This is prose from the future, after the Trump era comes to the end:
First, they looked at those who dared to live as their true selves, those who wore the weight of their identity on their sleeves, defiant and proud. They came for transgender people, cutting through their dignity with cruel precision, and I stayed silent. It wasn’t my fight, I thought. My skin wasn’t in the game, my world untouched by their pain. I told myself their battles were not mine to shoulder.
Then they turned their gaze to love. Not the kind of love they understood but that breaks moulds, defies expectations, and blossoms in places they deem unnatural. They came for gay people, tearing apart unions, silencing joy, and I did not speak. I wasn’t gay. Their struggle wasn’t mine, and their heartbreak was foreign to me. I watched and turned away.
Soon, their shadows fell on those with different prayers, different names for the divine, and histories written in languages I couldn’t read. They came for Arabs and Muslims, painting them all with the same broad stroke of fear and suspicion. I told myself their faith and their blood were not my own. I didn’t raise my voice, didn’t lift a finger. It felt safer that way.
They moved next to the immigrants, the wanderers, the seekers of dreams in a land that promised them life, liberty, and a home. They came for those whose accents carried the weight of distant shores, whose hands built what others would claim as their own. I watched from the comfort of my place, telling myself their struggles were born of their choices, their stories too foreign for me to understand. I stayed quiet.
Then, anyone who didn’t fit the image of their “America” was caught in their net. The ones whose skin wasn’t the shade of the soil they called sacred, whose traditions didn’t echo the hymns of their forebears, whose very existence reminded them of a history they wished to rewrite. They came for anyone not of “American blood,” whatever that meant. The line they drew grew sharper, the space for us smaller. I let them redraw the boundaries, thinking I was safe within the circle, never realizing how quickly lines can shift and enclose us all.
After they had taken so many, they finally turned their eyes to me. I had nothing left to cling to, no one to call upon. My silence had built walls around me, brick by brick, until I stood alone. I see now that I was silent because I was safe. I was quiet because I was afraid. And from the beginning, my fear left me voiceless when I needed to shout the loudest.