Look closely:
What plagues us is not hidden.
It stands in the open,
unmasked,
unashamed,
thriving on our willingness
to call it normal.

Violence is the drumbeat of our era—
gunfire folded into daily routine,
wars erupting like old wounds reopened,
families scattered by systems
that confuse punishment with protection.
We have built a world
where harm is predictable
and safety is the surprise.

Power has learned to move quietly—
in signatures,
in budgets,
in the voice that explains
why someone else must bear the cost.
It redraws the map of who matters
and expects gratitude
for the precision of its cruelty.

Exploitation is the scaffolding
of our prosperity—
labor extracted from bodies
we refuse to see,
lives bent around decisions
made far above them,
people reduced to categories
that justify their suffering.
We have perfected the art
of benefiting from what breaks others.

Greed is the architect
of our discontent—
the myth of endless appetite,
the gospel of scarcity,
the fear that enough
is never enough.
It teaches us to clutch
what was meant to flow,
to guard what was meant to be shared,
to forget that abundance
cannot survive captivity.

Understand this:
What plagues us
is not a single force
but a constellation—
violence, power, exploitation, greed—
orbiting the same dark center:
the belief that we can thrive
while others are crushed.

But the truth is rising,
sharp as a siren,
steady as a heartbeat.
It exposes the bargains we made
with fear and convenience,
names the harm we normalized,
reveals the cost of the world
we keep choosing.

The oracle speaks plainly:
We cannot survive
the future we are building.
Not with these habits of harm,
these rituals of forgetting,
these stories that pretend
we are not bound together.

And yet—
beneath the wreckage,
another possibility flickers:
a world where power bends,
where violence loses its script,
where exploitation collapses,
where greed starves for lack of worship,
where we remember
that our lives rise or fall
as one.

This is the word:
What plagues us is real.
But so is the turning
we have not yet dared to make.