It's Time To Wake Up From The Dream
Before we can talk about healing this country, we have to admit how much of it was built on forgetting.
“They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin said that—and as raw as it is, he wasn’t wrong. It’s not just a clever turn of phrase—it’s a warning. We were sold an idea: that hard work is the answer to everything. That if you just push hard enough, sacrifice long enough, stay quiet long enough, you'll make it. But how many people do we know who’ve worked themselves into the ground with nothing to show for it?
Think about the farmer who works eighteen-hour days. Who knows the weather, the soil, the cycle of the earth. Who plants seeds with faith and harvests with gratitude—but still, their success is too often determined by forces beyond their control. By government policy. By international trade. By subsidy or the lack of it. They're asked to meet impossible expectations—production quotas, environmental standards, pricing margins set by people who’ve never touched the dirt. And when they can’t meet those expectations, the funding disappears. The land is sold. Generations of labor undone in a season, while corporations buy up the acreage for pennies on the dollar.
Hard work has become the secular gospel of America. Money has become synonymous with virtue, and struggle with failure. If you’re poor, it must be your fault. If you’re rich, you must be doing something right. But that equation was written by the beneficiaries of a rigged system, and it leaves out the millions who labor with no safety net, no equity, and no recognition.
And while we’re calling out myths, we need to confront the role of media and manufactured outrage. The cycle of distraction is not organic—it’s intentional. If it bleeds, it leads. If it divides, it spreads. We are constantly baited into culture war skirmishes while the architects of inequality build higher walls. Algorithms don’t care about truth—they care about engagement. Outrage pays.
And what about the essential workers? The ones who stocked shelves, delivered packages, tended to the sick, picked the crops, cleaned the spaces the rest of us avoided—hailed as heroes during crisis, forgotten as soon as the cameras moved on. Their exploitation was repackaged as patriotism. Their needs—livable wages, healthcare, dignity—never made the headline.
We owe it to this story to lay out the truth—to honor it. That means telling the full story of redlining: how banks and the federal government drew literal red lines around Black and brown neighborhoods, refusing loans, denying opportunity, and starving entire communities of wealth. It wasn’t about risk. It was about race. No matter your income, no matter your discipline, if your address was inside the line, the answer was no.
And we owe it to this story to speak plainly about the true origins of policing. About how modern law enforcement in America evolved from slave patrols—organized groups of white men empowered to chase down, capture, and punish enslaved Black people. Policing was not born to protect all people equally. It was born to protect property, and to control bodies. That legacy didn’t disappear. It adapted. It lives on in practices that still disproportionately target, harm, and criminalize communities of color.
We also have to dispel the myth that European immigrants were noble pioneers, while immigrants today are somehow a plague. That’s not history—it’s propaganda. The immigrants of the past didn’t arrive with permission slips or perfect English. They came fleeing poverty, war, and persecution. They were often met with suspicion, slurs, and exclusion—until their identities were absorbed into whiteness. Now their descendants are told to see new immigrants as a threat to the nation their ancestors also arrived in search of. That contradiction is not accidental. It’s how systems maintain control—by feeding yesterday’s outsider the lie that they now belong by keeping someone else out.
And while we’re remembering, we have to name the displacement too: Twenty percent of all Black housing in this country was demolished between 1950 and 1969—bulldozed in the name of “progress.” Highways, shopping centers, office buildings—all laid atop the broken foundations of Black neighborhoods that were thriving, connected, and full of promise. Communities were fractured, generational wealth obliterated, and families scattered with no reparations, no warning, no care.
It wasn’t just buildings that were lost—it was possibility.
You can’t talk about economic gaps today without talking about the wealth that was taken. Not failed to be earned—taken.
And we must remember how much of this land was Mexico before borders were redrawn through conquest. California. Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. Entire regions swallowed by force and renamed, while the people who lived there became strangers in a land that once belonged to them. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a map. And it tells a story that too many have been taught to ignore.
The history of this country has been whitewashed—erased and rewritten to suit a narrative of self-made greatness. But how can some Americans claim their ancestors built this country, while ignoring the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the stolen labor of the enslaved, and the erasure of cultures that predated the flag?
And what about the earth itself? Environmental justice is not separate from civil rights—it is civil rights. The same communities redlined out of opportunity were boxed in near smokestacks and poisoned waterways. When disaster hits—be it hurricane, wildfire, or industrial spill—it hits the most vulnerable first and hardest. Climate crisis is not just environmental. It is racial. It is economic. And it is moral.
