THE CAULDRON OF CALIFORNIA

Where the Soul of a Nation Boils—and Where We Must Not Break

“Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever will” - Sting

California is the cauldron.

The flame is not metaphor. It is literal—burning in the streetlight glow of downtown Los Angeles, where smoke drifts above broken glass, above crushed water bottles and shattered barricades, above a city made to feel again like a battlefield.

This is where America has come to boil.

And I’ve heard from more than a few:
“This is it. The end of civility. The time for talking is over.”
They say the only language a fascist understands is violence. That we must burn it down.

But I say this with no naiveté, and with all the blood of this nation’s history behind me:
You are wrong.

Because we have been here before.
And we did not win with rage.
We won with clarity.

Gandhi said it plain:

“Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”

The streets right now are a fever dream—flags waving, pride and defiance swelling in chants, and somewhere in the mix: anger, grief, a breaking point.

But listen to me: the regime wants a riot.

It wants to turn the image of protest into the image of threat.
It wants a clip for the evening news.
It wants fire on the screen so it can point and say: “See? They’re the danger. They’re the enemy.”

If we answer power with violence, we will not weaken its grip—we will feed it.
Violence is not resistance. It is surrender to the script written by the state.

The regime wants chaos—because chaos gives it cover.
It wants fear—because fear justifies force.
It wants the kind of fire that scorches indiscriminately, so the boot of the regime can press harder on the neck of the people—and claim it’s keeping order.

But the fire we need is not theirs.
Ours is not the spark that destroys—but the flame that refines.
Not combustion—but consecration.

Let’s be clear: this is not about rejecting fire—it’s about reclaiming it.

I’ve received messages from readers saying it plainly:
“We’re beyond peace now.”
But I have to ask: Have you forgotten what the power of peace actually looks like?

Let me remind you.

What if John Lewis had thrown a Molotov cocktail on the Edmund Pettus Bridge?

What if, instead of bowing his head and crossing that bridge with nothing but the strength of conscience, he had hurled fire toward the Alabama state troopers?

Would you remember that day as Bloody Sunday—or just another riot?
Would the Voting Rights Act have passed—or would the nation have flipped the channel?

When they cracked Lewis’s skull, the moral order cracked with it.
Because he didn’t meet hate with hate.
He met it with something far more terrifying to the state:
Discipline. Courage. Dignity.

That is what changed the world.

And now here we are.
Not on a bridge in Selma, but under an overpass on the 101.
In the shadow of a detention center in San Francisco.
In the blistering daylight of a Home Depot parking lot, where children clutch backpacks and watch their parents disappear behind doors they will not reopen.

This is our Selma.

And we cannot answer it with rocks and flames. We cannot.
Not because we are afraid.
But because we remember.

We remember that justice doesn’t arrive on the wings of violence—it rises in the silence after the tear gas, when the world is watching and the conscience of a nation is forced to choose sides.

As Baldwin once wrote,

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” But the question is not what we’ve lost.
It’s what we still stand to save.

And if we fall into the easy seduction of fury—
if we meet the tanks with firebombs,
if we match the state’s cruelty with chaos—
we will lose the one thing they still fear:
our moral advantage.

We cannot become the image they crave.
We must become the image they dread.

Not the mob—but the movement.
Not the riot—but the reckoning.
Not the fire they fear—but the one they cannot extinguish.

Let them come with riot shields and rifles.
We will come with locked arms and unshaken hearts.
Let them bring the boot.
We will bring the burden—and we will carry it in front of the whole world.

As King said:

“We must meet hate with love.”

And as Kennedy said:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

And as we enter this summer of dissent, we have to carry this message forward across the nation:
Nonviolence is the only way forward.
Not because it is easy—but because it is the only path that leaves the future standing.

But we have not yet made peace impossible.
We are not there—unless we choose to be.

So now we stand at the edge of something enormous.

We can break—or we can bend history once more.
We can burn—or we can shine.

Let it be said of us not that we lost our way in anger,
but that when the moment came,
we stood in the fire—and did not flinch.