Via Stulti

The God’s We Chose

I stood in a Meijer’s, flipping through magazines celebrating the end of 2025.

Year-in-review issues.
Best-of lists.
Victory laps for a year most people just survived.

Then I saw LIFE Magazine.

I’ve always liked LIFE.
I’ve always loved its motto:

“To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man at his work—his work and his leisure; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.”

It’s beautiful.
It sounds like truth.

The cover read:
100 People Who Changed the World.

The usual suspects stared back at me.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Oprah Winfrey.
Abraham Lincoln.
Jesus.

Bottom left:

Adolf Hitler, partially obscured by the barcode.
The appearance of neutrality is important.

I opened the issue.
I read the list.
I thought again about the motto.

To see and to be instructed.

And I realized what I was looking at wasn’t history.

It was hero laundering.

A hundred people “who changed the world.”
But changed it how?
For whom?
Was the change positive—or merely survivable?

I looked around at the country I served.
The country I live in.

An idea endlessly promised.
Never delivered.

I thought about LIFE Magazine—about how many lives it’s touched, and how easily the right stories can pacify, distract, and slow-boil a population while wealth and power quietly concentrate into fewer and fewer hands.

All under the cover of neutrality.

Excerpt from “The 100 People Who Actually Changed the World”
Available now on Amazon and Kindle.