Fuss Johnson was born in Daytona, Florida, grew up in North Carolina, and then returned to the Sunshine State with his family as a teenager. He once tried living in California. He caught the first ride back.

“It’s hard to imagine being anywhere else,” says Mr. Johnson, who is now in his 50s. “Florida’s home.”

A home, he says, that is now sitting in water. Days after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast, killing over 100 people and leaving vast fields of wreckage, water from the storm’s massive rainfall is still inundating the great peninsula’s palmetto-dotted interior.

The Peace River near North Port is still turning yards into ponds. Clear Water Lake in Apopka has continued to rise. People are trudging in and out of sodden apartment buildings in Orange County – the seat of Disney. 

And here in Astor, where Mr. Johnson is the bridge mechanic for the single-span Astor Bridge, the St. Johns River was still severely flooded on Tuesday, leaving hundreds of homes with water in them and residents wandering around in disbelief.

America’s premier state of dreams is in a state of flux. 

Hurricane Ian’s winds and floods have put a spotlight on how bigger and wetter storms create new risk in a state where unique geography intersects with fast-paced development. With everything from manufactured homes to million-dollar waterfront condos in harm’s way – from storm-wrecked Sanibel Island to the backyard docks of River Road, here in Astor – the storm leaves major insurance questions in its wake. 

Legions of Floridians have uninsured properties. Florida’s singular political and legal culture has resulted in a strained marketplace for those who do have insurance. The aftermath of Ian could lead to a reordering of personal and communal responsibilities here in one of the most dynamic weather states in the U.S.

“We were already in crisis before this storm, and we will certainly be in full collapse after this storm,” says Ray Lehmann, editor-in-chief of International Center for Law & Economics. “If you look at the history of Florida, going all the way back to [the founding of] St. Augustine, it exists as a long series of speculative real estate bubbles. At some point the gravy train is going to stop. We’re getting there.”

One indicator of trouble: In counties where residents were asked to evacuate, only about 18% of homes have coverage through the federally backed National Flood Insurance Program. Mr. Johnson has it, but many of his neighbors do not.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Extensive flooding can be seen in Astor, Florida, on Oct. 4, 2022, after Hurricane Ian moved across central Florida. Winds pushing against the north-flowing* river helped create historic high water levels.

That sobering statistic shows the broader challenge facing how America rebuilds after disasters. Strain is only growing on the mix of private and public dollars that prop up storm-damaged areas.

Here in Florida, especially after Ian, it could be called a full-blown insurance crisis.

Unlike any other state, Florida’s insurance market is populated, as a feature of Florida law, by mom-and-pop insurance companies that write only property insurance. Auto and boat premiums drive profits at most insurance firms. Some of those smaller companies are struggling.

“We have thinly capitalized, very undiversified domestic insurers, six of whom have been declared insolvent in the last year and two dozen more that stand ready to be downgraded” by a rating agency, says Mr. Lehmann, in Tampa.

That has left Citizens Property Insurance Corp., a state-backed firm headquartered on Bay Street in Jacksonville, as an insurer of last resort. Its market share is growing fast, even as its risks are as well.

The community of Astor is named for the wealthy New York family dynasty, which once owned most of this crook in the St. Johns River. Today, it is part of northern Lake County, where double-wide trailers are squeezed together around boat-filled canals. Flags fly everywhere on front-yard flagpoles. There are Trump 2020 flags not far from one with the profile of a lumbering sasquatch holding a fishing pole. 

Stephanie Fletcher and her mother, Michelle Fletcher, live next door to each other just outside the reach of Tuesday’s crest. Ms. Fletcher’s home sits 10 feet above her daughter’s – the result of newer construction and updated county flood codes. “We stayed dry. We were lucky,” she says.

But down the street, things are more difficult. The Fletchers have rescued neighbors and confronted gawkers driving too fast through the floodwaters. On Tuesday, Lake County sheriff’s deputies investigated a report of a man who drew a gun on residents after they confronted him about his speed.

Before the storm, Ms. Fletcher says her insurance had “gone through the roof.” She expects more hikes now. As if to punctuate her point, an insurance adjuster – identified by a buttoned-up shirt and new truck, stepladder jutting out of the bed – drives through the flood, only to be turned back by the water.

