With the Whole World Watching, Money Speaks

Super Bowl Sunday as a Global Mirror for Values, Power, and Protest

Each year Super Bowl Sunday arrives wrapped in spectacle, sequins, and billion-dollar bravado. The ads. The halftime show. The collective pause of an entire nation. This year, that pause carries a charge. Electricity. The weight of attention and money converging.

Because the stage itself has begun to speak.

The National Football League has been throwing deliberate elbows. Inviting Bad Bunny to headline and then refusing to back down in the face of racist outrage, it doubled down by pairing him with Green Day. That pairing hums with memory and defiance. Music as witness. Music as refusal.

History keeps teaching the same lesson to anyone willing to look: artists move first. Singers. Songwriters. Poets. Painters. They feel the fracture before it becomes legible. They name the harm before institutions admit it exists.

Art has always been the early warning system, revealing the clay feet and fragile egos of those who would use power to dominate rather than protect. For fucks sake, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are warnings, not how-to manuals.

I hope Green Day opens with American Idiot (with or without the updated lyrics), a song forged in the heat of 2004 dissent. If they do, it will land as more than a performance. It will land as a reminder that culture remembers who tried to mute it.

Predictably, a conservative organization is hosting its own “halftime show” in protest. No, I won’t name them. I won’t give them or the algorithm the satisfaction. Their response to a non-white global icon tells the truth: they understand the power of the moment, and they fear where it’s headed.

And then there is the advertising.

The Super Bowl remains the most expensive megaphone money can buy. A single ad broadcasts a company’s posture into millions of homes at once. Escapism has been the usual flavor for Super Bowl ads - a palatte cleanser if you will, but there have been a few that have been used for social commentary. This year, these ads will function as moral artifacts.

Because money never floats above reality.
It enters it.
Shapes it.
Funds it forward.

I am watching closely. I am deciding with precision.

I have already withdrawn my money from platforms that quietly bankroll harm. I have stopped supporting brands that prioritize comfort over conscience. I have declined convenience when it demanded that I abandon discernment.

Even when it costs me pleasure.
Even when it interrupts a story I want to finish.
Even when it would be easier to look away.

In 2020, I left two career-defining organizations. One publicly supported harm. The other remained silent. I refused to lend my labor to either. Ironically, I have more respect for the first, because silence is complicity, and neutrality is anticipatory obedience.

That decision clarified something I have never forgotten: platforms are choices. Money is alignment. Participation is never neutral.

This moment hurts. Rage lives here. Grief breathes close to the surface. The harm unfolding each day is real, relentless, and body-level. None of this is abstract. None of it is theoretical.

And still.

We cannot let the times we are living through take us out.

Each of us has work to do. Good work. Purpose work. Mission work that did not disappear just because the world grew more hostile. When we allow the hurt, the rage, the grief to hollow us out completely, to pull us from our posts, to silence our contributions, they win without resistance.

I refuse that outcome.

I let the pain inform me, sharpen me, sober me. I refuse to let it calcify into paralysis. My work continues because it must. Because opting out is exactly what systems of harm count on. Because staying resourced, present, and effective is its own form of protest.

Prosperity, when held ferally and cleanly, becomes leverage.

Money moves the world whether we engage consciously or not. I refuse to kneel. I refuse to hand my country to those who treat power as prey. Money carries consequences. My resources know what’s at stake and behave accordingly.

Every purchase extends a relationship.
Every renewal strengthens a platform.
Every dollar rehearses a future.

The world is watching.
So am I.

👉 Reflection Prompt

What is your truth, and how is your money speaking it out?

🔥 Daily Affirmation

I wield my resources with clarity and ferocity.
My money moves in alignment with my values.
I trust my discernment to guide every financial choice.
My prosperity funds truth, dignity, and repair.
I stand visible, resourced, and unmovable.

P.S. Profit is Protest and so is discernment at scale. Every purchase is a ballot. Every renewal is an endorsement. Every dollar tells a story about the future we are willing to fund.

This one is important. Please share and restack.