@JennyZee

To The People, For The People,

_{If you believe the violence is justified, this letter is written for you. I ask that you read it in full before deciding you already understand it.}

Is this the end, or maybe this is just history repeating itself.

It is difficult to sit with hope for the future when violence is justified in the streets of America, when harm is permitted, then rationalized; when cruelty is framed as order, and fear as patriotism.

They call them villains to quiet their conscience.
They kill them to prove their power.
Stand beside the one who pulled the trigger,
and the violence is no longer another’s.
It passes to you, by consent.
You are not exempt.

This is how it always begins. Language collapses first. People become threats. Children become statistics. Death becomes “necessary.” The public is trained, slowly, deliberately, to see compliance as virtue and empathy as weakness.

This is why some people rage at those who sit during the national anthem. Not because they care about honoring the dead. Not because they respect the sacrifices made in this country’s name. They rage because sitting interrupts their performance. Because it allows them to say: I see how great this country is, and you don’t.

This is not patriotism.
It is conformity.
It is blind allegiance to a government even when that government fails to deliver on its promise to protect the people.

They do not love this country. They make a mockery of her, demanding reverence for symbols while abandoning the ideals beneath them.

And they are afraid. What if I sit. What if I am seen. What if the veil of nationalism falls away and reveals what has been carried quietly beneath it, a cold willingness to excuse harm. What if I am denied the empathy I have refused to extend to others.

That fear has to go somewhere. So it is redirected outward. They are told immigrants will kill them. That danger comes from outside. That safety requires force. And so they support raids, mass detentions, and state violence under the comforting illusion that citizenship is a shield.

It is not.

Because enforcement increasingly bypasses due process and extends far beyond actual violent threats. Detention and confrontation decisions are too often driven by appearance, language, location, and proximity rather than concrete conduct. Innocent people. Citizens. Children. Entire families.

What is demanded of the protester is not demanded of the enforcer: peace. This is the imbalance. One side is required to remain calm while being restrained, struck, or suffocated. The other is permitted fear, permitted escalation, permitted force. And yet the protester is often fighting for something more dire

for breath, for safety, for the right to exist without threat.

The enforcer is tasked with control. The protester is pleading for survival. To treat these positions as equal is not neutrality. It is the misuse of power.

Those who justify this believe citizenship will protect them. But when enforcement relies on perception rather than proof, citizenship becomes thin protection. Skin darkens in summer. Accents sharpen under stress. A body drifts a shade closer to suspicion. A moment closer to being mistaken.

George Orwell warned us of this exact moment:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Authoritarianism does not arrive with fireworks. It arrives by normalizing brutality, by teaching people to defend violence as order and obedience as morality. And once fear replaces truth, cruelty becomes ordinary.

I find it difficult to sit here with hope when the justification of slaughter is this casual. When the tightness in my chest grows under the weight of knowing that doing nothing is itself a choice. Waiting for “tomorrow” is how atrocities persist. Complicity is not passive. It is active delay.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in the streets.
Liam Ramos, five years old, detained in a bunny hat.

What is sickening is that this happens and that it is explained.

ICE raids are planned in major cities, justified as protection and necessity. To what end? To “save” our cities? From whom? Five-year-olds. Families. People whose only crime is existing outside the boundaries of someone else’s comfort.

What is most baffling is that this cruelty is enacted and defended by a government meant to be for the people, by the people. We see the videos. The evidence. The bodies. And still it continues. Still it is justified.

Why?
For what end?
For whom does the bell really toll?

If we live in a country where the choice is “Comply or Die,” then we are no longer the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We become the Land of the Captured, the Tortured, the Killed, and the Home of the Cowards and the Dead.

Those who truly agree with this process rarely remain in conversations like this. To stay would require confronting what has been endorsed. It would require the willingness to be wrong. Humans resist that. They resist the loss of power it implies. So they choose narratives that preserve innocence rather than demand responsibility.

The red hats disappear now, folded away, tucked behind jackets. Their owners grow quiet, trusting time to soften what they refuse to confront. Trusting that no one asks for an extra coat. Because in that moment, the red hat would slip loose and fall, softly and without spectacle, landing in view. A reminder to the one who sanctioned the harm with a ballot cast. Evidence not of deception, but of consent. Of allegiance given to spectacle over substance, to authority mistaken for order. A dictator granted power without resistance, in the land of the free.

