May 2025 — When Understanding Becomes Weight

A Year in Review

By May, something changed.

March taught me how to ask better questions. April forced me to confront what those questions revealed. May was the month when understanding stopped feeling neutral. The weight of it settled in.

I was no longer trying to keep up with the news cycle. I wasn’t interested in reacting faster or consuming more. Instead, I began looking for pressure points—places where decisions made quietly had visible consequences. The question stopped being whether a story was controversial, or even whether it was true. The question became whether it mattered.

That shift changed how I read everything.

I stopped asking Is this true? and started asking What happens if this stands?
I stopped asking Who’s right? and began asking Who absorbs the cost?
I stopped asking How does this make me feel? and started asking What does this change?

Social Security became a recurring lens—not because it was dramatic, but because it was unavoidable. It represented a promise backed by math that was never hidden. We tracked the baby boom in real time. We knew when that generation would retire. In the 1980s, leaders acknowledged this reality—and then chose to borrow from the system with the intention of paying it back.

They never did.

What began as a temporary adjustment hardened into a permanent shortfall. Social Security quietly became a loan default, and no one was held accountable. That absence mattered more than the funding gap itself. Accountability is the load-bearing beam of any system. When consequences can be deferred indefinitely, erosion is inevitable.

That same lens applied everywhere else.

I began paying closer attention to the media—not just to what was being reported, but to what it was trying to make me feel. Headlines weren’t designed to inform so much as to provoke. Stories weren’t framed to explain complexity but to validate emotion. Fear traveled faster than facts. Reassurance sold better than nuance.

The media had become a kind of sorting mechanism—less about facts, more about feelings. Sorted by emotion. Sorted by identity. Sorted by allegiance.

Recognizing that didn’t make me immune to it, but it did make me accountable for how I consumed it.

Public displays of power told a similar story. Throughout May, parades and protests dominated the landscape. Parades were framed as strength and legitimacy. Protests were framed as disruption—even when peaceful. One was protected and amplified. The other was managed, constrained, and scrutinized.

Seen clearly, both were expressions of public power. A parade signals who currently holds approval. A protest signals who feels unheard. What mattered wasn’t which one I preferred, but how differently authority responded to each.

Immigration followed the same pattern. The rhetoric stayed emotional. The reality stayed economic. Undocumented workers continued to labor, pay taxes, and contribute to systems they often couldn’t access. Services labeled as “free” were already prepaid through rent, consumption, and payroll deductions. The failure wasn’t contribution. It was ambiguity—and ambiguity persisted because it benefited too many interests.

Across all of it—Social Security, media framing, immigration, protests—the same pattern emerged. Oversight still existed, but it no longer had teeth. Constraints were reframed as inefficiency. Accountability was delayed until it lost meaning. Nothing collapsed all at once.

It thinned.

By the end of May, disengagement no longer felt neutral. Understanding had turned into responsibility—not the kind that offers easy answers, but the kind that makes looking away a choice.

May didn’t provide solutions.

It asked something harder.

If the consequences are visible—if the patterns are clear—what responsibility comes with seeing them?