(FEE)—Americans are angry and divided—perhaps more than at any time since the Civil War. Holding strong opinions, especially in defense of truth, is no vice. But failing to bridge our differences and resolve them peacefully is no virtue either. Here’s my “to do” list if you want to be part of the solution instead of the problem.
- Choose someone you disagree with and start a dialogue. Make friends even if neither of you changes your mind.
- Find common ground, avoid epithets, and presume goodwill on the part of others unless and until their actions suggest otherwise.
- Embrace America as an imperfect, unfinished product—and one whose future depends on a respect for those principles that made it largely free and exceptional in the first place. No country is without flaws, and few countries in world history have accomplished as much for life and liberty as America.
- Think twice before using political connections and influence to get something you can’t secure voluntarily from others in the marketplace. Cronyism diminishes respect for both you and for the free enterprise system it corrupts.
- Judge every individual by “the content of his character” and the merit of his actions, not by the group to which he was assigned by birth, origin, faith, color, or politics.
- Elevate the importance of personal character in your life. No society can flourish if it denigrates virtues such as honesty, humility, patience, responsibility, tolerance, courage, gratitude, self-discipline, and respect for the lives, rights, property, and choices of others.
- Choose liberty over power, persuasion over force. Find ways in which you can leave the world not only a better place, but a freer one as well, for life without liberty is both unthinkable and unlivable.
- Live your life as though politics is but a corner of it, not consumed by it. Recognize the incalculable value of intact families, vibrant and voluntary associations, community engagement, loving relationships, and institutions created and sustained outside the divisive realm of politics.
- Ask yourself every day, “Am I good enough for liberty?” Then dedicate yourself to self-improvement if you can’t honestly answer “yes.” Reforming the world starts with reforming oneself.
- Defend the free speech of all people. If you catch yourself attempting to intimidate, shut down, or frighten others into submission, shake it off before the impulse turns you into an antisocial monster. “Cancel” nobody except those who insist on canceling others.
- Revere truth and the honest search for it. Never let truth be obscured or destroyed by claims that it doesn’t matter or that it is nothing more than a subjective whim of the moment. There is no such thing as “his truth” or “her truth,” only “the truth.”
- Seek diversity of opinion. Minds that try to stigmatize or close the minds of others, or that pretend that color, sex, and religion are all that matter, are enemies of the “diversity” that matters most.
- Love peace more than you love force, conflict, compulsion, and intolerance. Work toward a society in which individuals choose to do right because they want to, not because they’re forced to.
- Reject nihilism, cynicism, and pessimism. People of goodwill and character can shape the future for the better. It’s never too soon or too late to start.
- Learn from history; don’t rewrite it. Lessons from the past can make us better people in the future. Don’t twist your underwear into a knot over an old statue. Never allow the poison of “presentism” to corrupt your perspective.
- Celebrate the “uncommon.” It is the uncommon to whom we owe the greatest debt—those who speak truth to power, invent and innovate, turn failure into success, and add value to society. No one should encourage a child, for example, to aspire to nothing more than “commonness.” Respect and encourage the exceptional.
The former U.S. Senator from Maine, George Mitchell, once said, “I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. They’re created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.”
I hope he’s right. But in any event, no peace of any kind can prevail so long as we nurture conflict within and between ourselves. No peace of any kind can long be imposed from the outside in. It must begin on the inside, as a matter of conscience, one conscientious individual at a time, and then grow outward into a course of action.
These sixteen suggestions constitute a course of action for each reader to consider.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
First off, let me say that these 16 suggestions are admirable, however number 14 should be evaluated further.
How can you except all peoples opinions, when people who hold a pessimistic view are “to be rejected”!!.
Is it pessimistic to consider that one wrong move on the world stage can result in a nuclear holocaust?. Is it pessimistic to be concerned that the people who were fired for not accepting forced covid vaccinations, may be one of the first to be rounded up and brought to internment camps if Marshall Law is enacted?.. Is it pessimistic to be cognizant that there a relatively few underground bunkers to protect working class Americans in the event of a nuclear strike or nuclear fallout?..Ect, Ect, Ect…
Im just asking, because I am one of those people who were shocked when there lives were turned upside down, and left for dead as companies all across the united states, forced them to vaccinate against their will.
Oh and by the way, I recently got a tenenus shot, so I am not against vaccinations, but when i saw the vast majority of our rulers, not willing to stand up for people of conscience, I decided to take a stand, which resulted in my being fired.
The point here is that pessimism is an opinion and in my opinion, and based upon what I have experienced, regular working class people are being led to the slaughter, by a system manipulated by lies..
Now, thats NOT to say everything is bad, and I know there are numerous happy and successful people who are at the top of the food chain. Just dont forget those at the shrinking middle and bottom!!