I love God, Jesus, and this country. I am deeply committed to the United States because I believe it is worth protecting. There is no place I would rather live and raise children with my wife than here. I am not rooting for collapse. I hope to be proven wrong, and for this civilization to endure long beyond my great-grandchildren.
Eulogy for the Stripes serves as a cautionary tale for a simple reason. I am observing a moment in history where a spiritual revival is unfolding in real time. Moments like this do not arrive often. When they do, they either mark renewal or become missed opportunities we only recognize later.
This story begins there.
Many people imagine the end arriving as a spectacle. World War. Nuclear weapons. A pandemic. An asteroid. History suggests that decline is usually anything but that, yet just as lethal. Economic strain paired with moral exhaustion.
The characters in this story are not caricatures. They are good people facing predicaments that resemble the present, with a generation of life in between. They hesitate. They second-guess themselves at the kitchen table. They make mistakes under pressure. They carry fear, and they grow through lived consequence. Faith is tested without an aim to be performative.
My professional life has been spent inside complex systems across industries where outcomes carry real stakes. Budgets, timelines, and outcomes. Over time, I learned that naming risk early is not pessimism. It is stewardship. Projects succeed when someone is willing to confront what can break before it does, and accept accountability. This is the lens through which the work is viewed.
This story is not written to inflame, recruit, or entertain panic. It is not a fantasy with obvious villains and clean answers. It is not a collapse as wish-fulfillment. It examines how erosion happens while institutions still function, while daily life still feels mostly normal, and while people tell themselves there will be time to deal with consequences later.
Problem-solving begins with admitting there is a problem. Ignoring risk does not remove it. Inaction is still a decision, and its consequences arrive on schedule whether anyone is ready or not. Awareness is not surrender. Responsibility still matters, and there are people, inside and outside institutions, who care enough to act when given the chance.
Throughout this body of work, I focus on causation rather than placing blame on a single villain. Societies rarely fail because of a single event. They weaken through accumulation. Choices that seem reasonable in isolation and irreversible in total. Families and communities end up carrying burdens.
That is where the danger lives.
If this book leaves anything behind, I hope it is a refusal to outsource responsibility. This is entertainment in the way a warning flare is light. The story is fiction. The dynamics are fundamental. And if it moves even one reader with the power to act on behalf of humanity, it will have done what it was written to do.
Leave a Reply