The home I would come home to

According to the United Nations’ 2025 World Urbanization Prospects report, Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, has displaced Tokyo as the most populated city in the world. With 42 million residents, Jakarta’s population is about the same as that of Canada’s. The report also notes that 45% of the world’s 8.2 billion human inhabitants live in cities.

I’ve just returned from the Basque Country, where people always surrounded me. I mostly walked everywhere — 3-5 miles a day on packed streets where, when it rained, we engaged in a kind of umbrella war jockeying for space on the wet sidewalks. My trip home took 27 hours — two bus rides, three airplanes, three airports, and finally a car trip from the airport in Wyoming. 

I was worn out and happy to be home, to be welcomed back to silence and space. The Basque Autonomous Region — Euskadi, where I usually spend a month or so each year, has an area of 2,800 square miles and a population of 2.2 million. Johnson County, Wyoming, where I live for the rest of the year, has an area of 4,175 square miles with a population of 8,500, about half of whom live in Buffalo, the county seat.

While I was out of the country, a neighbor contacted my wife to say that she loves the columns I write, even though she mostly disagrees with what I say. This is a generous comment reflecting the degree to which we are acquainted with one another in small towns. But it’s also a statement that’s becoming increasingly rare, as our disagreements have become ever more bitter. Our social discourse has been degraded by social distance — digital interaction rather than face-to-face — and by living among strangers, both of which seem to encourage vulgarity, aggressive hostility, personal animosity, self-interest, and perhaps most alarming, an inability to imagine the lives of others, to feel what others feel.

One marker for this lack of feeling is seen in the Trump administration’s murder of suspected drug traffickers in international waters — no arrests, no charges, no due process, no trials. Our government announced that certain people were drug traffickers and ordered them murdered.

While I don’t know if they were responding specifically to this, seven members of Congress, all with military and intelligence backgrounds, released a video in which one of them, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said, “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.” Kelly, a former Navy fighter pilot and astronaut, was referring to the U.S. Military Code of Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, which state that the military requirement to obey orders “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”

The response to Kelly’s statement from retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who served as U.S. commander of Basic Training, was that the order to refuse illegal orders, first stated for recruits in George Washington’s Continental Army, is given to all recruits to this day and is an expectation placed on all military personnel. But that was not President Donald Trump’s response. The president wrote on his Truth Social platform that Kelly and the others had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” The president also reposted another Truth Social user who wrote, “HANG THEM.”

Secretary of War (Defense) Pete Hegseth initiated a Pentagon investigation into Kelly, citing the Military Code of Justice. Kelly, seemingly with some degree of humor, said, “He’s going to prosecute me under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for reciting the Uniform Code of Military Justice … It’s almost like you can’t make this shit up.” Kelly’s fellow Arizona senator, Ruben Gallegos, said Kelly “was doing his duty and just reminding people about their rights as service members.” Gallegos added, “And Secretary Hegseth … fuck you guys.”

These two little linguistic intrusions — “you can’t make this shit up,” and “fuck you” are revealing tics. How is it that we’ve come to accept this language in public discourse and in print? How is it that we’ve abandoned what we formerly saw as respect for those with whom we disagree and now see as weakness? Or am I wrong and the inclusion of this formerly unacceptable language simply reveals how strongly our lines are drawn, how pressured we are, how much we feel we can only make our point if we present it in the most extreme way possible?

And what about my neighbor saying she loves reading my columns even though she disagrees with what I say? I see her there at her kitchen table reading calmly and patiently. In response to her generosity, I can only say thank you. This is the home I would come home to.