Nutmeg And The Weight Of Ordinary Things

What a spice jar teaches us about power and survival.

Nutmeg is an interesting spice. Although nutmeg is something that we rarely think about, it plays such a vital part in our history. When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) took control of the Banda Islands (also known as the Spice Islands) in 1616, the only place where nutmeg grew at the time, they cornered the spice market. The English managed to gain control of a tiny island in the Banda Sea named Run that was only a mile long and half a mile wide, claimed their first colony, and launched the British Empire.

The Dutch and the English had been fighting, each wanting more islands in the Spice Islands. After several years, they came to an agreement. The English gave the Dutch Run Island in exchange for a small territory they held across the world, which they called New Amsterdam. The English later renamed that territory “New York.”

The Dutch East India Company was foundational to modern global capitalism, allowing public members to buy shares in a commercial enterprise. The brutality they inflicted on the Bandanese population is unimaginable, killing most of them. It says just as much about the origins of capitalism as it says about its current state.

Now, you can pick up a small bottle of nutmeg in a plastic container, right in between mustard seed and paprika, for $5.99, and you don’t think twice about it. You don’t think that it was once a highly sought-after commodity, or how many Bandanese people were killed because of it, or how it has its ties with modern capitalism, or the birth of America.

We’re surrounded by things that seem ordinary, until you pull at the strings of history. Nutmeg is a staple in the spice aisle, but it carries with it empire, slaughter, and the invention of capitalism. The same is true of rhetoric. The last 24-hours of rhetoric from Republicans may seem like Republican bluster, but words have carved empires, toppled governments, and sanctioned atrocities.

That’s what struck me listening to Chip Roy on the House floor today.

Nutmeg shows how fragile power really is. An island you can walk across in half an hour set the course of empires. Chip Roy’s speech on the House floor is built on that same fragility, the idea that America, the Constitution, even “Western civilization” itself could collapse at any moment if we don’t destroy some imagined enemy within. The truth is, the danger isn’t fragility. It’s men like Roy convincing people they’re under siege.

And then there was Congressman Ondor from MO’s words.

Congressman Onder tells his story. That the left are Marx, Stalin, and Pol Pot reborn, that they “literally kill those with whom they disagree.” History is clear on what follows once people swallow that kind of story.

Good versus evil, truth versus lies, beauty versus ugliness. This is theology. And when politics becomes theology, dissent becomes heresy.

For the crime of wanting a living wage, clean air, and access to healthcare, millions of Americans are now targets of an ideology that insists democracy itself is a war to be won by force. We can’t afford to shrug off this kind of rhetoric. It’s the deliberate casting of fellow Americans as monsters to be destroyed.

Today, Megan Thuy reminded me of something very important.

We have to keep ourselves grounded and united.

We stay grounded by refusing to accept their framing. We are not monsters. We are neighbors, workers, parents, and students. We are the people who get up in the morning to make breakfast before school, who drive trucks across the country, who take care of aging parents, who mow the grass and sit in traffic and laugh with friends on a porch at the end of the week.

When they say we are an existential threat to “Western civilization,” what they’re really saying is that they cannot imagine a civilization where everyone belongs. But we can. And we already live in it every day, in a thousand ordinary acts of care, labor, and survival.

Jim Acosta wrote today that the greatest danger now is that we give in to the same hate being weaponized against us. He’s right. Trump and his allies want nothing more than for us to mirror their fury, to fall into an endless cycle of reprisals that would confirm their narrative of a “war for civilization.” They’ve spent years monetizing outrage, and Kirk himself was one of the pioneers. But as Acosta warns, we can’t let their provocations push us into becoming what they already accuse us of being.

Acosta is right that what we do next matters. When violence becomes the answer to violence, the cycle deepens. And that’s precisely what the right is counting on, to drag us into their civil war, to make their story of enemies and survival our reality too.

History reminds us that empire and violence have always hidden in ordinary things.

But history also reminds us that people resist. The Bandanese who survived carried their stories. Workers and abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights marchers, each in their time refused the frame handed to them.

We are living through another such moment. The right wants us to believe democracy is a battlefield where only one side can remain standing. But democracy, at its best, is a community that keeps making room for more. That truth is already alive in our daily lives, in our labor, in our care for one another, in the way we choose solidarity over scapegoating.

We are neighbors, workers, parents, and students, and together, we are the future they fear. If we hold onto that, if we refuse to give in to hate, then their war will fail and our democracy will endure.

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