Some people in this country still don’t realize what it takes for others to feel human in a pressure cooker like the United States. Everything keeps getting harder: housing, healthcare, wages, safety, basic stability. And instead of changing the conditions that are crushing people, the system keeps demanding that individuals cope better. When people cannot, the system treats their collapse as a personal failure instead of a predictable outcome.

Everyone has their own way to make this world bearable, even if they pretend otherwise. Everybody needs something to keep them comfortable, or at the very least numb, whether it’s healthy or not, whether it comes from a doctor, from a store, or from a ritual of faith.

People keep talking about fixing the system or working harder inside it, as if the problem is our effort. But the system is not broken. It is working exactly the way it was built to work. It is designed to break people, to exhaust them, to keep power where it already is, and to make sure the average person cannot gain anything without the permission of the people who already have everything.

And when the system breaks you, you are forced to go outside it just to survive. But the moment you reach for anything the system does not approve of, you are labeled weak. The only acceptable escapes are the ones that keep the system running, the ones that make you more obedient, more productive, more manageable. Everything else is treated like a personal failure.

And when the people with power start telling us a version of events that does not match what we are seeing with our own eyes, when we are still learning what happened and new witness footage is still coming out, and they are already insisting on a story that does not line up with the truth in front of us, that is when speaking becomes non negotiable. Because that is not confusion. That is not uncertainty. That is power trying to lock in a lie before the dust has even settled.

And yes, some people will say that talking about this now is opportunistic, that pointing to what just happened is “using” someone’s death. But naming a pattern is not exploitation. Ignoring it is. When the system breaks someone in full view of the public, that is exactly when we have to speak, because people are finally paying attention. This is not about benefiting from tragedy. It is about refusing to pretend the tragedy is separate from the system that produced it.

And whether the harm comes from malice or indifference, the effect is the same. People are broken, and the system keeps running. The distinction matters to the people who study it, but not to the people living inside it.

Until the system itself changes, until it stops being built to break people, we will always need something outside it just to survive it. And the system will keep punishing us for doing exactly what it forces us to do.