I was back in Washington, D.C. with our Moral Monday family to continue the witness of a public pulpit for truth-telling amidst the lies and distortions of this season. We have been called to look at our nation through the lens of moral truth. We look at the deep, painful contradictions playing out in our state capitols and across this country, and we insist that we must have the courage to call out the dangers hidden behind grand spectacles.
This past weekend, 850,000 fireworks were launched into the night sky by Donald Trump. It was a grand spectacle. A flash of light. A loud boom. And then, absolute darkness. How do you justify burning up thousands of dollars in smoke when our people are suffering in the streets?
It makes no moral sense to fire off fireworks when millions of Americans are working full-time jobs and still cannot afford a basic living wage.
It makes no moral sense to celebrate “freedom” with expensive explosions when families are choosing between buying groceries and buying life-saving medication because they lack healthcare.
It makes no moral sense to fund a temporary show while our schools are underfunded, our infrastructure is crumbling, and our communities are crying out for real systemic investments.
Fireworks do not pay the rent. Fireworks do not heal the sick. Fireworks do not feed the hungry. That display was a symbol of a leadership that prefers the illusion of greatness over the reality of justice. It is the definition of a moral distraction.
But we have to look deeper than just a fireworks show. We have to look at this obsession with “bigness”—the constant rhetoric of wanting things to be “huge,” “massive,” and “MAGA big.” History warns us that when a leader becomes obsessed with extreme size, grand spectacles, and projecting absolute dominance, it is a psychological and political red flag. Historians call this megalomania—a delusion of grandeur and omnipotence.
We have seen this spirit before, and we know where it leads. I spent a week in Germany to listen to the lessons of history there not because we are up against Nazis today, but because today’s authoritarians have learned from Hitler’s failures. And, like every authoritarian movement, our adversaries are subject to some of the same vulnerabilities. Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, were consumed by an obsession with grandiosity. They didn’t build for the well-being of the people; they built to feed an ego and project totalitarian power.
They planned Germania—a grand design to completely flatten Berlin and rebuild it into a supreme global capital to outshine the world. They designed the Volkshalle, or the Great Hall—a monstrous, domed building meant to hold 180,000 people. It was designed to be so unnaturally gigantic that engineers estimated the breath of the crowd would literally create indoor rain clouds. They built the Prachtstraße, the Boulevard of Splendors—a massive, 120-meter-wide avenue designed purely for military parades to showcase raw, unchecked force.
Nazi architecture was explicitly designed to dwarf the individual. Hitler wanted any human being standing in those spaces to feel completely insignificant, powerless, and crushed compared to the absolute power of the State. They built for what they called “Ruin Value” (Ruinenwert). Hitler didn’t care about the living conditions of the citizens of his day. He ordered buildings to be constructed out of stone and granite so that when his empire eventually fell thousands of years later, its ruins would still look majestic. He prioritized the legacy of his name over the lives of his people.
When we look at Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd size, his constant demands for massive military parades, and his rhetoric of absolute power, we are seeing that same dangerous spirit. When a leader cares more about the size of a spectacle than the size of your paycheck, we should be concerned.
When a leader cares more about projecting an image of total dominance than ensuring you have access to a doctor, we should be concerned.
When a leader uses massive spectacles to make the individual citizen feel small, dependent, and powerless, that is not democracy—that is the groundwork for authoritarianism.
The distraction in the sky and the rhetoric of bigness are meant to keep us from seeing what is happening to our rights on the ground.
While they preach “bigness,” they are trying to make our rights smaller. We must look closely at the political agenda being pushed in the voting booth.
They are pushing voting restrictions that seek to restrict, rewrite, and roll back our hard-won progress. They are making it harder to cast a ballot. They are attacking mail-in voting. They are purging voter rolls. They are gerrymandering our districts so our voices are diluted.
We cannot just get angry. We have to get organized. We must form a fusion coalition that rolls up its sleeves and fights back. Right now, we must focus 100% of our energy, our resources, and our time into three critical areas at the state level:
Voter Education
A society is destroyed for lack of knowledge. We must educate our communities and our neighbors. People need to know the new rules. They need to know what ID is required, where their polling places have moved, and who is on the ballot. We must turn our community centers and union halls into classrooms of civic literacy.
Voter Mobilization
Moral conviction without action is dead. We cannot just talk about justice on Monday; we have to get people to the polls on election day. We need to organize phone banks, community transport, and block-by-block outreach. We must activate every single eligible voter in our radius.
The March to the Polls
We must take this fight straight to the state level. The laws that affect your daily life—your wages, your healthcare, your voting access—are decided right here in this state capitol. We must mobilize a unified, diverse, unstoppable march to the polls. We must show up in numbers so large that no bureaucratic hurdle or authoritarian distraction can stop us.
850,000 fireworks may light up the sky for an hour, and dictators may try to build massive monuments to their own egos, but the ground eventually rejects them. Hitler’s massive structures literally sank into the mud because the earth could not support the weight of his ego.
We know that history is not finished. It is unfolding. And so we have choices to make. We get to decide whether the fires of spectacle will overwhelm us or whether the fire of justice burning in the hearts of a moral movement will light our way. Those who’ve chosen to subvert democracy and abuse power have made their decision. We must make ours—and find the remnant that will stand with us as we trust the power of truth and justice to outlast every lie.
In light of all of this, I wish somebody’s soul would catch fire, burning with the Holy Ghost and with a fire for justice. I pray each of us can let our little light shine until we burn so bright that all flesh can see together the way to a more perfect union.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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