I noticed something years ago about class descriptions on college campuses. If a course’s subject matter included the word “war,” it was much more popular with students. A seminar on “organizational theory” might find a few takers; a seminar on “military organization and war planning” would attract too many students for most classrooms to hold. I asked a professor about this once, and he grinned slyly, reminding me that young professors who teach popular classes have greater career prospects. The observation struck me as a bit perverse.
At a fundamental level, war fascinates people. They can’t get enough of it. Organized violence appeals to their death drive or need for adventure. Young students gather in the yard to protest violence on the other side of the world, but they also sign up for classes that offer an academic exploration of violence in its most disturbed forms.
For some students, I believe, “studying war” feels like “serious business.” Compared to someone getting a degree in the “gender-affirming artwork of transsexual cats,” they have a point. Still, a lot of young people seek out classes on war not because they wish to be good soldiers or wise citizens but because engaging with subjects that involve life and death allow armchair theorists to feel a bit of the “action.”
I have been in many rooms that included servicemembers pursuing classwork as part of their career advancement. There is a vast canyon of knowledge separating those who have read about war from those who have been in war. I’ve seen smart people deliver incredibly detailed remarks about what kind of strategies the U.S. military should pursue around the world. Their arguments are grounded in theory and filled with references to the most famous academics from the last hundred years. Then the people who have actually fired weapons in combat stand up and explain to those well-read students why they don’t know anything.
You can’t really know about logistics until you’ve tried to move tons of equipment over mountains, across deserts, or through mud. You can’t really understand breakdowns in communication until you’ve attempted to relay information while people are shooting at you. You can’t really assess the effectiveness of battlefield tactics based on the annotated footnotes of the college’s most popular “war” professor. When the people who have been there, done that get done chewing through the arguments of those who have been nowhere, done nothing, the silence in the room is deafening.
There is a huge difference between “playing soldier” and being one. There is a huge difference between those who see war as a “game” and those who know war means death.
These memories always jangle around in my head near Memorial Day. Why? Because those who died while serving in the Armed Forces are never around to debate the next war, while those who merely “studied war” tend to become only more opinionated with time. There’s an undeniable unfairness about that. Those who know most about the cost of war are forever silenced from teaching the next generation.
I must admit that when it comes to matters of war and taxes, I don’t think we give enough votes to those with actual “skin in the game.” It doesn’t seem right to me that those who pay nothing in property taxes and income taxes are often the most vocal in demanding how other people’s money is used. It doesn’t seem right to me that those unwilling to fight in wars (or send their children off to fight) are often the most vocal in demanding that we open up a new front. I say, “open up a new front,” because we Americans have been fighting wars — big and small — all over the world since WWII. There hasn’t been a single year when American boots weren’t on the ground somewhere. The entire globe is our battlefield.
War has been the status quo for so long that it has lost all meaning. Most Americans will be too busy vacationing during the three-day weekend to take a moment to contemplate just what we’re supposed to be memorializing. Whose memory are we meant to be preserving? Those who died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. The ones whose voices are now lost.
Many politicians in patriotic parts of the country will deliver speeches about all the Americans who “made the ultimate sacrifice” or “died so that we may be free.” But those are our words, not theirs. They are not around to tell us whether they think their sacrifice was worth it. They are not around to judge whether America is still free. Others will pretend to speak for them.
You know how Memorial Day really took hold? It didn’t come from the brains of government bureaucrats. It didn’t come from spontaneous outbursts of patriotism. It came from America’s mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. It came from the hundreds of thousands of women across the North and South who lost their loved ones during the Civil War. It came from a sense of tremendous grief that utterly destroyed families. Violence and death soaked the land, and the women of America lost their men forever. It is they who decorated the tombstones of their husbands and sons. It is they who mourned the fallen. It is they who consecrated graves with their tears. It is they who shouldered the broken nation’s collective agony. Sadness, not patriotism, is the essence of Memorial Day.
Walt Whitman wrote a poem during the Civil War that was frequently read by survivors on what we now call “Memorial Day.” It is entitled, “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and tells the story of an Ohio farm family learning about their son and brother’s death. The eldest daughter has a letter from Pete and calls her mother and father to the porch, so that they can read what he has to say. They hurry together and quickly open the letter. Soon, however, they realize that it is not in his handwriting. Their eyes fall on certain words: gunshot wound, skirmish, hospital.
The mother’s face goes white as she collapses against the door. Her eyes fill with tears, as she knows her only son is dead. The poem describes the mother’s anguish: “By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking, / In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing, / O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw, / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”
This melancholy poem became the intimate expression of several generations of nineteenth-century women in the decades following the war. It was arguably the most beloved poem of the era. Consider how much pain was endured by so many for such sorrowful stanzas to become their prayerful anthem.
Whitman’s words reflect a reality of war that is often hidden by those who rally nations to take up arms: carnage and heartbreak do not remain on the battlefield. They cross far distances, reach into the pastoral peace of farmlands otherwise teeming with life, and shatter families forever. Anyone who has lost a loved one to war knows that death takes first but torments forever.
As General Robert E. Lee observed, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” If only Americans alive today spent as much time reading about the great confederate general as they do defacing and toppling his statues. Those who have waded into the blood, sweat, and tears of war know it best. It is not a thing to be desired or praised. It is not something to celebrate. It is a measure of last resort. It is a bringer of infinite sadness. It is why we mourn. We must remember that.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.