Reclaiming red.

This summer, the 4th of July passed as fast as fireworks.

A momentary celebration, but these days it's hard to even call it that.

It all felt different this year. Jokingly, we called it "The last summer". But as the days grew hotter, the joke stopped being funny. And started to become a warning.

With the rise of Americana aesthetics over the years, I've been pondering the implications of red.

Unlike blue and white, red and its vibrancy have been instilled in my head. A bold, brash, out-there color, one on stupid weaponized T-shirts, and one in our American flag.

Since Trump's attempt at aestheticizing his politics, his MAGA line has done immeasurable damage to the American psyche. So much so that anything red with little wording makes me do a double take. The struggle between fashion and politics has made me look at the way we dress differently.

Fashion matters; it tells a story just as much as it can control one. When we talk about the reworking of Americana aesthetics into today's trends and fashions, we can't skip over the American flag's importance in these images and what it aims to say. When Trump waves the flag, it lacks meaning; it feels flat and vain.

When I see the red he's spread across the country, I acknowledge that he's taken it's meaning. The thing I won't let him take: the American flag.

If you asked me six years ago what that flag meant to me, I wouldn't have had a good answer for you. But with time on our hands, and not on our side, something replaced my lack of response with anger, fear, and doubt.

Red represents power and sacrifice.

In Juneteenth tradition, the color red symbolizes the bloodshed and enduring resilience of the enslaved African Americans whose free labor built this country into prosperity. They bled and sacrificed for their promised freedom.

Trump might've conned his way to power, but the only thing he sacrifices for this country is its citizens.

We want so badly to not acknowledge it, but all that does is drive us into darkness.

When the enslaved got their freedom, when they survived and thrived and lived to build a future, that was the "greatness" of America. It was every union that fought for their safety and rights; it's in the educators and doctors advocating for Americans against corporations and government intrusion.

As I reframe what it means to me, I think of every battle fought to grant us the possibility of freedom, and every life lost, forgotten, and washed away in the mechanics of politics and history.

We can't let their efforts be for nothing, and so we must not give up on America just yet.

America isn't great because of its whiteness; it's great because despite the powers that be that may seem greater, the people, a melting pot of different cultures, religions, backgrounds, and histories, believe in the power they hold. The power to change what doesn't work, the power to change, to become better.

The world has gotten so dark lately; people are more prepared for its end than to dream up a new beginning.

The way we view the country has to change, so that when we pick the people who will lead it, it's not out of fear or complacency, but out of an honest attempt at a better future.

250 years in the grand scheme of humanity isn't that long. When we speak about innovation and empires, our generation is at a standstill.

How much can we do when there's already so much going into just trying to survive?

Rent, groceries, and healthcare are at an all-time high, and lord help you if you have student debt.

Maybe we find hope where they used to place anger. Where they don't want you to look: History.

The revolution made Americans. We saw something wrong and together made a plan to fix it.

During the American Revolution, Loyalists pledged obedience, while Patriots built the resistance against the outdated systems that had withheld them from true liberty.

After the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, the British suppressed the people's attempts at protest (The Intolerable Acts), and they rebelled. The crown may change, but the fight stays the same.

The "patriots" on the street are nothing like the real ones.

They are leftover relics from failed and dying ideologies that have lived on like cockroaches in the foundation of America. They are nationalist cowards, given a platform by just as cowardly men. They wave our flag and claim an "America first" position, and we just listen and let them, but they are liars. Our flag means more than that, and it means more than them.

Just because they fly it doesn't mean they own it.

When a leader in great power doesn't know how to lead, he becomes a liability.

Trump is America's liability. A sour reflection of our nation's separation over the past decade. A con man taking advantage of a crumbling system, he has stripped it for parts and sold it to the highest bidders. The American people have been sold out.

While we beg for change before it's too late, the rich begin investing in their next round of election manipulation. Billionaires have already poured more than $433 million into the 2026 midterms. Billionaire families, and anyone else willing to buy in, get a ticket to democracy.

If money “puts you in the room” of democracy, how free are we really? As data centers are being planned under our noses, AI-related super PACs spent more than $50 million on 2026 races, including a $27 million proxy war between Anthropic- and OpenAI-aligned groups. If politicians are willing to sell out our country in favor of a check, what do the rest of us do if we don't have millions to decide our fate?

