Wrath & Reverb—Volume Up \ Systems Down:
Dear Mr. President by Four Non Blondes
I wasn’t supposed to say anything.
Not out loud. Not like this.
I was taught to be polite.
To work hard.
To trust the process.
To keep my head down and hope for the best.
That if I stayed good, the system would be good to me.
That if I stayed quiet, I’d be safe.
But that was a lie.
A lie passed down through sermons and staff meetings, DEI trainings and Sunday school.
The left told me they cared.
They passed out words like “justice” and “equity”
while signing off on layoffs and salary freezes.
The right told me they spoke for God.
But their god wears a flag like armor
and demands obedience, not mercy.
The liberals gave me a seat at the table—
but only if I kept quiet and smiled.
The nationalists said they’d save me—
if I agreed to worship their white Jesus
and forget what they were doing to everyone else.
And behind them both, laughing,
stands the broligarchy:
tech billionaires, hedge fund visionaries, crypto cowboys, data cultists.
They don’t wave flags.
They don’t kneel in pews.
They snort metrics like coke
and call it the future.
They talk about freedom
but they mean freedom from accountability.
Freedom to extract. To surveil.
To grind people down into profiles and purchase paths.
They feed on our attention, our confusion, our exhaustion.
They don’t need you to believe in them.
They just need you to be too numb to resist.
And the worst part?
Both parties let them feast.
We are on the cusp of authoritarianism with a user interface.
Not boots and barbed wire—apps and backend dashboards.
Not gulags—just deplatforming, blacklists, automated suspicion.
They built the surveillance state together.
Both sides.
The left sold it as protection.
The right sold it as patriotism.
Now the eyes never close.
And they tell you that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.
While they decide what wrong means.
They don’t want free speech.
Not really.
They want speech that flatters their tribe, their god, their donors, their branding.
Free speech isn’t just a principle anymore.
It’s a battleground.
And everyone’s holding matches.
They’ll distract you with war and reality TV.
With plastic politics and consumer pacifiers.
With endless scrolling and empty slogans.
They’ll keep you just awake enough to argue.
Just tired enough to give up.
Listen to Kendrick.
Turn the TV off.
———
So what do I believe, then? After all this?
After the fire and silence and the static?
And the rage—the unbridled teeth-gnashing, breast-ripping rage?
Well—I don’t believe in God.
But I’ve read what Jesus said—
and if you listen that dude and not the preachers,
you hear something worth carrying.
I believe the poor were never the problem.
I believe the liars wear robes and run banks.
I believe the women were always left out of the stories—
except when they were bleeding, screaming, or being stoned.
And I believe neither party wants anything to do with that Jesus.
I’m from a place you can’t Google.
A town where people still wave at each other,
but the food bank line gets longer every month.
Where the preachers get richer
and the single moms get blamed.
This space is not about safety.
It’s about witness.
It’s not about hope.
It’s about remembrance.
It’s not about being seen.
It’s about refusing to let the silence write the story.
I don’t care if you follow me.
I don’t care if this gets shared.
I care that someone out there
might read this and whisper: “So it’s not just me.”
This is not a brand.
This is not therapy.
This is not for the cameras.
This is what’s left when the pretending stops.