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We used to be horrified by the phrase “kids in cages.”
Not because the metaphor was clever. Because it was literal: chain-link, mylar blankets, concrete floors, fluorescent lights that never go off, and crying babies in the background. Children processed like evidence, held like inventory.
We knew it was wrong, and for a minute we couldn’t stop thinking about it. We felt the wrongness in our bodies, and it haunted us.
Then something happened that is almost more terrifying than the cages themselves:
We got used to them. The haunting stopped.
Outrage has a shelf life in an attention economy. Not because the harm stopped, but because our nervous systems cannot stay in open-loop emergency forever. The story doesn’t end, so our minds do what minds do to survive: they downshift. They compartmentalize. They normalize.
The keyword here is “survive.”
The normalization becomes its own kind of policy. The political class changes costumes, the language changes, the headlines change, but the machinery keeps running.
In 2021, under the Biden administration, the number of unaccompanied children held in Border Patrol custody surged again, including reports of kids being held far beyond the intended short-term window, and it hit a scale that fact-checkers compared to previous peaks.
But we barely noticed.
Maybe it was inconvenient to admit it wasn’t just an “evil Republican” thing. Maybe with the pandemic, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to notice.
This is how a society learns to live with the unthinkable. Not by agreeing with it—by learning to look away without noticing.
We have looked away.
And now we are inside a different version of the same mechanism, scaled up until it starts to feel cosmically destabilizing.
The Epstein Files
A flood of documentation so massive that it stops functioning like “information” and starts functioning like weather. An atmosphere. A constant drip of names, connections, communications, logistics, receipts.
A revelation that never resolves into justice. The Epstein files will not become the Epstein trials—and we can feel that in our gut.
In late January 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published millions of pages of Epstein-related material under a federal transparency law, including large volumes of media. And across February, the news cycle has been a churn of fallout, denials, resignations, investigations, and political theater, with no shared sense of closure.
This is the part that feels like a psychological operation, even if no one planned it in a smoky room.
Whether engineered or emergent, the effect is the same: the unthinkable is delivered to the public as a slow-release toxin.
We are forced to metabolize horrors at a pace no human organism evolved to metabolize.
We are trained to consume atrocity as content.
We are given exposure without resolution.
And exposure without resolution does not liberate people—it destabilizes them.
When something is truly unfathomable, the mind doesn’t just reject it. The mind fractures around it. People swing between obsession and shutdown, doom-scrolling and dissociation. It is a frantic hunger for the next drop, followed by nausea, followed by numbness, followed by shame for being numb.
That’s not moral failure.
That’s physiology.
A nervous system can only stay in sustained horror for so long before it reaches for anesthesia.
And here is where the trap closes:
If the story becomes: “Look how bad it is, and nothing will happen,” then the files don’t simply reveal criminality. They teach helplessness.
They become a curriculum in hopelessness.
And control thrives in hopelessness.
Hopelessness is the perfect governance strategy because it doesn’t require censorship. It doesn’t require jackboots. It doesn’t even require lies. You can publish the truth and still win—if the truth arrives without consequence.
Because a truth with no path forward becomes a cage of its own.
So people do what people do when they feel trapped:
They cope.
They distract.
They pick a team.
They weaponize the information against enemies and ignore it when it implicates allies.
They turn a nightmare into a talking point.
They make memes so their bodies can breathe again.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the unthinkable becomes part of the wallpaper. That is the spiritual crisis underneath the political crisis.
Not only, “What happened?” But “What happens to us when we are asked to witness evil as a spectacle, day after day, with no justice, no repair, no reckoning, no protection for children that we can feel in our bones?”
It changes us.
It changes who we trust.
It changes how we relate to institutions.
It changes how safe the world feels at a cellular level.
That is real. That dismantling is real.
And still…
We have to be careful with the conclusion our despair is begging us to draw.
Despair wants to say: Nothing matters. No one can be stopped. The powerful are untouchable. The world is rotten. Close your heart. Shut it all down.
That is the voice of captivity. It sounds sophisticated. It sounds like realism.
It is, in practice, surrender.
Here is a different way to hold it, one that does not require optimism or denial:
What if the job is not to “handle” the whole horror at once?
What if the job is to refuse the nervous system capture? To refuse the false binary between numbness and collapse?
To say:
I will witness what is real, but I will not let it destroy my capacity to act.
I will not let endless revelation replace accountability.
I will not let the exposure itself become a substitute for justice.
Because names in documents are not convictions, and archives are not trials. (That distinction matters if we care about truth and not just rage.) But the existence of the archive still reveals something unmistakable: structures that protected predators, insulated reputations, and treated children as disposable.
If we want to break that, we don’t need to carry the whole nightmare in our bodies at once. We need to build consequence.
Consequence is not only courtrooms, though we should demand them.
Consequence is also: support for survivors that is material, not performative; statutes of limitation expanded; institutions forced into transparency and liability; media that investigates instead of drip-feeding spectacle; and communities that stop outsourcing protection to systems that have already demonstrated their priorities.
And in the meantime, a personal ethic that is almost revolutionary in its simplicity:
Do not let horror turn you into a spectator.
You are allowed to set limits on what you consume.
You are allowed to stop reading when your body starts to freeze.
You are allowed to grieve.
You are allowed to rage.
You are allowed to keep your heart open without feeding yourself into the algorithm like kindling.
The goal is not to be perfectly informed.
The goal is to stay human enough to protect what can still be protected. The goal is to keep your agency intact.
If control thrives in hopelessness, then hope is not a mood. Hope is a practice.
Hope is choosing a lane where your hands can touch reality.
Hope is refusing to normalize cages, in any form.
Hope is refusing to let “nothing will happen” become a prophecy you help fulfill.
And if you feel yourself changing, if you feel your inner world reorganizing around the knowledge, you are not weak. You are not dramatic. You are reacting like a sane person reacts to an insane world.
Let that sanity become a vow:
Not to carry everything, but to carry what is yours to carry.
Not to know everything, but to do something real.
Not to look away, but to look forward and build consequence anyway.
~
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