Some people learned to endure pain; others learned to prevent it. We mistake the difference for politics— and it’s tearing us apart.

That sentence explains more about America than any red-and-blue map ever has.

We like to believe our political divisions are about intelligence, values, or information— who knows more, who’s moral, who’s misinformed. But beneath ideology and policy, something older is at work.

Two competing moral strategies.

Two different lessons learned from hardship.

I think of them as Endurance Logic and Preventive Care Logic. Both emerge from tribulation. The difference is not who suffered more, but what suffering taught them to value.

This Is Not About Intelligence

If political conversations feel like everyone is speaking the same language and still missing each other entirely, this is why.

You’re not watching a debate.

You’re watching two moral operating systems collide.

Endurance Logic forms where harm is unavoidable.

Preventive Care Logic forms where harm is interruptible.

What Endurance Logic Learns

Endurance Logic teaches that pain is normal. Tolerance becomes virtue. Pushing through becomes proof of worth. If you can take it, you’re fine.

If you can’t, that failure is personal. Rules are flexible. Authority is suspect. Experience outweighs expertise. The body learns to keep moving because stopping was never an option.

What Preventive Care Logic Learns

Preventive Care Logic learns something else.

Pain is information— not initiation. Harm is not a moral test; it’s a problem to be solved. If suffering is avoidable, avoiding it becomes a responsibility.

Knowledge functions as protection. Safety is not softness. It’s stewardship. These are not political opinions. They are moral operating systems. And they do not speak the same language.

Why Everyone Feels Talked Down To

When someone shaped by Preventive Care Logic says, “We should reduce harm,” Endurance Logic doesn’t hear compassion. It hears indictment.

It hears an unspoken suggestion that endurance was unnecessary— that what was survived should never have been required. And if endurance is the primary dignity you were ever offered, that suggestion feels like theft.

It feels like erasure.

Endurance Logic measures virtue by how much pain one can tolerate.

Preventive Care Logic measures virtue by how much pain one can prevent.

That single difference explains why political arguments so often collapse into contempt instead of conversation.

Each side believes it is defending something essential.

Each experiences the other as a threat to moral coherence.

Why Empathy Often Backfires

This is also why appeals to empathy frequently misfire.

To Endurance Logic, empathy can sound like condescension— an aesthetic of concern offered by people who never had to develop calluses in the same places. Calls for prevention can sound like fragility disguised as virtue.

Preventive Care Logic, meanwhile, looks at Endurance Logic and sees needless cruelty, rigidity, and a refusal to evolve. It struggles to understand why avoidable harm is defended so fiercely— why toughness is mistaken for wisdom when gentler alternatives exist.

Both frameworks believe they are acting ethically.

Both feel morally undermined by the other.

Why Strength Without Apology Feels Safer

Modern American politics doesn’t create this divide. It amplifies it. A political figure who performs certainty without nuance, rejects shame, dismisses expertise, breaks rules unapologetically, and reframes cruelty as honesty will reliably resonate with people oriented toward Endurance Logic.

Not because that figure is principled or coherent. But because he does not demand reinterpretation of the past. He does not ask people to soften. He does not suggest that what they survived could have been prevented.

Preventive Care–oriented politics often does exactly that. It insists systems matter.

That suffering is not fate.

That harm reduction is possible.

For those whose lives were structured around endurance rather than protection, this can feel less like expansion— and more like negation.

Endurance Is Not a Moral Credential

Understanding this does not excuse harm. A worldview shaped by endurance can still become dangerous when it governs policy— when it decides who deserves protection, whose pain is acceptable, and which risks are framed as character-building rather than negligent.

Explanation is not absolution.

But it is clarity.

Endurance Logic was once adaptive. It built infrastructures, institutions, and identities under conditions where sacrifice was required.

But adaptation is not permanence.

A strategy that once kept people alive can become destructive when treated as a moral ideal instead of a historical necessity.

Preventive Care Logic threatens the mythology that suffering is a credential— that pain earns belonging, that hardness equals virtue, that risk is a rite of passage rather than a failure of responsibility.

Mythologies don’t step aside politely when they sense replacement.

They fight back.

The Question We’re Actually Facing

The question is not whether endurance mattered.

It did.

The question is whether endurance must remain the price of dignity.

We can honor resilience without worshiping harm. We can respect toughness without mistaking it for goodness. And we can choose— deliberately— to build a society where enduring pain is no longer confused with moral worth.

That choice is political.

But it is also profoundly human.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. And here’s to a happier New Year.

Be safe. See you in 2026 ✨

—Rebecca M. Bell

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The mirror remembers what the country refuses to see.

There’s a strange moment in every horror film when the creature finally glimpses itself in a mirror— a shudder of recognition, a recoil, a flicker of something ancient stirring beneath the skin.

That moment never arrives for America.

