “self” part.

A republic works best when the people living in it know, at minimum, the shape of the system they are operating.

You do not need to memorize court cases.

You do not need to quote James Madison at dinner parties.

You certainly do not need to develop strong feelings about powdered wigs.

But it helps—just a little—if we occasionally read the house rules.

They are shorter than most social media arguments.

And considerably more useful.

Part of the Saturday Morning Civics series.

Quietly Becoming Jess is a free publication and 100% reader supported.
If you find value in this writing space and would like to support my work with a donation—of any amount—it is deeply appreciated.

My full-time work is wife, mother, and home educator. The paycheck is hugs and kisses—the very best kind.

Your support helps make it possible for me to continue researching and writing, my small way of contributing thoughtful conversation to the world we’re all trying to understand together.

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“Surely we should all know the basics of how this works…”

—you are not alone.

The United States operates on a remarkably short rulebook. The Constitution and Bill of Rights together are shorter than most instruction manuals for assembling furniture.

And yet many of our national debates happen without anyone glancing at the manual.

Saturday Morning Civics exists to change that—gently, with a bit of wit tossed in for flavor.

Each week we’ll explore the basic ideas that shape American government: how the branches of government work, what constitutional rights actually protect, and why the system was designed the way it was.

Not with lectures or cable-news shouting.

Just thoughtful explanations, a little historical context, and the occasional dry observation about powdered wigs.

If you enjoy understanding how the system actually works—and maybe chuckling along the way—you’re in the right place.

Coffee recommended.

But nations do not remain strong on ideals alone. They rise or fall on the character of the people within them.

And the shaping of character begins in smaller places than we often imagine.

We are living through a moment in our country that asks something of us.

Not because upheaval is new—it isn’t—but because the pressures shaping us now are subtle and constant.

Technology expands.
Information accelerates.
Systems promise efficiency, comfort, and convenience.

Tools now exist to handle almost any task.

Yet tools never remain neutral for long. Over time, they begin to shape the patterns of thinking with which we live.

Every technology promises efficiency and convenience. But every technology also trains us—forming how we think, how we pay attention, and how we relate to the world.

Every tool shapes the hands that use it.

And if we are not careful, we may wake up one day formed in ways we never consciously chose.

So before we focus on systems, power, or politics, we must ask a deeper question:

What is happening to us?

The Astonishing Reality of Being Human

Before we can answer that question, we must remember something we rarely stop to consider.

Being human is astonishing.

When you strip away the noise and look closely at what we are actually capable of—emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—it becomes almost unbelievable.

Consider a few of the qualities that define the human person.

We possess a profound capacity for meaning.
Humans do not merely live—we interpret. We take raw experience and turn it into story, purpose, and legacy. Even in suffering, we ask why.

We imagine what does not yet exist.
Every invention, every work of art, every movement toward justice began first as a flicker in someone’s mind.

We experience remarkable emotional depth.
Joy braided with grief. Hope tangled with fear. We hold contradictions without collapsing. We love fiercely even when we know loss is inevitable.

We carry an instinct to care for one another.
Across cultures and centuries, humans reach toward each other—comforting, protecting, teaching, and sacrificing. Families and communities are built on this deep impulse to carry one another through impossible things.

We grow and change.
Humans can rewrite their own stories. We can repent. We can forgive. We can rebuild.

We create beauty.
From lullabies to cathedrals, from children’s drawings to symphonies, we make things not merely because they are useful—but because they are beautiful.

We long for connection.
To be known. To be understood. To be seen. This longing shapes families, friendships, and entire civilizations.

And we possess courage.
Human beings face uncertainty every day and still choose to move forward. We endure heartbreak, illness, and loss—and still choose to love again.

These qualities are not small things.

They are extraordinary.

Why This Matters

This dignity is not a mystery.

Scripture tells us that human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Our capacity for meaning, love, creativity, repentance, and courage is not accidental. It reflects the One who made us.

And in Jesus Christ we see the clearest picture of what humanity was always meant to be—truthful, humble, courageous, and filled with sacrificial love.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote:

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

Every person we encounter carries that kind of weight.

The human mind is not merely a processor of information. It is the place where meaning, conscience, imagination, and conviction take shape.

It is where we decide what kind of people we will become.

In many ways, the inner life we carry is sacred ground.

