Etelson is the author of “ Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide ” and co-founder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.
In a country so polarized that even a chain restaurant’s menu turns into a culture war food fight, it’s not surprising that we lack a consensus around Covid prevention policies. Covid found not only our public health apparatus wanting, but our public discourse as well. Two and half years in, we are not even attempting to negotiate the sharing of public space by people with widely divergent opinions regarding how dangerous Covid is and how far we should go in trying to protect ourselves and others from it.
Most of us, if we have the luxury of autonomy, order off the a la carte menu whatever precautions we perceive to be the most effective or manageable and then sit in judgment on those who load up their plates with different items. Some won’t dine indoors but will fly on an airplane. Some won’t go to a party but will sit through an indoor concert. Some host an extended family holiday meal but want all students in masks. Everyone thinks they’re right and that those who have calibrated risk differently are wrong.
Not just innocently wrong, but wickedly wrong. I have carefully weighed and fact-checked all the evidence, investigated the credibility of all my sources, fine-tuned my moral compass and drawn the correct conclusion. I value health and longevity versus pleasurable experiences the correct and proper amount. They have drawn the wrong conclusion because they, unlike me, are motivated by selfishness, neuroticism, disinformation and/or in-group conformity bias. They are ignorant. They are virtue-signaling. They are fascists. They don’t care about students’ well-being. They are gullible conspiracists. They cower in fear. They are being duped by bad actors.
Who is the “they” being castigated? Anti-vaccine “fanatics”? Zero-Covid “zealots”? It could be anyone, and that’s the point. In each epithet, one can see the shape of one’s adversary.
The virus mutates; new information about survival rates, natural immunity, and vaccine and mask efficacy becomes available; and many of us recalibrate accordingly but, whenever we do so, we are right once again and those who recalibrated differently are catastrophically mistaken.
The stakes of being wrong are high and so, naturally, resentment toward those who err is intense. There is a powerful desire to convince The Wrong of the error of their ways and intense irritation that they still just don’t get it or care to get it.
Even now, I imagine readers thinking to themselves: “How dare you both-side this when the other side is so clearly insane. I refuse to dignify the dangerous, ill-informed opinions of fascists and ignoramuses.” The thing is ... it doesn’t matter how right you are if the other side isn’t willing to listen. If the other side feels their needs and concerns are not being acknowledged, they will double-down on their priors and reciprocate with closed-minded ill-will.
What if we all give up the fantasy of overpowering The Wrong with our facts, logic and moral superiority? What if we accept that no one will win this war and, instead, try to negotiate a lasting peace?
What would such a negotiation look like? It begins with trying to understand where people are coming from. Empathy for people who act in ways we see as wrongheaded or harmful is not easy, but it is necessary. Imagine the depths that could be plumbed during a facilitated conversation between an elderly diabetic woman who lost her husband to Covid and a single mother who lost her job as a cashier when her kids’ school switched to remote learning.
Absent empathy, we blame each other for a state of affairs that is intrinsically bad and for which there is no panacea. No matter what restrictions we enact or rescind, there will be Covid deaths, there will be inconveniences and sorely missed experiences, there will be learning losses, there will be loneliness and suffering. Our task is to agree upon the best of the bad options, a process that begins with empathy and leads, hopefully, to creative compromises.
I don’t know what the outcome of such negotiations would be. Maybe there are mask-only and mask-optional flights, concerts and religious services. Maybe there are, as in the early days of the pandemic, special hours for more vulnerable people to shop. Maybe public schools are retrofitted with better ventilation and students given a remote learning option. Maybe free N-95 masks are distributed in all public venues. Once people start listening and brainstorming, ingenious ideas will likely emerge.
Learning how to engage in collective problem-solving could help us repair our pandemic-ravaged social fabric. It would also serve us well when it comes to other heated conflicts regarding the use of public space. For example, on the issue of women’s locker rooms, one side sees the exclusion of trans women with penises from traditionally women-only spaces as transphobic. The other side worries that trans women with penises present the same potential safety risks that having males in those spaces always has. Neither side is willing to acknowledge the other’s legitimate needs for safety, dignity and respect.
Covid isn’t done with us. In terms of death, it’s like having a 9/11 attack every week. The virus is destined to become more – or less – virulent, and the cycle of recalibration and recrimination will begin anew. Divisive politicians and media will prey on our mutual contempt and ramp it up to mobilize their base or boost their ratings. If we don’t negotiate the use of public space, our society will remain sick long after we’ve recovered from Covid.
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.