What Kind of Nation Are We Becoming?

I didn’t set out to write a political series last month. But this Administration gave me no choice. The cruelty was constant. The recklessness, staggering. Every week brought a new erosion of truth, decency, or basic compassion. I wrote not because I had answers—but because silence began to feel like complicity.

What emerged in April was a body of work that documents the corrosion of truth, the criminalization of compassion, and the quiet violence of forgetting.

Here’s what we saw—and what I refused to unsee.

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🔥 The Full Defiance Catalog – April 2025

• Say His Name (Apr 1)
  Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported despite legal protection. No explanation. Just disappearance. I wrote his name because they wouldn’t.
  

• White Rabbits (Apr 1)
  Florida’s contradictions, wrapped in sun and silence. On surveillance, safety, and forgetting.
  

• My Perfect Cousin (Apr 2)
  A backyard lemonade war becomes a metaphor for economic hypocrisy. Satire meets sense-making.
  

• Do the Tariff Tango (Apr 4)
  A poem about power, punishment, and who gets squeezed when the music changes.
  

• The Club I Thought I’d Joined (Apr 10)
  I became a U.S. citizen by choice. But lately, I’ve wondered whether the club I joined still exists.
  

• Disappeared by Design (Apr 17)
  A “clerical error” strips a family of protection. But these are not mistakes—they are messages.
  

• The Detail Is in the Devils (Apr 17)
  The GOP didn’t just lose its way. It became a machine that feeds on its own.
  

• You Don’t Get to Say “Happy Easter” Like That (Apr 20)
  A holy day twisted into rage. This piece is a reclamation—of faith, love, and the quiet voice that still whispers: even you are loved.
  

• War of the Worlds (2025 Edition) (Apr 21)
  Aliens invade. Signal chats fail. Earth is (barely) saved by emoji and ego. Absurdity becomes a mirror.
  

• What We Left on the Table (Apr 24)
  A diplomatic promise, broken. Ukraine abandoned. A plated lunch untouched. What we walk away from says everything.
  

• We Will Find You (Apr 26)
  Judge Dugan opened a side door. For that, she was arrested. When compassion is punished, what future are we writing?
  

• When Mercy Is Named a Crime (Apr 30)
  Reverend Barber knelt and prayed. The Capitol Police called it obstruction. I called it a turning point.
  → Read »

What ties them together?

This wasn’t a month of random outrage. These posts are tethered to three truths:

• That cruelty is being normalized by design.

• That mercy is now radical.

• That memory is one of the last honest tools we have.

Each piece holds the line—against forgetting, against flattening, against complicity.

A question worth repeating:

What kind of nation are we becoming
if prayer is a crime,
mercy is obstruction,
and remembering is the most radical act left?

What stayed with you this month?
Share it in the comments.

Or share this post.
Because resistance begins with remembering.

—Robert