We are a nation that broke its own mirror out of self-preservation, a country wandering through the house with the lights off, refusing to look directly at the thing it has become because looking requires remembering.

And remembering is the one thing we seem constitutionally incapable of doing.

I. Amnesia as a National Pastime

If you listen closely— past the fireworks, past the punditry, past the algorithm humming like a tired god— you can hear the faint rustle of a country misplacing its memories.

We forget the lessons we never fully learned.

We forget the wounds we never allowed to scar.

We forget the names of those we buried, the rights we surrendered in moments of fear, the quiet bargains we made with cruelty to keep our comfort intact.

Amnesia is not accidental here; it is curated.

It’s a strategy.

It’s a shield held up against the unbearable truth that every empire dies, and all of them begin to rot from the inside first.

We are, in every psychological sense, a patient waking up with no idea how the blood got on the floor.

II. The Dissociated Union

There is the America we perform— shiny, triumphant, always “the greatest.”

There is the America we export— heroic narratives wrapped in Hollywood lighting.

And then there is the America we hide, trembling in the hallway:

The one that cages families and calls it “deterrence.”

The one that mistakes cruelty for strength and fear for patriotism.

The one that feels the ground shifting and decides to build higher walls

instead of deeper roots. Carl Jung warned that whatever we reject in ourselves returns as fate. Nations are no different. When a society represses its shadow long enough, the shadow begins to govern. We live now in the space between selves— a fractured psyche staggering under its own contradictions.

A country in a dissociative fugue, performing normalcy while something darker paces just out of view.

III. Innocence as a National Delusion

There is a particular kind of myth that only powerful nations tell themselves: the myth of inherent goodness.

Not earned goodness.

Not practiced goodness.

Inherent.

A purity narrative so deeply stitched into our identity that any attempt to hold a mirror is treated as treason. We are taught from a young age that America is always the protagonist.

Always the liberator.

Always the chosen one in the cosmic script.

But a nation that believes itself incapable of wrongdoing is a nation incapable of repentance. And a nation incapable of repentance is a nation incapable of change. Innocence makes us blind.

Blindness makes us dangerous.

IV. The Fog Between What We Are and What We Claim to Be

There is a fog settling over the American ethos— not the kind that obscures truth, but the kind that softly erases it.

We scroll past atrocities with the same thumb we use to like a dog video.

We ration outrage like electricity in a blackout.

We normalize the grotesque because naming it would require action, and action would require risk, and risk would require admitting that things are not fine and have not been fine for a very long time. It is surreal to live in a country where the extraordinary horror has started to masquerade as the ordinary day.

Sometimes I think we’re all standing in the same burning room, debating whether the smoke is an inconvenient weather pattern.

V. The Mirror We Refuse to Build

The hardest truth is this:

America does not lack the ability to self-reflect.

It lacks the willingness.

Self-reflection requires humility.

Humility requires accountability.

Accountability requires change.

And change terrifies a nation that built an entire mythology on the illusion of immutable greatness. But the mirror is coming whether we build it or not. History is a patient archivist; it collects our contradictions with quiet diligence.

You can only run from your reflection for so long before it learns to run faster.

VI. So How Do We Live Here— Inside the Dissociation?

There is no tidy ending. No patriotic bow to smooth over the fracture. But there is a path, and it is small and human and stubbornly bright.

We must become the mirror for each other.

We must remember when the country forgets.

We must speak plainly when institutions lie poetically.

We must name the wounds others would camouflage as “policy.”

We must keep the collective memory warm so it does not slip back into the cold of forgetting.

And above all: we must refuse to surrender our humanity to a nation that sometimes treats humanity as a negotiable asset.

VII. The Reflection We Deserve

A country is not its government.

It is not its corporations.

It is not its myths or slogans or televised fantasies.

A country is the accumulation of ordinary people making extraordinarily difficult choices in a time when forgetting is easy and remembering is rebellion. Maybe the mirror we fear isn’t a verdict. Maybe it’s an invitation.

To grow up.

To wake up.

To stop worshipping the myth of what we were and begin shaping the truth of what we could still become. America has forgotten its reflection. But we have not.

And we are not done ringing the bell.

Until the mirror returns,

—Rebecca M. Bell

P.S.

Memory is the last form of resistance.

Hold onto it with both hands.

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Filed under: National Dissociation & Other American Pastimes

Hope is not a feeling.

It’s a choice I have to remake every time the world throws another match into the dry grass. I don’t wake up glowing. I don’t wake up serene. Most mornings, I’m just a person staring down a cracked horizon, deciding— again— not to look away.

People mistake hope for cheerfulness, for naïveté, for some pastel-colored spiritual bypass. They don’t understand that hope, real hope, is forged the same way steel is: pressure, heat, and a refusal to break.