Wading through her flooded garage, the younger Ms. Fletcher brags about her “indoor swimming pool.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Stephanie Fletcher (right) and her mother, Michelle Fletcher, showcase "hurricane smiles" on Oct. 4, 2022, as floodwaters continued to push into their Astor, Florida, neighborhood. While their homes were largely unaffected, many of their neighbors had to evacuate as floodwaters rose over the banks of the St. Johns River.

Days after the deadliest Florida storm since 1935, such gallows humor was tempered by a rising sense, for some, of running out of rope. 

Nearby, Alan “Jake” Jacobson sat outside his bait shop, reassuring an older Kentucky relative on the phone that his octogenarian mother was OK after taking a fall while she was being evacuated from her Alice Drive home.

“I just put $60,000 into my home. I had it on the market for over $300,000,” he says. “Just before the storm, I took it off the market. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to sell. And now it’s underwater – in more ways than one.” 

“People don’t realize that we’ve never ... seen this amount of flooding where the rivers [are] overflowing,” says Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida professor emerita in political science who lives in Lutz, Florida. “People tend to only look at the ocean and the Gulf, so that’s really wreaked havoc in places that aren’t used to having water come 2 to 3 feet into their homes.” 

In North Port, flooding continued as watershed managers tried to keep reservoir outflows tightened down. In Harlem Heights, a mostly Hispanic area where the annual median household income is $26,000, flooded residents fretted over how to recover from a just-receded flood.

“A lot of [newcomers] don’t realize they are putting themselves at risk by moving [to Florida], and not just along the coast,” says Mark Hafen, a former member of the Tampa Bay Climate Advisory Council.

Rebecca Santana/AP

Residents of apartments in Harlem Heights, Florida, clean out clothes and other possessions from their apartments swamped by floodwaters from Hurricane Ian, Oct. 1, 2022.

Hurricane Ian’s total cost may exceed Hurricane Irma’s in 2017, which by some estimates left $77 billion in damages. 

As other insurance firms struggle, state-backed Citizens Property Insurance now writes over 1 million policies, nearly double what it wrote a few years ago. Insurance rates have skyrocketed as housing values and risks rise. Florida is also a victim of its own laws around litigation. While the state has about 9% of national property insurance claims, it sees over two-thirds of all insurance lawsuits. 

One oft-used strategy is for contractors to offer residents free roof repair – by making a claim to their insurer. When the insurance company balks at the high price or necessity, the contractor’s lawyer sues. The insurer usually settles – at a loss.

Of course, insurers could seek to raise premiums, but the state’s insurance commission has been trying to go in the other direction. Raising rates is a tough sell in a state where the middle class is being squeezed by rising housing costs. Floridians already pay triple the national average for property premiums.

“There is very little political will to do the things that need to be done,” says Mr. Lehmann. “I’m sure we will start hearing calls that we need a federal catastrophe fund” to shore up insurers, “but the major problem with that is that it benefits no other state.”

Over 20% of Floridians are over age 65, and thus often on fixed incomes like Social Security. As costs rise, letting insurance lapse is an inevitable outcome for many.

“Florida is growing so fast, and what happens is [that as] the value of property goes up, ... insurance costs go up,” says Dr. MacManus. “When people can’t afford insurance, they give it up, so you have all these uninsured parcels. Then when something happens, the person who owns the property has to get help from state and local and [federal] authorities. It’s an abundance of riches in some ways and a real pressure point on the poor.” 

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Alan "Jake" Jacobson informs a relative in Kentucky that his octogenarian mother sustained some slight injuries while being evacuated from her home near the St. Johns River in Astor, Florida, Oct. 4, 2022. Mr. Jacobson saw flooding in both of his riverside homes – one where he lives and one where his mom lives – after Hurricane Ian dropped over a dozen inches of rain on parts of central Florida.

To be sure, Florida, which takes the most hurricane hits of any U.S. state, has worked to keep claims down. It has some of the strongest wind-resistance codes in the United States. It has worked to make communities more flood-resistant. It has revamped insurance regulations, though it’s unclear whether the Legislature has gone far enough to discourage frivolous litigation. The state has a strong economy. It is the fourth-largest in the U.S., at $1.2 trillion in annual output. Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing are the state’s largest economic sectors.

