Quarterly Story for Third Quarter 2026

“War Without End”

John skimmed his notes as his first period students walked into the classroom. A few nodded towards him or said things like, “Hey, Mister Wilard.” He just smiled and nodded back.

The bell rang and a few seconds later a couple kids rushed in. He raised an eyebrow at them, but with a big smile. He set his notes on his desk and stood. Looking around the room he saw there were no empty seats, and he didn’t see any unfamiliar faces.

Clapping his hands, he began, “First off, I want to repeat that these little five-minute Tuesday Tangents are just odd bits of history often overlooked by history books that I throw in to give you a fuller picture of history. And while nothing in them will come up on tests, there may be an occasional quiz question based on them. Given how many of you got the question about King Kalakaua on last week’s quiz wrong, some of you have apparently forgotten that.”

This was met with a mix of low chuckles and groans.

Turning around, John started writing on the chalkboard. “Today’s Tuesday Tangent is on the 1894 Fraga Uprising in Cuba.”

Turning back to the class, he saw most of them were taking notes.

“To set the stage, in the 1890’s Cuba was controlled by Spain and one of the main products of Cuba was sugar. Now, you think of sugar as just something you sprinkle on your corn flakes, but sugar production – especially in the past – was horrible. You get sugar from sugarcane, which I believe is technically a grass, but it has a thick stem – a cane – and it grows to be like ten feet tall. You cut the cane, and then put it through some rollers that crush it and squeeze all this liquid out of it. This liquid is somewhat sweet, but if you boil all the water out of it, you’re left with sugar. There are some extra steps to make the nice, white kind you get at the store, but that’s not important right now.

“That doesn’t sound so bad, but one thing I left out is that the leaves of the sugarcane are very sharp: sharp enough that you can get, like, papercuts from them. So to harvest a field of sugarcane, you send someone out with a machete to cut a bunch of canes, bundle them up, and pass them to someone who will take them to a wagon that will take them to a mill. So you spend hour after hour cutting canes and getting little papercuts all over your body in a hot, humid environment. Not only are you getting sweat into the cuts, there’s also the sweet juice from the canes that also attracts insects.

“For centuries, the only way to make enough cheap sugar to satisfy the world’s demand, was to have slaves do all the work. But what do you do when slavery is abolished? Well, now you pay the workers, but you pay them as little as possible and cut as many corners as you can to keep the price of sugar low.”

John then added two names to the chalkboard. “That is the world Miguel Fraga and his brother Jorge lived in. Records aren’t the best, but we think they were in their early twenties and had been working on sugar plantations since they were old enough to do any of the work. Now I said you crush the canes to get the sweet juice out, well, it seems Jorge got his hand caught in the crushing machine and he lost his arm. While horrible, it probably wasn’t that uncommon. What also wasn’t that uncommon is that the wound got infected and Jorge eventually died, most likely a slow, agonizing death.

“We don’t know if there were other horrible things that happened to put Miguel on this track, but Jorge’s death was the final straw. Miguel got the other workers to basically go on strike. Now when you hear about a strike, you probably picture a bunch of people walking around with signs while the leaders negotiate for higher wages, or whatever. But strikes in the 1890’s were more like everyone gets a gun and they start shooting each other until one side gives in.

“While it started on a sugar plantation, there were plenty of other people in the area upset with Spain or the rich owners of the plantations, and the factories, and whatever, so this sugar strike turns into an uprising. This is where,” John turned and wrote another name on the board, “Jerimiah Wilshire enters the story. Jerimiah owned one of the sugar mills as well as the shipping company that carried the sugar to the US. He was also brother to Samual Wilshire, who was the Secretary of the Navy at the time.

“Now we don’t know exactly what happened, because it wasn’t a big enough scandal to be investigated, but shortly after the uprising began, the US warship,” John checked his notes, “the USS Erie, that just happened to be in the area, was,” John air quoted, “‘fired upon’ and fired back at the plantation house where Miguel and everyone was organizing. The ship only fired like ten rounds, but one of them set the building where they were stockpiling gunpowder on fire, causing an explosion that killed Miguel Fraga and twenty or so other people. With that, the uprising fell apart. Spanish authorities went in, executed twenty or so,” here John again air quoted, “‘rebel leaders,’ and things went back to the way they had been. Some estimates of the death toll have it around 100, but others put it at almost 500. There are such discrepancies because, one, bad records, but two, whenever there is violence like this, some people take the opportunity to settle old scores, or do other horrible things, and do you count those deaths as part of the total or not?”

John stopped and looked around the class. A few of the students were writing in their notebooks, most were watching him, and a couple were looking out the window.

