Eduardo Hernandez – teacher, veteran, long-distance runner, citizen who believes a new world is possible.
1 | A Pause
Yesterday afternoon, in my apartment, I was loosening my hamstrings before a run when the alert lit my phone: “U.S. joins Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.” A heartbeat later another headline scrolled past—smaller font, less drama—reporting a study that found nearly one in five Americans with diabetes now rations insulin. Two stories, same sterile typography, as if war and wellness belonged on the same receipt. If that contrast made the room spin for you—how the richest nation on earth bankrolls war in a heartbeat yet makes neighbors beg for prescriptions—you’re exactly who I’m writing for.
This isn’t a 60-page policy memo or a doom-scroll rant. It’s a steady breath and an open door marked Different Choices, Starting Now. Step through with me.
2 | What Just Happened—And Why It Matters
The strike. U.S. B-2s released deep-penetrator bombs on three Iranian facilities.
The tab. A single GBU-57 “bunker-buster” costs about $20 million standard.co.uk. Independent analysts peg the first 24 hours of the mission near $100 million.
The legality gap. No congressional vote preceded the order, slicing clean through the War Powers Resolution’s guardrails.
The moral fog. The ally we aided—Israel—is led by officials for whom the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has formally requested arrest warrants over Gaza war-crime allegations. reuters.com
One fact collides with another until an unavoidable question forms: if lethal force can be green-lit in minutes, why can’t life-saving care clear the same bureaucracy?
3 | What We Pay When We Look Away
Cost arguments are easy to drown in spreadsheets, so stay with one comparison long enough to feel it:
One Bunker-Buster
Roughly equals a year of full insulin supplies for 3,000 American adults.
Missile vapor dissipates; stabilized blood sugar keeps parents at the dinner table and kids out of the ER. That is the real “national security” most of us care about.
4 | The Pattern Behind the Headlines
Ethical Drift – Each unvoted strike normalizes the idea that lethal action outranks public consent.
Opportunity Cost – Budgets slide toward armaments while clinics close early and mental-health waitlists stretch into winter.
Global Isolation – Allies who once copied our homework now raise eyebrows when we defend an indicted partner.
These aren’t abstract “issues.” Trust is like tendon: once it frays under hidden strain, the smallest wrong move snaps it outright.
5 | Behind the Noise
Turn down the left-versus-right volume and the outline of a shared future appears almost instantly:
A doctor’s bill should never decide a child’s fate.
No law should be drafted with a foreign lobbyist’s pen.
Talk first, strike last—every time.
These aren’t fringe ideas; These aren’t fringe takes; scroll a TikTok comment thread, hop into a Discord server, or catch the chatter in a group-chat-lit coworking loft—you’ll hear the same: yeah, everyone deserves care. Yet the partisan business model thrives on keeping us convinced the other side hates daylight. The longer we let that script run, the farther we drift from the country we could build together— left and right are valid directions on a compass—but the purpose of a compass is to move us forward.
6 | War Budgets into Wellness Budgets
We don’t have to raid pensions or punish small businesses to cover everyone’s doctor visit. We simply need the tiniest course-correction at the very top of the mountain. A sliver of surtax on fortunes so vast they grow by millions while their owners sleep—after the first yacht, after the first island—would bankroll universal healthcare several times over. A 2 % surtax on assets above $50 million alone would raise roughly $300 billion each year—more than enough to zero-out premiums.
What does the country get back? Parents who skip fewer shifts to navigate bankrupting ER bills. Teachers who can focus on fractions instead of GoFundMe pages for chemo. Inventors who pour their energy into patents, not payment plans. Health isn’t charity; it’s load-bearing infrastructure. FDR didn’t call roads ‘handouts’; Eisenhower didn’t brand the Interstate ‘socialism.’ Good health warrants the same grown-up framing.
Every vaccinated child, every depression treated, every cancer caught early yields compound interest—boosting productivity, sparking creativity, and fortifying the nation’s health. And when we spend fewer billions turning cities to rubble, we free those same dollars to rebuild bodies, minds, and neighborhoods here at home. That’s not taking; it’s trading fear for flourishing, missiles for medicine, and short-term fury for generational well-being. Covering the basics should be so automatic that no woman ever has to pick between birth-control refills, prenatal vitamins, or next month’s rent again.
