A Prophecy of Shadows

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt a sort of shadow cast over the future. I didn’t know how it would happen, or what circumstances would bring it to fruition, but I knew that I would live to see a great cataclysm. I knew it with the same surety as my name. It just seemd inevitable. 

I remember reading the Bible like a chapter book when I was 8. When I had questions, my mother sent me to church with an older neighbor, and I remember being terrified when they told us about the end times. Was this the shadow I saw? I remember expressing that fear to my mother. She gently assured me that I was worried over nothing, that the end of the world would happen hundreds of years in the future and not during my lifetime. And for a long time, the shadow went away, and I carried on with the business of growing up.

The shadow came back on 9-11, as 21-year-old me stood in my father’s living room watching the second plane hit the South Tower on live TV. I looked at my dad and said, “nothing’s ever gonna be the same again, is it Dad?” He laid his work-hardened hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“No, honey, it’s not.”

The shadow has only grown since, a subtle undercurrent of darkness, a black river of fear that would drown me, and everyone else, if it ever came to the surface. 

That fetid water has been rising for a while, and now we are standing in it ankle-deep. And it’s rising. 

America is entering a terifying time, and a third of the country is too busy gloating to see they’re about to be cut down too. The realization will be slow, and painful. And maybe that pain will motivate change, but even if it does, how many will suffer in the meantime? How many will die waiting for a savior who never shows up? 

It’s getting harder to see anything but the shadow. It’s devouring the world. And I could despair. But my father taught me that the worst thing you can ever do is feel sorry for yourself. I never understood it fully until I was an adult, and the meaning only rings truer for me now. If I feel sorry for myself, I’ll give up. And then the shadow WILL consume me.  

People in America, regardless of politics, need to wake up. As Shakespere said, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” I don’t know what the next four years will bring, but I know it will be covered in a thick layer of bullshit. It will take work to get to the truth in a time when those who control all the means of communication are kissing the ring. And frankly, most people are either too busy working three jobs ot make rent, or too lazy, to do that work. Or, they are so comfortable with the manufactured reality in which they live that they don’t care if the rest of the world burns around them, because they really think it won’t happen to them. 

They will try to silence those telling the truth, first by discrediting them, then by criminalizing them, then by killing them. And maybe, one day, they’ll come for me, and the shadow will win. But at least, I’ll know I didn’t cower. I didn’t stay quiet while atrocities were committed in the name of making the country “great again.”