I didn’t think I was going to do it—not really. I’d thought about it, maybe once or twice, late at night when everything felt heavier and the world just seemed… mean. Like it had its hand around my neck and was just waiting to squeeze a little harder.
But today, everything caught up to me. Rent’s late again. My manager cut my hours. I asked my mom for help and she didn’t even call me back. And I just sat there on my bed, staring at the cracked screen of my phone, wondering what I even had left to offer. And then, like… I don’t know, like something outside of me whispered it, the thought came back.
“You could.”
I didn’t even say it out loud. Just sat there, heart thudding, fingers numb. I told myself I was just curious. I mean, girls do it, right? I’ve seen the posts. I’ve read the threads. It’s not like I’d be the first. Not even the hundredth.
So I googled it. I looked at some ads. I didn’t even mean to go that far, but I did. They weren’t like I imagined—some of them looked normal. Cute even. Just girls trying to make it, same as me. I kept thinking: What if it’s just once? Just to catch up. Just to feel okay for a minute.
I didn’t feel okay though. My stomach was all twisted. I kept refreshing the screen, like maybe the feeling would go away. It didn’t. I made a profile. Chose a name that didn’t feel real. I couldn’t use my real one. That would make it too… true.
I stared at the “Post” button for almost twenty minutes. I was shaking. I kept hearing my dad’s voice in my head, how he used to say, “You’re better than all this mess.” But he’s not around anymore, and I don’t know if I believe that.
When the first message came in, I almost dropped the phone. He was older. Said he was “respectful.” Wanted to meet for an hour. Just talk, maybe more. Said he’d pay well.
And I said yes. I don’t know why. My fingers typed it before I could stop them. Then it was real. The world didn’t spin or anything—it just went quiet, like a pause in a song where the next note never comes.
Now I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, in a dress I used to wear to dates, and I feel… hollow. Not scared, not yet. Just weird. Like I’m floating just outside myself. I keep telling myself it’s just my body. Just for one night. I’m still me. I’ll still be me after.
But then I wonder—what if I’m not? What if something changes and I can’t ever go back to who I was before this night?
I wish someone would call me and tell me not to go. But no one will. So I’m going.
It was always dusk in the city, or maybe the sun had simply stopped bothering to rise—no one quite remembered. Time here didn’t tick so much as hum, low and wet, like the sound of an old refrigerator rotting in a ruined motel. The streetlights never went off. The shadows never left. You had to squint to see people’s faces, even when they were right in front of you. That’s how they liked it.
He woke up in a steel-walled unit designed for optimal docility. They used to call them apartments, once upon a time, when doors had hinges and windows opened. Now there was just the hiss of hydraulic locks, the blinking red light in the ceiling’s eye socket, and the pale, flickering glow of the propaganda mural bleeding across the wall—children holding flags, static creeping through their smiles.
The boy—no name, never one of those—brushed his teeth with a powder made from algae and bone ash. Tasted like death and salt. He didn’t mind. There were worse things. His father had once told him about fruit. Apples. He’d described them like dreams: red, crisp, alive. He died a week later in a “utility misalignment.” That’s how the morning bulletin phrased it.
Outside, the city breathed like an iron lung. Cars without drivers hissed down neon canals of tar. Patrolmen, faceless in mirror helmets, paced like wind-up toys with stun batons in their hands and prayers in their throats. The boy kept his head low and moved fast. Everyone walked like they were trying not to be seen by ghosts.
His job was at the Archive—a windowless, soundless tower in Sector Nine. Inside, he cleaned memory reels. Actual tape, glossy with the sweat of old history. The Archivists wore gloves and masks and never spoke above a whisper. They said the past was infectious.
He worked in silence, breathing through cloth, fingers trembling as he slid a reel into the incinerator—“JUNE 1984: UNAUTHORIZED ROMANTICISM.” He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried since the last curfew riot, when they shot the air so full of sound it tore the sky open like tissue paper. He’d watched a girl fall in half. Her name was—no, not safe to remember.
At 3:07 PM, the fire alarms blared for precisely nine seconds. A test, they said. But he noticed the Archivist across from him flinch wrong—like he hadn’t known it was coming. That’s how you knew someone was about to disappear. The sound of not knowing.
After shift, he didn’t go home. Not yet. He walked the old line—where the subway used to run before it flooded with blood or data or both. Down there, things echoed differently. Rats with cyber-spines scurried past, their red eyes blinking Morse. And in a corner only he knew, behind a sheet of scrap metal, was a projector. Ancient. Illegal. Precious.
He powered it with a stolen battery from a city clock. It whirred like a dying animal, coughing light onto the crumbling wall. The film was broken, half-erased, but the faces that flickered across the cement were real. Laughing women. Men dancing with cigarettes. Kids running down streets with no sirens, no patrols. People living like they weren’t being watched.
