I spent Saturday afternoon making a song nobody asked for. I may be the only one who listens to it.
I want to be clear about why I’m telling you that. Not as a disclaimer. Not as false modesty. I’m telling you because the impulse to make it—before I could think clearly about what happened on February 28, 2026, before I could locate the correct analytical posture, before I could write anything coherent about Operation Epic Fury or the Strait of Hormuz or the geopolitical architecture of a world in which the United States and Israel struck Iran simultaneously across 500 sites—that impulse is itself the thing I want to examine.
I needed to get into better headspace. The news was too much to hold in silence, and silence felt like complicity, and the only thing between me and another week of paralysis was a song. So I made one.
The song is a call-and-response between my own voice—Nik Bear—and the Liam Bear Brown persona I’ve built from two men named William: my father, who ran unarmed onto battlefields because his theology left him no other choice, and my own voice carrying his. The style is gospel blues and roots Americana and psychedelic protest soul. Slide guitar. Driving percussion. Spoken word. The images in the video are AI-generated: two figures in traditional dress watching a sky thick with warplanes, soldiers at border fences, a boy in front of burning houses, children with dust on their faces and fire behind them.
What the Geopolitical Assessment Doesn’t Say
I’ve read the assessment. The tables are precise. The acronyms are correct. “HVIs”—High Value Individuals. “SEAD missions.” “Decapitation logic.” “Leadership neutralization.” The report tells me that Khamenei was “neutralized in a pinpoint strike on his downtown Tehran residence.” It tells me that an Israeli missile struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing between 60 and 100 students, and that the IDF maintained it only targeted “military establishments.”
Sixty children.
The assessment notes this. It moves on.
I’m asking: what does it mean that we have learned to write sentences like that and keep moving?
The report also tells me that in some districts of Tehran, residents climbed to their rooftops not to hide but to watch the smoke rise with something described as “emotional vengeance”—decades of silencing finding release in the sound of someone, anyone, finally dismantling the thing that has silenced them. And in other districts, state-organized rallies, men waving flags, chanting against American and Zionist aggression. Both things true. Simultaneously. In the same city. The same people divided not by geography but by what they can afford to hope for.
The assessment calls this “complex domestic reaction.” I call it what it is: a population that has been surviving for so long it has more than one face, and we keep being surprised when human beings contain contradictions.
The Grammar of “Still”
My song has one formal move that I want to name, because it’s not incidental. It’s the word still.
Still the mothers count the missing. Still they wait beside the door. Still they fold the empty garments left by sons who went to war.
I borrowed the scaffold from Edmund Sears, who wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849 during the Mexican-American War—a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, watching his country manufacture justifications for conquest, encoding his dissent in the form of a Christmas carol because that was the form that might survive. The angels who never stopped singing against the world that stopped listening.
Two thousand years. Two thousand years of the same song.
Here is what the assessment’s chronology does not include: the mothers. Not a table entry. No column for “mothers still waiting.” No row for “children whose fathers are now HVIs.” The timeline runs from February 6—Muscat Indirect Talks, “initial progress on guiding principles”—to February 28, 8:15 a.m. local time, Operation Epic Fury commences. Clean. Causal. Technical.
The mothers don’t fit in a Gantt chart.
The spoken-word center of my song says: Two thousand years. Two thousand years of the same song. And still we build the guns. Still we draw the lines. Still the mothers count the missing. Still they set the table for the one who doesn’t come. Still they keep the light on. The angels haven’t stopped singing. We just stopped listening. But the mothers—the mothers never stopped.
I wrote those words before I read the assessment. I would write them the same way after.
The Headspace Problem
Here’s the thing I actually want to say.
The assessment gives me three scenarios. Scenario one: swift transition to an NRC-led interim government. Scenario two: persistent Hormuz blockade, global energy crisis, domestic political backlash for Trump. Scenario three: Iranian state fragmentation, “IRGCistan,” civil war, ethnic secessionist movements in Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Baluchistan.
What none of the three scenarios includes is a reckoning with how we got here. Not tactically—the tactical causality is meticulously documented, the diplomatic collapse, the 450 kilograms of enriched uranium, the satellite imagery of hardened underground facilities. I mean morally. How we built a world in which the options on the table for February 28, 2026 were: nuclear-armed Iran, or this.
I needed the song before I could think about the war because the song asked the question the assessment cannot ask. Can you hear it? Above the noise of war? It’s not rhetorical. The angels haven’t stopped. The mothers haven’t stopped. The question is whether we are capable of hearing anything above the technical requirements of the next target set.
I teach at Northeastern University. I teach artificial intelligence. I build systems that help people see patterns in data—patterns that might, if used correctly, surface the things that matter before they become crises. I fund a 501(c)(3) called Humanitarians AI. I make music about light as resistance and power without accountability and love as the infrastructure of movement rather than its sentiment.
And I spent last Saturday afternoon making a song for an audience of possibly one, because the alternative was to open the assessment and start writing notes in the margins as though I had something useful to add to a conversation about missile intercept rates and the Reza Pahlavi succession problem, when sixty children in Minab were already dead and I hadn’t yet found a way to hold that.
The song is how I hold it. Not how I solve it. How I hold it.
What Remains When the Smoke Clears
The assessment ends with this sentence: The strategic initiative now lies with the Iranian people and the surviving remnants of the regime’s security apparatus, as the world watches the most significant kinetic intervention of the 21st century unfold.
The Iranian people. Listed last, after the security apparatus. Receiving the strategic initiative the way you receive a weather event.
My song ends differently.
Till every mother finds her child / And sorrow trades her crown / Then mortal hearts shall find their rest / No more in sorrow’s sting / And joined with all the hosts of heaven / We, too, shall learn to sing.
That “shall” is doing everything. Not “will.” Shall—the future tense of moral commitment rather than factual prediction. We shall, meaning: this is what we are called toward, not what we have achieved. We shall, meaning: not yet. We shall, meaning: I am not done expecting this of us.
I don’t know if Iran stabilizes. I don’t know if the Hormuz blockade holds, or for how long, or whether Brent crude hits $100 or $150 or comes back down to $80 by March. I don’t know if Khamenei is dead or if that matters, or what fills the vacuum if he is.
I know that sixty children were in a school in Minab on a Saturday morning.
I know that somewhere, their mothers are counting the missing.
I know the song is still being sung.
The question is whether we are willing to hear it before we need the next assessment.
Tags: Operation Epic Fury Iran strikes, protest gospel music, Strait of Hormuz conflict, Musinique Nik Bear Brown, anti-war lament 2026
