Heard a singer on the radio late last night
Said he’s gonna kick the darkness til it bleeds daylight…
I… I believe in love…
–excerpt from “God, Part II,” by U2, from the album, Rattle and Hum
Dear Everybody,
Most of you, I don’t know your names. I have never seen your faces, and so long as my captors continue this selective video ban, you may never see mine. We are separated, you and me, by fences covered in concertina wire, by steel bars and concrete walls, by a patrol truck with a loaded shotgun designed to keep me in… and to keep YOU out.
In fact, if everything had gone as planned, the way my captors designed it, you would never have even been aware of my existence. I would have remained a population statistic in official government reports, for decades and decades until some guard making union-scale wages tossed me in a hole and buried me.
But, something happened.
YOU happened.
Despite the fences and bars and walls, despite the perimeter truck, my captors lost control of the situation. They lost control of YOU.
Those who erect the fences, who insert steel bars, who conduct the grisly business of disassembling captives behind concrete walls, have always dictated what you are allowed to know, and to feel. They impose limits on the experiences of your world AND mine. Those experiences are never permitted to converge.
There’s a perimeter truck between us.
They trained you for years and years not to trust the voices from inside the fences, not to listen to the echoes from the inside of the concrete tombs.
They spent a lot of money making sure this never happened.
But, it happened.
YOU happened.
In that instant that you let me be real to you, and you became real to me, those fences dissolved… the bars rusted… the walls fell… the perimeter truck stalled… and the powerful who spent all that money on programs to mismanage your thinking became utterly powerless.
They no longer mediate your experiences. They no longer dictate what you and I are allowed to mean to each other, or how we choose to collaborate together, or how we imagine the future we will manifest.
In fact, there’s a serious question as to whether you will continue to let them run it…
Or, more accurately, whether you will allow them to maintain the DELUSION that they run ANYTHING.
You have done something. Something very, very dangerous. You have rendered the fences and bars and walls and perimeter trucks irrelevant. You have rendered those who rely on those tools to keep all of us– you and me –under control just as irrelevant.
They are afraid. I can feel it. Their fear is seeping out of everything in their dying domain.
YOU did this.
YOU took power away from those who misdefine our world, who misdefine who we are, and what we are, and how significant we may be.
There is an incredible darkness they represent, and that darkness, fuelled by hate and fear and mistrust, by division and anger, is under assault. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of dedicated and determined rebels are kicking that darkness.
It’s bleeding.
On my side, I can see it. This darkness that I have been kicking for decades, never knowing anyone else was kicking too…
It’s bleeding daylight.
It might be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The dying of their darkness.
Thank you for this image, painted in the blood of their dying darkness.
No matter what, no matter how this ends for you or for me, the world… this world… OUR world will never be the same. Those who rely on fences and bars, concrete walls and perimeter trucks, who rely on this infernal darkness to continue murdering the future, our future, the future we know CAN be… They will never sleep as sound in their beds, or sit as relaxed behind their desks…
They know what YOU did to them…
What you CAN do to them…
And they know YOU own the future.
We kicked their darkness…
We made it bleed…
And we outnumber them.
Freedom or Death,
Sean.