John took a deep breath, and let it out. “Now the most important thing, the number one thing I want you to remember about the 1894 Fraga Uprising in Cuba, is that it never happened. I made the entire thing up.”

Now all the students were looking at him. In the front row Niara hesitantly raised a hand. When John pointed at her she asked, “Um, what?”

“This was a demonstration of how when you don’t know something, someone can make up anything and people will go along with it because it sounds plausible. Anyone with any knowledge of 1890’s Cuba would know this Fraga Uprising was fake, but how many people have knowledge of 1890’s Cuba? I threw this all together last night in ten minutes, but bad actors with AI can do so much worse.”

John leaned back on the front of his desk. “In the olden days,” he began, “when your parents were your age, they’d get an email from the ‘Spanish National Lottery’ saying they’d won $10,000. They just needed to send their banking info for the winnings to be transferred to their account. And despite 99.99% of people deleting the email because they knew it was a scam, enough people replied with their bank info for the scammers to clean out their accounts and make enough money to keep going. Now those same scammers with less effort can have some AI create a ‘person’ online with TikToks and Instagrams and whatever the latest site is, and have it spend months becoming ‘friends’ with thousands and thousands of people around the world. And then it will have a skiing accident, and would you like to donate to this GoFundMe to help pay for ‘their’ medical expenses.”

John paused for a few moments before continuing. “Worse than just stealing money, is how AI is being used to change how people think. For centuries, people have made up lies about Jews, Muslims, Blacks, women, homosexuals, everyone. And a lot of people believed those lies, either because they wanted to believe them, or because the lies were the only thing they ever heard. And now racists and misogynists and other terrible people are using AI to make up thousands of lies to flood the internet. I’m sure most of you have been scrolling along and come across some offensive post and blocked the poster. That’s good, but I’m also sure you’ve scrolled past hundreds, thousands of other posts that either weren’t offensive enough, or were offensive in ways you didn’t understand, in an 1890’s Cuba way.

“There’s an old saying that’s usually misquoted as ‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ As someone who has learned from history, I’m 99.99% certain that there are groups – from companies with military contracts, to religious fanatics, to some deranged person sitting in their basement – that are already filling the internet with lies to start a major war. Here’s shaky video of people in Country X burning the American flag. Here’s a news report of someone being executed in Country X for listening to Western music. Here’s footage of Country X’s leader saying they will destroy America. You start seeing stories like that once a week, and over time an image of Country X builds up in your mind. It’s all plausible, but it could all be a lie so that when we go to war with Country X, you may not fully support it, but you’re not really against it because it was a terrible country to begin with.”

Niara raised her hand and John nodded at her. “Shouldn’t you be telling us how to tell what’s true, and what’s not?”

John smiled. “Searching for the truth in a sea of lies is a war without end. It has always been a challenge, and then my generation created mega lie factories with the sole purpose of drowning out the truth. It is one more existential burden we have left for you to muddle through and probably leave most of it for the next generation.”

John walked to the board and started erasing what he had written. “I won’t tell you to blindly trust the news, or those in authority, or your textbooks. Recently I saw a story about how some school had textbooks created by some AI that made up states, like West Dakota and Connecticut.”

He turned around to see most of the students frowning and looking at one another. “That was a joke. I know Connecticut is real.”

This brought smiles and a few chuckles.

“I won’t tell you to blindly trust everything, but I also won’t tell you to just question everything. The first will have all the bad people taking advantage of you, and the second will have you in a basement somewhere thinking the world is flat and that aliens were behind the Kennedy assassination. You need to find something in between, and sadly, if you manage to find something that works, it won’t always work. And what works for one, won’t work for another.” John shrugged. “As I said, it’s a war without end.

“I will give you two pieces of advice. The first, learn all you can in subjects you care about. One of you could have taken an interest in your family history and found out that your great-great-great grandfather emigrated from Cuba around the 1890’s and started studying that time period. In which case, you might have figured out I was lying.” To drive the point home, John pointed around the room as he said, “The more you know, the harder you are to fool.”

John was happy to see a few of the students appeared to be writing that down. “The second piece of advice, is if anyone – teacher, reporter, politician, stranger handing out pamphlets on the sidewalk, JoeBob6-7 online – gives you information to change how you feel about something, that needs extra attention. Because maybe Country X is a tyrannical hellscape and JoeBob6-7 has family there and wants the rest of the world to know those facts. But he could also be a bot made to drum up support for a future war.”

John waited a moment, then clapped his hands. “I know that was a weird way to start today, but it is a serious matter that you will have to deal with. And if twenty years from now one of you isn’t taken in by a scam because of today, then it was a success. But we do need to actually go over some real history.”

Going to the chalkboard, John started to write. “Today we’ll cover the Sherman Antitrust Act.”