Truth is, I didn’t get here by being naturally optimistic. I learned hope the hard way, the way people learn to build fires after too many nights freezing in the dark.

I. The Origin Story

For a long stretch of my life, if I didn’t leave a light on for myself, I would drown in the dark. Depression taught me that pessimism is effortless. It greets you at the door. But optimism? You have to drag that thing upstairs like a body.

At some point— quietly, without ceremony— I realized I had to become my own lighthouse. No one else was coming to pull me out. So I kept a little light burning in the corner of my mind, a flicker that said: Try again tomorrow.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t profound. It was survival.

I joke that my sense of humor is dark because the alternative is crying at inopportune moments, but the truth is darker still: humor has always been a lifeline. A way to keep the grief from swallowing me whole. A way to refuse surrender.

II. The World We’re Living In

And now we’re all living through a time that feels like the prologue to someone else’s dystopian novel. Regimes tightening. Freedoms thinning. Politicians testing how much cruelty they can normalize before people notice the temperature rising.

Most days it feels like the air is humming with static— warning signs, headlines, deja vu threads from history repeating themselves in sharper tones.

Apathy has become a luxury item. Numbness is the new national pastime.

But despite it— despite the spiraling, the unraveling, the near-constant sense that we’re witnessing the era of endings— I still find myself reaching for that small, stubborn ember.

Because hope, in days like these, isn’t softness. It’s subversion.

III. What People Get Wrong About Hope

Hope gets misread so easily.

People think it means ignoring reality.

It doesn’t. It means staring reality in the face and refusing to let it decide who you will be.

Hope is not blind. Hope is bruised.

Hope is not passive. Hope is preparation.

Hope is not pretending everything is fine. It’s insisting that things can still change for the better.

Hope is endurance disguised as faith.

When I talk about believing in people, I’m not talking about some sunshine-and-warmth sentiment. I’m talking about a radical act of remembering—remembering who we still could be, even in the ruins.

IV. The Science of Staying Lit

There’s a strange kind of intelligence baked into hope.

The brain is wired toward meaning-making. Toward pattern. Toward the possibility that tomorrow might be different. Neuroplasticity itself is a vote for hope. The mind reorganizes. It learns. It adapts. It believes that change is possible even when experience argues otherwise.

And faith— religious or not— functions like internal architecture. A stabilizing beam. A quiet scaffolding the psyche uses to survive chaos.

Hope is not a glitch in human evolution.

It’s the feature that kept us alive.

V. The Nanny and the Nation

Working with children taught me something I wish I’d learned sooner: caring for another life forces you to imagine a future worth surviving. It makes you protective not just of a child, but of the world they’ll inherit.

In that sense, caretaking is political.

Love is political.

Optimism becomes a form of responsibility.

Hope isn’t an escape from reality.

Hope is how we stay anchored in it without collapsing.

VI. Hope as Resistance

Here’s the quiet part the authoritarians don’t want you to realize: regimes depend on despair. They thrive on the moment you stop believing change is possible. The moment you sink into numbness. The moment you give up.

Despair is hypnosis.

Hope is the slap that wakes you up.

Some days, hope feels like defiance.

Some days, like a matchstick.

Some days, like the last working radio tower still broadcasting through the static.

And some days, it’s just the smallest, almost-imperceptible decision to not shut down.

Some of us are still carrying matches.

Some of us are still leaving lights in windows.

Some of us refuse to let the world go dark.

VII. The Personal Promise

I don’t believe in hope because the world is good.

I believe in hope because the world is still capable of goodness—and that capability is worth fighting for.

I believe in staying soft even when it hurts.

I believe in telling the truth even when it ruins the mood.

I believe in choosing light even when it flickers.

I believe in protecting my future family with the fierceness of someone who knows exactly what darkness can do.

Hope isn’t my default. It’s my practice.

And I return to it the way some people return to prayer.

VIII. The Light Left On

So yes, the world feels ruined sometimes. And yes, I feel it too—the heaviness, the dread, the exhaustion of caring so much in a time that rewards apathy.

But I also know what happens when the light goes out.

I’ve lived in that darkness before, and I’m not going back.

I believe in hope because I know the cost of its absence.

I believe in hope because someone has to keep the signal alive.

I believe in hope because the world needs witnesses who refuse to go numb.

And until the tide turns—

until the future steadies—

until the bell rings louder—

I’ll leave a light on.

For myself.

For you.

For the world we’re still trying to build.

In light that refuses to die,

—Rebecca M. Bell

P.S.

Hope is the quiet rebellion.

A single flame saying—

not yet.

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Filed under: Dispatches from the Lighthouse ✨

Dawn was still hours away, but the unraveling had already begun.

Power doesn’t crumble in a single, cinematic moment.

It unravels in patterns— small at first, then unmistakable, then impossible to deny.

Historians map these patterns with forensic precision.

