On June 28th, 1914, a man in the city of Sarajevo, located in then Austria-Hungary, was
standing outside of a deli. He was having a tough day, to say the least. Who knows why he was
standing there? Maybe he was hungry, maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it was intentional?
All we really know is what happened next. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, recovering from a failed assassination attempt earlier in the day,
wanted to visit the victims who had been injured by the bomb intended for him. On the way to
the local hospital, his path crossed with Gavrilo Princip, the man previously mentioned. Princip
shot Ferdinand, World War I broke out within days, and the world would never be the same.
“Peace for our time.” These were the words spoken by British Prime Minister, Neville
Chamberlain, after having reached an agreement with a German leader earlier on in that day,
September 30th, 1938. That leader was Adolf Hitler. It is quite possible that there has never been
a more inaccurate statement in all of recorded history. Germany would invade Poland one year
later, approximately three percent of the world’s population would die over the next seven years,
and again, the world would never be the same.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Donald Trump,
8:06 AM, Tuesday April 7th, 2026. Now there’s a lot of words you could use to describe this
statement. Horrific, authoritarian, and genocidal all come to mind, at least for me. But the one
word that I don’t think of would be ambiguous. That statement is as unambiguous as it gets. A
sitting United States President has threatened to wipe an entire civilization out. Let that sink in
for a second.
People will tell you a lot of things about politics nowadays. You’ll hear a lot of it from
people on campus. “Why does everything have to be so political all the time?” This is a
statement, in one form or another, that has been present throughout all of history. A lot of
colonists in the American Revolution didn’t care one way or another about the British
government, they just wanted to make a living. Peasants in the middle ages didn’t care about
wars between their lords, they just wanted to not starve. The person working at McDonalds or
the person working on Wall Street have one thing in common: they just want to make a living.
And there’s a good chance they don’t care about politics either, outside of how it affects their
wallet at the end of the day.
Honestly, I can’t really blame either of them. There have been times in my life where I
had to pay for gas with spare quarters because my whole paycheck had gone to trying to buy
myself food for the week. It makes sense that this would be somebody’s primary concern.
The trouble is, there’s an inherent flaw in that. When you vote from your wallet, and put
aside the issues that affect your fellow citizen, this is what can happen. You get tricked.
Hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray. Whatever term you want to use, this is what happens. You
get a President, someone who explicitly ran on a campaign of two primary things: fix the
economy, and no new wars.
Let me ask you something, the person reading this: how’s your wallet? Is it full right
now? Can you afford food, gas, rent, textbooks, whatever else you might need? Can your
parents, can your grandparents? For a lot of Americans, the answer to that would be a resounding
no.
The fact is, I could sit here typing on my laptop, and I could give you a list of statistics
that would prove everything I’m saying. But the truth is, I don’t need to. They’re out there, trust
me. But that’s not my job. I’m not a reporter, or a politician, or anyone of any real importance.
My official title would be concerned student. Or, guy who doesn’t want World War III.
When you vote for somebody, whether you realize it or not, you’ll typically make a list of
priorities. There’s this movie I like, Judas and the Black Messiah. There’s a great scene from the
movie where Fred Hampton Sr., the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, goes
into a meeting of a local organization of White Southerners. And he asks them: “If this building
caught fire right now, what would you worry about? Water and escape. If somebody asks you,
what’s your culture during this fire? Water, that’s my culture. Well how about your politics?
Water and escape.”
Truthfully, there’s a million reasons I’m personally voting Democrat this November. But
you know what the biggest one is? I like living. I like being alive, and breathing air. And I don’t
know a lot of things. But the one thing I do know, is that Donald Trump is playing with fire right
now.
He is playing with fire, in a region that is currently the most unstable region in the world:
the Middle East. It has been for some time. You know what the most unstable region before
World War I was? The Balkans. You know what it was before World War II? Eastern Europe.
History repeats itself.
No new wars. A better economy. If you voted for this man, you were lied to. But you
probably already know that. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the Democrats either.
They aren’t perfect by any means. But at least they haven’t (explicitly) threatened to wipe out an
entire civilization.
This is why you need to care about politics. You don’t have to know everything about
every single person. But you need to know enough to vote for people that will ensure your
survival. Because if you take away anything from this article, let it be this. There’s a pretty
effective way to wipe out an entire civilization. It’s with a nuclear weapon. And right now, sitting
in Washington DC, there is a man sitting in the Oval Office with the launch codes to about 5,177
of them.
The other two countries with the most nuclear weapons in the world? Russia, and China.
The two countries that have allied themselves with Iran in the past? Russia and China. I’m no
fortune teller. But if President Trump goes the nuclear route in this war, you better believe there
are going to be serious international consequences. Consequences that mean most likely soldiers
will die, and innocent people will get killed.
Some of you reading this might accuse me of fearmongering. To that, I would say that’s
fair, but I would point out that President Trump has put a hard deadline of 8 pm tonight for a deal
to be reached. You know, like the kind your professor puts on Brightspace for an essay due? The
only difference is, in one scenario, if you don’t submit the essay you get a failing grade, and in
the other, if a peace deal isn’t reached it’s likely that millions of people will lose their lives,
through nuclear means or otherwise. I can’t really think of another outcome of threatening and to
wipe out an entire civilization, provided Trump makes good on the threat.
Now, on the other hand, you might be sitting here reading this and think that I’m
overreacting bringing up nukes. And you know what? I hope you’re right. I genuinely pray to
God that you are right. I pray that my friends read this article and clown on me for a week
straight, and I look back on it 40 years from now and laugh.
But doesn’t it say something that there is a non-zero chance that I’m right? That we’re
even sitting here, considering that it might happen? That the Atlantic ran a headline today asking
if Trump just threatened to use nuclear weapons in Iran? That this is even a serious possibility
that could be on the table, in a war that the United States are the clear aggressor in?
The fact is, this President just pushes the bar of reality further and further, until things
that we used to think were absolutely insane now feel like just another day. Either way, he’s able
to do that because he has a Congress where his party holds a clear majority, he acts unopposed
from within that party, and he can essentially do almost anything he wants. That changes if the
Democrats can take both houses in November.
So, the reason I’m writing this article is this: please vote Democrat this November. Don’t
just think about your wallet. Think about social issues, think about education, think about
poverty, think about democracy. But if none of those things appeal to you, then think about
survival. Water and escape. Because if you don’t think about those things? There’s a chance the
world will never be the same.
