Went on FB, which I rarely do, and wow, everybody is looking to join a church. Young, middle-aged, married, single.

“I’m covered in tattoos, is there a church that will accept me?”

“I’ve never been. Which church will be kind to a total newb?”

“My husband and I are in our forties, but we hope it’s not too late to start.”

“Looking for a church buddy to start going together because it’s scary to go alone.”

“My wife wants to start going to church. Anybody got any advice for how to get started?”

It’s by far the best experience I’ve ever had on FB.

And it works the other way round. People see Putin wage endless wars and assume he must be a nationalist because they’ve learned to equate nationalism with war.

In reality, war is a normal state of humanity. War always existed and always will. That sucks beyond belief, and I hate it deeply. But people waged war before the nation-state and they wage it after.

The people who say that the Charlie Kirk memorial looked fascist to them are expressing an important thought. They think that nationalism always leads to fascism.

Nationalism sometimes leads to fascism. That fascism became associated with nationalism as its only possible development is one of the greatest problems faced by the nation-state. We shouldn’t dismiss this reaction but look for ways to address it productively. We need people to work on how nationalism turns to fascism and how it doesn’t. Because usually it doesn’t.

They are noticing Erika Kirk has 3 K's in her name and calling her KKK. https://t.co/QS9PXooxTt

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 22, 2025

A person I know, the wife of a colleague, somebody who has been to my house (but never invited me to hers because you know) wrote on Facebook “Do you think it’s a coincidence that Erika Kirk has KKK in her name?”

This is a person with several college degrees, a high-earning individual who has access to every luxury.

How is this different from Candace Owens saying that Marie-Claude is a suspicious name? Can anybody point me to a significant difference here?

I used this:

Not because I’m old but because that’s what we had in the USSR all the way up to 1991.

The Charlie Kirk memorial was typical nation-building. That’s why the entire cabinet was there. That’s why there were speeches about ancient Greece and Rome. That’s why a Catholic preached to tens of thousands of Protestants, and then a Jew did the same, and it was not only positively but rapturously received. That’s why people who watched felt happy and inspired

Contrast this with 2020. That was typical nation-unbuilding. Statues glorifying the nation’s origins were pulled down and defaced. National achievements were condemned. National history was retold as shameful. A man who never did anything admirable even in the view of his family members was put in a gold casket and worshipped. Statues and memorials were put up not because his life symbolized something good about the country but because his death symbolized something bad. This all culminated in calls for austerity to abolish one of the biggest achievements of the nation-state model, which is police. Destructive riots took place as a symbolic gesture of tearing apart the social compact of national coexistence.

Nobody tried to inspire in the audience any guilt for being American at the memorial. In contrast, the whole point of 2020 was to evoke national guilt and shame.

Charlie Kirk’s memorial made so many people want to be better, kinder, bring more light to the world. I’m still very sad that he was murdered but I also feel like I’m walking on air. Like we’ve all been given a chance to do our absolute best.

I only watched some of the memorial but the power of the inspiration it carries is overwhelming.

Let’s all be good, loving, and strong. Let’s carry out our purpose with everything we’ve got.

My mushroom and buckwheat stew is divine. I married bok choy and smoked pimentón, and the whole thing simply sang.

Speaking of marriage, the best way to gauge the quality of yours is to ask yourself if you’d want your child to be in exactly this kind of marriage, with their husband or wife treating them like yours treats you.

The annual church picnic has a band, free food, games, competitions, prizes, and even offers a chance to dunk the principal and the two pastors in water. It’s for the kids. And it’s not really free. The church provides all this, including the dunkable pastors.

A group of Bangladeshis without kids crashed the party. They are heaping platesful of food and pushing their way to the front of the line for every prize. It was not until they started taking pictures of parishioners’ kids that they were asked to leave. The Bangladeshis are probably lovely people but they don’t know how to decipher what is happening and realize why their behavior is inappropriate. Any of the Americans at the picnic would look as rude and out of place at a gathering in Bangladesh.

As an immigrant myself, I know how long it takes to start figuring things out, reading the cultural clues, and remaking yourself according to a different mold. Uprooting and transplanting is always complicated, always carries consequences.

We are on our way to our church.

Then we are going to a church picnic organized by the school church.

After that, we are going home to make mushroom stew.

I’ll clean my makeup brushes. Kara and N will make leaf piles in the backyard.

Life in America.