The Mess is the Point
Spring explodes in the South, and reminds you that change is chaos
Atlanta doesn’t do spring gently. It attacks you.
One week the trees are bare - those skeletal Georgia oaks and pines that look like they’re part of a movie set from a zombie murder film - and then overnight, without warning or ceremony, the world turns a green so fluorescent it almost looks fake. Like someone cranked the saturation dial past the point of good taste.
And then, of course, comes the pollen.
Let me paint you a picture of an Atlanta spring. You wake up, walk to your car, and it is yellow. Not dusty or lightly coated. Yellow. Like a catastrophe has occurred. The streets look like they’ve been dusted in industrial sulphur. The pollen is so bad, even the dogs sneeze.
This is spring in the American South. It is not subtle or graceful; it is an explosion.
America, But Louder
I’ve been thinking a lot about change this Easter season, as I admire the blast of pink and white blossoms - resembling 1980s bridesmaids - lining my street.
Atlanta’s spring reminds me that renewal is always messy. Maybe the pollen - billions of microscopic particles flung chaotically into the air by millions of trees simultaneously, with zero regard for your sinuses or your clean car - is the physical example of our political landscape right now.
Moving from winter to spring is a detonation, not a whisper.
The Look From My Daughters
My daughters asked me what I’d be writing about today. I said Trump and Spring. They exchanged the look - the one that means here she goes - and retreated into their bedrooms.
Fair enough.
I’ve been thinking about America the way I think about Atlanta’s pollen season.
Something massive is happening; something so large, and so pervasive, and so difficult to breathe that it’s hard to see what it might actually be.
Which is … a beginning.
Two Stories, Same Moment
We are living through the most politically turbulent stretch of American life in at least two generations, possibly more.
Depending on which cable channel you watched this week, you will have received a very different account of what’s happening.
On one side: the dismantling of democratic norms, the hollowing-out of institutions, the systematic removal of people who dedicated their careers to public service.
On the other: the long-overdue demolition of a bloated bureaucracy that stopped serving ordinary Americans decades ago, a reckoning with the permanent political class, a course correction after years of drift.
Both accounts are, in different ways, describing the same thing.
Something old is dying.
Resurrection Is Not Neat
Resurrection stories are not gentle stories. They are stories about what comes after the worst thing that has ever happened to you.
I am not a Bible reader, which makes me an outlier in the Deep South, but I do know that Easter is a story about collapse and return. Every society has some version of the phoenix rising from the ashes.
I think America is in its pollen season.
A System Under Renegotiation
Whatever you think of what’s happening in Washington, something is being violently renegotiated.
between expertise and democracy,
between institutions and the people they’re meant to serve,
between global leadership and the foundations of power.
That renegotiation is, like the pollen, everywhere.
What comes after renegotiation, if we’re lucky, is a new arrangement. Not the old one restored but something different. Something better.
What the Old Order Produced
I grew up during the tumultuous changes in South Africa. I’ve lived in a society that shifted violently from oppression to democracy and I’ve spent the past thirty years reporting on political change. Sometimes these moments look, from the inside, like endings or failures. And from the outside? Chaos.
Many of you look at us in the USA and shake your fists. You damned Americans - meddling in Iran, strong-arming Venezuela, slapping tariffs on allies, pulling out of institutions you built. Harrumph.
But before we harrumph too hard, it’s worth asking what the previous arrangement actually produced.
Consider what the last thirty years of “order” actually delivered.
China used the open architecture of the global trading system - the one America designed and underwrote - to become the world’s dominant manufacturer of semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, and the rare earth minerals that every battery, every fighter jet, and every smartphone on earth requires.
That’s the central strategic fact of our time and it’s unacceptable to Washington.
Russia spent the same three decades doing something simpler and more patient: it threaded European energy infrastructure through its pipelines. Vladimir Putin understood that Europe’s dependence was a leash. Ukraine is the most visible consequence. There has to be a restructuring of European energy, defense spending, and political will.
You can’t blame America for all that.
Which brings me to Iran.
Tehran’s version of the same strategy created more threats via proxy networks. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias across Iraq and Syria. A franchise model of disruption, with nuclear capabilities.
Three different countries. Three different methods. One shared project: making the American-led order too expensive to maintain.
Something had to change. It was imperative, and inevitable, for all Americans.
The Method, Not the Malfunction
This past weekend, I went for a walk along the Chattahoochee River. There were joggers, families, and dogs. Ordinary life continuing even though everything feels unsettled and dangerous.
Here’s what I know about Atlanta in spring.
In about two weeks, the pollen will stop. The yellow residue will be washed away by a thunderstorm. The leaves will deepen from neon to something darker. The dogwoods will flourish.
The messiness of the world right now is not a malfunction. For the Trump administration, it is the method. It’s a time of pollen.
Whether that method produces something better, or just produces more mess, is the question none of us can answer right yet.
We’re still in the pollen.
Happy Spring
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