What Have We Become?
There’s a moment when something breaks so cleanly you can hear it. This is that sound.
This isn’t a call to argue. It’s a record of grief.
I keep losing people.
Not to death…though that’s happening too,
but to ideology.
To apathy.
To “just following orders.”
To choosing cruelty dressed up as leadership over basic human decency.
Friends I loved.
Friends I trusted.
People I never thought would look at inhumanity and shrug.
The country is split down the middle and it’s not left vs right anymore.
It’s not politics.
It’s empathy vs indifference.
It’s humanity vs obedience.
It’s people who still flinch at suffering and people who explain it away.
Someone I loved chose inhumane, corrupt leadership over a good ass friendship.
And that rupture?
That wasn’t small.
That was tectonic.
It’s the kind of break that starts a movement. Not because anyone wants one, but because silence becomes impossible.
Who else do I lose next?
Because right now it feels like everyone is showing their moral underbelly all at once, and it’s…
defecating.
Rotting.
Feral in the worst, most vile way.
I’m disgusted with this country.
I’m disgusted with our leadership.
I’m disgusted with how divided we’ve become; to the point where we don’t trust our neighbors anymore.
We live in constant fear and panic.
Low-grade, ever-present, humming in the background of our nervous systems.
And we’re being murdered. Morally and literally. While being told it’s normal.
Empathy is treated like a liability.
Compassion is mocked.
And legality has somehow become the new excuse for violence.
Legal murder.
Sanctioned cruelty.
Paperwork absolution.
They say World War III hasn’t begun yet, but it feels like it has; just quieter, bureaucratic, dressed in uniforms and press releases.
We all live on stolen land.
Every single one of us.
And now the violence isn’t coming from some foreign enemy…it’s being carried out by our own government.
Boats bombed.
Doors kicked in.
People taken in the night.
Children deported.
Veterans beaten.
Nurses… the same nurses who held soldiers’ hands as they lay dying… being killed.
This is not security.
This is not order.
This is not protection.
This is fear wearing a badge.
This is power without restraint.
And the most dangerous part?
We are learning to look away.
So I ask plainly, without metaphor, without comfort:
What have we become?
And if this is who we are now,
How does this end?
All I know is this:
I didn’t imagine freedom.
I didn’t hallucinate the idea that people deserve dignity.
I didn’t make up the belief that governments exist to protect life, not terrorize it.
And neither did my ancestors.
They fought for the same damn thing we’re fighting for now.
The right to exist without fear,
the right to speak without punishment,
the right to care without being criminalized.
So yeah. I’m scared.
I’m grieving.
I’m angry in a way that makes my hands shake.
But I’m still here.
Still writing.
Still witnessing.
Still refusing to pretend this is normal.
Because that’s how this continues. Not through apathy, but through people who feel too much and refuse to shut up.
And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe we keep going not because it’s easy or hopeful or guaranteed,
but because stopping would mean letting this be the end of the story.
And I’m not done yet.
