On the Glass of Apathy🪞

A Letter to My Fellow Americans ✨🇺🇸

Filed under: Cracks in the façade.

Smash the glass. Sound the alarm.🚨

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America feels feverish.

Some will call it summer heat.

Some will call it politics, per usual;

but you and I both know it’s the tremor before the pane shatters—

that moment when the air tastes metallic,

and the headlines are less about what’s happened

and more about what we’re bracing for.

I don’t write this to comfort you.

I write this to remind you that comfort is not the goal.

The goal is to feel—so sharply, so undeniably—

that the glass of apathy cannot survive the weight of our hands.

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A Letter to My Fellow Americans:

(On the Glass of Apathy)

I write to you from the fracture—
that hairline crack between
what we were told we were
and what we have become.

Can you hear it?
The low hum beneath the 
floorboards—
not progress, not peace,
but the tightening wire of control.

Last night, the National Guard stood
in the streets of our capital,
not by invitation but imposition—
a hand on the throat of a city
that dares to breathe in a language
not blessed by the man in the high tower.

Some call it order;
I call it the sound glass makes
just before breaking.

They redraw our maps until
we forget where our neighbors live.
They erase names from the walls—
Harvey Milk, gone.
Pride, silenced.
Memory, deleted pixel by pixel
until we doubt it was ever there.

Meanwhile, our debts pile
like unburied dead—
numbers so swollen
they block the sun.

And still we sleep.

We’ve been told feeling is weakness—
that outrage is uncivil,
that empathy is naive.
But I am telling you now:
apathy is glass,
and it will cut you to ribbons
whether you break it
or it breaks beneath you.

So let us swing the hammer.
Let solidarity be the weight,
let grief be the arc,
let outrage be the shatter—
not for the noise it makes
but for the air it frees.

The time is not “someday.”
The time is not “soon.”
The time is now,
and the crack is already running
the length of the pane.

If you feel nothing else,
feel this—
we have one country,
one sky,
one chance
to choose something other than silence.

I will meet you in the streets
as the glass hits the ground.

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If this letter leaves you restless—good.

Restlessness is proof you’re still awake.

And the awake have a responsibility:

to warn, to witness, to wield whatever tools we have left

before the silence becomes permanent.

The crack is already running the length of the pane.

The next sound you hear will likely be the break.

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See you in the street.

Bring your hammer.

Bring your heart.

Yours in the shatter,

—Rebecca M. Bell

The Bell Rings 🔔

P.S. Keep this close. Or send it far. Just don’t let it rot unread. 🥀

Filed under: Cracks in the façade.