History Will Ask What We Did Next

I have always been an optimist. Attuned. Someone who believed that progress, while slow, moved forward.

Lately, I feel something else entirely.

What we are witnessing right now is not new, but it is newly unmasked. Power no longer bothers to hide. Violence, exploitation, and domination are no longer whispered or obscured. They are in full view, without shame, without consequence, and often without even the courtesy of a faux explanation.

History tells us how we arrived here not through a single collapse, but through erosion, pebble by pebble. The first pebble was allowed to pass. Then the second. Then the third. In each moment, something sacred was dismissed as less worthy.

Women measured against men.

One race above another.

One religion elevated over another.

Anything different treated as lesser.

Anything not the same deemed expendable.

Over time, those pebbles became boulders.

Those boulders became mountains.

Those mountains became entire landscapes we now stand inside of, wondering how the ground disappeared beneath our feet.

Part of that erosion came from the gradual separation of what is fundamentally human. The steady fracturing of empathy, shared responsibility, and recognition of inherent worth. When some lives become abstract. When suffering is categorized, explained away, justified, or ignored. Humanity itself becomes conditional.

And yet nothing in this world is the same. Not a seed. Not a plant. Not a grain of sand. Difference is not deviation. It is the design. To deny that truth is to deny life itself.

The most devastating part is not that suffering exists. It always has. It is that so much of it is contrived. Children harmed. Families destroyed. Lives altered forever for no reason. Power, it seems, is the rationale.

Witnessing that kind of suffering changes you. Even if you recover from the moment, the pain remains. Pain reshapes you, and it should. It alters how you see everything that comes after. And perhaps that is the point of suffering. That something should change. That something better should come from it.

Those of us living through this moment, surviving it, feeling it, and carrying it forward will be the veterans of this time, as our ancestors were the veterans of theirs. Because this is a kind of war. Not one fought only with weapons, but with language, power, fear, exhaustion, and the slow, deep normalization of cruelty.

And like all wars, it leaves marks.

Some visible.

Some permanent.

None optional.

There is no logic or moral rationale to what we are seeing or hearing in response to overt cruelty. There is only repetition. The same lines. The same phrases. The same deflections, delivered again and again. Not to explain. Not to resolve. But to condition.

Repetition is the strategy.

Repeat it until doubt replaces clarity.

Repeat it until exhaustion replaces outrage.

Repeat it until people begin to internalize the script.

Not because it is true, but because resisting it requires energy they, we, no longer have.

What I feel right now is not hysteria or panic. It is grief.

Grief for the loss of shared moral ground.

Grief for the real time realization that restraint was never guaranteed and may never come.

Grief for the clarity that arrives when illusion dissolves.

This is not a declaration of hopelessness, though I am surprised to find it creeping in at times. It is an acknowledgment of reality. And that acknowledgment matters. Because avoidance, ignorance, and silence have, and will always be, the most expensive choices.

I do not claim answers.

I claim awareness.

And I refuse to look away.

History will not ask what we believed.

It will ask what we were willing to see.

And what we did next.

SNM