Those efforts and assets are now being tested by the sheer magnitude of Hurricane Ian, and promises of storms that are larger, wetter, and more powerful as a result of rising air and sea temperatures.

“It’s hard to gauge the true flood risk ... so that exposure coupled with intensive development is a real recipe for disaster,” says Gavin Smith, a disaster resilience expert at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “The question is, to what extent is the state or even insurance companies thinking about incentivizing more risk-reduction measures? Are they going to take it to the next level? And who pays for it?”

The industry is testing new methods of adjustment, including using mapping technology to determine premiums and claim awards. Using individual structures instead of zoned areas to set premiums is one possible solution. 

Questions around who shores up the broken insurance market may also be answered politically, says Dr. MacManus. Democrats, she says, are already linking property insurance issues and climate change to activate two key pools of voters: the younger and the older.

The heart of the issue, she adds, isn’t necessarily political, but the unique bonds many Americans have to Florida, even if they don’t live there.  

“Often, properties have been passed on, some little place that’s not a palace but it’s a Florida retreat, loved by family and enjoyed by family,” says Dr. MacManus. “Now the family is going to have to make some decisions.” 

Mr. Jacobson here in Astor is at that point. Lacking flood insurance, he expects to receive some FEMA funds to help get his home livable again. It was the second time in five years he was hit by a flood that experts called once-in-a-century events.

That fact weighs on him as he fills out paperwork and ponders the new burdens on his checkbook.

“The risk is growing,” he says. “You start to realize you are taking your chances.”

Editor's note: The second photo caption in this story has been corrected. The river in Astor, Florida, flows northward.

Julio Cortez/AP

Shipping containers are stacked together at the Port of Baltimore, Aug. 12, 2022. While the bottlenecks at West Coast ports have dramatically improved, some of that has been at the expense of growing congestion at East Coast and Gulf ports.

Anticipating the end of supply-chain problems has proved akin to waiting for Godot: It never seems to come.

But many of the factors that kept goods in such short supply throughout the pandemic are improving – and those are good tidings for the economy and consumers, especially as the holiday shopping season approaches.

In August, the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index – a measure of supply constraints from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – fell for the fourth month in a row from historic highs. Prices of plastics, used in everything from packaging to machinery parts, have begun to ease. The bottlenecks at West Coast ports have all but disappeared. And shipping prices have plunged from $11,000 per container a year ago to about $4,300 today, though that’s still more than double pre-pandemic rates.

The global flow of goods is almost back to normal, Scott Sureddin, North America CEO with international shipper DHL, stated in August.

This is good news for consumers on two fronts: More goods will be available on store shelves and Christmas sales are likely to be more robust this year. 

What remains to be seen is whether the supply-chain picture is resolving quickly and comprehensively enough that the nation can avoid recession. The Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates in its push to tame inflation, making a recession-free slowdown or “soft landing” less likely. But some economists remain optimistic because improving supply chains could bring down inflation more quickly than many imagine, they say.

“I’m hopeful with normalization of supply-chain conditions that the Fed can engineer a decline in inflation without significant job losses,” says Rob Johnson, an economist at Notre Dame University. “That’s the golden outcome.”

Nam Y. Huh/AP

A help-wanted sign is displayed at a restaurant in Highland Park, Illinois, July 14, 2022. While many pandemic-induced supply-chain problems have begun to improve, the labor shortage is still a factor, hindering efforts at some companies to boost production.

When the pandemic hit, consumers dramatically shifted their spending away from services, such as travel and eating out, and toward goods, such as lumber and computers, as they outfitted home offices and hunkered down. Normally, supply chains handle increases in demand by producing more goods. But the pandemic also constrained production on many fronts, as factories closed or slowed their output to accommodate social distancing and other pandemic restrictions.

As prices began to surge a year ago, the Fed initially took no action, arguing that such supply-driven increases were transitory. But supply-chain woes kept building – fueled by pandemic shutdowns of entire metro areas in China, as well as the war in Ukraine and the surge in energy prices. Companies were able to charge customers unusually high prices, but many couldn’t increase supply.

Economists like Mr. Johnson believe this dynamic is behind the sharp rise in inflation – and that the resolution of supply-chain issues in coming months will solve the problem.

