And Still, We Refuse to Forget

We trace the patterns. That’s what we do. Not because we want to be prophets, or martyrs, or right. But because we’re scared. Because we’ve seen this before. Because somewhere beneath the noise and the slogans and the calls for blood, we remember what it means to be human.

This is the tenth post in a series I wish I never had to write. I thought maybe one piece would be enough. One scream. One warning. One grief made public. But the world kept moving. The machine kept turning. The violence kept happening. And so I kept writing, not because it changed anything, but because I needed to bear witness. To name what I saw. To draw the thread.

If you want to understand the full weight of what follows, click each linked title as you read—each one is a chapter in the same story, and the story only makes sense when you’ve seen it all.

In What Comes After the Gunfire, I started with shock. With grief. With the moral weight of refusing to celebrate a death, even when that death ended a legacy of harm. I tried to hold space for contradiction: the relief that comes when a dangerous voice falls silent, and the sorrow of knowing that silence came not through justice, but through violence. That post was my reckoning with retaliation. My refusal to mirror what I hate.

Then the world bent.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen was my attempt to name what happens when truth itself is rewritten. When silence becomes complicity, and orthodoxy becomes unconsciousness. It was about the ritual of punishment, the manufacturing of enemies, and how reality is shaped by those who control the narrative. I was scared, and I still am, of how quickly the world will forget what it once knew.

The Machine Keeps Turning was a zoom out. A re-centering. A reminder that grief is political, that power shapes who we mourn and how loudly. That when someone famous dies, we are commanded to feel a certain way—but when a Black child, or a trans woman, or a disabled person is killed, it barely registers. It was a meditation on silence, on whose deaths matter, and on what gets buried with them.

In Poisoning Their Minds, I traced how narrative is weaponized. How incoherent violence becomes a justification for more power, more surveillance, more fear. The shooter didn’t matter. His ideology didn’t matter. What mattered was how his actions were used. The point wasn’t truth—it was usefulness. That line echoes in everything that came after.

The Generals Gather in Silence showed how power tests its own. How the military—ostensibly separate from politics—can be summoned not to defend, but to kneel. It was about spectacle, about obedience, about fear dressed up as ethos. And how, even as we watched generals file into a room, the real war was happening elsewhere—quiet, daily, systemic.

The Thoughtcrime Register came next, because words were already becoming weapons. Because the list was already being written. It was about how dissent becomes dangerous, how protests become treason, how narratives are retrofitted to justify erasure. The enemy shifts from a person to a phrase, from a group to an idea, until even grief is criminalized.

Then came Now Ministry Speaks. The quiet part said out loud. Lethality as identity. Diversity as decay. Peace as weakness. It was about the final shedding of pretense—when war is no longer a last resort, but a virtue. When purification becomes policy. When doctrine becomes destiny. And when difference is redefined as defect.

And then We Are the Panopticon broke the fourth wall. Turned the mirror inward. That one hurt to write. Because it was about us. About how we became the machine. How surveillance became self-policing. How cruelty got dressed up as justice. How we started devouring each other in the name of purity. It was about myth-making, about performance, about how even the righteous can be manipulated by the algorithm of fear.

Which led to We Calculate the Death We Accept. The COVID post. But not just COVID. A reckoning with eugenics in real time. How we decided—quietly, passively, efficiently—how many deaths a week were tolerable. It was about the casualness of genocide when it wears a lab coat. About how air became politics. About how even care itself was reframed as fragility. It was about abandonment. About exhaustion mistaken for freedom. About the breath we stopped noticing.

And now I’m here.

Ten posts deep. Each one linked. Each one a response to the last. A sequence. A cycle. A system.

Gunfire. Lies. Machinery. Propaganda. Obedience. Surveillance. Doctrine. Performance. Abandonment.

Each step followed logically from the one before it. Because history often rhymes.

From the beginning, I knew this would be a series. Not because I wanted it to be—but because once you start tracing the arc, you can’t look away.

So, maybe now, with this tenth entry, you’ll understand what I’ve been trying to say:

"What comes after the gunfire? The clock strikes thirteen. The machine keeps turning, poisoning their minds. The generals gather in silence, the "Thoughtcrime Register"; Now Ministry speaks. We are the Panopticon, we calculate the death we accept — and still, we refuse to forget."

I don’t know what comes next. I wish I did. I wish I could end this series with clarity, with a promise, with a clean closing paragraph that says: and here is how we fight back.

But I don’t have that.

All I have is this: we have to keep remembering. We have to keep naming it. We have to resist the urge to look away.

We must mourn rightly. We must protect each other. We must reject the comfort of forgetting.

Because the clock still strikes thirteen. Because the machine is still hungry. Because the story is still being written, and silence is not neutrality.

Maybe I won’t write another one. Maybe I will. But no matter what happens next, I know this:

We were here. We noticed. We spoke.

And I still believe—naively, foolishly, stubbornly—that compassion is stronger than cruelty. That care is resistance. That love, even now, is not a weakness, but a weapon. (Click to read what I mean)

And I hope. Despite everything. Despite the gears. Despite the noise. Despite the boot.

I hope.

And when the patterns finally became too clear to bear, I realized tracing them wasn’t enough.

Naming cruelty only mattered if I could also remember what it meant to be kind.

That’s where the next story begins — not with warning, but with rebuilding.

Not with the machine, but with the human hands still trying to fix what it broke.

This starts with the next blog, "Those We Call Monsters".

Click here to continue the journey in the next series — The Practice of Being Human — a record of how compassion learns to survive the ruins.

This is the world they built. This is the silence they demanded. But we are still here. And we remember how to speak.

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements—an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world—even those who would wish me harm.