He watched until the reel snapped. Watched until the ghosts went quiet.
Then he stood. And for just a second, in the dark, he whispered his name. Just once.
Not loud. Just enough to remember he still had one.
Outside, the city screamed again. Sirens this time.
With the election of Zohran Mamdani—a man whose platform reads like a Bolshevik fever dream—the greatest city in the world is poised to slit its own throat in broad daylight. This isn’t reform. It isn’t progress. It’s ideological suicide. And like all grand utopian delusions, it begins with a smiling man in a tailored suit promising free everything—while loading the chamber.
Mamdani’s blueprint is simple: punish producers, reward dependence, and drown the city in a flood of government control. He wants a $70 billion public housing push, free public transportation, universal childcare, free college, rent freezes, and state-run grocery stores. To fund it? He proposes extortion: 11.5% corporate taxes, a new city tax on millionaires, and a blank check mentality straight out of 1970s Havana.
Let’s be blunt. We’ve seen this before.
New York in the 1970s: Overregulated, overtaxed, and overrun. A city spiraling toward bankruptcy, saved only by a brutal austerity program and a federal loan that came with a leash. Violent crime exploded. The middle class fled to the suburbs. Graffiti blanketed every inch of public life. The spirit of the city rotted. And now we’re heading straight back.
Venezuela under Chávez: Another idealist who promised housing, food, and dignity for all—at the expense of free enterprise. What followed was hyperinflation, mass starvation, exodus, and the death of democracy. Mamdani speaks the same language: the seductive language of redistribution, central planning, and “justice” at the end of a policy gun. Venezuela once had the richest oil reserves in the world. New York has Wall Street. What happens when you drive out your golden goose?
The Mamdani agenda treats private success as a sin and public incompetence as salvation. He will smother small businesses under taxes and compliance. He will send landlords running to Florida. He will take the subway—the lifeblood of the working class—and turn it into a petri dish of “equity” projects that grind it into dysfunction. He’ll chase cops off the streets and replace them with clipboard-carrying volunteers who “dialogue” with gangbangers.
We are not heading toward a revival. We are headed toward a Sovietized city-state.
The worst part? This will not just hurt the rich. No—this will break the backbone of the poor. Public housing will become bureaucratic hellscapes, policed not by order but by dysfunction. State-run grocery stores? Try price ceilings, shortages, and rotting food. Free buses? Expect violence without enforcement, chaos without consequence. The people who suffer most under socialism are always the ones it pretends to protect.
This is not idealism. This is war against reality. A war against history. And history always wins.
If Mamdani wins in November and his policies go unchecked, New York will not become fairer or freer. It will become poorer, more violent, and unlivable. The city that once symbolized human potential will become a cautionary tale, a failed state in miniature—a Gotham not of heroes, but of hubris.
And when the crash comes—and it will—he’ll blame capitalism. Like they always do.
After the Civil Rights Era, the great promise was unity—legal equality, dignity, a shared American identity. But what came instead, quietly and without headlines, was a split—a divergence within Black America that few dare to speak about openly: those who learned to operate within the evolving rules of polite, civil society, and those who remained—by circumstance, trauma, or choice—outside of it.
The first group emerged through fire—resilient, composed, often middle-class or aspirational working-class. These individuals cultivated the tools of social fluency: education, decorum, delay of gratification, discipline. They paid a price for it too—code-switching, masking pain, enduring slights in silence. But they played the long game. And many of them won. Or at least survived with dignity intact.
The second group, however, remained closer to the raw wound—those for whom systems never really reformed, neighborhoods never stabilized, schools never improved, trust never returned. They inherited not just poverty, but suspicion, generational fatigue, and a cultural narrative that valorized anger without direction. Their relationship with American norms became more adversarial, and more expressive—sometimes violently so.
This split is not about morality. It is about pathways—what doors opened for one group and stayed shut for another. But here’s the danger: the longer this divide goes unspoken, the more permanent it becomes. A bifurcated identity cannot thrive. One half cannot sustain the image of progress while the other is left to flail, ignored or blamed.
So yes—it is incumbent upon those who have found a way to stand tall within polite society to reach back, not with condescension, but with memory. Because those who made it only did so because someone reached for them once, too. And if the more stable half of Black America chooses safety over solidarity, assimilation over aid, silence over action—then the other half may be cast aside by a country that’s already growing cold toward the idea of uplift.
This is not a question of guilt. It’s a question of strategy. If a rising class forgets its origin, it becomes brittle, and ultimately vulnerable. The ones who made it need to become teachers, mentors, anchors—not just for the sake of the others, but for the sake of a unified Black future.