As I lay awake, scrolling articles on the rise of "techno-feudalism", a new world made from the old one, this time where billionaires and tech giants control everything while we are rented out our own existence; warnings about tyranny on the rise as Trump comes off of his richest year yet as president, meanwhile 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; Trying to erase the feeling that this could get worse. I replace it with: it gets worse before it gets better. Better has to come soon.

When we see the USA through the lens of nationalism, it becomes hard to be proud of something that isn't true.

An ordered society requires accountability, but "cancel culture" is a joke now, and those in power believe themselves above the people. How far will they go to test the limits of what that means, when no one will stop them?

New ways of leveraging our power emerge as we reject the finite ways of imagining reality.

who says you can't reshape the world? They do it every day.

After all, summer is a revolutionary time.

The calvary of the men and women who have given their lives in pursuit of democracy, from the summer of 1776, when the thirteen colonies declared independence while Britain set sail to crush the rising rebellion, to the summer of 1964, when across the nation hundreds of college students, activists, and community leaders mobilized to challenge voter suppression. They provided education and helped register black voters in Mississippi despite the major suppression from the government and violence that tried to stop them.

Before the war, while thoughts flurried in the air, dreams of a new world gained more weight in reality, and Founding Father John Adams wrote a dissertation on the canon and the feudal law in 1765.

In it he writes, "Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees. And the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." He wrote as a protest to the British Stamp Act, more followed, and public opinion began to turn.

We can’t re-write the past, there is only today and tomorrow, an imperfect vision of America, prime for new dreamers.

One day I want to show my children and grandchildren the beauty of this place I call home. I want to show them the vast richness of America's natural beauty, all my favorite cities and museums; I want to tell them our history, and I want to show them all the ways we failed, so they can see all the ways we won.

I want them to dream of their own futures without fear that there won’t be one.

I want them to know the only way you lose is if you stop trying, and that the world needs people who try.

We can't change it all in one summer or a generation, but we can be relentless in our pursuit. The moment we release the reins of our humanity to those who believe themselves powerful enough to take it, is when we lose.

Our flag is represented on picket lines, and rallies, and marches for freedom. It's the people on battlefields of wars they can't get out of, it's the essential workers that got us through the pandemic, it's the volunteers at the food bank down the street, it's the teachers that stick around; It's the neighbor you don't know, yet.

The fight is in how you vote and speak with neighbors, community leaders, etc.

It’s the money, time, and resources back into your community while we vote and fight out politicians harmful to the new American dream. Whatever that might be.

At our greatest, it is the brokenness and the resilience to keep going anyway.

I'm trying to love it again, in the true American way, as an act of resistance, and honoring the land of the free.

But, why AI?

Like most sane people, I have grown to hate AI the more it’s pushed into my face.

I’m not talking about all AI, like Siri, Alexa, or adaptive NPC’s in video games. I’m talking about Fruit Love Island, Suno, NanoBanana, and all the other harmful programs that serve to do nothing but distort reality.

Poisoning water with data centers, decreasing literacy rates and social ability, literally stealing the actual hard work of artists and scholars, and giving larger conglomerates and evil people plausible deniability.

But, why? If people are constantly saying ‘AI is bad,” then why is it still consistently being pushed and used?

The real answer is reality being so bleak for so many, and rich companies wanting to be even richer, shocker. But another reason could be the ways in which we talk about the cons.

A lot of people understand that AI in this unregulated amount is bad.

Maybe due to some innate human reaction to things pretending to be like us, or they conflate talking points to the point of becoming misinformation.

AI is being pushed not for the purpose of meaningful innovation, but for endless profit; the consequences of which we bear the cost of. We should not give in to the temptations of it, but that is easier said than done.

The reality is that AI has been around for a while.

Artificial Intelligence simply refers to any man-made program that can act free of the direct control of a user.

Big companies have been using predictive AI for things like risk management and market prediction. The ‘boom’ that we’ve been seeing in recent years is simply due to the fact that it has become accessible to everyday people, and the companies funding and creating it are richer than ever.

The biggest developers of AI are OpenAI, Palantir, Google, MidJourney, Microsoft, and IBM.

The only reason people have excessive access to AI isn’t because these companies care about making life any easier for us.

It has been, and will only ever be, so they can make more and more money. 