Formation in a Distracted Age

Yet the modern world exerts enormous pressure on this sacred ground.

We live in an age of constant information, endless stimulation, and near-permanent distraction. Attention is fragmented. Reflection is rare. Silence is becoming rare.

The danger is not simply that technology exists.

The danger is that we slowly become passive participants in our own formation.

Our habits of attention shift. Our patience shrinks. Our relationships thin out into messages and notifications.

And gradually, almost without noticing, we begin to live closer to the surface of our own lives.

The greatest threat to a free people is not simply what happens around them, but what slowly happens within them.

A nation remains free only as long as its people remain awake—morally formed and capable of thinking clearly about what is true and good.

A Steady Responsibility

We do not control the direction of history as completely as we sometimes imagine. Nations rise and fall, technologies advance, and cultural tides shift in ways no single generation fully commands.

But we are not powerless.

The shaping of a society still begins in the decisions of ordinary people—how we think, what we give our attention to, how we treat our neighbors, and whether we remember the God who made us.

If we allow ourselves to become distracted, passive, and detached from one another, we will slowly forget the very qualities that make us human.

But the opposite is also true.

When people choose faith over cynicism, presence over distraction, responsibility over comfort—something remarkable happens.

Communities strengthen.
Minds sharpen.
Courage returns.

A nation cannot remain One Nation, Under God, Indivisible unless its people remember what it means to be human.

And remembering begins in small places:

Turning off the noise.
Looking one another in the eye.
Thinking carefully.
Working with our hands.
Praying.
Forgiving.
Building lives rooted in truth and love.

These are humble acts.

And perhaps reclaiming our humanity will begin there again.

I was brought home from the hospital in a 1967 baby blue Volkswagen Beetle. I think somehow that Bug and I morphed souls, because I have never been quite like anyone else I know my age. In fact, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with people my age.

I had a pretty cool childhood, although a lot of people might say otherwise. I didn’t go to vacation Bible school. I didn’t have play dates with friends. I think I only spent the night away from home twice, and that was when I was much older. When my baby sister was born in ‘91 and my family became quite domesticated.

But this story is about growing up in the 1980s. Before the internet. Before cell phones. Back when you waited until after 7pm on Friday to make a long-distance call.

My parents took me everywhere with them. Everything they did, I went right along with them.

I did have a babysitter one time. I was two years old, and I’m guessing teenager/college‑girl Christy did not anticipate my parents coming home a little early to find two‑year‑old me sitting on the floor watching Christy and her boyfriend in a rated‑X scene on the couch.

So from then on—unless I explicitly asked to stay with my grandparents—I always went everywhere with my mama and daddy.

I loved talking to adults. I had some sweet friends from preschool and then elementary school, but I also had a hard time in social settings with my own peers. Kids were boring. They didn’t talk about anything interesting or important, like the economy or politics or music.

Also, they ate glue. And boogers. We didn’t have a whole lot in common.

I was born into a family of entrepreneurs. My super‑power‑in‑real‑life‑hero aunt was working to earn her doctoral degree in Law during my toddler and early childhood years. I was exposed to quite a bit of interesting conversation—economics, history, law, the Constitution, the branches of government, you name it.

Which brings me to a memory at Mercer School of Law.

Did you know that if your mom misses her little sister so very much—and also probably wants to go to the sorority house for a gathering—that even at three years old, back in the 80s, you could be snuck into a dorm room? No, I didn’t attend Mercer, but I can tell you how to be very, very quiet sneaking in to stay the night in a dorm room with your super‑cool mom and aunt.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my super‑cool aunt would come to live in a wonderfully magical historical home in Macon, Georgia, where my parents toted me right along every time my aunt and her sorority sisters threw a gathering.

Everybody loved me. I’m sure I’m being biased—I’m sure I could be very annoying at times—but man, I had so much fun, and I had zero awareness that any adult around me was intoxicated or that I, by any other standards, probably shouldn’t be at a sorority party. I got to sit and talk with students of law, and it was all very normal to me. I loved every minute of it.

I really didn’t think of them as anything different than my friends. I felt like I was their friend just as much as my aunt was their friend. Plus, I had the most amazing conversations, listened to the best music, and became center‑stage entertainment when I was breaking it down on the makeshift dance floor to anything from Michael Jackson to Marvin Gaye, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, to Guns N’ Roses.

