I do not think this is about the left or the right anymore.
Not really.
There are the people being left behind, and there are the people noticing it happen. At least, that is how it feels from the bottom. From the perspective of the poor, the exhausted, the indebted, the working people who keep being told to wait their turn while the ladder is pulled higher above them.
The middle class is not powerful either. Many of them are closer to falling than they want to admit. But some of them still believe they will be brought along for the ride. They look at the people beneath them and convince themselves there is still a safe place reserved just above the wreckage.
I think they are mistaken.
That kind of hope is not wisdom. It is sedation.
The people consolidating power are not building a future for all of us. They are building a future for themselves. Maybe they will bring the upper class with them. Maybe a few loyal servants will be granted comfortable places near the throne. Maybe some of today’s rich will become tomorrow’s lords, useful for a time, until they too become too expensive, too inconvenient, or too human.
But the rest of us are not being invited.
We are being managed.
The powerful know what they are doing. The truly rich are rarely ignorant. Some are actively participating in the betrayal. Some are simply compliant. Some are complacent because the system still feeds them well enough to keep their conscience quiet. But ignorance, at that level, is hard to believe.
The old world is dying, and the people fighting hardest to replace it do not want democracy. They do not want freedom. They want ownership. They want obedience. They want a world where citizenship is replaced by dependency, where community is replaced by consumption, and where human beings are reduced to labor, data, debt, and appetite.
The rest of us are another story.
Most people are not evil. Most people are tired. They are ashamed, distracted, overworked, afraid, and pacified by comforts that were first thrust upon them and then taught to feel like choices. The poison did not arrive all at once. It crept in slowly. Convenience. Entertainment. Outrage. Debt. Shame. Isolation. The endless little vices that make a person easier to govern because they make a person harder to wake.
And I do not say this from above anyone.
I am not free of it.
I drink the poison too.
I see more than I want to see, and still I reach for the cup. I am awake, with my eyes pulled open, and still I find the taste tranquilizing. Still I feel the pull to look down, to keep scrolling, to stay comfortable, to become numb enough that I no longer have to feel responsible.
That may be the most frightening part.
Not that we are asleep.
That we can be awake and still choose sedation.
I fear the direction we are headed. I fear the people who are gathering power. I fear the cruelty they will normalize and the dreadful things they may one day ask us to accept, excuse, or participate in.
But I am writing this because I do not believe all of us are gone.
There is still something in people that has not been bought. There is still a part of us that knows the difference between peace and quiet, between freedom and comfort, between hope and anesthesia. There are still people who feel the wrongness under all the noise. People who are tired of being told that their suffering is personal failure. People who are beginning to understand that looking away will not save them.
This is not a call to hate your neighbor.
That is what the powerful want. They want the poor to blame the poor. They want the working class divided into teams. They want us arguing over scraps while they redesign the table. They want us cruel, suspicious, distracted, and alone.
So maybe the first act of resistance is simpler than we want it to be.
Look up.
Tell the truth.
Refuse to become numb.
Refuse to become cruel.
Refuse to mistake comfort for safety.
And when you see someone else beginning to wake, do not shame them for taking so long. Sit with them. Speak plainly. Remind them that they are not crazy, and that the ache they feel is not weakness. It may be the last honest part of them trying to survive.
I do not know what comes next.
But I know this: if we keep drinking, they will keep pouring.
And one day, when they ask us to do something unforgivable, we may find that we have swallowed so much poison that we no longer remember how to say no.