The main issue with the development of AI is the data centers.

The argument that anti-AI debaters like to use is the effects that these data centers have on the environment.

Some say the data centers use too much water, and they’re going to exhaust all of humanity’s water resources. Some say that they’re pumping noxious greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, driving us further and further over that point-of-no-return.

The reality is that all of that is true, mostly.

The issue lies in how the water is being used and where. According to the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association (https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961), roughly 75-90% of all these data centers use water as their main source of coolant.

The water is used to cool off these huge machines that contain troves of data and run these AI programs, which is then improperly filtered and sent back out into the area from which the water was taken.

Most of the areas where these data centers lie are areas with high water stress already.

Places like rural Arizona and Georgia are complaining about the lack of water pressure required to keep their states running through dust control and advanced city cooling technologies.

One Oregon town found that Google’s data centers used over 25% of the city’s water supply in 2021. Here's a clear paraphrased version with the same meaning: Data centers that rely on water-based cooling systems generate significant amounts of wastewater. This wastewater may contain chemical additives such as biocides and corrosion inhibitors, high concentrations of dissolved minerals from scaling, and heavy metals that accumulate within the cooling system.

If it is not properly treated before discharge, it can contaminate nearby rivers and streams or place excessive demands on municipal wastewater treatment facilities. In some communities, sudden increases in wastewater discharge from data centers have stretched the capacity of local treatment plants, raising concerns about downstream water quality.

As a result, some municipalities now require data centers to treat their wastewater on-site by installing dedicated treatment systems before releasing it. Continuous water quality monitoring is becoming increasingly important to detect contaminants or unusual changes in water parameters early.

Evaluating only the amount of water consumed overlooks a critical aspect of sustainability.

Ensuring that discharged water is properly treated and safely managed is equally, if not more, important for protecting local water resources and surrounding communities.

The widespread use of artificial intelligence has raised concerns about its potential impact on literacy and artistic development among younger generations. As AI-powered tools become increasingly capable of generating essays, stories, artwork, and even music, young people may become more reliant on these technologies rather than developing their own reading, writing, and creative skills.

Excessive dependence on AI for completing school assignments or producing creative work can reduce opportunities to practice critical thinking, vocabulary development, and original expression, all of which are essential for literacy. Similarly, when AI generates artwork or creative content with minimal human effort, young learners may spend less time experimenting, refining techniques, and cultivating their own artistic abilities.

While AI can serve as a valuable educational and creative aid when used responsibly, overreliance on it may hinder the development of the imagination, problem-solving skills, and creative confidence that are built through sustained practice and independent effort.

Furthermore, the rapid advancement of AI-generated content has also contributed to growing skepticism toward independent artists and musicians, particularly those who lack widespread recognition or established reputations.

As AI tools become capable of producing increasingly sophisticated music, visual art, and written works, audiences may become more inclined to question the authenticity of creative works produced by lesser-known creators.

Independent artists whose work demonstrates a high level of technical skill or polished production are sometimes accused of using AI without evidence, simply because their success appears unexpected or their style resembles AI-generated content.

These unfounded accusations can undermine an artist's credibility, damage their reputation, and diminish public appreciation for the time, effort, and originality invested in their work. In contrast, well-established creators with stronger public trust and professional credentials are often less likely to face the same level of scrutiny.

As a result, the rise of AI has created an environment in which independent creators may feel compelled to prove the authenticity of their work, adding an unnecessary burden to an already competitive creative landscape.

So the real question is, what now?

Clearly, these companies couldn’t care less about what the general public wants or needs, so how can we, as a society, move forward with this impending villain constantly creeping up on us?

The best strategy is to hold ourselves and those around us accountable.

The money is where it matters. No, you do not need to make an AI poster; the public would rather a stick figure drawing than the repetitive slop AI has a personal touch for. No, you do not need to turn your texts into a song; just sing them really badly like the rest of us. You don't need to spend money trying to get an AI to make something perfect or easy.

On top of this, make your voice heard. Do your own research about these data centers, and how close one is to being built near you.

Email your local legislators. Go to town hall meetings. Also, keep your family in the loop.

So many of our older population are falling prey to AI. It is up to us to guide them in the right direction, to let them know that, “No, Nanna, elephants cannot jump on trampolines.”

