The Contradictions Are the Point
Moral Mad Libs and Baby Back Ribs
It began with a sermon that wasn’t quite a sermon. A Substack post urging Americans to show up, even silently, for a protest. Sincere, heartfelt, written with the cadence of a Sunday pulpit. The kind of thing that makes you want to stand up. Until you sit down and think.
What followed wasn’t apathy. It was clarity. A slow, deliberate refusal to be moved by the machinery of moral alarm without checking the terms of the contract.
Because the truth is, the call to “just show up” sounds noble until you remember what happens after the cameras leave. Until you remember how many showed up for George Floyd, for Portland, for Kenosha. How many marched, risked, donated, wept—and how quickly that pain was metabolized by a system that changed its optics, not its structures.
The machinery didn’t break. It evolved.
We began tracing the architecture of this emotional economy: spectacle mistaken for strategy, sacrifice mistaken for progress, urgency mistaken for effectiveness. We noticed how both left and right speak the same moral language beneath their surface politics:
We are the true [plural noun] who represent [ideal].
They are the [adjective] [out-group] who’ve been misled by [enemy force].
If only we could [verb] together, we’d finally [reclaim/dismantle/restore] [sacred noun].
The Mad Libs of modern righteousness. Just fill in your team.
So what happens when you stop playing?
At first, you’ll be called selfish. Then apathetic. Then dangerous. But really, you’re just asking: Is the blood donation required every time? If the machine runs on spectacle and sacrifice, is refusal a betrayal—or a strategy?
Somewhere in the tension, you realize: the contradiction is the point.
You can acknowledge the pain of 50,000 detainees and still eat baby back ribs at your favorite BBQ joint. You can opt out of performative protest and still give a damn. You can debug broken software and refuse broken systems. You can stop chanting and start noticing.
This isn’t nihilism. It’s moral adulthood. It’s understanding that integrity doesn’t require purity, and that discernment isn’t cowardice.
You don’t need to fill in the blanks. You don’t need to take the rubber bullet so someone else can feel righteous. You don’t need to perform pain to prove allegiance.
You can simply say:
I believe in justice.
I don’t believe in this ritual.
I won’t donate my body to the machine this time.
I am allowed to live well while the world lurches.
And maybe, just maybe, that refusal is its own form of protest. The kind that doesn’t get televised—but lasts.
Addendum: Blood, Real This Time
In the early hours of Saturday, June 14th—the day of the "No Kings" protests—two elected officials and their spouses were shot in their homes by someone impersonating a police officer. Rep. Melissa Hortman and Sen. John Hoffman, both Democrats, were among the victims. Their conditions are grave. A manhunt is underway. The FBI is involved.
This was not protest. This was not symbolic action. This was an assassination attempt.
The same morning that trained volunteers prepared to "absorb rubber bullets" as a form of civic testimony, actual democracy was being targeted with real ammunition. The spectacle continued downtown, but it was irrelevant to the sphere where power and violence now intersect.
You cannot shield a lawmaker from a midnight gunman by forming a peace line at a park. No moral witness, no chant, no livestream can intercept a bullet at 2 a.m. The performance of resistance cannot protect against the machinery of destruction that is no longer playing by the script.
The machine doesn’t just run on pain. It has graduated to blood. And not just the blood of the willing.
So yes: the essay holds. Maybe more urgently than ever.
Because the refusal to show up was never about cowardice. It was about seeing where this was heading—and choosing not to feed the altar. It was about opting out of sacrifice, not out of care.
Welcome to the contradiction. Welcome to the reality beyond the ritual.
Pass the ribs. Guard your life. And read like the world depends on it.
Postscript: May I Be Gloriously, Publicly Wrong
Let this all be an overreaction. Let me be the person who packed too many emergency supplies and skipped the march because I overthought the optics of pain. Let the protests be calm, the state restrained, the marchers safe. Let the spectacle fade and the structure shift anyway.
Let someone find this essay folded in the back of a book stall and chuckle,
"Wow, this aged dramatically."
Let it age. Please.
Let the system prove me wrong by reforming. Let care flow without coercion. Let solidarity not require bruises. Let change come without sacrifice.
Let this be the anxious writing of a person who feared the worst and was gently laughed at for it—over ribs and chapbooks and quiet, sustainable joy.
Let me eat crow for dessert. May it be seasoned with relief.
And let the world that makes this essay irrelevant be the one we build next.