Today's Wisdom - Power, Order and Identity

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Somalia has never really had a strong central government. For centuries, power flowed through clans: your family, your tribe, your patch of land. However, by 1991, even that fragile order collapsed. When dictator Siad Barre, who had ruled the country since 1969, was overthrown, the capital city Mogadishu fractured into a maze of warlord territories where whoever controlled the streets controlled everything from food aid to checkpoints. When the UN arrived to secure humanitarian supplies, the Americans followed under Operation Gothic Serpent, a mission designed to weaken warlord power. The mission was focused on capturing one man, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a warlord who had grown powerful enough to challenge UN authority.

Somalia turned out to be the worst place imaginable for a manhunt due to its dense urban sprawl, a population that knew every alley, and a deep resentment toward foreign soldiers issuing commands at gunpoint. On 3 October 1993, U.S. Rangers and Delta Force launched a daylight raid intended to last less than an hour. That gamble collapsed when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by RPGs, trapping American troops deep inside hostile territory. A lesser known detail matters here: a third helicopter was also hit but managed to stay airborne and limp back to base. Had it gone down, the entire operation might have collapsed outright. Many soldiers had left their night vision goggles behind, expecting a quick mission, and suddenly found themselves fighting blind after sunset. What followed was eighteen hours of relentless urban combat, as thousands of Somali fighters used speed, numbers, and local knowledge to overwhelm the most technologically advanced military on earth. When rescue vehicles finally pushed in, they were packed with wounded, forcing exhausted soldiers to escape on foot through alleyways under fire in what later became known as the Mogadishu Mile. In the middle of it all, two Delta Force snipers, Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, repeatedly requested to be inserted at a crash site. They understood the odds, went anyway, fought until they were killed, and became the first U.S. soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor since Vietnam.

When rescue finally arrived, it was not a Hollywood style American convoy. Pakistani tanks and Malaysian armored vehicles led the advance, exposing how multinational and how dependent the mission had become. Tactically, the raid succeeded, as Aidid’s senior lieutenants were captured and extracted. Strategically, it was a disaster. Footage of dead American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu’s streets flooded television screens back home, and public support evaporated almost overnight. Within months, the United States withdrew from the nation entirely and to this day Somalia remains an unstable battleground.

England entered the seventeenth century burdened by tensions it had never resolved, particularly between king and parliament and between religious authority and political power. The Tudors had strengthened the crown, but by the time Charles I inherited the throne in 1625, the treasury was drained and the country stood deeply divided. Charles believed his authority came directly from God, while Parliament believed power followed money and insisted that it controlled the purse strings. Religion sharpened the conflict further, as many Protestants viewed Charles as Catholic, absolutist, and foreign. These disputes played out not only on battlefields but also via printing presses, where both sides flooded the country with pamphlets and illustrated broadsheets that exaggerated enemy crimes and spread early political propaganda. By the 1640s, England was no longer arguing about policy, it was fighting over who had the right to rule the nation.

In 1642, the country turned on itself as Royalists faced Parliamentarians in a civil war that reshaped the modern state. Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army prevailed through discipline, ideological commitment, and promotion based on merit rather than birth, breaking the old assumption that power followed lineage. In 1649, the unthinkable happened as Charles I was put on trial for treason, where he refused to speak a single word in his own defense, arguing that no court created by law could judge the King who embodied the law itself. His silence was his final protest. He wore two shirts to his execution, fearing that shivering might look like fear, and then his head was cut off. The monarchy was abolished, and for eleven years England existed as a republic known as the Commonwealth, a period many contemporaries described as a world turned upside down.

The political rupture triggered a social one. Under Puritan rule, even Christmas was banned for being too indulgent and disorderly, as the state demanded restraint instead of celebration and discipline instead of tradition. Across England, towns rushed to build public stocks to retain their legal status, since villages without them were downgraded to hamlets under the law. When the monarchy returned in 1660, it did so permanently weakened. Power had shifted, Parliament mattered now, and the doctrine of divine right, rule granted by God alone, was effectively dead. The English Civil War proved a radical idea that would echo across the modern world: authority does not descend from heaven, it comes from the people.

The Bronx in the 1970s was a landscape of abandonment where factories shut down, infrastructure decayed, and neighborhoods were redlined into neglect. Public services withdrew, gangs filled the vacuum, and communities were left to improvise. In response, DJs and MCs began throwing block parties, turning territorial conflict into musical competition and using sound to keep streets alive after dark. DJ Kool Herc sparked the movement in 1973, but the real turning point came in 1977 when a massive blackout hit New York City. Electronics stores were looted, and overnight professional DJ equipment landed in the hands of kids who could never have afforded it. Within weeks, the number of DJs in the Bronx multiplied. Sound itself became accessible.

Early rap was not built for radio, and tracks lasted as long as the crowd demanded, often stretching fifteen minutes or more if that was what kept bodies moving. When Rapper’s Delight exploded in 1979, its length baffled record executives who believed rap was a novelty that could never fit commercial formats. Cheap discarded technology played a role too. The Roland TR 808 drum machine was a commercial failure, mocked for sounding fake and abandoned by mainstream musicians. Young producers bought them cheaply and turned their booming bass into the backbone of modern rap and trap. By the late 1980s and 1990s, rap fragmented by city and region, with different sounds narrating the same underlying pressures: policing, race, money, survival. What began as neighborhood expression became a national language, then an industry, then a constant argument over authenticity.

Today, rap dominates global music because it evolves faster than the systems built to contain it. Linguists have documented this in detail, noting that Aesop Rock alone has used over 7,800 unique words in his lyrics, exceeding the vocabularies of Shakespeare or Herman Melville. The form itself has deep roots. Centuries before microphones, Norse and English poets practiced flyting, trading rhythmic insults before live crowds who decided the winner. Streaming erased geography, social media eliminated gatekeepers, and rap fractured into thousands of subgenres, each reflecting a fragment of modern identity. Yet its core function remains unchanged. Rap is still what it has always been: a record of power, pressure, and perspective, written from the ground up.

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Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team