Jahner is the founder of The Good Decision Project.
Considering the current conflicted state of affairs in our country, we need to reexamine how we make decisions for ourselves and democracy. As the next election cycle accelerates, we are looking at the most important decision Americans make in their public roles. But how do we arrive at the critical threshold called a vote?
The Good Decision was designed to address both the process of consideration and the binary yes/no of decision execution. The Good Decision Project is a call for collaboration in a collective reframing of our decision discipline in personal lives and democracy.
On our website, the collaboration portion of the project is an ongoing blog hosting a discussion of the nature of the much used and abused word “good.” This forum strives to provide followers with an opportunity to explore and discover how their personal sense of good interacts with today’s challenges and decisions. Every true decision we make has cause and consequence in our homes, communities and beyond.
The bottom-line requirement of The Good Decision asks us to face and accept responsibility for the consequences of our decisions, both positive and negative. Part of the hard truth we deal with in this project is accepting that no decision is perfect and no adult is perfectly innocent. This forum on “good” is open but stays within the guardrails of the ethical admonition “Do no harm.”
The due diligence of the Good Decision proposes four levels of identity found in a democratic society: personal sense of good, community sense of good, public/political sense of good and, finally, sense of service. We provide simple exercises an individual can complete to begin practicing the discipline. For most decisions, the process of The Good Decision can take less than a minute, but more complex decisions that involve local community, work settings and the polls, the process can take weeks or months for a single decision.
The neurological workings of decision-making are more uniform across humanity than one would think. The context, history, content and timing infused into the decision process, however, are infinitely varied. The uniform approach of The Good Decision process is designed to allow for the diversity found in a free democracy. Out of that diversity evolves culture and the vibrant differences that make life at once interesting, creative and profoundly challenging. This diversity is generated by the inherent subjectivity found in the individual and human communities.
We have found we can manage our actions by managing the nature of our subjectivity or unconscious bias – the source of how we initially experience “good.” As an adjective, good is used to convey a summarized sense of positive meaning within us as individuals and among ourselves as a community. After all considerations, including religion, the question is: “Does the individual’s initial sense-of -good align with the true, anticipated and witnessed consequences of the option chosen?” The decision’s consequence and individual accepting upfront responsibility for the option chosen underlies the entire process.
The subtext of The Good Decision is “Living well with the harder truth.” As Al Gore told us regarding the environment so many years ago, the truth of our situation was and still is “inconvenient.” By developing your decision making skills, you can live well with the hard truth. The Good Decision Process is described in detail on the website, but allow me to summarize the four levels of consideration or “pauses.”
Pause I: Sense of good
How do I immediately feel about this option? If you have the time to ask this question, it is not a non-conscious life-or-death emergency. You will live, so take the time to breathe and do a body check. The “gut check” is a solid clue to your body’s first impression, but rarely is the first take the complete answer and almost never in complex situations. Take a breath.
Pause II: Sense of community
How will the option I am considering impact my community? Who will thrive and who will suffer? Everyone has a few people whose approval or disapproval matters at the level of physical health. Deep conflict at this level can be experienced as physical pain. Any decision has a consequence of suffering for someone ... who suffers? Who or what thrives? You are now becoming aware of the true cost of this option. Stay conscious and take another breath.
Pause III: Sense of democracy
What are the limits of my tolerance for views and values other than my own or my community’s? Where does my tolerance end? How hard have I worked on non-violent language and my skills in conflict resolution? The sum of tolerance in a democratic society has a direct relationship to civil violence or its absence. The Constitution and the rule of law represent the frames around which the people exercise their skills in transforming their individual and community values/narratives into wisely articulated, just legislation. What is your sense of your democracy?
Pause IV: Sense of service
Given the considerations of the first three levels of identity, how can I best serve? This decision model was initially developed and presented to professionals, almost all of whom had legal issues woven into the decisions that carried heavy burdens of personal and community need. All the personal conflict, ethics and morality charges, audits, and investigations find their source in the mishandling of one of these levels of identity in service. Do your due-diligence and serve well.
Our national healing originates with you, at home, and locally with the decisions you make in daily life. Disagree? Let’s talk and work something out together.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.