My fellow Americans,
By now, you’ve been told that this is your fault. That you didn’t vote hard enough. That you didn’t knock on enough doors. That you should’ve compromised a little more, or fought a little harder, or trusted a little longer in the institutions that promised they would keep you safe.
But here’s the truth: everyone who was supposed to protect you failed miserably.
They told you the system would hold. That the checks and balances would work. That the “adults in the room” would step in before things got too bad. That the rule of law would mean something. That if you just did everything the “right” way, if you waited, if you were patient, if you voted, if you followed the process, then everything would be okay.
It was all a lie.
The people in power don’t care about you. They don’t care about your suffering. They don’t care about your rights, your future, your family, or whether you live or die, except in the abstract, as numbers on a spreadsheet or pawns on a chessboard. Because while they’ve had you fighting over bathrooms and pronouns, over flags and slogans, over which powerless group deserves to be blamed for your problems, they’ve been robbing you blind.
It’s not the immigrants taking your jobs, it’s the corporations shipping them overseas while raking in record profits.
It’s not the queer community ruining society, it’s the billionaires hoarding wealth while they let the world burn.
It’s not your neighbor who votes differently who’s the enemy, it’s the people at the top, laughing while they pit you against each other so you never turn your anger where it belongs.
This system was never designed to protect you. It was designed to control you. To keep you desperate enough to accept scraps while a handful of men own everything. To make you feel alone, powerless, divided, and afraid.
But here’s the thing: we are not powerless.
The institutions have failed, but that doesn’t mean we have to. We don’t need them anymore.
We live in an interconnected world. We can communicate across the globe in an instant. We can build, create, share, and organize without asking for permission. The days of relying on hierarchies enforced by violence can end, if we let them.
America was built on a dream of equality. A dream it has never lived up to. And maybe it’s time to wake up from that dream. Not to fall into despair, but to shake off the nightmare we’ve been living in and choose something better.
Stop looking up, waiting for someone to save you. Look around.
Help your neighbor. Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Protect the vulnerable. Build something real.
The emperors have no clothes, and they never did. They survive only because we agree to pretend they do.
So stop pretending.
They need us. We do not need them.
In solidarity,
R.L. Lawrence