Novelists translate them into myth.

And ordinary citizens— those who pay attention— feel the tremors in their chests long before the headline writers catch up.

Every collapsing regime carries the same fingerprints.

Every frightened government whispers the same warnings in its sleep.

These are the five signs scholars and storytellers look for when a system begins to fail from the inside.

I. When the Center Contradicts Itself

A stable government speaks in one voice.

A faltering one speaks in many.

Contradiction from the top is the first sign— the moment when the narrative buckles under its own weight. One day the crisis is a hoax; the next day, it demands urgent transparency. Leadership that was once iron-clad becomes improvisational, desperate to plug holes faster than new ones can appear.

Authoritarian nostalgia always rewrites its own script, but when the rewrites pile up too fast, the myth collapses.

A ruler who looks unsure becomes a ruler who looks afraid.

And fear at the center is where collapse begins.

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Some empires end with declarations; others end with décor.

This scene is not prophecy, nor threat, but reflection. The Big Beautiful Ballroom exists nowhere real and everywhere familiar— a monument built from greed, mirrors, and borrowed light. It burns not by hand but by consequence.

For those who’ve ever watched power gild itself while hunger growls at the door— consider this a requiem. A little therapy disguised as fiction.

(Excerpt from my upcoming novel, “Welcome to Wonderland”— a speculative archive of collapse, resistance, and rebirth.)

A record of beauty learning the cost of itself.

Decadence doesn’t die quietly. It drips.

The Big Beautiful Ballroom— Burning

(Alice, in the archives of memory)

The chandelier fell like an accusation, a slow, glittering verdict that forgot to be polite.

Heat breathed against the silk walls; gold vines wept down them in soft, obscene tears. Each drop landed with the faint, traitorous clink of coins remembering what they once were—ore, not ornament.

The portraits blistered first. Monarchs and ministers, all lacquered smiles and powdered deceit, began to sweat through their frames. Oil cracked under heat, and their eyes— those painted, eternal eyes— finally looked afraid.

Velvet burned next, sweet and thick. The smell was unbearable: perfume and ambition rendered into smoke. The marble statues didn’t scream, but something in their silence did. Their polished hands, once raised in blessing, blackened into gestures that looked like surrender.

Alice stood near the door, notebook trembling, ink beginning to run. The ledger she’d kept for years—every decree, every lie catalogued—curled at the edges as if trying to flee its own complicity.

The heat grew articulate. It spoke in crackles and sighs, reciting the inventory of everything that had ever been hoarded. The grand piano split down the center, ivory keys shrieking like teeth in confession. Champagne bottles burst one by one, their corks firing through the air like panicked doves. A mural of prosperity peeled away from the plaster, revealing the rot beneath—a history painted over too many times to count.

Gold leaves fell in flakes. Pearls hissed as their threads snapped. A thousand embroidered initials—stitched into napkins, monograms, the backs of chairs—unraveled into smoke. Each letter twisted upward, returning to the alphabet, free at last from the tyranny of names.

The orchestra pit collapsed into itself. Violins, still tuned for celebration, curled into black shapes that looked like question marks. Alice could smell sugar burning—the banquet tables surrendering their sweetness, their abundance charred into honesty. The mirrors along the walls burst, one by one, like old lies denied their reflection.

She wrote as she watched, her ink melting into the page, words liquefying into something that wasn’t quite language anymore. It felt right.

The rafters groaned. Dust descended like snowfall. For a brief and merciful instant, the fire caught the light just right, and every ember looked like forgiveness.

Outside, the city went on pretending. Buses sighed. Someone’s radio stuttered through static. The world, polite as ever, looked away.

Inside, the glass ceiling gave. It rained diamonds— counterfeit stars tumbling through the smoke. For a moment they were beautiful again, freed from ownership.

Then came the collapse—slow, thunderous, final. The chandelier’s corpse cracked open, spilling gems that no longer mattered.

When the last beam gave, the roar was almost tender.

Alice didn’t move. She watched the ballroom die the way historians watch empires: with reverence, with exhaustion, with a terrible kind of hope.

Outside, no one screamed. They only stared, eyes glassed by reflection, warmed by something dangerously close to relief.

Inside, the fire finished its meal. And for the first time in the history of the Big Beautiful Ballroom, everything inside it finally belonged to everyone.

By morning, the air had thinned into something almost merciful. Ash drifted like gray confetti, a celebration the city didn’t remember throwing. The ballroom was a hollow ribcage of stone and soot, sunlight bleeding through the fractures.

Alice stepped carefully across what used to be the threshold. Gold had cooled into dull, twisted ribbons. Glass crunched under her boots— the sound of luxury learning humility. The air still smelled of perfume, sugar, and endings.

She set her notebook on a slab of marble that had survived the fall and began to write again. The pen dragged, clogged with residue, but it obeyed. Architecture is confession, she wrote. And the fire only ever tells the truth.