Because history doesn’t wait. And societies that fail to integrate their own split souls are swallowed by the silence of what could have been.
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.
In the golden light of postwar America, the polio vaccine was a miracle. It marched into our school gymnasiums and public health clinics like a savior in a syringe, delivering us from the terror of paralysis. But behind the triumphal headlines and triumphant arms of inoculated children, something darker slipped through—something not fully understood, not fully acknowledged, and certainly not fully erased. Its name was SV40, Simian Virus 40, and it had no business in the bloodstream of a human being.
Between 1955 and 1963, millions of Americans—perhaps as many as 100 million—were administered a polio vaccine grown in the kidneys of rhesus monkeys. Those kidneys, it would later be discovered, were often infected with SV40, a monkey virus shown in animal models to cause aggressive soft tissue tumors: mesotheliomas, brain cancers, bone sarcomas. The virus was not screened for, not removed, and not publicly disclosed until years after it was found. It was not engineered. It was not malicious. It was simply… overlooked. But the consequences of that oversight may still be unfolding across generations.
To this day, government agencies insist that there is no definitive proof that SV40 causes cancer in humans. This is their position. But outside the neat boundaries of bureaucratic comfort, something else is happening. Soft tissue cancers—rare, aggressive, and difficult to treat—have risen sharply in incidence since the 1960s. Correlation is not causation, we are told. And yet, the virus is still being found in tumor biopsies decades later, like a phantom signature at the scene of a long-forgotten crime.
What does it say about a society that claims victory while burying uncertainty? That champions progress while ignoring anomaly? The story of SV40 isn’t about conspiracy. It’s about the uncomfortable reality of mass medical experimentation at scale. It’s about how public trust is often built on incomplete knowledge and how the full costs of our “victories” are often paid in invisible currencies: future disease, intergenerational mutation, statistical noise that doesn’t scream—it whispers.
To talk about SV40 is not to dismiss the heroism of Jonas Salk or the necessity of vaccination. It is to demand that we confront all of history—not just the parts with medals and ticker tape. If we injected a generation with a virus capable of integrating into human DNA, then we owe them not just retrospective regret, but ongoing inquiry. We owe them more than studies designed to silence questions. We owe them the truth.
Medical progress is not clean. It is not polite. It is not without shadows. SV40 is one of those shadows. And until we shine the full light of investigation upon it—without fear, without bias, and without institutional cowardice—it will remain a ghost in the bloodstream of the American century.
In the United States, a country built on individualism and self-reliance, there exists a paradox—one where empathy, in its most extreme form, becomes suicidal. This isn’t just about personal sacrifice or selflessness; it’s about a systemic cultural force that demands individuals, and sometimes entire groups, destroy themselves in service of others—even when those others do not reciprocate or even acknowledge the sacrifice.
This concept of suicidal empathy manifests in multiple ways:
1. Suicidal Empathy at the Cultural Level: The American Martyr Complex
The United States has a history of self-sacrificial ideologies, where entire populations are expected to bear suffering for the sake of a greater good that never seems to materialize for them.
• The Working Class Martyr: A factory worker who toils for decades, destroying his body and health, not because he believes in the corporation but because he believes that hard work is inherently noble, even when it yields nothing but exhaustion and medical debt.
• The Parent Who Gives Everything: Mothers and fathers who burn themselves out trying to provide every possible opportunity for their children, often at the cost of their own dreams, only to watch their children move far away and embrace completely different values.
• The Veteran Betrayed by His Country: A soldier who enlists, believing in the ideal of national service, only to return home broken—physically, mentally, and financially—realizing that the same country he fought for now sees him as an inconvenience.
Each of these figures engages in a form of cultural suicide—not in the literal sense, but in the way they allow themselves to be consumed by an ideal that never protects them in return.
2. Suicidal Empathy and Politics: The Endless Cycle of Appeasement
America’s political landscape is riddled with ideological self-destruction masquerading as empathy.
• The Middle Class Funding Its Own Erasure: The backbone of the economy, the middle class, is constantly expected to pay higher taxes, bail out corporations, and fund welfare programs, all while watching their own quality of life deteriorate. They are told they must sacrifice for the less fortunate, yet they themselves are never saved when they fall.
• The American Guilt Complex: Entire demographics—be they racial, economic, or historical—are expected to take responsibility for past sins that were often committed before they were even born. This guilt is weaponized, creating a culture of self-destruction where people feel obligated to give up their own stability, future, and even identity in the name of “atonement.”
• The Weakness of Over-Accommodation: In an era of mass immigration and globalism, suicidal empathy manifests in policies where America prioritizes helping the world before helping its own citizens—sending billions in aid overseas while homelessness, drug addiction, and economic decline ravage its own cities.
This is not an argument against empathy itself, but against empathy without limits—where a nation and its people are expected to give and give until they have nothing left.
