It's a time for fear.

The United States is engaged in an undeclared war — one of which the public does not understand the true extent. The president has gone in without Congressional approval. Military leaders struggle with cabinet members, politicians and themselves about whether and how to proceed. Weary soldiers, sailors and airmen want to finish their jobs and come home.

Inflation and energy volatility have put the squeeze on everyday Americans, who are struggling financially, while the wealthy float along in a protective cocoon.

A new and frighteningly powerful technology has emerged, threatening to put millions out of work and destabilizing the status quo. No one can confidently predict its true impact or know how it will change education, manufacturing and society.

Corruption appears to have infiltrated the highest offices of the land, even though much of the country has its doubts, and representatives for the president call the accusations a "witch hunt."

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes, uncovering secrets the administration and other world leaders would much prefer stayed hidden.

The year: 1973.

Things don't change all that much, do they?

In "Cover-Up," a documentary released last year about Hersh's formidable body of work as a journalist — accomplishments that include exposing the My Lai massacre, pursuing the Watergate Scandal, uncovering the attempted CIA coup in Chile — he's asked why he does what he does for a living.

"We are a culture of enormous violence. It's just so brutal," he answered. "You can't just have a country that does that. You can't have a country that does it and looks the other way."

I thought of that quote the other day as I read a Substack article Hersh wrote about President Donald Trump and the war in Iran, which has uncanny parallels to the unilateral actions taken by former President Richard Nixon in Cambodia, an incursion conceived of by Henry Kissinger — who began 1973 as national security adviser and ended it as secretary of state.

Now, we have a secretary of defense who has changed the name of the department to "the Department of War" and a government that has allegedly denied survivor benefits to the wife of a fallen airman because no one has ever officially declared war. We're eager to use the word "war" as a boast, but afraid to mention it when it counts.

The year 1973 truly has a challenger in 2026, and where we were once worrying about microprocessors and Cambodian bombing campaigns, we're now thinking of artificial intelligence and an ongoing war against Iran.

It seems to me that there are lessons to be learned in the past, and though we are increasingly bewitched by the powers of emerging technology like AI, we ought to be more attentive to the lessons 1973 and Seymour Hersh can teach us.

Notice that Hersh didn't say that "some of us have a violent culture." He said, "we are a culture of enormous violence." All of us, whether or not we agree with a particular act of violence, emerge from a culture that glorifies it.

There are more guns in the United States than there are people, enough for every man, woman and child to arm themselves. Almost half of the households in our country contain at least one gun, and they are fired thousands (if not millions) of times every year in conflict. We rank first in the world among wealthy nations in homicide rate. The top cause of death for American children? Gun-related injuries.

I don't mention these statistics to distance myself from them. We are all a product of this place and time. I live here, too, in the same country as Seymour Hersh and Donald Trump, and in the nation that bore and bred the world's most famous pacifist, Pope Leo, the head of the Catholic Church.

We have a responsibility, though, not to always look the other way.

Now, we can't all be Hersh, willing to stare horror in the face, to confront it and learn all of its dark secrets. There is too much information in the world, and we can't and shouldn't take it all in. Sleeping at night is important, too.

But we do our part, even if our part is much smaller than is the part of investigative journalists, peace activists and officials swimming against the tide of corruption.

We can all acknowledge responsibility for what our country has done in our name. We can all hold politicians accountable for dishonoring their office through corruption by voting them out. We can all keep an open mind and stay amenable to evidence of wrongdoing by those with whom we otherwise agree politically.

We can live in this culture of violence without accepting it, and perhaps more importantly, without perpetuating it.

That's what Seymour Hersh has done — from before 1973 straight through to 2026 (and counting).

In him, we can all find a little bit of inspiration.

Photo credit: Element5 Digital at Unsplash