I had no idea that children were not allowed in speakeasies. Was I in a bikini contest at the then‑famous Spinnaker at four years old? Why yes I was, and I “won.” And I had zero clue why the lady in front of me had a real bad wedgie problem with her bikini bottom.

I had no idea that other four‑ and five‑year‑olds didn’t learn to salt the napkin from the bartender or get to order Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers with extra, extra, extra cherries. (I feel like I need to make it clear that these were completely non‑alcoholic drinks.) But we were in fancy places with fancy bars.

As I look back, thinking about how the various bartenders loved to talk to me, I wonder if maybe I was a bit of light in their night as they were endlessly serving people who were stumbling all over the room. They were a light in mine, because I had another mind with a wealth of knowledge to have good conversation with.

I’ll never forget the night I held an electric guitar for the first time. New Year’s Eve, live band. I can’t even tell you the name of the band, but I can tell you that year it had been 88 degrees on Christmas Day, and it was still warm on New Year’s.

I vividly remember wearing this gorgeous tiered dress that my parents brought back from a trip to Hawaii. I was enjoying my filet mignon dinner and taking tips up to the stage, requesting songs from people donned in fingerless gloves, pumps, and probably a case of Aqua Net.

We were probably one of three tables left in the Club as the midnight hour passed, and looking back, I bet the band members were exhausted and just wanted to leave. Somewhere in a box long lost are photos capturing the moment of me with the band, holding a gorgeous white electric guitar.

I saved up quarters for the jukebox instead of the pinky‑dinky (if you’re not from the Deep South, pinky‑dinky is the ice cream truck). I ate dinner with adults at adult restaurants, a folded white linen over my lap, instead of happy meals. I never had a child restraint seat or even used a safety belt.

It was the 80s.

And the 80s was a wild place, man.

One Nation, Under God, Indivisible.

Eleven syllables. Five powerful words. Together, these words form quite a beautiful and altogether holy posture. The moral architecture: a people held together by shared purpose, guided by divine authority, and committed to remaining whole even in the face of strain.

This is more than a line we recite; it’s a vision of what a people can be when we remember who we are and to Whom we answer.

Maybe, if we have the grit of the people before us who built this nation, and I pray we do, we will persevere.

If you are reading this and do not share my faith, I invite you to stay. Not because I aim to convert, but because I hope we can all agree by now on one truth: there is evil in this world. Not simply evil acts. Pure evil.

And if evil exists, we must ask ourselves a hard question:
Are we fueling evil by ignoring who we really are and becoming slaves of destruction?

If we continue to forget that we are one nation, under the authority of God, a people who refuse to be divided, my friend, we are in for a long, hard road ahead.

At its core, “One Nation” is a call to shared identity. It says: ‘You belong to each other. You are responsible for one another. You are not enemies, but neighbors.’ A community bound by responsibility, sacrifice, and a common moral imagination.

That is the human, societal echo of Christ’s explanation of the second greatest command:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” –Jesus, Matthew 22:39

It’s no wonder society begins to fracture when we turn against one another. It is no small thing to find ourselves at odds with our fellow man. It’s deeply painful.

Uncorrected, it is the hollowing out I discussed in my last article on Rome. Uncorrected, we collapse just as a house collapses when the foundation is fractured.

A nation cannot be “one” without mutual care, humility, and a willingness to bear one another’s burdens.

Unity is not political—it’s relational. It’s love lived.

“Under God” → Love God

This is the vertical commandment.

It places our entire nation beneath God’s divine authority, divine law, divine truth.

We do not invent morality. We receive it. We do not worship the state. We worship God. We do not place human power at the top. We place God at the top.

“Under God” is the civic way of living under the Greatest Command:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” –Jesus, Matthew 22:37

It’s a posture of humility, dependence, and reverence. And it is imperative to understand that we serve a holy and just God. If you’re still reading, this is where I need you to stay with me.

The evidence of evil in this world needs no further proof, especially if you have been living anywhere but under a rock as of late.

Scripture gives us a clear picture of the spiritual forces at work behind human systems. During the temptation of Jesus, Satan offers Him “all the kingdoms of the world” if He would worship him, illustrating his temporary sway over worldly systems (Matthew 4). This passage reveals the spiritual struggle that has always surrounded human authority.