Others, however, say the speed of this normalization may come too slowly to bring inflation rates down dramatically.

“What we’ve seen is a rather orderly decline [in supply woes] rather than a rapid decline,” says Alfredo Romero, an economist of North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro. The shipping time from China to the U.S. has fallen from a peak of about 80 days at the beginning of the year to about 60 days by the beginning of September, he points out, but that’s still about 20 days longer than pre-pandemic levels.

And it’s not clear that the remaining kinks will be worked out anytime soon.

Take automakers. For more than a year, they had to ratchet back production because of a global computer chip shortage even though consumers were desperate to buy cars.

Now, the supply of chips is beginning to grow – but other problems have cropped up. Last month, Ford announced it would have to pay suppliers $1 billion more this quarter than anticipated because of shortages of many parts, including windshield wiper motors and even Ford’s famous blue oval nameplates.

“It does feel like Whac-A-Mole,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told Yahoo Money on Sept. 28. “I think we should count on this happening for some time.”

Then there’s the labor shortage. With workers in short supply, some companies haven’t been able to boost production. And people who are working are in a strong position to demand – and get – pay increases, which boosts costs for companies and thus potentially prices as well.

The way to douse those inflationary flames is to bring the job market back into balance, some economists say. That means either attracting more people back to the labor force or slowing the economy to the point that demand goes down and the need for more workers disappears.

The idea of “wage-price spirals” as a cause of inflation in general is a matter of debate among economists, but at the very least, Fed Chairman Jay Powell has called this year’s U.S. labor market “tight to an unhealthy level” in explaining the central bank’s inflation-fighting campaign.

The Fed can’t control the labor supply, but it can reduce demand by raising interest rates to the point that the economy slows.

“One of the main messages coming out of Fed communications is a sense of urgency around not being able to wait any longer for supply-chain issues to resolve themselves,” says Michael Gapen, U.S. economist with Bank of America Securities. Trying to avoid the mistakes of the inflationary 1970s, when the central bank cut interest rates prematurely, the Fed now has made cutting inflation back to 2% its “overarching focus,” as Mr. Powell put it in a speech in August. 

Such language – and the unprecedented speed with which the Fed has raised interest rates – has changed Mr. Gapen’s outlook. Six months ago, he was in the “soft landing” camp, believing the U.S. economy could slow and get back to 2% inflation without actually contracting. Now, he sees a “hard landing” and has penciled in a recession sometime in the first nine months of next year. 

Of course, inflation could still surprise on its way down, just as it surprised many economists with its surge on the way up. 

“The quicker it resolves itself, the less work the Fed has to do,” Mr. Gapen says.

Rui Vieira/AP

British Prime Minister Liz Truss, flanked by members of her Cabinet, listens to Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng speak at the Conservative Party conference this week. The government bowed to market pressure and dropped plans to cut income tax for top earners, part of its $45 billion package of unfunded cuts.

The words carried added power by virtue of the speaker, and his manner: a famously cerebral former British cabinet minister, in a quiet, almost matter-of-fact tone.

“Reality bites,” Michael Gove remarked on Sunday, the opening day of his Conservative Party’s annual conference.

He was reflecting on the collision between an ideologically driven rightward swerve in the party’s economic policy and the panicked response of the financial markets – sending interest rates soaring and the value of Britain’s currency plummeting.

Yet the fundamental clash British Prime Minister Liz Truss is facing – between a rigidly ideological agenda and real-world pressure to rethink things – confronts other politicians across Europe, and in America as well.

We live in an age of fiercely ideological politics, with a nationalistic brand of populism on the rise.

But a constellation of crises – the war in Ukraine, inflation, the threat of recession, and the challenge of climate change – is forcing politicians of all stripes to figure out how to respond when “reality bites.”

In the short term, at least, there are signs this is prodding some to soften the hard edges of their ideological doctrines, to prioritize problem-solving, and even to engage with their critics or political foes.

It is uncertain whether that trend will have a lasting effect, or whether the angry divisions in a number of world democracies have become too firmly embedded to allow such a turnaround.

In Britain, however, the bite of reality does seem to be having an effect.

Chris O'Meara/AP

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (left) speaks at a news conference about Hurricane Ian. An opponent 10 years ago of federal aid for New York state in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, he appealed to political foe President Joe Biden for such government assistance in the wake of Ian.