In the distance, bells were ringing— not alarms, but something older, almost liturgical. A requiem for excess. A summons for whatever comes next.

Alice closed the book. The page was warm. And the world, for once, was honest enough to touch.

I wrote this scene as an act of exorcism—a record of the moment excess confessed itself. The fire, as always, is metaphor— though metaphors have teeth.

Art isn’t an act of destruction; it’s an act of remembering what deserves to be rebuilt.

If this piece stirred something in you— rage, grief, relief— good. Let it burn in language, not in the streets. Then, from the ash, write something of your own.

—Rebecca M. Bell

Coming Soon:

Release Date TBA

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Filed under: Allegory, Architecture, Catharsis

[Broadcast from Station 11.11 📡]

If you’re new here, this is where the signal begins.

You’ve found The Bell Rings 🔔— not necessarily a newsletter, but a living signal. A small rebellion disguised as poetry. A gathering place for those who still believe that art is a form of moral infrastructure.

Since June, more than one hundred and sixty new readers have joined this circle, and to every one of you: welcome. You are proof that the algorithm hasn’t yet erased our attention spans or our empathy.

This is not a daily dispatch. It’s a bell rung to sound the alarm.

I wrote A Collection of Momentum while the air itself felt electrified— poems that burned like teargas, written to shake the dust from fostered apathy. Then came A Collection of Reverence, quieter but no less radical: a book about remembering how to kneel before the sacred, even while the sirens screamed through screens.

Those two books are out in the world now, but this space—this Substack—is where the next pulse begins. Here, I publish essays, dispatches, and whispered revolutions in verse. I write about politics because it shapes the body. I write about wonder because it saves the soul. I write because someone has to keep record of who we were while it mattered.

Some essays here are freely offered. Others are held more closely, so the work can continue.

If you stay, expect fire and philosophy, satire and sincerity, grief and awe— meticulously braided together. Expect to be reminded that beauty still belongs to us.

The bell rings to wake the living.
I hope you’ll listen. 🔔

Stay tuned, stay human,

—Rebecca M. Bell
📚 Author of A Collection of Momentum (2025), A Collection of Reverence (2025), & Welcome to Wonderland— Coming soon (Summer 2026) ⏰✨🐇🌀

P.S.
when the world went dim,
we stayed luminous—
specters of empathy
drifting through the wires,
ringing the bell
for whoever still believes
in the living.

🌐 rmbellwrites.com
🕯️ @rmbellwrites

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Filed Under: Samizdat, Static, Signals in the Noise

🕯️ We keep waiting for revolutions to look like fire— crowds, slogans, noise. But sometimes the most radical thing we can do is stay soft in a world that keeps trying to harden us.

The Misunderstanding of “Nice”

We’ve learned to mistake kindness for being nice. But nice is about comfort— it wants peace without honesty.

Kindness, on the other hand, tells the truth even when it trembles. Kindness can stand its ground. It can protest without cruelty, and protect without spectacle. It holds the door and the line. That’s what makes it dangerous to systems that depend on disconnection.

Niceness soothes the status quo. Kindness interrupts it.

Real kindness does not flatter power— it steadies the shaken.

Why Kindness Feels Radical

Cruelty has been professionalized. It’s automated, optimized, woven into the gears of everyday life. Indifference is the most reliable worker in any machine. So when you stop and see someone fully— when you offer softness instead of speed— you’re staging a quiet walkout from the culture of apathy.

Every small kindness disrupts the algorithm.

Every moment of care slows the churn.

We’re taught to think resistance must be loud, but a single tender act— unrecorded, unpaid, unpraised— is its own kind of refusal.

To notice someone is to declare them unexploitable.

The Economics of Empathy

Control depends on detachment. The powerful thrive on the illusion that we are alone— tiny islands of effort, competing for oxygen. But kindness collapses that illusion. It redraws the map. Suddenly the “I” becomes “we.”

It’s how every movement begins: before the marches, there were meals. Before the slogans, there were hands tending wounds. Before the manifestos, there were mothers, neighbors, lovers, friends who refused to give up on one another. The world doesn’t crumble because of cruelty. It crumbles when people stop caring.

Kindness is the mortar that keeps us from falling apart.

The Courage to Stay Soft

To stay kind in a cynical age is a kind of athleticism. It takes training to keep your heart open when you’ve been taught to close it for safety. Cruelty pretends to be strength. But it’s brittle— always in need of proving itself.

Kindness endures. It bends, rebuilds, keeps reaching back out. Cynicism feels sophisticated. But it’s a half-truth— the armor of those too smart to hope. Kindness requires more nerve.

It demands you believe, even after disappointment, that humanity is not a lost cause.

Softness isn’t weakness. It’s strength that remembers where it’s come from.