Throughout history, many who held power have faced that same temptation—to pursue control rather than truth, influence rather than righteousness. Today is no different. Satan’s tactics have never changed, he still tells the same tired lie.

The truth is, the prince of this world is also the prince of deception. And deception always bears fruit in the real world. Dark, unholy acts of pain, injustice, and chaos are being practiced. Celebrated. Protected. By people who have rejected living under God, and chased after the greatest deceiver of all time. This evil deceiver dances in celebration the more we divide, and the further we turn from God.

If we, the people, one nation, reject evil, united under God, no party nor any political official or elite power can put asunder an indivisible people.

Remember, as outlined in 1776, this government exists only by the consent of its people.

“Indivisible” → The fruit of both commandments

When a people love God (vertical) and love one another (horizontal), the natural result is indivisibility.

Not uniformity.
Not agreement on every issue.

But a covenantal unity that refuses to fracture.

Indivisibility calls us to the hard, disciplined work of unity—not the shallow unity of sameness, but the covenantal unity that refuses to let disagreement dissolve the bonds of belonging. It’s the societal expression of spiritual maturity.

When our pride is humbled, a common good prevails. When we love one another (even if we don’t feel like it), responsibility is shared.
And when God is honored above it all, we are indivisible.

When you step back and look at the whole phrase…Eleven syllables. Five words. It becomes a moral blueprint.

Reading it through the lens of the two greatest commandments, the pledge becomes almost liturgical:

• Love God → Under God

• Love one another → One Nation

• Live out the fruit of both → Indivisible

It’s astonishingly simple and profoundly demanding.

And when you sit with it, it becomes obvious.

It’s the architecture of a healthy people.

It’s the moral spine of a free society.

It’s the spiritual truth that holds a nation together.

A note from me:

I write from my heart about the beauty around me, my family, my sweet plot of life in the country, and even more about the state of humanity in this very broken world. Above is a piece that is completely unedited and published “as is”, and just as messy as me. Written as my thoughts tumble out of my head and onto paper. I like it that way, even if no one else does. Because, you see, I am human. And I am interested in protecting humanity in an age that is quickly, rather than slowly, losing humanity to the metaphysical (Ai). Be an encourager to your writer friends, your fellow artists, to let their work be human, untouched by anything artificial. All great works in our history have been borne of a writer, a composer, a thinker…a human. Let us protect that sacredness.

What unsettles me most right now isn’t just institutional decay. It’s the way ordinary citizens are being conditioned to see one another as disposable. I saw a post recently from a liberal woman calling for “war,” insisting that “straight, white conservative men” should be sent to the front lines. It wasn’t satire. It wasn’t fringe. It was another example of what we have become as a people divided. As if fantasizing about violence against political opponents were a form of moral courage.

That’s the part that stopped me cold.
Not the politics.
The dehumanization.

Rome didn’t collapse because people disagreed. It collapsed when citizens stopped believing they shared a common fate. When contempt became a virtue. When the idea of “those people” dying felt righteous.

That’s the part of Rome’s story we should fear most — and the part we’re beginning to echo.

Contempt is always the shortcut. It’s easier to demonize than to understand, easier to flatten whole groups of people than to wrestle with the complexity of a shared civic life. But contempt is also how a republic teaches itself that some citizens are expendable — and once that lesson takes root, the center cannot hold.

We’re watching elites shape narratives in real time. We’re watching media outlets tell us not to trust our own eyes. We’re watching citizens fracture into tribes while the same small circle of powerful people quietly protects itself. And now, with the Epstein files surfacing, we’re seeing something rare: Americans across political lines reacting with the same disgust, the same clarity, the same sense that something foundational has been violated.

For the first time in a long time, the truth is cutting through the noise.
The question is whether we’ll unite around it — or whether the same forces that hid this for years will divide us again.

That’s what sent me back to Rome. Not the Hollywood version with flames and mobs, but the slow hollowing that actually happened.

Rome didn’t lose its republic in a dramatic moment. It kept its institutions long after people stopped believing those institutions could restrain the powerful or protect the ordinary. The Senate still met. Courts still ruled. Elections still happened. But the spirit that made those forms meaningful had drained away.

The crisis wasn’t that laws disappeared. It was that laws became tools rather than limits. Leaders broke norms “for good reasons.” Emergency powers were justified as necessary. Precedents were violated to save precedent. Each exception felt small, even reasonable. But together they taught everyone the same lesson: the rules were optional when the stakes were high.

