This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.
If you supported Donald Trump — if you still do — what do you see in him that others are missing? Not the media caricature, not the opposition’s version. What did he represent to you, and does he still?
Because the grievances that brought him to power were real. The sense that the political establishment had failed ordinary people — that was not imagined. The feeling that working people had been left behind while credentialed elites congratulated themselves — that was not paranoia. The contempt that flowed downward from institutions toward the people those institutions were supposed to serve — that was felt because it was real.
Those grievances did not begin with Trump and they will not end with him. They are the consequence of decades of structural failure that no single administration created and no single administration will fix.
The question worth asking — across every political position — is not who to blame. It is what to build.
In 1961, at a moment of profound crisis — nuclear threat, civil rights, the Cold War at its most dangerous — a president stood before Congress and named a goal so large it seemed impossible. Not eventually, not when conditions permitted. By the end of the decade. A specific horizon. A concrete destination. Something that required cooperation rather than domination, that demonstrated what human beings could achieve when the framework shifted from scarcity to possibility.
Eight years later, humans walked on the moon.
The goal didn’t resolve the crises of that moment. The Vietnam War continued. Assassinations came. The social fractures ran deep. But the goal gave a generation something to aim at that was larger than the immediate conflict — a proof of concept for what was possible when people organised around abundance rather than fear.
We are at a similar moment now. Perhaps a worse one.
By 2040 — by the end of the next decade — it is plausible that human beings will be living in permanent settlements on the moon. Not as a fantasy. As a trajectory already underway. Artemis II has just returned. The infrastructure is being built. The solar power and battery storage technology that makes permanent habitation viable is developing faster than almost anyone predicted. The capability is arriving.
The question is not whether it will happen. The question is on what terms.
A moon settlement carved up by tech billionaires and national militaries competing for resources — organised around the same scarcity logic that has governed the Earth — would be the descent written into the stars. The hierarchy exported beyond the atmosphere. The same pattern, a quarter of a million miles further from where it started.
Or something different. Permanent settlements with people from every nation, every tradition, every background — making decisions together, sharing resources, demonstrating in the most literal possible way that the sixth day principle works. That equality is not an aspiration but a structural condition for survival in an environment that will kill you if you cannot cooperate.
The moon does not care about your hierarchy. It cares whether your life support system works.
The generation coming to power by 2040 will have grown up with climate change as a lived reality, not a policy debate. They will have inherited unaffordable housing, student debt, and the economic wreckage of decisions made before they could vote. They will be the most educated and the most diverse generation in American history. They grew up globally connected in ways no previous generation was.
And they will be looking for a framework. Not just a resistance, not just an opposition, but something to build toward. A destination. A proof of concept. A goal large enough to orient a generation the way the moon oriented the last one.
That world by 2040 is not utopia. It is not a clean slate. But it is a world where the structural conditions that generated the grievances have actually shifted — where wealth circulates rather than accumulates, where dignity is not contingent on zip code or credential or skin colour, where the institutions that govern people actually serve them. Where the moon is not a trophy for the powerful but a destination for all of humanity.
The tech billionaires are already positioning to shape what comes next. So are the war machines. The question is whether there is a positive vision coherent enough and grounded enough to offer something different — something rooted not in grievance or domination but in the original principle that every serious tradition in Western civilisation has pointed toward in its best moments.
Male and female. Equal. In the image.
Before the descent into hierarchy. Before the scarcity that hierarchy generates. Before the fear that scarcity produces. Before the fleeing man who fulfills the prophecy he is trying to prevent.
That is what is worth building. Not as a religious claim. As a structural one. The evidence is in the history — the Marshall Plan rather than Versailles, reconstruction rather than punishment, abundance rather than the management of scarcity.
There is an older promise that carries the same logic. To those who live in accordance with the original principle — who organise their lives around the image in which all were made equal rather than the hierarchies that diminished it — the future is not scarcity to be managed or decline to be survived. It is abundance beyond counting. As numerous as the stars.
That promise was not made to one people or one tradition. It was written into the structure of things from the beginning — available to everyone who chooses the sixth day over the Fall and descent into hierarchy. The blessing flows outward. Through you to everyone else. To all the families of the earth.
The stars are still there. Some of them close enough now to walk on.
The question is whether we can stop looking at the ground long enough to reach them.
And the question before that — the one that has to be answered first — is simple even if the answer is not.
What do you want to pass on?