Practice, Not Performance

We don’t need to perform kindness; we need to practice it. Over and over. Quietly. Consistently. Feed people. Check on your tired friend. Give time instead of opinion. Listen longer than comfort allows.

Kindness is repetition— a small ritual of resistance against despair. The more we practice it, the less absurd compassion begins to look. And when enough people practice it, cruelty starts to sound like static.

Reflection

Think of the last time someone extended you a small kindness. A stranger letting you merge into traffic. A friend texting when you thought they’d forgotten. A softness you didn’t know you needed. You carried it, didn’t you? For minutes, maybe hours. Maybe still.

Now imagine that multiplied— an invisible chain of care spanning streets, screens, and kitchen tables. Would we still tolerate a world built on indifference? That’s the quiet revolution already underway. It doesn’t break the system in half; it erodes it grain by grain.

Until what’s left looks more like community than control.

A Call to Kindness

Before you close this tab— pause. Consider one act of kindness you could offer today. Not to prove a point. Not to post about it. But simply because it makes you feel human again.

Write the message.

Hold the door.

Water the flowers.

That’s all it takes. The future won’t arrive in a single spark. It’ll flicker to life in embers— small, steady, unstoppable.

Still watering the cracks,

—Rebecca M. Bell

www.rmbellwrites.com

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Filed Under: Everyday Revolution, Humanity, Cultural Repair

They love the slow boil, the way a frog stays in the water until the steam curls its skin. They feed on our fatigue, our half-hearted outrage, our hope that maybe this time—it won’t get worse.

Authoritarian Creep 

It doesn’t knock—
it slips the key quietly into locks
we forgot were there.

First the signs change names,
then the words change meaning.
“Defense” becomes “War,”
“temporary” becomes “standard,”
and no one remembers the before.

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“I’ve found that there is always some beauty left— in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”

—Anne Frank

My President Hates Me

My president hates me.
He calls it patriotism.

My president hates me.
He says it with a smile meant for cameras,
while the ticker at the bottom of the screen
counts the jobs like casualties.

My president hates me.
I hear it in the static between commercials,
the roar of a crowd mistaking layoffs
for touchdowns.
Pink slips flutter like confetti.
The anthem plays.
The cheer is for my absence.

My president hates me.
He loves the echo more than the truth.
He claps when the word lunatic
grows teeth in my sleep,
gnaws through the seams of my paycheck,
leaves bite marks on my dignity.

My president hates me.
Still, a neighbor lends me bread.
Still, I plant seeds that sprout in the dark.
Still, the children on my block
draw chalk rainbows on the cracked sidewalk,
and not even the rain
can erase them fast enough.

My president hates me.
But the crowd beside me sings louder.
The chorus is ragged,
off-key,
but alive.

My president hates me.
That is not the whole of me.
My president hates me.
And yet—my name will outlast his applause.
My president hates me.
Which means he fears the part of me
he cannot erase.

From behind enemy lines,

—Rebecca M. Bell

www.rmbellwrites.com

Let the record show: we noticed.

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Filed Under: State-sanctioned spite and citizen defiance

The People in Violet Light

There are those who sneer at the purple revolution.
They say it is a trick of color, a mere mixing of red and blue.
They say it is a refuge for the guilty, an escape hatch for those who lit the fire and now wish to stand by the water.
They say it is softness. Compromise. Amnesty.

They are wrong.

Purple is not forgiveness.
Purple is not a pardon.
Purple is the color of bruises, and the bruise always remembers the strike.

Purple is the twilight hour, when the old order trembles and the new presses at the edges.
Purple is the horizon that does not belong to kings or presidents, but to the people who look toward it.
Purple is the light that leaks through when we finally rise together.

We do not forget who led us here.
We do not absolve the architects of cruelty, the profiteers of suffering, the hands that tightened the noose.
Their names are known; their actions are recorded; their debts to humanity will remain unpaid until justice has its day.

But while they divide us, they dine.

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America’s Got You Down? Try Weaponized Absurdity.

I. The Theater of Power

Authoritarianism is nothing if not theatrical. Its uniforms are pressed with military starch, its parades choreographed to the inch, its speeches delivered with the certainty of divine decree. The regime thrives on performance— on the illusion that power is sacred, inevitable, untouchable.

But every performance is vulnerable to heckling. Laughter punctures the stage lights. Absurdity drags the emperor’s robe into the fluorescent glow of a cheap costume. Where authoritarianism demands reverence, ridicule becomes its undoing.

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Lavender turned radioactive, revolution in bloom.

They said keep your head down.
We packed our heads with silence and called it survival.

Whispers first.
Thin wires. Thread that hums.

Purple— not compromise, not coalition.
Purple like a bruise that learned to sing.
Purple like a crown smashed into a flower.

