Chu The Cud

I grew up in Rhode Island.

Small towns, real winters, Christmas traditions that actually meant something.

When I moved to California in 2000, I didn’t expect to find anything that reminded me of home. But every Christmas season, my wife and I would visit Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, that stretch overlooking the ocean, because back then, it still carried a little magic.

They set up these beautiful seasonal displays.

Nativity scenes, glowing angels, lights, all sponsored by local churches, the fire department, the police.

Nothing political.

Nothing meant to provoke.

Just a simple, peaceful tradition you could walk through with your family while the air smelled like the ocean and the holidays at the same time.

It reminded me of being a kid back east.

It reminded me of what Christmas used to feel like.

It was something I could share with my wife, and eventually, my children.

And then the fringe groups showed up.

The professional complainers.

The people who don’t build anything but love tearing down whatever still brings joy to others.

They demanded “equal representation,” and under the big umbrella of free speech, they bought up their own plots, filling them with anti-religion, anti-Christmas, anti-anything-that-brings-light messaging.

That was the beginning of the end.

Because once you allow people who despise community to shape community spaces, everything slowly collapses.

Fast-forward to now:

Look at Santa Monica.

Look at California.

Tent cities.

Human waste on sidewalks.

Encampments stretching for miles.

A government that calls it compassion while residents tiptoe around needles and trash like it’s the new normal.

And it’s not just here anymore.

You’re seeing the same pattern in places like Germany, activists spraying black smoke into the air, screaming through megaphones, disrupting Christmas markets while families try to enjoy the lights.

Same type of people.

Same toxic energy.

Same mission to destroy anything simple and human.

This was never about religion.

It’s not even about Christmas.

It’s about the erosion of simple joys, the small traditions, the small comforts, the small reminders that we belong to something bigger than our complaints.

Some people build.

Some people vandalize.

And for the last twenty years, the vandals have been loud, organized, and relentless.

Maybe it’s time we stop letting fringe voices pretend they represent the majority.

Maybe it’s time we stop giving the microphone to people who produce absolutely nothing, just destruction.

Maybe it’s time the majority remembers its voice.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Ode to my father. 

Before he ever built anything with wood or steel, my father built his life with small, honest work.

As a kid he shined shoes on street corners, set up bowling pins in the crash of the alleys, and swept floors in a garage, just to hand a few crumpled bills and coins to his mother so the house could stay warm and the family could stay fed.

He learned early that money wasn’t given, it was earned one scraped knuckle at a time.

And he carried that truth into the man he became.

CRME Construction was his proof of it, his children and my mother’s initials, pressed into the company like a heartbeat.

Around it rose laundromats, record stores, strip malls full of small beginnings, and three houses climbing into the sky as if he could outbuild fate itself.

His work turned seven days a week into nine. He didn’t rest; he recalculated, rewired, rebuilt, and kept going.

And he didn’t just build for himself. He gave to charities, helped people who were struggling, built houses for friends and family for free and lifted others without announcing it, the kind of quiet generosity that never asks for credit.

But in Rhode Island, the ground beneath him was already shifting.

When the credit-union system collapsed, including Rhode Island Credit Union and Marquette Credit Union, they didn’t just freeze accounts; they froze futures, seizing the lifeblood of every working family who trusted them.

People called it a banking failure.

We knew better.

It was fraud wearing a tie, political decay behind a friendly handshake, and the long, unspoken reach of organized crime moving through the financial system like rot in the beams of an old house.

When the structure finally gave way, the men responsible slipped quietly out the back, and families like mine were buried in the debris they left behind.

My father didn’t just lose money.

He lost everything with a foundation, businesses built from sweat, strip malls filled with hope, homes still in mid-birth waiting for a sunrise that never came.

And the final blow came with a knock on the door.

Strangers stepped into our home, the one we built, as if they had written the deed and raised the walls themselves.

They told us to leave.

And we stood speechless, watching the locks change, hoping to wake from a nightmarish dream.

And the tax man didn’t care either. Tragedy doesn’t touch his heart or his ledger.

He wanted his share of the ruin, and for years after the collapse, he took what little my father earned, picking through the ashes as if the fire hadn’t been enough.

My father carried the weight the way only men who have been crushed by the world can, quietly, steadily, with a strength that refused to die.

Some inherit money.

Some inherit legacy.

We inherited perspective, the understanding that security is fragile, that systems crumble, that corruption rolls downhill until it rests on the shoulders of the very people who built the world.

But we also inherited his strength, the kind that survives collapse, stands in the dust, and still chooses to build again even when the world has taken every single thing but the will to rise.

Because in the end, they stole the money, the work, the land, the structures, the years.

But they never stole the man.

And they never stole the lasting will he passed to us.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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During World War II, sacrifice wasn’t a slogan, it was a way of living.

Meals were smaller, cupboards were thin, and no one believed the world owed them comfort.

People didn’t complain; they adapted. They understood that resilience wasn’t optional, it was survival.

Today, a delay in SNAP benefits and people claim they’re on the edge of starvation.

Panic replaces patience. Outrage replaces effort.

What happened?

A society that once rationed butter and sugar without protest now collapses at the idea of temporary inconvenience.

We’ve traded strength for dependence, resilience for reaction, and the belief in personal fortitude for the expectation that someone else will save us.

We forgot to practice endurance as we traded toughness for convenience and indulgence reduces the need for skill, discipline, or patience.

Control the impulse.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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As a Freemason, I’ve heard the word legacy more times than I can count, from brothers in the fraternity and from the men who knock on the door hoping to join.

They want to leave a legacy. Of what?

But legacy isn’t what most people think it is.

