@PrestorJohn Look up Bonneville seabase.
Not saying this explains it, but there is a place that you can dive near the Salt lake and it does feature nurse sharks.
Changing your mind because you learned something new is not weakness. It’s growth.
I’m still working on that. Every day. Not perfectly. Just intentionally.
But I also know that today, with what I know now, I would not make those decisions the same way. That shift didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s tied to how I was raised.
And it’s on us to defend those basics. Systems don’t protect those by default.
They can erode them too. Our voice is the shield. If we don’t use it, they fade. Slowly. Quietly. Incrementally.
I went to Iraq. I went to Afghanistan. Looking back, I see how little I questioned. I absorbed the narrative. I trusted the urgency. I didn’t do much independent digging. I don’t condemn myself for it. A lot of good came from that experience.
It was September 11, 2001. I was in high school English class. Normal day. I wasn’t thinking about much beyond girls, making a little money, and doing just enough to get by. Then the teacher turned on the TV. We all went quiet.
None of us fully understood what we were watching. But all of us knew something big was happening. A few years later, I joined the Army. I believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I believed we were defending freedom. I believed I was doing something good.