Patriotism without truth is performance. And history without memory is propaganda.
And we need to talk, too, about how faith has been manipulated. Weaponized.
What was meant to free has been twisted to control. A faith that once taught radical love is now being used to justify cruelty, exclusion, and hierarchy. Young right-wing men are joining churches in numbers we haven’t seen in over a decade—not because they’ve found spiritual peace, but because they’re being told religion can restore the power they feel slipping away. The narrative is no longer about saving souls. It’s about preserving dominance. White culture recast as the victim. And faith recast as the shield to defend it.
And far too many women—conditioned by culture, shame, and silence—have been led to vote against their own interests. Told to believe submission is sacred. That autonomy is rebellion. That justice is disorder. This isn’t faith. This is indoctrination.
Spiritual language is being used to justify cruelty. Love has been edited out of the gospel. And power has taken the place of purpose.
Redlining. Housing discrimination. The true origins of policing. The lie of immigration exceptionalism. The erasure of Indigenous and Mexican histories. The disruption of Black wealth and opportunity. The manipulation of faith. The war on bodily autonomy. The erasure of environmental harm. Labor exploitation. Manufactured outrage. How wealth was built. Who it was built on. And who it was built without. These stories were left out not because they weren’t known, but because they were inconvenient.
Whitewashed history isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system.
And some in this country—those in power—want you to forget. They want you to forget yourselves just like they want you to forget the erasure that made this nation possible. Because forgetting keeps you manageable. It keeps you from asking the questions that matter.
The kind of healing we need won’t come from slogans. It won’t come from sanitized unity or selective memory.
It will come from remembering.
And remembering is a form of resistance.
So I’ll ask you plainly: What were you never taught? What have you forgotten? And when you’re ready—what will you help the rest of us remember?
Because remembering doesn’t just uncover pain—it uncovers possibility. It tells us what was stolen, yes—but it also reminds us what is still possible to reclaim.
This isn’t about guilt. It’s about honesty. It’s about telling the truth even when it costs us the comfort of the story we’ve always told ourselves.
And it’s not too late. Not if you’re willing to sit in the discomfort. Not if you’re willing to listen—really listen—to the voices that were left out of the narrative.
The good news is, truth has a way of surviving. Even buried, even silenced, even erased—it remembers itself.
And if you let it, it will remember you, too.
You are not powerless. You are not lost. You are not too late.
They want you numb. They want you distracted. They want you blaming your neighbor instead of asking who built the fence.
But somewhere beneath the noise, you know better. Somewhere in your gut, you’ve always known: this isn’t just about politics. It’s about power. And who has it. And who’s been told they never will.
So this is a call back to reason. To clarity. To each other.
Because the truth is—we’ve been distracted. Distracted by noise and division, until we forgot how to see one another as people. Until we started seeing difference as danger. Until we looked through a lens shaped by fear instead of reality.
We need to be honest with ourselves. We need to stop mistaking identity politics for policy. Stop treating control over another person’s body as a valid platform. We need to reject the performance of righteousness and start practicing truth.
Because the soul of this nation is in decline—and not because we’ve faced hard truths, but because we’ve avoided them.
And it’s time to come back to one another—not as enemies, not as strangers, but as people.
You don’t have to have all the answers. But you do have to stop pretending not to see.
Because once you see clearly—you can’t go back. And once you remember—you begin to heal.
So let the tuning fork hum. Let the ache of truth vibrate through the silence you were taught to keep. Let it shake loose the dust of forgetting. Because that sound you feel rising in your chest? That’s memory returning. That’s clarity calling. And that’s your cue.
It’s time.
You’ve made it this far.
That means something in you is still awake.
Still reaching. Still listening. Still capable of being stirred.
So here’s the question that matters most now:
What will you do with what you now remember?
Will you share it? Will you sit with it? Will you let it shift the way you move through the world?
You don’t need permission to care more deeply.
You don’t need credentials to speak the truth.
You don’t need to know everything to begin.
You just need to start where you are—with what you’ve been given—and refuse to forget again.
Because the future is not yet written.
And the next chapter is waiting for someone brave enough to pick up the pen.
Let it be you.
We don’t need to build walls.
We need to build bridges.
Back to community.
Back to society.
Back to each other.
signal 11
Silent Sentinel
“The watchman has spoken. Let the sleeper awaken.”
Clarity is the beginning of resistance.
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