A republic that abandons order in the name of compassion eventually loses both. You can’t have compassion without structure. You can’t have mercy without stability. Rome learned that too late — and we are flirting with the same mistake when we treat boundaries, laws, or limits as inherently oppressive rather than necessary for the vulnerable to flourish.

Rome didn’t lose its constitution. It lost its confidence in the constitution.

And once that confidence eroded, loyalty migrated. Soldiers stopped seeing themselves as servants of the Republic and instead attached themselves to individual generals — men who paid them, defended them, and rewarded them when institutions failed to do so fairly.

It wasn’t tanks in the streets. It was trust quietly relocating — from process to person, from system to power.

But the deeper danger — the one Rome couldn’t recover from — was the emotional shift. The rise of civic contempt. The belief that some citizens were obstacles, not neighbors. That some lives were expendable for the sake of “saving the Republic.”

That’s the tone I hear now. Not everywhere, but enough to matter. Enough to warn us.

What strikes me most when I read Roman voices from this period is the emotional tone. Not panic — fatigue. Not chaos — a weary clarity. Cicero didn’t sound like a man trying to ignite a revolution. He sounded like someone watching the ground shift beneath his feet, knowing exactly what was slipping away and knowing he couldn’t stop it.

That feeling is familiar. It’s the quiet heaviness many Americans carry now — the sense that something essential is eroding even as daily life goes on. We still work, raise children, worship, argue, and hope. But the civic world that once held us together feels thinner, less capable of forming us. Rome didn’t end its citizens’ lives. It simply stopped shaping them. That’s the danger we’re flirting with.

But here’s where the comparison must be handled carefully.

Rome lacked several things America still has.

It had no deep tradition of decentralized power. No widespread ethic of conscience standing above the state. No strong intermediary institutions — families, churches, local communities — capable of forming people independently of political authority.

America still has these things, even if they’re strained. And that distinction matters.

A healthy republic doesn’t outsource virtue to the state. Compassion can be encouraged by law, but it cannot be manufactured by it. Virtue must be lived, not legislated. When a people forget that, they start asking politics to do the work of families, churches, and communities. And politics is terrible at soul work.

Rome’s renewal failed in part because nothing stood between the individual and the state once the Republic weakened. America is not there. And that gap — those layers of moral and communal life — are exactly where our responsibility lies.

Because here’s the truth:
Republics don’t collapse when institutions wobble.
They collapse when moral infrastructure disappears…and nothing remains to absorb strain.
When every conflict must be resolved at the center.
When power is no longer feared, and limits are no longer loved.
When citizens stop seeing one another as citizens.

America is strained, not terminal. Rome was terminal when norms died and no moral ecosystem remained to carry people through the transition.

Understanding that difference doesn’t remove responsibility. It clarifies it.

The work of preservation doesn’t begin with seizing power or predicting catastrophe. It begins with sustaining the forms of life that Rome no longer had when it needed them most — families that teach virtue, communities that tell the truth, institutions that refuse to bow to power, citizens who refuse to be divided by the very people who fear their unity.

The Epstein files are a test of that. A moment of clarity. A chance to see whether we still have enough shared moral instinct to recognize evil when it’s exposed — and enough courage to stand together against it.

Rome hollowed because its people stopped believing the Republic was worth the sacrifice — and because they stopped believing one another were worth the effort. Civic contempt did what no invading army could do.

America hasn’t reached that point.
But we are being tested.
And what we do now will determine whether we still deserve a republic at all.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

A note….

This was a heavy piece to write. Not because the history is unfamiliar, but because the emotional terrain is. I see good people growing weary. I see contempt becoming casual. I see institutions still standing, but trust quietly relocating. And I keep asking myself: what holds a republic together when the scaffolding starts to crack?

If this essay stirred something in you—grief, clarity, resolve—I hope you’ll sit with it. Share it. Talk about it around the table. Because the work ahead isn’t just political. It’s moral. And it begins with refusing to see our fellow citizens as enemies.

If the last essay traced the principles we’re quietly letting go, this one turns to the habits that still hold a republic together when its institutions begin to strain.

One of the quiet distortions of our moment is the belief that republics are saved—or lost—at the center.

