By Maurice the Goat

At three in the morning—when insomnia has already filed its union grievance and the moon is filing its nails—a boy named Edward Coristine, barely old enough to rent a car without bureaucratic suspicion, found himself living out a scene from a myth that hadn’t yet been written. He was walking a young woman named Emily Bryant back to her car after a party in Washington, D.C., that labyrinth of marble and moral molasses, when a mob of ten materialized like a bad rash of adolescent hormones and cheap vodka.

Edward shoved Emily into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and stood guard like a gargoyle that had slipped its perch to do the work of angels. The mob peeled at the car like raccoons with crowbars, and Edward—shirtless, human, absurd—kept swatting them away. They finally turned their fury on him. Emily lived. Edward bled.

The next morning, America discovered the boy not through whispered folklore but via a viral photo: battered, bloodied, nose bent into a new angle of philosophy. Donald Trump, true to his carnival barker soul, blasted the image across Truth Social and declared the nation’s capital had gone feral. Chaos was currency, and Trump spent lavishly.

But me? I recognized Edward immediately. Because you probably know him by another name. A name earned not through duels or sonnets or daring rescues, bestowed by friends who, like medieval jesters, understood the comic gravity of testicles. They called him “Big Balls.” And the nickname stuck, like gum under the pew at a Baptist revival.

Washington: Schrödinger’s Crime Scene

Depending on which political sorcerer you listen to, D.C. is either the safest it’s ever been or a real-time audition for Mad Max 2: K Street Drift. The paradox is baked into our national loaf. News networks dance with statistics like drunken prom dates: one moment crime is falling, the next it’s sprouting like mushrooms on cow dung.

In such a schizoid theater, the tale of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine ballooned into something beyond flesh. He was no longer a bleeding kid on the sidewalk; he was a prism refracting every political agenda, every frothy tweet, every campfire of culture war tinder.

The Hero Who Didn’t Want To Be One

I tracked Edward down, and unlike the demigod painted online, what I found was painfully, beautifully human.

“It wasn’t a conscious heroic act,” he said, shrugging as if brushing off lint. “I just… did a bunch of stuff.”

Imagine that. While the rest of us would be Googling “nearest exit strategy,” this kid didn’t think—he acted. Which is another way of saying he thought deeper than thought. He made a choice without making a choice, and in doing so, he wrote himself into the script of heroism.

And here’s the kicker: he hates the spotlight. He treats attention the way most of us treat gas station sushi—with suspicion, mild horror, and a refusal to ingest.

Big Balls Meets the Media Circus

But the internet, being the cracked funhouse mirror it is, didn’t care. On Threads, conspiracy theorists married his bloodied photo to lizard people lore. On Bluesky, middle-aged men challenged him to cage matches from the safety of their ergonomic chairs. On X, half the crowd built him into a folk saint while the other half insisted he staged the attack with crisis actors from central casting.

And then came the pièce de résistance: The Daily Beast, never one to let reality hinder its imagination, ran a story suggesting Edward might receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, placing him shoulder to shoulder with Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa. This was based on precisely one vague, offhand “maybe” from a press secretary, spun into a full opera of speculation. Journalism, meet fan fiction.

What’s a Medal Worth Anyway?

Let’s be honest. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, once minted for titans of peace and pioneers of courage, has become a cultural gumball machine. Pop in a quarter of political favor, out comes Oprah, Ellen, or Rush Limbaugh. One president gives it to astronauts, the next to talk-show hosts, the next to soccer players best known for their Twitter spats.

By the time Biden pinned it on George Soros, the medal had morphed into a costume jewelry trinket—still shiny, but you wouldn’t pawn it for gas money.

So, the question is not “Will Big Balls get the medal?” The question is “Why the hell not?” If medals are now awarded for vibes, branding, or strategic donations, why shouldn’t we reward the simple, unglamorous act of shielding another human being from harm?

DOGE Days

Edward wasn’t just some random kid at a party. He worked with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a bureaucratic fever dream where young technocrats tried to make Washington functional. They sliced waste, hunted fraud, and applied AI scalpels to the tumor of regulations. Their mission was noble, which naturally made them enemies. In D.C., efficiency is treated the way vampires treat garlic.

Edward joined because he believed in fixing the machinery, not worshiping the rust. Which is either hopelessly naïve or the first crack of dawn in a century of midnight.

Why He Matters

What hit me hardest wasn’t the blood or the politics or the circus—it was Edward’s refusal to be warped. “Public opinion is just a wave,” he told me. “You stand, or you don’t.”

In an age when outrage is our national pastime, that sounded less like a sound bite and more like scripture.

The boy is not wise because he has all the answers. He’s wise because he admits he doesn’t. He’s not a hero because he sought the role. He’s a hero because when the play demanded one, he forgot his lines and ad-libbed salvation.

The Hard, Right Thing

So should Edward get the medal? Honestly, he probably doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t crave the applause or the ribbon. But maybe we need him to take it. Maybe America, drowning in performative activism and celebrity sainthood, needs a kid who simply acted.

Because medals aren’t about the past; they’re about the future. They’re about telling us what we should admire, what behavior we want to replicate.

And right now, what America needs more than another athlete, actor, or billionaire donor is young men and women willing to do the hard, right thing—even when it hurts, even when it’s unpopular, even when ten shadows in the night are swinging fists and the only armor you’ve got is your own damn skin.

Today, America needs balls. And if Big Balls isn’t the right man for that medal, then maybe we’ve forgotten what freedom even looks like.