7 | AI—The Nation’s Save-File for Promises
(How perfect recall turns campaign talk into a contract you can enforce)
Picture the quick-save button in a game—only the game is democracy.
Every pledge a politician makes gets frozen in that instant, and the file can’t be overwritten without the player (you) noticing.
1. Save the Blueprint—Minute One
Cryptographic Time-Stamp – The moment a candidate announces, their platform—every bullet on health, climate, defense, taxes—is hashed and posted to a public, tamper-proof ledger.
Public Source Links – Audio of the stump speech, PDF of the policy plan, and the press-release text all live in one open folder. No more “I never said that.” Think of it as a tattoo on the body politic—indelible ink that lobbyists can’t laser off.
2. Track Every Move—Line by Line
Real-Time Cross-Check – Each vote, executive order, or budget line is scraped from .gov feeds and run against the original blueprint by an open-source model.
Traffic-Light Signal
Green – Action aligns with the promise.
Yellow – Partial or delayed fulfillment.
Red – Direct contradiction, with a clickable breadcrumb trail to the broken pledge.
Receipts Included – Hover to see bill numbers, funding amounts, and lobbyist meetings tagged by source.
3. Broadcast the Scoreboard—Daily
Pocket Dashboard – Free app and web widget show a rolling “Integrity Meter” (% Kept, % In-Progress, % Broken).
District Filters – Sort by zip code to see your reps, or compare states side-by-side before midterms.
Public API – Journalists, civic hackers, and high-school civics classes can build their own visualizations for debates, podcasts, or morning announcements.
4. Alert the Voters—Before the Spin Cycle
Push Notifications – If a promised insulin cap stalls, everyone in that senator’s voter file gets a heads-up that afternoon. Ping: “Sen. Manchin just voted to block the insulin-price cap he once bragged about—need the receipts?”
Auto-Generated Town-Hall Questions – Click once, print a cue card that cites the exact deviation so constituents arrive prepared.
Recall Ready – When broken promises pile up past a user-set threshold, the system links to recall or primary-challenge procedures in that jurisdiction.
Why the “Save-File” Changes Everything
Old World: Slogans fade after Election Day.
Save-File World: Memory beats marketing—the ledger never forgets.Old World: Accountability hinges on a few investigative reporters catching the slip.
Save-File World: Every voter has the same forensic lens, instantly.Old World: Politicians pivot quietly and blame “new information.”
Save-File World: Any course-correction must be explained in public; the data time-stamps the reason, the date, and the cost.
Built-In Guardrails (so the cure never becomes a new disease)
Concern Accountability Feature
Privacy: Logs draw only on public records—votes, budgets, statements. Personal or constituent data never ingested.
Bias: Code, training data, and weighting formulas are published on GitHub; rival models can run the same feed and challenge results.
Overreach: AI reports, humans decide. It can’t punish—only spotlight. Ultimate leverage stays with voters, juries, and courts.
What Perfect Recall Unlocks
Better Candidates – The ambitious avoid empty promises when every shortcut is spot-lit.
Quicker Course-Corrections – Honest shifts in policy show up as transparent, annotated patches—like release notes on software.
Revived Civic Spirit – When proof replaces punditry, politics feels less like spin and more like scoreboard watching. People re-engage.
AI won’t choose our future; it will remember the one we were sold and flash a beacon whenever leaders drift. In a nation ready to swap slogans for results, that single superpower—perfect, public recall—turns every voter into an auditor and every promise into a contract.
8 | Peace as a Competitive Sport
Picture a President stepping to the mic for the State of the Union:
“Last year U.S. life expectancy jumped two full years. Medical bankruptcies fell by half. Every allied capital saw the spreadsheet before our enemies did.”
