MICHAEL FERGUSON II: In today’s America, politics = climate

I ended my last article with an acknowledgment of Gil Scott-Heron’s “B-Side,” a prophetic response to the Reagan-era politics now being repackaged and parodied in the present. That reference was not nostalgic. It was diagnostic. Politics, after all, has never been abstract in my life. It has always been lived.

As a child, I remember gas lines during the Carter administration, adults measuring patience in gallons. I remember the nightly broadcasts dominated by the image of a gray- bearded cleric — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — as the Iran Hostage Crisis unfolded. The hostages were held for 444 days and released on the very day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, a moment that would shape American confidence, mythology, and posture for decades.

I also remember the pushback against social programs, punishing interest rates, and the prevailing sentiment within black communities that hardship was not incidental but engineered. Then came the War on Drugs, later understood by many not as a public safety effort but as a campaign waged disproportionately against black Americans.

Alongside it unfolded the Iran-Contra affair, a covert operation that bypassed congressional oversight and funded a secret war abroad while devastating communities at home. What followed was a form of chemical warfare: crack cocaine flooding black neighborhoods, hollowing out families, and criminalizing addiction rather than addressing it.

I do not know a single black family untouched by crack cocaine. It was a plague. In its wake came militarized policing, armored vehicles battering homes, neighborhoods treated as hostile territory, and police violence justified by the claim that certain people were undeserving of rights or dignity. The language was order. The result was terror. The echoes are difficult to ignore.

What is striking is not that these tactics existed, but how easily they return when fear becomes a governing tool. The rhetoric shifts slightly, the technology improves, the targets are reframed, but the logic remains. Economic pressure paired with moral panic. Surveillance justified as safety. Force explained as necessity. Politics ceases to be policy and becomes atmosphere.

The emergence of the No Kings movement reflects this recognition. It is not a rejection of
government, but resistance to the concentration of executive power and the erosion of due process. This, too, has precedent. The Reagan administration projected reverence for law and order while conducting a covert foreign policy operation that bypassed Congress and undermined constitutional oversight. The Iran-Contra affair was not a scandal of
personalities; it was a failure of process. Oliver North did not invent that logic; he operationalized it.

Recent events abroad only sharpen the point. Attempts to remove or detain foreign leaders outside established international frameworks recall earlier episodes, including the U.S. extraction of Manuel Noriega in 1989. The relevance is not equivalence of circumstance, but continuity of method. When restraint is treated as optional overseas, it rarely remains intact at home. Executive overreach is a habit, not an exception.

Many readers lived through these periods as adults and remember the changes as they occurred, in real time, with real consequences. I write in part to speak across generations: to those who remember and to those who inherited the outcomes without the context. The goal is not nostalgia, but canon — rendering history in a way that is relatable, reliable and
resistant to revisionism.

If any of this unsettles, that is not the intent. Clarity is not accusation. Longevity affords a rare privilege: the chance to revisit decisions with the benefit of hindsight. Wisdom, when honestly acquired, is meant not to harden us, but to help us get it right.

My mood now is Luke 16:19-31, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. It is a story about blindness, proximity and consequence. Those on the wrong side of history do not
lack warning; they lack attention. In that account, clarity arrives only after the divide is fixed, and the plea is not for mercy, but for the living to listen.

History, like Scripture, offers warning before it delivers judgment. Those who speak now do so not to condemn, but to caution. The message is simple and urgent: Get it right this time. Some distances, once crossed, cannot be bridged, but wisdom still gives the living a choice.