Tag Archives: political commentary

Puff of Power ©️

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It begins before the sun rises.

The floor is cold under my feet when I step from the quilt, thin as memory. My husband’s breath is slow beside me, my son curled up like a comma at the far end of the mat. The air tastes of dust and cabbage. I dress quietly—brown jacket, skirt, socks I sewed myself—and smooth my hair. In the mirror, my face looks older than I remember. Maybe it’s the hunger, or maybe it’s just how time clings to women here.

I boil water from the pump outside, watching my breath puff like a ghost above the pot. Breakfast is rice porridge, mostly water. If we’re lucky, there’s a hint of kimchi, cabbage fermented in old glass jars beneath the stairs. I don’t speak while we eat. Speaking wastes energy. My son eats slowly, watching me with his big dark eyes. He doesn’t ask why I only take a few spoonfuls. He knows.

We leave together—he for the school, me for the textile factory. The streets are gray veins through the city, lined with murals of the Great Leader smiling above us, his hand outstretched as if to catch the sky. We bow when we pass them. A woman was beaten last month for forgetting. The snow is dirty, pressed down by boots and cart wheels. Music plays from loudspeakers hidden in the trees—national hymns, songs of labor and love.

In the factory, the air is thick with fiber dust and the scent of grease. I take my seat behind the sewing machine, same one I’ve worked since I was nineteen. I’m thirty-six now, though I sometimes feel much older. My hands move automatically. Thread, pedal, fold. We make uniforms. We make them always.

There is little talk on the line. We whisper sometimes, short things about children or old dreams, but even that can feel dangerous. I remember once, two years ago, I laughed too loudly and the manager stared at me for the rest of the week. I never laughed again in that room.

When I sew, I sometimes imagine I am somewhere else. Paris. Tokyo. Even Seoul. I imagine food in markets so bright with color it hurts to look. I imagine books, and music without speeches in them. Sometimes, I imagine myself as a girl again, before the flood took our home and we were sent here to the city, before my father died building the dam.

Lunch is more porridge, with pickled radish today—rare. Someone must have done well in the quotas. I feel guilty for thinking it, but I am thankful. My stomach feels full for once, which only reminds me how long it has been.

After work, I walk the long road home. The factories release steam into the sky like wounded animals. The cold bites through my coat. I stop by the community board to read the news—a poster of the Supreme Leader visiting a hospital, a new slogan: “Work is Glory, Obedience is Freedom.” I say it aloud, just loud enough that a passerby hears me. It’s safer that way.

My son is home before me. He’s studying. I kneel beside him and correct his strokes. His calligraphy must be perfect if he ever wants to leave this neighborhood. He tells me they sang a song about unity today, and I smile. I do not ask how he feels. Feelings are too dangerous to name.

Dinner is more of the same, though we add a few wild greens I found on the way home. We eat slowly. We talk even less.

At night, when the electricity is out—which is most nights—I sit by the window, watching the moon drift through smoke. I imagine someone watching me from the other side of that sky. I imagine telling them my name. I imagine telling them I am tired, but I am still here.

And then I sleep.

And then I wake.

And then I live again.

Silent Majority ©️

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Let me speak plainly. In this country, power does not scream. It votes.

There are those, loud and frantic, who make a theater of their rage—gluing themselves to buildings, waving signs like sabers, lighting fires in the name of democracy, even as they spit on its outcomes. They lost. And in the United States of America, losing still means something. It means your vision, your ideology, your noise—wasn’t enough.

That’s the deal. That’s the republic. You persuade, you vote, and you live with the result.

But what we see now is not protest—it is performance. It is tantrum. It is the politics of narcissism dressed up as moral emergency. These people do not march for justice. They march for relevance. And in doing so, they reveal just how irrelevant they’ve become.

They say they resist—but they resist the will of the people.

They say they speak truth to power—but they scream fiction into a vacuum.

They say they fight fascism—but they demand censorship, conformity, and submission.

And all of it—every last tweet, chant, and headline—just hardens the very force they oppose. Every tantrum is a campaign ad. Every disruption is a reminder: they don’t want to live with the majority. They want to rule without it.

But this country isn’t ruled by hashtags. It’s not ruled by protest mobs.

It is ruled—still—by the silent, steady hand of the ballot box.

And the majority has spoken.

So let them scream. Let them wail. Let them glue their hands to history.

The rest of us have a country to run.

The Morning After ©️

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Imagine the Democratic Party as Rome after a night of lavish, unchecked indulgence—stumbling through the smoky haze of torches, they find themselves tangled in the arms of strangers, the remnants of the revelry still clinging to their clothes. In the cold light of morning, what once felt bold and indulgent has turned hollow, like the lingering aftertaste of wine that’s gone sour. The extravagance of their promises, whispered in the fever of a political high, now seems faded and tarnished, the remnants of a celebration with no real purpose or end. It’s a scene of crumpled ideals and misplaced loyalties, littered with the discarded relics of their excesses.

As the first light streams over the pillars and crumbling stone, the party faces a sobering reality. This is a moment not of triumph but of reckoning—a bitter dawn where promises given in a frenzy now reveal their empty core. They look around, blinking at the broken promises and unfulfilled vows left like scattered goblets on the floor. Their vision of grandeur has frayed at the edges, revealed as something unsustainable, a gaudy mask that couldn’t hold under the clarity of morning. The air is thick with the irony of it all: the grand illusions that once rallied voices now appear as flimsy as the smoke from last night’s fires.

Caught in the arms of strangers—voices they once claimed to champion but now seem distant, like ghostly reminders of an ideal they once chased but never fully embraced. They wear the marks of a long night of indulgence, of embracing every fleeting whim and extreme, only to find themselves here, drained and unsteady, searching for something real to hold onto. The Democrats awake, not in triumph but in disarray, like a Roman reveler realizing that the feast has ended and all that’s left is a cold, unforgiving morning.