Credibility grows when you care. You can’t negotiate from moral high ground if your people are tunneling through medical debt. In a world racing toward AI-fueled growth, the true superpowers will be the nation’s whose citizens are healthy enough—physically and financially—to keep learning.
9 | Why Age—and Imagination—Matter
Picture the room where tomorrow’s rules are written. Half the laptops are driven by twenty- and thirty-somethings who speak in code, prototype in hours, and see climate deadlines on their own life horizon. Across town, the average lawmaker shaping those same horizons is sixty—born before the moon landing, let alone the microchip. Wisdom gained over decades is priceless, but imagination can stiffen like old wiring. When the software of the future is compiled by people younger than the statutes that govern it, the gap isn’t just awkward—it’s dangerous. Bridging it means pairing lived memory with unjaded vision—history’s rearview mirror guided by tomorrow’s headlights.
Closing that gap isn’t about shoving elders aside; it’s about building a bridge sturdy enough for every generation to cross. A Congress that blends seasoned judgment with fresh audacity can spot blind-spots, course-correct faster, and dream bigger. Rotating new perspectives into the cockpit isn’t cosmetic any more than swapping tired bolts on an aircraft is “just decoration.” It’s preventive maintenance for democracy itself.
Hope lives in that rotation. Every young candidate who files, every mentor who holds the door, every voter who looks past resume length to vision breadth tightens the bridge. One seat reclaimed by imagination today can rewrite policy for fifty years. That’s how a country stays young at heart—by making room for the people who are still racing toward their own future.
10 | Catching Fire
This campaign is a spark, not the whole bonfire. If someone in another zip code grabs the same three commitments—health before hardware, sunlight over secrecy, zero foreign cash—and pulls the crowd ahead of me, perfect. That means the movement is catching fire. As a grade-school teacher, Air Force veteran, and ultramarathoner, I can keep a rhythm, sure, but if someone younger, louder, or wiser cranks up the tempo, hallelujah—run with it. The real win is hearing the question “Why not universal healthcare?” echo through every VFW hall, church basement, and group chat until it sounds as obvious as running water.
11 | What’s Really Stopping Us?
Learned Helplessness – A lifetime of “hold-your-nose and pick the lesser evil” has trained us to settle for crumbs and call it supper.
Manufactured Division – Red-versus-blue brawls are staged so relentlessly that the idea of working together now feels almost foreign.
Silence Fatigue – We mute the news to stay sane, then wake up to find the loudest lobbyists writing tomorrow’s rules. You’re allowed to rest; just don’t go numb forever.
Money Walls – When campaigns lean on six-figure donors, the conversation follows the checkbook instead of the ballot box, turning most voters into spectators.
Short-Game Thinking – Politicians chase 24-hour headlines and two-year election cycles, while healthcare reform and peacebuilding run on decade-long clocks.
None of these barriers are iron gates; they’re habits we can break. The cure isn’t doom-scroll fury or checked-out cynicism—it’s a before-dinner to-do list: one shared petition, one neighbor-to-neighbor conversation, one call that reminds an elected official the crowd is larger than the circus. Swap those small moves for the old reflexes, and suddenly a healthier country—and a steadier world—stop looking radical and start feeling like the most ordinary thing we could do together.
12 | Five Moves That Turn Conviction into Momentum
Swap Stories, Not Blame
When a co-worker gasps at a pharmacy total, shift the script from “should’ve picked a better plan” to “what if that bill were zero?” Trade lived moments—an aunt stretching insulin, a buddy selling gear for chemo—and watch real life bulldoze partisan talking points in sixty seconds.Trace Every Dollar—Then Show Your Work
Five minutes on OpenSecrets.org or FollowTheMoney.org turns you into a watchdog. Screenshot your representative’s biggest foreign-lobby or weapons-contract donor, email it with a calm “How does this help our district?” Offices measure polite sunlight like poll numbers—shine often.Flood the Feed with Fix-It Voices
Algorithms follow attention. Every follow, share, or “save for later” on content linking universal care to diplomacy-first policy becomes a data point editors—and campaign managers—cannot ignore. Ten boosted posts beat one angry thread, every single time.Take the Mic Where Budgets Are Born
City-council, school-board and campus-senate meetings hand every resident two minutes at the podium. Use yours to ask one question: “Which line-item moves us toward universal care and away from needless conflict?” Local budgets are the nursery where national priorities learn to walk.
