I didn’t watch the Super Bowl halftime show.
Before you say, “So what’s the big deal?”, let me offer some context, especially if you’re not an American football fan or if you’re reading this from outside the United States.
Each year, the Super Bowl halftime show functions as more than entertainment. It has become one of the few cultural moments where art, politics, commerce, and national identity collide in full view of a global audience. This year’s performance, headlined by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, reopened a familiar fault line. Supporters celebrated the unapologetic use of Spanish, the message of love over hate, and the refusal to soften cultural identity for mainstream comfort. Critics bristled at those same elements, framing the performance as divisive, un-American, or irresponsibly political, as though it were the artist’s obligation to unify a fractured nation.
The debate arrived instantly and predictably. Social media filled with declarations, condemnations, and certainty.
I missed all of it.
Not out of protest or restraint, but because I was on a plane, suspended between continents, returning to the United States after days of travel. And because, if I’m being honest, since my team — the Kansas City Chiefs — weren’t playing this year, the moment didn’t carry enough personal gravity to rearrange my life around it.
The spectacle moved on without me.
Back home, jet lagged and reacclimating to routines that reassert themselves with remarkable speed, I found myself preparing for something far more revealing than missing a global cultural moment. I was about to go to Target to buy groceries.
On the surface, the errand felt mundane. Familiar. Almost invisible.
Except it wasn’t.
In Minnesota, Target is more than a retailer. It is a civic symbol, a corporate neighbor, and increasingly, a site of moral tension. Recent decisions to roll back public commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, alongside reported cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, have sparked protests, boycotts, and calls for accountability. For many, Target now represents a familiar dilemma: institutions that speak the language of values while operating comfortably within systems that cause real harm.
I knew all of this.
And I was still going.
No deliberation. No moral inventory. Just habit, efficiency, and convenience guiding me forward.
Somewhere between a cultural moment I skipped without consequence and an errand I approached with quiet awareness, I realized something.
This is not an American story alone.
Every society has its own sanctioned arenas for expression, moments where outrage is permitted, symbolism is applauded, and moral energy is safely discharged without threatening the structures underneath. The venues change. The language shifts. The choreography remains remarkably consistent.
We live in a time when moral energy is abundant but carefully contained. It concentrates around moments that are visible, emotional, and collectively experienced, then dissipates quickly, leaving the architecture of power largely untouched. These moments feel significant because they are shared. They reassure us that we belong on the right side of a debate, aligned with the right values, among the right people.
Meanwhile, the systems that govern daily life continue uninterrupted.
Institutions have become adept at hosting dissent without absorbing its consequences. Expression is welcomed as long as it remains symbolic, time-bound, and cost-free. This is not accidental. It is an evolved response to a culture where outrage spikes and fades quickly, where discomfort is tolerated briefly, and where attention moves on before pressure accumulates.
The reactions to the halftime show followed this pattern precisely.
On the left, celebration arrived quickly and loudly. The performance was framed as brave, necessary, even restorative, as though thirteen minutes of televised defiance might serve as a corrective to institutional decay. The enthusiasm felt sincere, yet it carried a familiar temptation — the belief that feeling aligned might substitute for doing something difficult.
On the right, outrage took its expected form. The performance was treated as provocation and intrusion. The expectation, sometimes stated and often implied, was that the artist should unify the country, calm division, and carry a responsibility no performance could reasonably bear. That demand revealed a deeper confusion about where unity comes from and who is accountable for it.
Both responses fed the same machinery.
One side found affirmation.
The other found grievance.
Neither engaged the places where power actually resides.
What mattered most was not who felt represented or offended, but how efficiently the moment absorbed national attention. The argument became the event. The spectacle replaced the substance. The cycle moved on, satisfied that something meaningful had occurred.
While attention remained fixed on a stage, other realities continued without interruption.
Immigration raids expanded. Families were separated. Communities lived under renewed fear of arbitrary enforcement. Long-standing questions around accountability and abuse of power, including unresolved implications tied to the Epstein files, remained largely untouched by sustained public scrutiny. These were not symbolic disputes. They were matters of law, governance, and human consequence.
They struggled to compete with spectacle.
This displacement does not require orchestration. A culture trained to react supplies its own distractions. Moments that divide us along predictable lines are easier to metabolize than developments that demand endurance, focus, and institutional pressure. Outrage resolves quickly. Policy requires patience. Attention flows toward what feels emotionally legible rather than toward what demands follow-through.
Thirteen minutes can provoke reaction, but they cannot sustain the pressure that power actually responds to.
What unsettles me is not that these systems exist, but how easily I move through them. I can write about spectacle, power, and moral dilution, then walk into institutions whose contradictions I understand perfectly and proceed anyway. Nothing dramatic happens in that moment. No confrontation. No reckoning. Just continuity.
And that continuity is the point.
Most days, I choose what works. I choose what is familiar. I choose efficiency. I move through systems I know how to navigate, even when I recognize their failures, even when I critique them publicly, even when I understand the trade-offs involved. Comfort trains behavior. Convenience reinforces loyalty. Habits, repeated across millions of lives, become the quiet infrastructure that allows institutions to endure long after their moral authority thins.
This is why conversations about resistance gravitate toward spectacle. Spectacle provides distance. It allows virtue to be located elsewhere. It spares us from examining the accumulation of small, unremarkable choices that actually sustain the status quo.
The danger does not lie in caring about symbolic moments. It lies in mistaking them for sufficient engagement. Emotional release becomes a substitute for sustained pressure. The cycle repeats. Power waits. The structure holds.
Across the world, this pattern repeats itself in different forms. National pageantry paired with widening inequality. Moral language circulating through bureaucracies that struggle to translate values into outcomes. Stability and growth celebrated alongside silences everyone learns to live with. Different histories produce different expressions, yet the underlying trade-off remains familiar.
Comfort, once established, becomes persuasive.
This is why global audiences increasingly view democratic societies with skepticism rather than envy. The perception is not one of malice. It is one of performativity — values articulated fluently, sacrifice deferred indefinitely, freedom celebrated as identity while responsibility is treated as optional.
Institutions do not remain powerful simply because they resist change. They remain powerful because ordinary life continues to flow through them with minimal interruption. Expression alone does not disrupt systems built to absorb it. Endurance does.
I am not offering a checklist or a purity test. Ethical living inside compromised systems rarely presents clean exits. Awareness does not automatically produce courage. Withdrawal carries costs that are uneven and often invisible.
What remains is a refusal to confuse ease with impact.
Missing a halftime show required nothing of me. Buying groceries required no public justification. Those facts sit side by side because that is how modern life operates. The contradictions renew themselves quietly, without drama, every day.
I write this from within the system, not above it. I know how easily critique coexists with convenience, how quickly insight yields to routine.
The places where change might begin rarely announce themselves. They look like ordinary moments, stripped of spectacle, where no one is watching and no applause is coming. Those moments are easy to ignore. I ignore them more often than I would like to admit. I am still trying to understand what meaningful disruption looks like in a life structured around convenience.
The question worth carrying forward is whether we are willing to notice those moments before they quietly dissolve.
Power does not fear outrage. It has learned to coexist with it. Outrage has, at times, forced recalibration and reform, but only when it hardened into sustained pressure rather than dissolving into catharsis.
Until we confront that reality, we will continue mistaking moments for movements and reaction for leverage. And we will keep wondering why so much resistance feels passionate yet leaves so little changed.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