When institutions strain in the very eyes of citizens, our instinct is to look upward: to elections, courts, executives, national movements. We talk as if the fate of the country turns primarily on who holds formal power.

History tells us the truth. Republics rarely collapse because the center fails first. They erode because the moral infrastructure beneath them thins out.

This is where most conversations go wrong. We focus almost exclusively on political outcomes and neglect the pre‑political conditions that make self‑government possible in the first place.

Republics are not preserved top‑down. They are preserved before politics. A republic is for the people. The people unite to preserve.

The First Condition: Strong Families

Strong families are the first of those conditions, and not for sentimental reasons. Families form citizens capable of delayed gratification, self‑command, and responsibility—qualities no law can manufacture at scale.

They reduce dependence on the state not because they are ideologically motivated, but because they actually do the work of formation. Every durable republic rests on the family, whether it acknowledges it or not.

When families weaken, the state doesn’t become kinder. It becomes larger.

I’ve seen this in my own home, where the hardest lessons aren’t political but personal: telling the truth when it costs you, taking responsibility when it would be easier to blame, learning to govern yourself before trying to govern anything else.

These are the small, unseen habits that make a free people possible.

The Second Condition: Local Life

When national institutions wobble, local ones matter more, not less.

Churches, schools, town councils, voluntary associations, and informal networks of care do something centralized systems cannot: they teach people how to self‑organize in healthy, community‑rooted ways.

They give ordinary citizens practice in responsibility. They make problems concrete rather than abstract.

A republic survives strain when people still know how to govern small things together.

The Third Condition: Truth‑Telling

Truth‑telling is another quiet pillar, and one of the most endangered.

Not truth‑telling as performance or provocation, but as discipline. The refusal to lie even when it would benefit “your side.” The willingness to correct falsehoods calmly. The resistance to apocalyptic language.

Hysteria accelerates collapse more reliably than corruption. Corruption can be contained. Hysteria spreads.

A society that loses the ability to speak truth without panic begins to substitute force, shame, or narrative control for persuasion. That substitution feels stabilizing in the short term. It isn’t.

The Fourth Condition: Cultural Memory

Cultural memory matters far more than we tend to admit.

Republics fail when people forget why limits exist, why power is dangerous, and why freedom requires restraint. This isn’t about memorizing dates or documents. It’s about understanding the logic of self‑government.

A people who don’t know why their system exists won’t defend it when it becomes inconvenient.

This is why education—not just schooling, but the cultivation of wisdom—plays such an outsized role in moments of strain. Schools transmit information. Cultures transmit meaning. When meaning thins, institutions are asked to do work they were never designed to do.

The Fifth Condition: Moral Courage Without Drama

All of this converges at the personal level, where the most overlooked form of preservation takes place: moral courage without drama.

Not marches. Not viral posts.

But refusing to lie. Refusing to say what you don’t believe. Refusing to demonize neighbors. Modeling restraint, humility, and responsibility in ordinary life.

Every historical renewal began this way—not with a majority, but with minorities who refused to surrender inner freedom even when outer systems decayed.

They didn’t imagine themselves as heroes. They simply declined to be reshaped by lies.

This is the part of the conversation many people avoid because it feels unsatisfying. There’s no lever to pull. No enemy to defeat. No moment of release.

But it’s also the part that actually works.

America is not losing its soul because of one election, one policy, or one party. It is only at risk if citizens decide that principles are optional when inconvenient.

A republic survives if enough people continue to live as if law matters, truth matters, family matters, conscience matters, and limits matter.

That kind of fidelity is slow. It’s often unseen. It rarely feels dramatic.

But it has outlasted empires.

And it’s the ground on which everything else still stands.

Next week, I’ll turn to What the Slow Death of Rome Reveals About the Fate of Republics

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

If you prefer to read this piece on my website, please visit Quietly Becoming.

I don’t come to these questions as a theorist. I come to them as someone who became a mother at sixteen and raised a large family around a dinner table where Scripture, history, and difficult conversations were ordinary. I grew up in a home where the Constitution wasn’t an abstraction but something you were expected to take seriously, and I married a man whose service to this country came with real costs our family lived with. My concern about America’s direction is not abstract. It is tied to the world my children and grandchildren will inherit.

Not all principles erode at once. Some are ornamental. Others are structural. When the structural ones weaken, everything above them begins to strain.

