Oh, I am a hypocrite. Again!
Let’s just start there. Clear the table. Confess early. Yes. I am a hypocrite. A card-carrying member of the human race who has strong opinions about how people should behave in a crisis and then, under enough stress, occasionally does the exact opposite.
There are two things that absolutely set my teeth on edge.
The first is Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.
You know the scene. Something is actively on fire. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally. People are stressed. The problem is unfolding in real time. And someone decides this is the moment to hold court about all the things that should have happened differently in the past.
“Well, you know, if we had just…”
“Maybe if you hadn’t…”
“What we should have done was…”
Oh. Incredible. Thank you. Truly. Tell me more while I’m carrying the cat out of the burning building.
Here is a sentence I would like engraved on a very large, very public plaque:
Woulda, coulda, shoulda is not a fire extinguisher.
It does not stop the bleeding. It does not stabilize the patient. It does not fix the server that is down, the trip that is falling apart, the relationship that is imploding, or the democracy that is currently being stress-tested by people who think cruelty is a personality.
There is a time for analysis. I love analysis. I will happily autopsy any situation later with color-coded highlighters and footnotes. But in the middle of the crisis?
We need three things:
- What is the problem right now?
- What can we do in the next 5 minutes to make it less bad?
- Who is doing what?
Everything else is just commentary.
Which brings me to the second thing that makes me want to flip a table:
“I told you so.”
Oh. That one.
Something bad has happened. Someone is scared, or hurt, or panicking, or watching their worst fear unfold in real time. And some smug, emotionally underdeveloped peacock steps forward and says:
“Well. I told you this would happen.”
Congratulations. You win. The prize is: no one is helped and everyone hates you.
“I told you so” is not wisdom. It is not leadership. It is not even particularly intelligent. It is just ego standing on the rubble taking selfies.
It is saying, “Your pain is less important than my correctness.”
It is the verbal equivalent of stepping over someone who has fallen so you can point out that you warned them about the stairs.
So: these are my two great, towering irritations in life.
- Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.
- I told you so.
Both are useless in a crisis. Both are ways of standing next to the work instead of doing the work. Both are stress responses dressed up as insight.
And yet.
And yet.
Here we are.
Here we are as a nation, in an actual, real, no-metaphor-needed crisis.
And I have to tell you something that is not particularly noble or inspirational:
I have nothing!
I have no brilliant solution. I have no five-point plan. I have no stirring call to action that magically fixes this. I wake up, read the news, and feel the slow, cold creep of “oh my god, this is really happening.”
And what do I find myself thinking?
Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.
AMERICA: You put this man in office. Again.
It was clear who he is.
It was clear who was behind him.
Project 2025 was not hidden. It was not secret. It was not subtle. It was available for the media and for every private citizen to read.
I read it.
I believed it.
And yes.
Yes.
I told you so.
There was a better choice. There were warnings. There were flares in the sky and sirens in the distance and whole libraries of evidence. And for all of the wild, tangled, infuriating reasons of modern America — here we are. Again.
And now I am doing both of the things I claim to hate.
I am thinking woulda-coulda-shoulda.
And I am saying I told you so.
Which makes me — say it with me — a hypocrite. Again.
Why do we do this?
Because when we are scared, the mind looks for retroactive control. It looks for a story where this didn’t have to happen. Where it was preventable. Where someone could have stopped it. Where maybe, if we say it clearly enough, we can rewind time by sheer force of moral correctness.
But time does not rewind.
The building is still on fire.
And I am forced to sit with a deeply uncomfortable truth:
Being right is not the same thing as being useful.
So here I am. A person who hates crisis-narration and crisis-scorekeeping, narrating and keeping score anyway. A person who believes in carrying buckets, standing in the smoke with a bucket in her hands, realizing she does not yet know where the water is.
Maybe this is just where we are right now.
Not in solutions.
Not in clarity.
But in the honest, trembling space between rage, grief, fear, and responsibility.
And maybe the only truly adult sentence in a moment like this is still:
“Okay. This is bad. What do we do next?”
I don’t know yet.
But I do know this: we don’t need more narrators. And we don’t need more victory laps from people standing on wreckage.
We need people willing to stay in the room.
We need people willing to carry buckets.
We need people willing to admit they’re scared and still show up.
Right now my hands are empty.
And if you see me starting to lecture while the building is burning, you have my full permission to hand me a bucket and say:
“Julie. Less commentary. More water.”
Julie Bolejack, MBA
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