(that broke its own promises.)
When I was younger, politics worked as a narrative because it claimed to be accountable. It had villains, sureโbut also consequences. Corruption was a scandal, not a brand identity. Lawmaking carried the pretense of stewardship. The suits were bad, but the script still pretended to care about the audience.
That mattered. Not because it was perfect, but because it signaled an aspiration: we are trying to do better than brute force.
What changed is not that I became naรฏve and then โwoke up.โ It is that the system stopped bothering to even perform legitimacy. When corruption becomes celebratory, when cruelty is reframed as efficiency, when civil rights are treated as negotiable โpreferencesโ instead of load-bearing structures, the genre collapses. It stops being a soap opera and becomes a farce with real casualties.
Redundant rules deserve fire. Arbitrary constraints deserve abolition. But civil rights were never fashion accessories to be discarded when inconvenient. Burning those is not rebellionโit is arson against the people who needed the shelter most. Anyone who confuses the two was never doing liberation work to begin with.
I believe in advocacy, not power. . I believed the law was a toolโimperfect but usableโto give voice, to slow harm, to create friction where exploitation wanted speed. That belief was not foolish. It was coherent within the world as it claimed to be.
Staying inside a system that has normalised harm requires a particular kind of dissociation. A hardening. A willingness to translate suffering into precedent and keep going.
Some people survive that by numbing.
Some by becoming cynical technicians.
Some by deciding that winning inside a broken system is still winning.
I stepped sideways.
Not giving up on justice – refusing to confuse justice with procedure once the procedure stopped pretending to serve it.
I still believe that rules exist to protect the vulnerable, not to launder violence. I just no longer believe that the loudest institutions are where that work lives.
Am I right? Hard to say.
Sometimes the most political act is not participation or protestโit is withdrawing your soul from a machine that wants to use it as lubricant.
Being spared does not mean being passive.
It means living your life with clarity.
And clarity, right now, is rarerโand more dangerousโthan ever.
