Beloved,

collision follows collision.
And the days—
the days do not improve.

People certain of their rightness
meet the machinery of the state,
power moving through the streets
like weather—
impersonal, efficient, hard to stop.

But remember this:
everyone belongs to someone.

Sons and daughters.
Fathers and mothers.
Uncles, nieces.
One family—
split by uniforms,
but still a family.

Sleep comes lightly now.
Thoughts do not stay put.
Calendars are crossed out.
Even ordinary days
begin to crack.

It feels like walking
toward the last battlefield,
toward Golgotha—
that hill where history keeps returning
without learning the hymn.

You can feel it, can’t you?
The tightening.
The cold breath of total rule.
The wind of authority
that does not ask.

And it falls—suddenly—
on a thirty-seven-year-old body:
Alex Pretti,
January 24, 2026.

And not on him alone—
but on others with him:
Renee Good,
Keith Porter,
Heber Sanchez Dominguez,
Victor Manuel Diez Parady La,
Luis Beltran Yanez Cruz,
Geraldo Lunas Campos.

Hear their names.
Say them softly.
They were not statistics.
They were someone’s someone.

America trembles now,
afraid of losing
what once felt natural—
civility,
solidarity—
shaken by fear
and by untruth.

And Scripture still tells us the truth:
when we keep silent,
extremes grow bold.
When we look away,
power learns it can return.

Under a sense of permission,
masks appear.
Marches form—
part parade, part warning—
celebrations of control.

They confuse noise with strength.
They mistake dominance for order.
They imagine power as something
you seize
and keep.

They say it aloud now:
Now it’s allowed.
Now we can come out.
The government is with us.

And so they march—
before the war is even named.

They dream of a nation made smaller:
one color,
one voice—
feeling threatened
by many tongues,
many stories,
many ways of breathing.

They shout for
patriotism,
order,
tradition—
and hide beneath those words
exclusion,
deception,
violence practiced as duty.

Beloved,
the danger is not disagreement.

The danger is thought hardened into a crowd.
Belief turned into threat.
The public square made unsafe.

This is the hour—
not to sleep,
not to shrug—
but to refuse what is being normalized:

violence made routine,
division made policy,
the slow slide toward rule by force,
the quiet undoing of choice.

Do not dismiss this
as common sense.
Normal is fragile.
Normal is rare.
Normal is the last reservoir.

We cannot afford
to lose it.

But hear this also—
there is another sound.

Hands joining hands.
Songs rising—
not loud,
not perfect,
but human.

From want toward enough.
From harshness toward fairness.
A people relearning
how to sing.

And this is our hope, beloved:

there is a third day.

A day that breaks the dark.
A day when stones are rolled away.
A day when what was declared finished
is not finished at all.

The return of the ordinary.
The saving of the normal.
The dignity
of being human.

So let it be said of us:

No more shouting in hatred.
No more weeping in grief.

On the third day,
we rise—
not with fists, but with faith,
not with fear, but with love.

Amen.

— TaeHun Yoon
January 26, 2026