The Dream of a Ridiculous Plan

And I saw the whole thing… The dark air, thick and oppressive, flickered with feverish sparks of rage. A sickening feeling settled within me, deep enough to scratch my soul, a wordless torment, yet I must try to give it voice. It was the agony of a soul torn asunder, forced to accept fate, a moment when statues crumble, and you stand paralysed—not in protest, but in mute, bitter astonishment. Above all, the question gnaws: why? Why this descent? The anger festers, aimed at those ensconced in their lofty offices, their eyes cold and remote, who, by design or neglect, have led us here, to the precipice.

My head on full tilt, meticulously scanning the sky. We had something worth saving, but decided to end it. Yes! We chose this fate through benign ignorance. We stood idly by and watched hatred fuel our society. Polarisation became palpable, to the point where conversation became impossible. The pursuit of a common goal was brushed aside by the will to be right rather than true. We had life in common; was that not enough? Do I praise their reset? Let me try. One must at least try. If they intended to divide, what a success. The plan is realised.

But plans, I now see, are never singular. They do not belong to those who design them. They seep outward, into ordinary hands, into obedient minds, into people who believe they are too small to matter. That is how they succeed, not through brilliance but through quiet compliance and acceptance of needs met for the many. Through people like me.

They offer us an olive branch for the polarised sides. This person will be different, a saviour for the right, for the left. It matters not. The aim was never to find the voice of reason and order but separation and disorder. The politicians and media willfully sailed our naive vessels off the edge and into the pit of anarchy.

Once, I clung to the notion that responsibility could be divided, thinned out among committees, lost in the machinery of bureaucracy. Procedures, protocols, deterrence—these became the language of evasion, wrapping the act in a shroud of abstraction. It is easy to deceive myself through comfort.

As the destructive flares illuminate the sky, an overpowering realisation that systems do not act ignites my cognition; people do, rips my heart.

And yet, even now, I struggle to locate the moment where it became mine. Was it when I first agreed? When I stopped questioning? Or only at the final second, as acceptance was the only answer?

Even though I played my part in the destruction, it did not feel like power. That is the strangest part. There was no triumph, no surge of control. Only a narrowing—a reduction of existence to a single irreversible motion. As though everything I had ever had had been distilled into one act, and found wanting.

Nobody stopped me, and nobody stopped you. We sealed our fate through compliance. Millions of years of evolution to end through our own hands. Brains crushed by machines. We gradually killed God in our society, and this was just the final chapter. Truly, there is nothing more ridiculous than this fate.