3. The Psychological Toll: Individual Suicidal Empathy
At the personal level, suicidal empathy plays out in how Americans internalize suffering as a virtue.
• The Empath Who Absorbs Everyone’s Pain: There is a growing culture of emotional exhaustion, where individuals are told they must understand and absorb the suffering of others, even when it destroys them. This is seen in activism burnout, caregiver fatigue, and the rise of extreme guilt-based anxiety.
• The Man Who Must Be Strong Until He Breaks: Men are expected to sacrifice their mental and emotional well-being for their families, their communities, and their country—often without any emotional support in return. The result? Skyrocketing male suicide rates, as they are told that to struggle is weakness, but to give up is cowardice.
• The People-Pleaser Who Becomes Invisible: Many Americans, especially women, are conditioned to prioritize everyone else’s needs over their own, leading to cycles of emotional depletion, depression, and, in extreme cases, suicidal ideation.
The core issue here is that there is no reciprocity—empathy should be an exchange, yet in America, it is often a one-way sacrifice.
4. Suicidal Empathy in the Global Order: The World’s Caretaker with No Healer of Its Own
America, as a superpower, engages in suicidal empathy on an international scale.
• Policing the World at the Expense of Its Own Stability: The U.S. spends trillions intervening in foreign wars, defending allies, and promoting democracy abroad, while its own infrastructure collapses and its people go without healthcare or security.
• Open Borders and National Self-Destruction: While most countries fiercely protect their identity, language, and culture, the U.S. is told that to enforce its own boundaries is immoral, even as unchecked migration strains resources and reshapes entire communities.
• The Debt of Generosity: The U.S. forgives debt, funds international projects, and absorbs global economic crises, yet receives little to no gratitude or assistance when it struggles. Other nations expect America to be the perpetual provider, even as it drowns in its own debt.
There is a limit to how much a nation, a people, or an individual can give before they collapse.
5. The Solution: Limits to Empathy, Not the Erasure of It
The problem is not empathy itself, but empathy without boundaries.
• Reciprocity Must Be Required: Empathy should not be a one-way transaction. If people, communities, and nations expect to receive, they must also be expected to give.
• Strength Is Not Cruelty: Americans must learn that setting limits is not cold-hearted—it is necessary for survival.
• Redefining Nobility: True nobility is not self-destruction, but the ability to thrive while still helping others in a sustainable way.
• Empathy Must Be Earned: Blindly sacrificing for those who would never do the same in return is not virtue—it’s self-destruction.
Suicidal empathy is not a virtue—it’s a weapon used against those who refuse to see it for what it is. If America does not learn to set limits, both as a nation and as individuals, then the cycle of self-destruction will continue, until there is nothing left to give.
The Democratic Party, often self-branded as the bastion of progressivism and the champion of the underdog, has increasingly revealed itself to be a masterclass in hypocrisy. Despite their rhetoric of equality and justice, their actions often paint a starkly different picture—one that suggests they are more interested in maintaining power than in genuinely advancing the causes they claim to support. Their policies, which are frequently touted as progressive, often end up reinforcing the very inequalities they promise to dismantle.
Take, for example, their stance on economic inequality. Democrats frequently rail against the wealth gap, pointing fingers at the ultra-rich while simultaneously courting the same billionaires and corporate donors behind closed doors. They decry the influence of money in politics, yet rely on massive fundraising operations that draw heavily from the same Wall Street financiers they publicly condemn. This double-dealing undermines their credibility, making it clear that their commitment to economic justice is little more than a convenient talking point.
The party’s hypocrisy is also glaring in their approach to civil rights and social justice. Democrats are quick to posture as the defenders of minority communities, yet their policies often fail to deliver real, meaningful change. Despite controlling major cities for decades, many Democratic strongholds are plagued by systemic issues like police brutality, inadequate housing, and failing public schools. Instead of addressing these deep-rooted problems, they offer platitudes and symbolic gestures, which do nothing to improve the lived experiences of the people they claim to represent.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Democratic hypocrisy is their handling of climate change. While they loudly proclaim the urgency of addressing this existential threat, their actions tell a different story. They continue to support policies that protect the fossil fuel industry, resist meaningful reforms to reduce carbon emissions, and fail to hold corporate polluters accountable. This disconnect between their words and actions raises serious doubts about their sincerity in tackling one of the most pressing issues of our time.
In sum, the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy is not just a minor flaw—it is a fundamental betrayal of the values they claim to uphold. Their inconsistency on critical issues erodes public trust and reveals a party more interested in political expediency than in the genuine pursuit of progress. Until they reconcile their rhetoric with their actions, the Democrats will remain a party defined by its contradictions, rather than by its commitment to the people it purports to serve.