Barely 24 hours after Mr. Gove spoke, Prime Minister Truss’ plan to overhaul economic strategy by focusing on tax cuts began to wobble. The markets were dubious over how the cuts would be paid for, and with the benefits tilting toward the wealthiest, her growth plan was politically toxic.

On Monday, her finance minister announced she would not go ahead with an income tax cut for the richest.

Her retreat was the more remarkable because she had taken office only weeks earlier modeling herself on former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Britain’s first female prime minister was famous for refusing policy “U-turns” with the memorable remark at another Conservative Party conference: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

It’s still not clear whether Ms. Truss will make further U-turns. She is still arguing that the way to recharge Britain’s sluggish economy is to cut financial burdens on businesses and those who run them, while paying less attention to redistributing the nation’s wealth to the less well-off.

But the markets are likely to have a major say in what comes next.

Economic and geopolitical realities are already having a political effect in other European countries.

Within days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz abandoned his country’s entrenched political orthodoxy by pledging billions of dollars in new defense spending. He has also ruled out activating a new pipeline to import Russian gas and, with other European states, moved to break his country’s long energy reliance on Moscow.

In a particularly dramatic sign of “reality” trumping ideology, his Green Party coalition partners have backed temporarily reopening coal mines to help avert a winter energy squeeze and reduce Mr. Putin’s scope for using gas as a tool of political pressure.

In Italy, although it’s too early to say with any certainty, the newly elected right-wing populist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, seems aware that she’s facing reality pressures of her own.

Though deeply euroskeptic – and combatively nationalistic – she used her victory speech to emphasize her aim of “uniting this country.”

And perhaps in part because she knows Italy’s fragile economy needs its share of a huge post-pandemic European Union recovery package, she added that “the situation Italy and the EU are heading for is particularly complex and needs the contribution of all of us, requiring a serene atmosphere with reciprocal respect.”

This past week, there was even a sign that reality may be biting in highly partisan America.

It came in Florida, which has suffered terrible destruction to life and property from Hurricane Ian.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is one of the leading Donald Trump-style populists in the Republican Party. Bitterly opposed to President Joe Biden’s policies, he is seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2024.

As a congressman, he was a strident opponent of federal government support for New York state after Hurricane Sandy, a decade ago. He called such a bailout typical of a “put-it-on-the-credit-card mentality” that he was determined to fight.

Now, however, as the recovery from Ian was getting underway, he himself sought urgent federal financial help for his state.

“We live in a very politicized time,” he told a TV interviewer. “But you know, when people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when they’ve just lost everything, if you can’t put politics aside for that, then you’re just not going to be able to.”

Whether he, or other Western politicians, are able or willing to keep doing so remains to be seen.

That may ultimately depend on one of the major “reality pressures” they are encountering – the basic needs, and the voices, of the voters.

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and veteran defense correspondent whose bestsellers have chronicled U.S. wars, Thomas E. Ricks was drawn to study the civil rights movement through the war stories of his wife, Mary Kay Ricks. 

“We’d be driving along, listening to NPR talking about civil rights, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy.’” She was co-president of her Washington, D.C., high school’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“I was reading about it partly trying to understand my wife’s experience, things she said to me over 30 years of marriage,” Mr. Ricks says. 

The more he researched, “the more I thought, ‘This is a generation of heroes – this is the greatest generation.’”

He also found himself thinking, “Wait a second – this was a war. I know how to write about this.”

Out this week, Mr. Ricks’ new book, “Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,” explores the strategies and tactics of the leaders and foot soldiers in the fight for Black equality. 

“Everybody knows what the civil rights movement did,” he says. “But what struck my eye as a military reporter is understanding how it happened.” 

And that, he adds, was writerly inspiration. “With Iraq, I kind of had to force myself to get to the desk. Here, every morning, it was like a magnet pulling me in.” He spoke with the Monitor from his home in Austin, Texas. 

Courtesy of Alessandro Vulcano

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of "Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968."

So how did the civil rights movement make use of the kind of strategy we’d normally associate with the military? 

One of the things that fascinated me was the preparation that went into anything publicly visible. Demonstrations, boycotts, strikes would be preceded by days, weeks, months, and in a couple of cases, years of strategizing: What are we trying to do? How are we going to do it? How do we recruit the right people for this? How do we train those people? 

The role-playing they did, for example, to protest a segregated lunch counter: Some activists played sit-in demonstrators and others played the white mob attacking them – pouring coffee and ketchup on them, slugging them. 

One of the things it prepared activists for was how to deal with the fight-or-flight impulse – to sit there and not move, to deal with it in a way that surprised, even flummoxed, the attackers.

I love that one of the things they taught was if somebody spits on you, ask for their handkerchief. It just gave people pause.

You point out that this military-style organization extended to marches, too. How did that work?

Marches were organized by block, and that in military terms first of all meant cohesion: You knew these people on your left and right. You were surrounded by familiar faces, and that really helped in times of attack or danger. The second thing it does is to deter infiltrators or provocateurs.

But in order to have people march block by block you had to say, “Who will be there? Who’s going to get them out to march? What do they need?” 

So part of the civil rights movement was making sure there were babysitters. And people are going to be hungry when they come back, so let’s have people cooking food in the church. That also gave people who couldn’t march or wouldn’t march or were afraid to march or were too frail to march, that gave them roles. They could babysit; they could be cooking food; they could be monitors along the parade route, watching and taking notes in case you needed witnesses in court. 

"Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968," by Thomas E. Ricks; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 448 pp.

You talk about strategic and tactical innovation as well. What are some examples?

One of the things that struck me, that the U.S. military doesn’t do, is that every march had a message. Remember, a lot of these people are ministers, and for them the march was “the Word made flesh.” The march should somehow convey a concrete message sent.  

In Selma, [Alabama], one of the things the white power structure said was that Black people are too ignorant to march. In response, the Black people of Selma marched carrying their toothbrushes. The message is, “I’m willing to go to jail.”

There’s also tactical innovation. When they couldn’t get the adults in Birmingham, [Alabama], to march in spring of ’63 – because they knew they were living under a near-totalitarian structure, and they would lose their jobs and be beaten and jailed and so on – [minister and civil rights leader] James Bevel went out and recruited students to march. Not just high school students, but kids as young as 8. 

The purpose of this was first to get people on the streets. Second, he recruited so many students he was able to swamp the Birmingham jails. So [Eugene] “Bull” Connor, the police chief, says, “I can’t arrest any more of these kids – I have thousands of them in jail. I’m going to bring out the police dogs and fire hoses.”

What Bevel does is show America that the white power structure is so insistent on preserving this racist system they will do this to children – these fire hoses are so powerful they’d knock the bark off a tree. And it shocked the country. 

It was a risky move. [The Rev. Martin Luther] King wasn’t sure he was for it. King and Bevel actually have a confrontation about this. King says, “They’re children.” And Bevel says, “They’re believers. They go to church. I’ve taught them nonviolence. If they can be members of the church, they can march.”

You write given that the civil rights movement relied heavily on nonviolence, it might be jarring to think of it in military terms – but did Black leaders often invoke this analogy? 

This is actually one of the themes of the book – that nonviolent resistance is not passive resistance. It’s confrontational resistance. It’s aggressive. It’s saying, “Anytime we get attacked, we respond – but we respond in our own fashion.”

Nonviolent philosophy emphasizes the importance of reconciliation. What do you think the civil rights movement could teach the U.S. military about this?

One thing that I think the movement was better at than the U.S. military is reconciliation – what the military would call Phase 4, or the endgame.

After the Montgomery, [Alabama], bus boycott [having won their yearlong fight to desegregate], Black organizers assigned two ministers to ride each line during rush hour to monitor the behavior of their own people. [Dr. King instructed his victorious followers to resume riding the buses with courtesy, Mr. Rick writes, and advised anyone who couldn’t quite do that to “walk for another week or two.”] It’s teaching not only the other side, but your side how to live under the changed circumstances.

In Birmingham, a bitterly divided city – really the Gettysburg of the civil rights movement in 1953, 100 years after Gettysburg – it was all about the endgame from the beginning.

One of the things Black activists did, when they won an agreement to integrate segregated restaurants, would be to call ahead to the restaurant and say, “We’re thinking of coming in for a meal tomorrow. What time would be convenient for you?”

This did a couple of things: It was in simple human terms polite – why cause trouble for people? It was also a way of saying, “We’re coming in. This isn’t theoretical. This is really going to happen.”

What that also did was train the white population to live with integration. Think of the brilliance of that: The last phase of your operation is to train the opposition. 

It’s not going to be everybody embracing each other, but it’s seeking a form of human reconciliation: “We are trying to find a way we can live together in a different way – and we will work to make that happen.”

How did you feel about being a white historian writing the story of a movement of predominantly Black civil rights leaders – did anything about that give you pause?

That’s a good question, and one I mulled as I researched and wrote this book. The obvious answer is that the civil rights movement brought about one of the most important social revolutions in American history, and so should be of interest to all Americans.

But there’s more to it than that. 

I think that looking at the movement through this military lens underscores how much work and courage went into [it], and how much it achieved. I think many readers will be both inspired and moved by the stories about people like Diane Nash, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, and others.

When Raymond Antrobus released his first poetry collection, he titled it “The Perseverance.”  

Early on, family members thought Mr. Antrobus, born in London to a Jamaican father and a British mother, had a learning disability. At age 6, he learned he was deaf. His father showed little interest in trying to understand his son’s experience. As a young adult, Mr. Antrobus says he tried to pass himself off as “an able-bodied hearing person” by not wearing hearing aids. He lost several jobs due to misunderstandings.

His beliefs about what it means to be valued shifted when he started to develop an interest in writing poetry. “It changed how people started talking to me – and in a good way,” recalls the writer, who channels his experiences into poems that invite listeners into his world.

His latest project utilizes a fresh medium. The feted poet has recorded an audio collection, available via Bandcamp, titled “The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids.” But it’s not purely a spoken-word album. Grammy Award-winning producer Ian Brennan created audio effects and fractured musical accompaniments to emulate how people who are deaf encounter sound. That’s in keeping with the intent of Mr. Antrobus’ work. The poet aims to inspire understanding and inclusion. 

“He’s a treasure,” writes professor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, a representative for the Voices Reading Series at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, via email. This year, the program bestowed its Lucille Clifton Legacy Award on Mr. Antrobus. “Raymond’s writing exemplifies a devotion to the craft of poetry and a deep compassion for individuals who have been misunderstood, mistreated, and misrepresented due to their identity and perceived worth as humans,” says Mr. Coleman.

Mr. Antrobus’ love of poetry started at an early age. His mother read William Blake to him; his father recited the words of socially conscious reggae icon Linton Kwesi Johnson. But his first formal attempt at poetry, a high school homework assignment, was met with accusations of plagiarism by the teacher. 

“She was convinced I couldn’t have written it,” says Mr. Antrobus. “I kind of felt often misunderstood and undermined at school.”

A few years later, Mr. Antrobus wrote a breakthrough poem, “The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids.”

“I’d shared something that people didn’t really know or understand,” he says in a Zoom interview. “The kind of conversations I was having with the people around me became, to me, more interesting. More meaningful.”

Mr. Antrobus’ award-winning work covers social justice, racism, and his sometimes strained relationship with his father, who didn’t live long enough to see his son’s success. In 2021, Queen Elizabeth II honored Mr. Antrobus for his services to literature. Two years earlier, he won the prestigious Ted Hughes Award. One of the judges of that prize was Mr. Johnson, the reggae icon. 

“Affirmation is such a powerful thing when it comes from the right person,” says Mr. Antrobus. “This kind of blows apart so many stories now that I had about myself and my worth.” 

Reflecting on that award ceremony, his thoughts turn to his late father. “I would love to have seen his face, just me standing next to Linton and, you know, him shaking my hand,” he says with an affectionate laugh.

Mr. Antrobus curated 16 poems for the audio collection. While many of the narratives are autobiographical, some also chronicle the plight of others. “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris” was a response to a North Carolina state trooper shooting a deaf man in 2016.

Marilena Umuhoza Delli/Courtesy of Ian Brennan

Raymond Antrobus' album "The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids" includes 16 poems that are a mix of personal experience and reflections. “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris,” for example, is a response to a North Carolina state trooper shooting a deaf man in 2016.

“When stories only exist as newspaper headlines and they are commodified, they’re irrelevant the next day,” he says. “But if you write a poem or make some art from it ... it sustains if it’s a successful piece of work or poetry.”

Some of Mr. Antrobus’ earlier poetry roils with a fury on behalf of those who’ve been victimized. But his work has begun to evolve. He recalls critics of his poems that wondered whether it was possible for him to, as he puts it, stand in his deafness and Blackness but in a way that’s joyous. In a poetry workshop, Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze offered advice that he’s never forgotten: “She said something like, ‘Where’s the air in your poem?’ Meaning, ‘Where’s the hole that your reader can look through and receive some air,’ like to fit themselves into what you’re talking about?”

One of the poems on the audio album, “I Move Through London Like a Hotep,” attains that empathy by detailing the writer’s misreadings of other people’s lips. Inside a Waffle House in Mississippi, he can’t tell if the person opposite him is saying, “You look melancholic” or “Do you want a pancake?”

Mr. Antrobus’ 2021 book of poems, “All the Names Given,” is the culmination of what he calls “a bit of maturity and illumination and again, like really thinking hard about what is the impact? What is it I’m trying to put into the world?” 

This year, the writer’s work has featured in notable efforts to advocate on behalf of people who are deaf. When protesters marched to London’s Trafalgar Square in March to successfully campaign for the government to legally recognize British Sign Language as a language of England, Wales, and Scotland, deaf actor Rose Ayling-Ellis read Mr. Antrobus’ poem “Dear Hearing World.” She also appeared on television to employ sign language to read Mr. Antrobus’ 2020 children’s book, “Can Bears Ski?” The poet was surprised. He praises Ms. Ayling-Ellis’ soulfulness.

“Again, it was that kind of affirmation that something that I had written, something that I just felt in my spirit, in my soul, in a way – if we believe in such things – but it felt like such a justice,” says Mr. Antrobus. “It was soulful enough, just writing those works, just creating them.”

AP

President Vladimir Putin watches a Russian military exercise at Donguz shooting range near Orenburg, Russia, two years ago.

As Russia’s military forces lose ground in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has escalated his threats to use nuclear weapons. The United States, he said Friday, had “created a precedent” in 1945 by dropping atomic bombs on imperial Japan to force its surrender. Russia, warned Mr. Putin, will defend “our land” – which he now claims includes eastern Ukraine – “with all the forces and resources we have.”

The U.S. takes these threats seriously, promising “catastrophic consequences” for Russia as a deterrent. Yet the fact remains that ever since Russia began to lose the war soon after its invasion in February, it has not used a nuclear weapon or even prepared them for battlefield use.

One reason is that the world has rejected the 1945 “precedent” and created a strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. A global norm to protect innocent civilians from weapons of mass destruction has held pretty well. Even within Russia, “it is still a taboo ... to cross that threshold,” Dara Massicot, a former Pentagon analyst of the Russian military, told The Associated Press.

On Monday, the Kremlin even criticized a call by one of its loyalists, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who had advocated the use of “low-yield nuclear weapons” in Ukraine. A spokesperson said the Kremlin prefers a “balanced approach” to the issue of nuclear weapons and not one based on emotion. Russia will rely on its military doctrine of using nuclear weapons only if another weapon of mass destruction is used against it or it faces an existential threat from conventional weapons.

The rise of humanitarian law since World War II – known as the Geneva Conventions – may have helped restrain Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Its troops have killed thousands of noncombatants, yet the global outcry – and Ukraine’s studious investigation of such war crimes – could be coloring the Kremlin’s thinking on nuclear weapons.

The keeper of those humanitarian laws, the International Committee of the Red Cross, has been busy trying to protect civilians in Ukraine. Last week, ICRC Director-General Robert Mardini was in Kyiv calling for a halt to military operations around a Russian-held nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine. He said any release of radioactive material from the Zaporizhzhia plant would bring “consequences for millions of people.”

More countries openly oppose Russia’s taking of Ukrainian lands and its tactics. Statements by China and India indicate those two powers do not want any military escalation. And the European Union warns that Russia’s political leaders will be held accountable for violations of international humanitarian law.

It may not seem like it to Ukrainians, but part of their defenses against Russian forces is a global norm, or international laws safeguarding the innocent. The world’s embrace of its progress against nuclear weapons can be a mighty weapon.