Several of America’s foundational principles are under pressure—not through open rejection, but through gradual redefinition. That kind of change is easy to excuse and hard to notice until the effects are already visible.

This is not an argument for nostalgia, nor a claim that the past was purer or more just than the present. It is also not a denial of complexity, pluralism, or the real constraints of governing a modern nation. The founders themselves disagreed deeply, failed often, and built a system precisely because they did not trust human virtue to be constant. My concern is narrower and more modest: that certain principles were designed to restrain power, instill responsibility, and preserve legitimacy over time—and that when those principles are slowly reinterpreted as obstacles rather than safeguards, the system may continue to function mechanically even as its moral authority thins. I am not predicting collapse. I am asking whether we still recognize the conditions that make self-government possible at all.

One of the most vulnerable is the equal application of the rule of law.

The founding idea was demanding: no one stands above the law, and the law is not a weapon. It was meant to restrain power as much as behavior. Process mattered because it protected legitimacy, even when the outcome wasn’t what you hoped for.

What is at risk now is not the existence of law, but its credibility. When enforcement shifts depending on who is involved or what outcome feels justified, the structure weakens quietly. Whether these failures are isolated or becoming patterned matters less than how often they are defended instead of corrected. When people begin to believe the law is political, compliance becomes conditional. History suggests that when this shift goes uncorrected, republics rarely remain stable for long.

This is not about party. It is about precedent. Once law is treated as a tool rather than a restraint, its future use no longer has clear limits.

Closely related is the erosion of consent of the governed. American legitimacy was meant to come from the people, not from credentials or efficiency. Consent requires persuasion. It requires explaining decisions to those who must live under them. It requires lawmakers who are willing to do that work rather than bypass it.

Yet many consequential decisions are now resolved through administrative rulemaking rather than legislative deliberation, leaving the public with little opportunity to understand or challenge what is being decided. “You don’t understand the issue—trust us” replaces the harder work of democratic persuasion. As consent thins, governance drifts toward management rather than trust.

Limited government is under strain as well—not because it has been openly rejected, but because exception has become familiar. Emergency powers once understood as temporary are now treated as normal. The risk is not one crisis, but how quickly people stop questioning crisis logic at all. A system built on restraint cannot operate indefinitely on urgency without changing the habits of both rulers and citizens.

Freedom of conscience and speech is also narrowing without formal prohibition. The founding assumption was that truth emerges from open debate, not enforced agreement. A republic can endure disagreement. It cannot endure being told that certain questions are no longer open for discussion.

Today, informal censorship operates through platforms, funding mechanisms, professional consequences, and reputational pressure. Moral questions are treated as settled. Dissent is discouraged less by law than by the quiet fear of losing standing, work, or community. Over time, disagreement does not disappear; people simply learn when to stay quiet. Public discourse grows thinner and less honest, even as it grows louder.

Beneath these developments lies a neglected principle: civic virtue.

The founders were clear that a free people must govern themselves internally before they can govern themselves politically. The Constitution assumes a population capable of restraint and responsibility. Without those habits, no system of checks and balances can hold.

This is not only a political failure but a human one. Discernment takes practice. It takes self-control, the ability to pause, and the willingness to notice when emotion is driving judgment. When those capacities weaken, people become easier to manage and harder to persuade, and institutions adjust to that reality.

Moral formation is increasingly handed off to institutions that were never meant to carry it. Freedom is often understood as doing whatever one wants rather than learning how to govern oneself. Responsibility is treated as coercion. Limits are dismissed instead of understood as the conditions that make freedom workable.

You don’t have to share the founders’ faith to see where this leads. A society that struggles to form self-command in its people will lean more heavily on external control—not because anyone set out to dominate, but because something has to fill the gap.

None of this means the country is lost. It does suggest that the health of the republic depends less on the next election than on whether citizens still believe these principles apply to them, even when they are inconvenient.

A republic endures not because its ideals are perfectly lived out, but because enough people continue to treat them as real.

I feel the weight of this not as a commentator, but as someone who has had to think about what gets passed down. Around our dinner table, we have tried to form the habits a free people need. That is why this moment feels heavy. Before questions of policy or power, it raises a quieter one: whether we are still forming people capable of carrying freedom without being managed.

Next week, I’ll turn to What Actually Preserves a Republic When Institutions Wobble

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.