Lockard has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Northern Iowa (1994) and has continued classes at the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City. She writes regularly for "The Courier", a regional newspaper, and has published several short stories and poetry. Amy and her husband live in Cedar Falls, Iowa with the youngest three of their eight children.
Loitering slow, the future creepeth; arrow-swift, the present sweepeth, and motionless forever stands the past. (Schiller)
Except during pandemics, as the one we’re still spinning from and desperately hoping not to be plunged back into. That possibility, having the nightmarish quality of an infinitely rerunning “Twilight Zone” episode, combined with the surreal projection of candidates for the next presidential election, is more than enough to keep us up at night.
Most, when speaking of events of the last five years, divide the time up, saying, “it occurred before the shut-down,” or “that happened during Covid,” or “it took place right after the pandemic.” Nearly swallowed by the time warp we were then living in, once the shut-downs took hold and everyone scrambled to “shelter in place” there was very little to distinguish one day from the next or even one month from another.
The “cure” then? Akin to a mad cook loose in a topsy-turvy kitchen. A dash of science, heavy doses of masks and shields, a dousing of rules. Add legions of renegade rule-breakers and more than a smattering of confusion, economic chaos, and financial devastation; throw in canceled weddings, graduations, funerals, and lonely deaths.
Our clocks imploded, our rhythms exploded, the usual markers of time, canceled, along with everything else. It is no wonder we have trouble re-regulating time now.
But that temporal Covid warp cannot be blamed for our current complacency. Since mid-March, 2019--collective groan—when we fell into that unreal reality, we have claimed to want to pull ourselves up, to get on with it, to fully live our lives.
We now have the experience to prevent us from falling back into the mayhem of another pandemic. And the wherewithal not to repeat the pathetic 2020 presidential election.
Almost half of Democrats and over half of Republicans say the political parties are doing a poor job of upholding democracy. (Courier, AP, July 18, 2023)
Yet, here we are, presumably retreating to the former presidential election, second act, with the same two men who ran four years ago, older but no wiser. Are these really the only candidates for “leader of the free world” we can come up with? Are we to be left again with the choice between despot and doddering?
Since “original” Covid 19, a parade of variants made their appearance: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron, etc., and news is now circulating of a harsher virus, with 30 mutations, riding in with the winter winds. This new strain, BA.2.86 or “Pirola,” is projected to be more invasive and potentially more potent than its predecessors. We cannot allow this runaway “Greek alphabet” to trigger another worldwide tragedy. We must be proactive.
It’s time-- it is always time-- for leadership.
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” (Winston Churchill)
So, let’s move forward. Let’s use our knowledge of how--and how not--to handle a pandemic and be prepared. Let’s look at new political possibilities, new candidates, possibly a third party, and break this stymied system.
Let’s put our pandemic and political experience into preemptive action. How? By becoming involved, by refusing to become despondent, by believing we can.
And we might try channeling Abraham Lincoln, who said, “Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.”
Let’s find a way.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.