I walked away from a career in the entertainment industry when my kids were very young. My wife wanted to hire someone to be with them all day, and I refused to let anyone else raise my children.

In those early years, I was the one dropping James and Lizzie off on my way to work, and the one picking them up after work.

Most of my paycheck went straight to daycare. And when Charlie came along, I stepped away altogether.

I knew then what I still know now: nothing was more important than being present. Three young souls needed guidance in an ever-changing world. I never questioned the choice. I never weighed pros and cons. It wasn’t logic, it was instinct. It was the only path that made sense.

Never thought about a legacy.

I may now live paycheck to paycheck today, but I get to see the people they’ve become, independent, thoughtful, grounded, an incredible sense of humor and great all around people. Nothing in any career could replace that.

That is what legacy means.

Not wealth.

Not influence.

Not applause or power.

I still create. I write my books, my second book dropping soon, play and write my music, act, do stand-up for friends, co-host a podcast, and make faces in the mirror like a man who still enjoys being alive.

But none of that compares to the three incredible human beings I had the privilege to guide as an artist, throughout their lives.

They are my legacy.

Not me.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad went viral, the kind of viral that feeds on outrage. A few seconds of denim, beauty, and wordplay turned into a cultural food fight about race.

Then piranhas ate it up like Kobe beef.

I felt it was manufactured then.

It wasn’t about jeans anymore; it was about meaning, or the illusion of it.

Right as her films Christy and The Housemaid were set to release, the storm felt rehearsed.

A little controversy, a little innocence, the perfect PR cocktail. The controversy was everywhere and impossible to escape.

But like all cocktails, it eventually wears off.

Now, the box office tells the story the headlines won’t. The numbers don’t lie, they simply whisper what the hype tried to hide: manufactured fame and controversy is loud, but temporary.

Before all this, most people didn’t even know her name. I watch a show she was in and didn’t remember her.

Then came the uproar, and she became a mirror reflecting the system that built her, a system that confuses attention for admiration, clicks for credibility, and virality for value.

What was meant to lift her into stardom may instead become the lesson: when fame is engineered, authenticity becomes collateral damage.

The noise fades. The numbers remain.

And the biggest lesson, people are easy to manipulate. Just like a switch.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Are you walking around unconscious, meticulously brainwashed into believing you’re awake, while following the choreography of a collective sleep?

Your eyes, tracked and patterned, already predicted by those who know what activates your gaze.

Does that make you conscious? Or just a well-trained reflex, scrolling up and down the feed of illusion?

What makes you stop?

What makes you continue?

Are those choices of preprogrammed impulses, synapses rewired by repetitions of electrical strikes choreographed by design?

The stimulation turns you on, for its purpose. And you believe it’s a choice.

But are you sure?

Is consciousness the watcher, or the reflection staring back, of a vortex perceived unconsciously?

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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You can’t control your thoughts or fears. You can’t control your actions, so you see a therapist and take their prescribed advice and pharmaceuticals, because you believe without their perspective on you, you’re just a lump of clay in the corner.

No wheel.

No drivetrain.

Waiting for someone to tell you what to do, what to take, what to say, to rewire your brain by example, until you become nothing but a blob, dependent on the hands that shape you.

But your mind is like your skin, full of pores. Whatever touches it, soaks in.

Be careful what you put on it, because what seeps in becomes part of you. Good and bad.

The thoughts, the noise, the media and medicine, the bad advice, all enter the bloodstream of your being.

And be careful of those opinions of others, who use the opinions of others, who used the opinions of failed others, to guide your hand.

This is the problem with society: the weak don’t fight to stand upright. They follow the gravy train of kibble.

They’d rather fly a kite than face the weight of gravity.

But nothing worth anything comes easily.

You can’t wake up and say, “Ice cream for breakfast, cake for lunch.” When even the simplest forms of life know it’s bad.

You have to master your own domain, your body, your mind, your emotions: anger and tenderness, integrity and empathy, envy, jealousy, and hierarchy.

Because the battle isn’t out there.

It’s in you.

In the clay before the wheel turns, in the mind before the thought forms.

Guard what enters.

Shape what remains.

And when you finally take form, let it be by your own hands. For impatience comes at an expense.

When you see the barbed wire, trust your gut and don’t talk yourself out of what it is.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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You wanna be a writer?

There’s an app for that.

Screenplay, novel, memoir, just feed it your fragments, and it’ll “find your voice” for you.

You wanna be a musician?

There’s an app for that too.

Type a mood or idea, and it’ll write your song, chords, lyrics, and emotion on demand.

You wanna sing?

No problem. There’s an app for that.

It’ll polish your pitch, fix your soul, and make sure you sound like everyone else.

You wanna make a film?

There’s an app for that too. One sentence is all that’s needed.

No actors, no crew, no vision, just prompts and pixels pretending to feel.

And here’s the downside: the more we click, the less we think. The more we consume, the less we create.

Originality fades into automation, and imagination collects dust on the shelf of convenience.

We’re not losing art, or our ability to think or problem solve, we outsource it.

One tap at a time.

Welcome to the 21st century.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

Imagine living a life so empty you spend it listening for a slip, a stutter, a pause, a mispronounced breath from someone you claim to despise without properly vetting.

Waiting for that gotcha moment to post, to prove, to perform your hypocritical outrage for an audience of Pavlov dogs, salivating at the sound of another’s mistake.

Imagine needing someone else’s imperfection to feel your own reflection still matters.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Feelings have their own intelligence, monitoring the rhythmical pulse, a message.

Vibrations shake when shackles break, control awakened, a fight-or-flight reflex on autopilot, unknown.

Fire tempers, focus… the mind returns to assess the mess, that warrants investigation.

What shakes first is never the earth, but the soul.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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