5. Make Election Day a Team Sport
Recruit three friends—quiet voters, first-timers, or the chronically busy—and trade rides, childcare swaps, or reminder texts. A shared lift or well-timed ping beats any glossy ad; turnout spreads like good gossip, and every extra ballot shifts the budget toward people instead of payloads. Ripples look small only until they meet—keep tossing stones.
A Generational Note
If you’re in your 20s or 30s, this is your cue. The average member of Congress is pushing sixty; the future they legislate is your mortgage, your climate, your healthcare bill. Challenge them—at town halls, in primaries, on the ballot if you have the fire. Replacing one career politician with one fresh voice multiplies the impact of every action above.
Small, repeatable motions beat sporadic marches. Do one tonight, teach one tomorrow, and momentum belongs to all of us—especially the generation that has the most tomorrow left.
13 | Between the Lines
You’ve already met me between the lines:
the grade-school teacher who can turn a recess squabble into a hug.
the Air Force veteran who’s worked shoulder-to-shoulder with people from every background to complete the mission.
the distance runner who still hears his coach: “mind first, miles second.”
That’s all the bio you need. The bigger point is this:
If I step away tomorrow, the blueprint still works. Movements worth joining don’t rely on a single narrator—they rely on rules sturdy enough for anyone to carry forward.
14 | Landing
Pause for a heartbeat and picture a headline five years out:
“U.S. Re-Aligns Defense Priorities, Funds Universal Health Care—Strength Up, Casualties Down.”
Sounds bold only if we’ve accepted missiles as destiny and medicine as an after-thought. Every historic pivot felt impossible until regular people nudged the balance.
No hard sell—just four ways to keep the nudge going:
Stay in the Loop
Subscribe to my Substack here, or follow @eddieuel on X and pdx.hernandez on Instagram. A no-paywall site with every policy draft is dropping soon—read it, remix it, stress-test it.Share a Spark
Float one line from this piece in your next coffee break or comment thread—watch how fast heads start nodding.Ask Local Budget Questions
When city-council or state-house discussions crop up, pose a single calm query: “How does this spending move us toward healthier people and fewer unnecessary wars?” Local dollars grow national norms.Meet Me on the Road
I’ll be teaching, running, and driving town-to-town—hosting open conversations, not rallies. When the tour launches, I’ll invite local nurses, teachers, and parents to co-moderate every stop—because lived experience beats any stump speech. Bring your perspective; each added voice sharpens the map we’re charting together.
Wars shouldn’t be our first reflex; robust defense will remain, but we can retrain our instincts to reach for dialogue before detonators. Redirected budgets, stronger bodies, open ledgers—that’s a peace plan built with the tools we already have.
Step one is believing it. Step two is walking—together—through the door that belief unlocks. I’m here, holding it open, until everyone who wants in has stepped through.
A Quick Word to Gen X—Our Bridge Generation
You’re the hinge between analog childhoods and digital tomorrows, and that gives you more leverage than anyone else in the room. Yes, the Boomers set the policy table—and too often set it on fire—but Gen X kept the door propped open, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of hope that “moderate tweaks” would fix a system tilted toward endless wars, unreachable home prices, and roulette-wheel retirement plans. Those tweaks weren’t enough. Now the Millennials and Zoomers are pushing through with new tools and new urgency—but we can’t replace the floorboards while you’re still standing on them. So here’s the ask: either grab a pry bar and help us rip out the rot, or step clear so the work can happen at full speed. Challenge your own senators, redirect your PTA energy into city-budget hearings, rout your 401(k) voice away from defense ETFs and toward community health bonds. Show the next generation that the middle child of American history can still choose sides—people over profit, future over fossilized habit. Do that, and you become the bridge that finally carries this country forward; stay silent, and the bridge collapses under everyone at once. The choice is yours, and the clock is loud.