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Filed under: Resistance literature, apocrypha section

When the glass broke, the voices poured through.

They arrived at dawn,

not perched but nailed against the air, four blue shards flung across the village sky. No one should have heard them— their throats were too small, too fragile— but the sound came anyway, a shriek that rattled shutters and shook old prayers loose from the rafters.

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Self-appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Literary Resistance

filed under: the music of maps/the maps of music

No sharps, no flats. Just starlight in C major.

Cartography and music are our oldest conspiracies against chaos. A map flattens the earth, a score flattens sound. Both take something wild— horizon, harmony— and pin it to a page, convincing us that infinity might be folded into something pocket-sized.

This has always been our human trick: to translate the immeasurable into a system, to make the cosmos legible. The Babylonian star charts, the Gregorian chant, the earliest sailors steering by constellations— they all belong to the same genealogy. People pointing at the sky and insisting:

But to read and to play are not neutral acts. They are political ones. To map is to claim; to compose is to choose what dissonance will be tolerated. Every atlas has borders that cut through someone’s home. Every score has silences where someone’s note was omitted.

Which is why I want to linger in a key that resists complication: the Key of C. No sharps. No flats. The natural state.

Maybe that’s where we begin again.

I. Staff Lines Across the Sky

The sky has always been a manuscript, whether we admit it or not.

Imagine the night horizon as a stave, those five familiar lines etched across the void. Now lift your eyes. Orion’s belt: three even notes, a motif steady as percussion. The Big Dipper: a ladle tipping a scale. Cassiopeia: a zig-zag that could be mistaken for syncopation.

Even the Milky Way itself— once mistaken for spilt milk, for the breast of Hera, for a celestial road— is just a smear of chords strung across the staff. It hums whether or not we are listening.

And don’t forget the silence. Music lives by what it withholds. The rests punctuate the measure. Likewise, the black between stars is not emptiness—it’s negative space, the pause that makes light meaningful. Without rests, music is noise. Without darkness, starlight is clutter.

It’s tempting to romanticize this, but the ancients were more practical. They mapped stars to survive: to plant crops, to cross oceans, to measure time. Navigation was not just metaphor— it was life and death. Yet even then, survival required imagination: to see a hunter in scattered points, or a pitcher pouring water, or a swan with its wings extended. Pure invention disguised as necessity.

We forget this. We inherit constellations as if they were there all along. But the truth is starker: someone once squinted long enough to draw a line between two bright dots and declare it a story. Cartography disguised as myth. Myth disguised as map.

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Galaxies rehearse in miniature. 🪐✨

Don’t Mistake the Cocoon for the Cage

A poem written by Rebecca M. Bell

There are chambers in life that close around us like nightfall.
We feel the hush and call it exile.
We feel the narrowing and call it loss.

But not every silence is a prison.
Not every closing is a curse.
Some silences are wombs.
Some shadows are scaffolds.
Some endings are beginnings rearranged.

The cocoon and the cage share a silhouette—
both enclose, both darken, both strip the world away
until we can hear only our own pulse.

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The sand runs red: one headline elevated, countless lives buried.

Thesis: The spectacle of one white man’s public assassination has dominated global headlines, while ongoing atrocities— including the genocide in Gaza and the disappearance of detainees from ICE’s Everglades detention facility—remain unacknowledged. This disparity exposes the machinery of selective empathy and the engineered apathy of Western media culture.

Introduction

The Western news cycle thrives on spectacle. One body falls in public, and the world rushes to declare a turning point. The assassination of a white political figure triggered endless headlines, special coverage, and debates about democracy itself. Yet this reaction to a single death contrasts sharply with the muted, almost nonexistent response to mass atrocities unfolding daily.

For months, I— and millions of others— have watched genocide in Gaza via livestream on our screens. Children pulled from rubble. Hospitals reduced to dust. Parents recording their last words to the world. I do not write this lightly: I have seen a child filmed after being disemboweled, their body hung by their intestines. If there is a summit of horror, this is it.

So forgive me if one assassination doesn’t shake me. My grief already knows higher thresholds.

Gaza Through the Screen

The genocide in Gaza is one of the most documented atrocities in modern history, captured by civilians in real time and disseminated globally through social media. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly warned of war crimes and collective punishment of civilians.

Unlike past genocides— where testimony came decades later— this one is broadcast live.

Because the footage is raw, continuous, and unsparing, the issue becomes not access to truth but the capacity of audiences to endure it. Western media often filters or attenuates these images, giving consumers the illusion they didn’t see— or that it’s too complex or “foreign” to care about.

The Vanishing Detainees of Alligator Alcatraz

Meanwhile, another atrocity festers— closer to home.

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Written by Rebecca M. Bell

When the eulogies end with a campaign speech, we are no longer mourning.

We are pledging allegiance.