For those never disillusioned by the promises outlined by a convicted felon and sex offender, it is difficult to understand how he was believed to be “for the people.” And still, I try to find compassion. Othering those who made that choice would repeat the same moral failure. That is the catch-22. You want to speak plainly. You want to name the harm without qualification. But rage, when uncontained, is seized as permission to disengage.

So you listen. You stay. You meet them where they are, knowing exactly what is being defended: state-sanctioned violence against dissent.

It is the people who voted for this, who agree with it, who champion this style of governing, who will remain a stain on the American conscience.

There is no longer “I didn’t know.”
There is no longer “It doesn’t affect me.”

There is only: I was wrong. I see that now. How can I help?

Those who still champion this presidency do not fear dying in the street. They do not bear the cost. And they refuse the responsibility of standing up for those who do.

America was built on the idea that when a government oppresses its people, resistance is not treason, it is duty.

To be told now that the enemy is our neighbor is not just a lie. It is an insult.

To be American is not to think the same way as your neighbor.
It is not to vote the same way.
It is not even to agree on what freedom should look like.

You are not American the moment you decide that disagreement justifies death.

If you believe protest should be met with bullets,
that dissent should be punished with force,
that fear is a legitimate tool of governance,
you are not American.

A president who sanctions the murder of protesters is not American.
A government that persecutes its people for exercising their First Amendment rights is not American.
Men who kill protesters in the streets, without remorse, without restraint, believing themselves righteous, are not American.

This is not exaggeration.
This is definition.

America was never meant to be a place where obedience is rewarded with life and dissent is punished with death. “Liberty and Justice for All” does not come with exceptions. “We the People” does not mean only the compliant.

You can wear the flag.
You can quote the Constitution.
You can demand reverence while betraying its meaning.

This is not an argument against belief. You are free to believe whatever you choose, even beliefs that others find repugnant. Thought alone is not a crime.

But if you believe that disagreement justifies death, you hold that belief knowing it places you in opposition to the very principles this country was founded on. You may keep the belief. What you cannot keep is the illusion that it makes you more American than those harmed in its name. A belief that treats dissent as a capital offense stands against the words woven into the fabric of this nation.

You may believe what you want. No one is owed death for a thought. But the moment you treat violence as the rightful response to dissent, you forfeit the claim that your belief aligns with the Constitution that protects your right to hold it.

So understand the gravity of your choices. This is no longer about policy nuance or political disagreement. This is about whether we allow a government to decide whose lives are expendable, and whether we choose to participate, excuse it, or look away.

America does not collapse all at once. She is made to endure. Each act of sanctioned violence stretches the moment longer. Each justification delays the end while deepening the damage. Her survival is not mercy, it is resistance. It is the refusal of the people to let her die, even as she is wounded again and again in the name of protection.

And when she is finally brought low, when the accumulated weight of these choices has done what no foreign enemy could, there will be a moment of stillness. Not silence. Stillness. The kind that comes when the body has taken all it can, and time hesitates before deciding what comes next.

She will not be unrecognizable. She will still look like herself. The flag still draped across her shoulders. Breathing shallow beneath the pressure placed on her in the name of protection.

For Liberty and Justice for All is whispered, not because she is afraid to say it, but because it is all the strength she can muster after the brutality administered to her in its name.

And in that pause, another choice will present itself.

Will you step away?
or will you remain hovering, measuring how much more she can take?

Will you press again, not to end it, but to extend it, your hand practiced, your weight familiar, the harm shaped precisely to fit you? Not to save her, but to learn how far the pain can be taken without killing her.

Will you finally understand that she is still bleeding because you have not stepped away?
Will you finally see that what you call devotion is simply the discipline of restraint, holding back just enough to keep the suffering going?

Will you finally realize that the pain continues because you insist it must.

Ignorance is a choice.
Cowardice is a choice.
Complicity is a choice.

And you are not exempt.

Of the People,
Jenny Zee

P.S.
And still, if this is history repeating itself, then history has already shown us what endures. This country has been starved before. Pressed. Whittled down until survival itself felt conditional. And each time, it was not the force applying the weight that lasted, but the body beneath it. Hope does not come from believing the pressure will lift. It comes from knowing the body has learned how to breathe under it. So hope finds its sustenance in this fact: we have been here before, reduced to almost nothing, and we have not let ourselves down yet. The weight has not finished the job. And if history is honest, this time will not be the exception.