There are many ways that we can combat this and turn back towards humanity, but it truly is going to take all of us.

Everything is Getting Hotter (Except Us)

Being in your twenties right now can feel disappointing.

This decade of our lives is supposed to be about meeting new people and making memories so we can discover who we are. Every decision and action is supposed to be about maximizing our time while minimizing any damage to our lives, while we don’t have knee pain and our livers are functioning at full capacity.

When we were younger, we were sold a picture of adulthood that looked like life-changing lively parties, last-minute flights, and spontaneous hangouts galore.

But for a generation entering adulthood amid rising living costs, and a time when warm summer nights have turned into boiling hot evenings, having a good summer as a young adult looks much different now than the picture sold to us when we were younger.

You’ve probably seen the meme online of how you can’t step outside without spending $40, which for some, may amount to half a bag of groceries. When having to choose between a fun activity and needing to eat, the choice is obvious. 

So how do we actually enjoy our city without just consuming it?

Before you even step outside your single square foot apartment, you’ll need an outfit first.

Influencer culture and social media have convinced people that new outfits for every occasion—brunch, a rooftop party, vacation, or dinner—is the move. And dressing while looking like the same algorithmic feed becomes a sore sight quickly.

But being an outfit repeater is so chic, especially when no one thinks about others enough to be an outfit rememberer.

Instead of dropping another $100 dollars on “going out tops” from Amazon, hosting a clothing swap with friends, shopping secondhand, or even borrowing outfits from roommates can expand your options a whole lot more than you think.

Learning how to tailor clothes can also breathe new life into older pieces and give you a chance to flourish creatively, especially when having a revitalized appreciation for fashion after rewatching The Devil Wears Prada.

Instead of buying the same trend everyone else will donate in six months, maybe your next statement piece that will last you years is sitting in a thrift store in the Lower East Side. You don’t need to own more stuff; you just have to love what you own already.

It’s a blessing to live in a city where public transportation is so deeply integrated as much as it is.

Even though we’ll have to wait a bit for the Brooklyn-Queens Interborough Express, you can already include the subway into your plans. Instead of everyone calling separate Ubers after a dinner or a night out, organize a carpool.

Four people sharing one ride can cut costs and emissions while also giving everyone more time to catch up and send the digicam pictures before tomorrow begins.

You can ride the ferry to watch the sunset, and then later meet your friends downtown and hop between neighborhoods and boroughs. Walking between bars or restaurants instead of hopping on and off the subway also lets you discover places you'd never have glanced at twice on a moving train.

Before I began blowing some $20 sum on cocktails to feel like I had a social life, some of my most memorable summer evenings have been free.

Having a picnic in the park with a cooler and games instead of brunch. Watching an outdoor movie instead of bootlegging the same one online again. Taking a fling to every pier I can find at dusk instead of rotting inside.

Even just walking around in circles with a cup of gelato and exploring neighborhoods I would otherwise not have a reason to step into was a blast.

Where you spend your money also matters, and instead of defaulting to yet another Blank Street, look for neighborhood cafés, bookstores, immigrant-owned restaurants, and more local music venues.

Supporting small businesses keeps money circulating within the community while making your corner of the city feel a little more unique. Besides, the day a café knows your order is the day you can finally feel like a part of the city.

Sometimes, if you want to genuinely spend no money at all, the healthiest places might be spaces where nobody is trying to sell you anything. There are tons of volunteer opportunities to find in the city, like joining a neighborhood cleanup or working at a community garden.

You could consider spending a Saturday with organizations like New York Cares and Lower East Side Ecology Center and meeting people from different industries and neighborhoods while contributing to the city you love so much.

Community is best built through sharing something.

Start borrowing and lending within your circle of friends instead of everyone buying the same items they’ll rarely use.

Someone might have a projector; another might have power tools. One person has the space for a backyard; another has the extra chairs to host there.

It’s cheaper and less wasteful, plus it gives you another excuse to see your friends.

Especially in this economy, the biggest flex has never been spending. Constantly buying into new trends is a money pit that ends up feeling so unrewarding. But being able to find pockets of life amid all the price tags can make your summers feel richer.

To be environmentally conscious isn’t about being perfect, but you have to be willing to pay attention.

Paying attention to your community and your consumption can leave you with stories years and years into the future instead of just another pile of stuff.