What course will our lives take? How stable is the United States? What promise of jobs and success await college graduates? What can we say about the future with any level of confidence? We ponder such perennial questions in “Uncertainty,” a collection of columns offering advice, humor and courage.
“Once you’ve ruined your reputation, you can live quite freely.”
Oftentimes, this quote is found while on a routine scroll, posted on a hope-core themed Instagram account that either makes us giggle or gets us thinking.
Rewind the clock 5 years, and I may have taken Anthony Bourdain’s words at face value. Moving along with my nose to the sky and an added pep to my step, happy to oblige to the idea that we are free within our carelessness of an outsiders opinion.
Tank your image, embarrass yourself, say the quiet part out loud, and suddenly there’s nothing left to protect.
No expectations. No performance. No careful curation of how you’re perceived. Liberating, in a chaotic sort of way.
But what if it’s a country losing its reputation?
The United States has always cared deeply about its image. Or at least always did a better job at pretending to care. Democracy. Stability. Checks and balances. The whole “institutions over individuals” thing. Even when reality didn’t quite match the branding, the reputation did a lot of heavy lifting.
It created a sense of predictability. Of guardrails, limits.
Lately, those guardrails feel theoretical. The limits now abstract. Accountability and consequences now coating themselves in uncertainty.
Statues, murals and school names are all being removed, covered, and renamed after Dolores Huerta exposed the real Cesar Chavez. The truth about his abuse of power, to her, and many other young women, minors, little girls. She kept the truth uncovered for years for the reputation of the UFW.
While Chavez was getting away with his abuses, taking the credit from those around him, Huerta was constantly overlooked. Did you know Huerta coined the phrase, “¡Si se puede!”? Did you know that I, a native Arizonan, was never taught her name in grade school? Do you know how it feels to recognize that Cesar Chavez will never roll in his grave because he died before facing the repercussions of his repulsive actions?
Did you see how fast Latinos took accountability?
Compare that to John Wayne, a grandparents’ once favorite nod to Wild West films. In Orange County, California, there have been years of calls to remove his name from John Wayne Airport after a resurfaced 1971 interview revealed openly racist and white supremacist views. Despite public pressure and national attention, the airport still bears his name. The debate drags on, stalled in committees and politics. Is the demolition of Wayne’s statues and the renaming of the airport still under way?
In 2024, U.S. president Donald J. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York criminal case. He has also faced multiple allegations, including a civil case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. In the Carroll v. Trump case, a federal judge upheld the jury’s findings and noted that the jury had implicitly found that he raped her, dismissing Trump’s attempts to compare the case to others involving lower damages as irrelevant.
Not to mention, Trump has repeatedly dismissed connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Rich, considering, “The New York Times identified more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references to Mr. Trump…and other related words and phrases in the latest batch of emails, government files, videos and other records released by the Justice Department.” The president has referred to accusations from his victims as a “hoax” or politically motivated attacks.
Epstein has yet to roll over in his grave because the people capable of exposing it are also the ones most invested in protecting their own reputations.
Norms that once felt automatic now feel negotiable. Consequences feel inconsistent. The political equivalent of “that would have ended a career” has quietly become “we’ll see if this sticks by next week.”
And this is where Bourdain’s quote starts to feel less inspirational and more unsettling.
The dictator president and his boyfriends move through the system without consequence while the rest of us are left with less stability and fewer protections.
They’re the ones who ruined our reputation, now they get to lead life with no concern. Everyone else gets the instability.
The rest of us get uncertainty. Uncertainty about the rules. Uncertainty about the limits. Uncertainty about whether consequences still exist.
Uncertainty isn’t freedom.
Freedom requires structure. It requires consistency. It requires the basic understanding that power has boundaries and that those boundaries hold, no matter who is in charge.
When a country’s reputation erodes, accountability doesn’t disappear for everyone. It disappears selectively. The people at the top gain flexibility. They gain room to test limits, to push further, to operate without the same fear or vulnerability.
The public doesn’t gain freedom from that.
Maybe Bourdain was right. Once you’ve ruined your reputation, you can live quite freely. It just depends on who you are.