---

THE LIGHTS CAME FIRST

Bright enough to bleach the stars from a winter’s night sky. Then the crowd, gathered like a congregation— not just to mourn, but to witness.

They put a widow center stage, haloed in white light. Her grief projected larger than life. She spoke of forgiveness, the words ringing like a hymn: we are the righteous ones.

And then, quietly, the booths.

Register here. Turn this grief into action.

Authoritarianism rarely marches in with jackboots.

It comes wrapped in ritual. It comes singing.

I. THE SCENE AS SCRIPTURE

A stadium is not a neutral place. Under those lights, the crowd becomes a single organism. Awe is manufactured through sheer scale— flags, camera pans, the swell of sound. It’s the kind of mass choreography Leni Riefenstahl perfected in Triumph of the Will, a film still studied for its ability to make power look inevitable.

I live in Oklahoma, where we already know what happens when extremism and spectacle meet. The bombing memorial sits just miles away; a quiet testament to what happens when ideology curdles into violence. Tonight felt like the opposite pole— grief not as silence, but as pageantry.

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☀️🌓 Look Up—The Sky Is Writing Something Down

When the World Turns Its Face

Written by Rebecca M. Bell

The light doesn’t just fade. It thins.

As if the sky has been stretched too far and is about to tear.

Shadows sharpen until they look like etchings—perfect, merciless outlines of things you thought you knew. The air cools, but it isn’t just temperature. It’s the uncanny coolness of being watched.

Every sound grows loud enough to feel deliberate: the wind’s teeth on your neck, a car door shutting three streets over, your own breath finding its way out of your chest. It feels like the planet has taken one long inhale and is holding it, waiting to see what we’ll do.

This is what a turning point feels like.

Not trumpets and headlines. Not the world collapsing in one cinematic instant.

But a hush.

A reminder that something larger than us is moving, and we are in its path—whether we are ready or not.

No wonder eclipses have always been read as omens. What else could they be? When the brightest thing we know is swallowed, it feels like a verdict. Our ancestors panicked, prayed, danced, rioted. Even now, we gather in fields and on rooftops, holding flimsy glasses to our faces, hoping to catch a glimpse of the devouring.

And some small, feral part of us wishes that the darkness would keep going—

that the moon would finish the job and swallow the whole day.

Because secretly, don’t we want a reset?

Don’t we want certain things—corruption, cruelty, the way we’ve grown numb to disaster after disaster—to be swallowed whole?

Wouldn’t it be easier if the sky did the hard work for us?

But the light always returns, and it returns to the same world it left.

The difference is us.

We are the ones who have been altered, even slightly, by the sight of a devoured sun.

We are the ones who have stood under a strange sky and felt the raw possibility of change, the reminder that nothing—not even daylight—is permanent.

What we do next is the real omen.

Whether we walk back into the day pretending nothing happened, or walk back carrying this thin slice of revelation like a torch.

Whether we let the next cycle spin us back into sleep, or decide to stay awake, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Because here’s the secret the eclipse won’t tell you:

what we fear disappearing is not the light, but our own agency.

The power to turn toward what matters before the shadow passes.

The courage to make a new thing, even if it means dismantling the old.

Even if it means standing in the dark a little longer.

So watch the sky.

Let it watch you back.

Feel the edge of the shadow pass over your skin, a reminder that you are alive in a world that is still turning.

And when the light returns—as it always does—step into it changed.

Step into it with the knowledge that the dark didn’t erase you. It revealed you.

The eclipse will end, but something has already shifted. If you feel it too—don’t waste it. Carry it into tomorrow. Let this be your reset, not just the sky’s.

Written under borrowed sky,

—Rebecca M. Bell

www.rmbellwrites.com

PS:

as moon ate the sun,

for a moment,

the world remembered

how to be still

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Filed under: cosmic interruptions, political weather, omens in motion, shadow work, light returning

Written by Rebecca M. Bell

Catholic Roots, Crooked Questions

I grew up Catholic, the kind of childhood where prayers were memorized like multiplication tables, and faith wasn’t so much questioned as recited. God was supposed to live in the wafer, the incense, the hands folded properly on the pew. I was told the heavens declared His glory, but when I looked up at night, all I saw were a few scattered dots, drowned out by city lights. The rituals were tidy. The sky was not.

The Whitman Effect

Then came college, and with it the kind of double exposure that can shatter and rebuild your worldview. I was sitting in American Literature to 1860 with Walt Whitman on my desk and Introduction to Philosophy in my backpack. Whitman sang the body electric, Emerson dared to call nature itself divine, and suddenly the rigid God of my childhood looked suspiciously small.

Whitman once wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Pantheism gave me permission to contain multitudes too— questions, doubts, wonder— and to call all of them holy.

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Classification: [REDACTED]

Clearance Level: EYES ONLY

Filed Under: COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE/DISSENT

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