When the Patient Dies

Democracy is dead. Some will argue over when it happened. Was it when he took office the second time? Was it in the rigged silence before the election? Was it long before, when courts, corporations, and billionaires bent the system past repair? We can debate the time of death, but the body is before us now.

And what do we do when a patient dies? We can pretend. We can keep pressing cold organs, shocking the chest, calling it life when the pulse is long gone. We can paint rouge on the corpse and sit it upright in the chair of state. But it is still a corpse. And the stench of rot spreads.

The tools of the old order no longer work. We lodge complaints, we file lawsuits, we shout into the void. For a moment, the process appears alive: a case passes through the lower courts, a ruling offers hope, and then it reaches the Supreme Court. And there the hammer falls. Quashed. Erased. The system is not broken. It is captured.

Meanwhile, the people are exhausted. Some have tuned out entirely, worn down by years of headlines, choosing ignorance as anesthesia. Others cheer the collapse, waving banners of tyranny as if they were flags of freedom. And a smaller portion, awake, horrified, and still standing, resist. They protest, they march, they speak. And for this, they are punished: silenced on media platforms, their voices cut from the airwaves, their gatherings erased from the record. Most recently attacked en masse at peaceful protests, injured and arrested. Because solidarity is the one thing the state fears.

And yet solidarity is also the cure.

Because what the state fears most is not one protest, one lawsuit, one outcry. It fears us seeing each other. It fears us standing together. Fear shrinks when shared; courage multiplies when witnessed. A single worker can be fired; a thousand refusing together can halt an industry. A single marcher can be beaten; a hundred thousand in the streets cannot be unseen.

Solidarity breaks their spell. It says: you are not alone. It says: your pain is mine, your fight is ours. It denies them the victory of isolation. They want us working three jobs, collapsing in silence, too tired to care. Solidarity says: we will lift one another, and in lifting each other we will rise.

This is why they silence us. This is why they erase us from the airwaves. Because they know solidarity is not just resistance. It is the seed of the world to come.

We are not the first to face this. Our ancestors fought kings, empires, and embezzled governments. They lived under the same illusions we face now: that power is permanent, that rulers cannot be shaken. But they learned what we must remember, that government is meant to serve, not rule; to safeguard liberty, not gorge itself on the people. When it forgets that, it ceases to be government at all.

The Founders did not simply complain. They built committees of correspondence. They organized boycotts. They wrote. They declared. And when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, they were not speaking in metaphor. They knew the cost. And yet they birthed a new world.

Today we inherit both their courage and their burden.

And so we, too, must declare. Not as isolated voices, not as broken survivors, but as one people. Not in violence, but in vision. Not in despair, but in the fire of freedom.

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A New Declaration of Independence

When government serves, it is the steward of free people. But when government forgets its place, and seeks to rule instead of serve, it ceases to be the guardian of liberty and becomes its thief. When power is seized not by consent but by fear, not by justice but by greed, then it is not government at all, but tyranny wearing democracy’s mask.

We, the people, declare that we will not live as slaves.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

• That all people are equal in worth and dignity.
• That freedom is not granted by rulers, but born in every human soul.
• That every person has the right to life, to health, to liberty, to love whom they choose, and to live free from abject poverty while others feed on their labor.
• That the measure of government is service to the people, not enrichment at their expense.
• That government exists to secure justice, safeguard liberty, and serve the common good, and when it fails in this, it forfeits its legitimacy.

Today we stand in the long line of those who came before us, who cast off kings and empires, who dared to imagine a new world. Our ancestors pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We pledge no less.

We therefore declare our independence from authoritarian rule, from corruption, from lies, from the machinery of fear. We declare our right to live free, to speak truth, to stand together.

We will build anew, not in the image of the old, but in the vision of justice, equality, and solidarity.

We make this declaration not as isolated voices, but as one people. We will not be silenced. We will not turn away. We will not surrender the future to tyrants.

With our lives, our labor, and our love, we claim our freedom. And together, we will be free.

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A Final Word

The old patient is gone. What comes next is up to us.

This is not the work of one voice, or one article, or one march. It is the work of many hands, many hearts, many lives bound together in solidarity. They want us tired. They want us silent. They want us alone. We will not give them what they want.

Read these words aloud. Share them. Carry them into your conversations, your communities, your families. Let them be a spark.

We are not finished. We are not powerless. We are not alone.

Together, we will be free.