As we approach this Thanksgiving, many people feel that they don’t have that much to be thankful for because of this uniquely challenging time.

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According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs there are about nineteen million American veterans, representing between six and seven percent of the entire population. They range in age from 112-year-old, World War II veteran Mr. Lawrence Brooks to the almost ten thousand young men and women who aren’t even twenty years old yet.  

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In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis the world came the closest in human history to a nuclear war. There are useful lessons from this Cold War period, when nuclear missiles were being transported on Soviet ships to support Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution, that aren’t being applied to relevant situations in the world right now. During those 13+ days beginning on 27 October 1962 when the U.S. became aware of the presence in Cuba of Soviet missiles that could strike any city in America:

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“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” was a statement from a 2019 research report produced by Facebook on the impacts of Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) on teen mental health. This is just one of the many items we learned from the documents and testimony provided by a Facebook whistleblower to the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes and Congress. Less than a week later, in countries all over the world for six hours people couldn’t talk to loved ones, conduct business or - in places like Afghanistan and Syria - coordinate travel to escape life or death situations due to a Facebook outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger (all also owned by Facebook).Then during the aforementioned congressional hearings, elected officials demonstrated their lack of understanding of technology that has been around for almost two decades. 

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The Haitian Immigrant Crisis on our Southern border is a reminder that foreign policy is not foreign. This current crisis is a bit different from previous ones originating from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, because in this case you have nationals from one country (the Haitians) attempting to come to the United States from another country (Chile, Columbia, Panama), where they have been living for many years. One commonality with this current crisis and the others is that it’s the drug cartels’ human smuggling networks that are lying to vulnerable and desperate people and moving them over thousands of oftentimes treacherous miles. 

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Over one million people lost power in Louisiana recently because of its fourth natural disaster in twelve months. Texas was shut down for a week because of winter storms. People were dying in the Pacific Northwest because it was too hot in the summer and the West Coast seems like it’s perpetually on fire. I had the opportunity recently to meet someone who put all this stuff in context for me. Katherine Hayhoe, a climatologist and Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, taught me that to care about climate change you don’t have to be a certain type of person, you just have to be human.

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If you were to perform an internet search for “California Recall Election” most of your results would be articles from people freaking out that the Democratic Governor of California might get removed and replaced by a Republican. To comprehend how deep blue California could turn red, we first have to understand why the state is currently in the middle of an election that could potentially remove Governor Gavin Newsom from office. 

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What if the next coronavirus was actually designed in a lab to affect a specific population? The field of bioengineering has evolved to a point where this could become a reality. COVID-19 is far from the last pandemic the world is going to have to reckon with, whether naturally occurring throughout the world, or being engineered by people with bad intentions. 

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I never thought I would write a book. I never thought I would run for Congress or be in the CIA either. However, my mother has always told me that you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

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