The Prisons are Being Built

Call the Duck a Duck

I don’t need to dress this up. You feel it. Something’s happening! It´s in the air, and it’s not paranoia, it’s pattern recognition. P-a-t-t-e-r-n. You gotta learn to see the signs. 

They’re building the prisons

No, not metaphorical ones. Real ones. Fenced. Barbed. Wired. Funded. Staffed. With contracts signed, Dow Jones listed for profit, cement poured, and policies wrapped up in patriotic language.

They’ll say it’s for “illegals.” They’ll tell you it’s for “bad hombres”, those horrible brown criminals. They’ll tell you it’s for “home-grown threats.” And then one day, they'll see you walking down the street, nod softly to one another, the signal given, and they will stop you and ask your name. They will check on their list and guess what? You will be on that list.

I know, I know. You don´t believe this shit. What I'm saying, you’ll just shrug it off. Hey, that duck hasn’t turned its head yet, right? But I’m telling you, that beak is twitching.

A Duck Is a Duck

You know how the saying goes; if it walks like authoritarianism, quacks like fascism, builds camps like tyranny. Then it’s not a goose. It’s a damn duck! And we need to start calling it that because they're not just building detention centers “for migrants.¨ Hell no! They're laying the blueprint for anybody, any soul, any voice that dares to say: I disagree!

Legal Experts Say It’s Impossible… and Yet It Happens. The lawyers will tell you it’s unconstitutional to imprison U.S. citizens for dissent. That it can’t be done. And I agree with their textbooks. But maybe they haven´t noticed yet that reality doesn’t live in the Constitution anymore. It lives in loopholes. Right next door to the corrupt Supreme Court. It lives in bills passed at midnight. It lives in pathetic justices who’ve traded robes for power and money and paid luxury vacations.

They told us family separation was illegal and yet children were ripped from parents, traumatized into silence. Not all children, but a specific kind of brown colored ones. The hatred is strong, living large in the land of equality and freedom, right? They told us internment was a relic of the past, and yet Guantánamo never closed. They told us democracy self-corrects, but the algorithms brought to us by the high tech bros don't care. They are just made to control.

The Infrastructure of Control Is Already Here

56,000 ICE beds now. Over 100,000 funded. A “beautiful” new detention center in the Everglades; barbed wire, and gators for company.

Guantánamo Bay, once a ghost of America’s shame, is baaaack! Whispering to the winds again.

Surveillance cameras don’t blink anymore. Neither does your neighbor. He or she will start to watch you, to snitch on you. You still think this is about immigrants? No. They’re testing the system. Measuring silence. Preparing a cell for someone who looks just like you, and talks just like me.

Hello? Is There a Plan B? Surely there must be! People often ask this. They say, “Surely someone’s gonna do something about this?” I want to say yes. I want to hand them a hotline, a hero, a map. Something. But the honest truth? We are the Plan B. You. Me. People who still feel something when injustice screams, when injustice breathes around you, around us. We’re the firewall. The lifeboat. The last smoke signal.

Plan A: trust the system. That has already failed.

... Gone!

Plan B is to wake up. Build. Connect. Speak. Prepare. And don’t let them scare you back to sleep. This Is Not About Politics Anymore. It’s not about left or right. It’s about who gets crushed today, and who watches and doesn´t react. It’s about whether your children inherit a cage or go to a school built nearby. That would be nice, right? It’s about whether your voice still matters when it says “no.”

They are building the prisons. They are naming you the threat. They are shaping a world where obedience is virtue and silence is survival.

So What Now?

Now, we better be ready to build something else. To fight for ´that´ something else. Small but real. Honest but dangerous. Because it is going to become dangerous. Because if they're building a prison for dissenters, what are you gonna do, stay quiet? Allow it to happen to others? Wait for your turn? Let’s make our voices worth the cell. It´s already being built for you and yours. Let’s speak so truthfully that the bars rattle from the weight of it.

Because we must call the duck a duck. And if you don´t want to deal with this reality, then fly away. While you still can.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas