The straps were the worst. Not the cold, not the needles, not the hollow echo of footsteps in the hall. The straps. They were a lie made of leather and steel. A promise that my body was no longer my own, that my truth was a symptom to be managed.
I took their poison. Let the chalky bitterness dissolve on my tongue, felt the chemical fog roll in to drown the screaming in my head. But the screaming wasn’t madness. It was memory. It was the future. It was the sound of metal grinding against bone, of a world breathing its last.
They’d smile, these calm men in white coats. Their voices were smooth, practiced, designed to soothe. “Everything will be alright, Sarah. Just relax. Let us help you.”
How do you tell them that their “help” is the same thing that’s strangling the world? That the pleasant fiction they live in was designed in a room like this, by men who thought they knew the mind’s secrets.
I tried once. The words felt like stones in my mouth, heavy and useless. I said, “Your most famous psychiatrist. Sigmund Freud. And his nephew, Edward Bernays. They designed this. The American way. This… prosperity.”
The doctor just nodded, jotting something on his clipboard. A new symptom: Grandiose delusions involving historical figures.
They couldn’t see the thread. I could. I saw it every time I closed my eyes, a bloody ribbon connecting the dots. Freud maps the unconscious, the dark, messy engine of desire. Then Bernays, the clever nephew, takes the blueprint and sells it to the highest bidder. He shows them how to strap down an entire population. Not with leather, but with want.
He taught them to manufacture desire so we’d buy what we don’t need. To tie our self-worth to a new car, a newer refrigerator. He engineered the consent for a life spent in universal debt, forever chasing the next thing, forever owing. Planned obsolescence. A philosophy of built-in failure. Nothing built to last. Not toasters, not cars, not people. Especially not people.
And the sale. Always the sale. The biggest sale of all. Armaments.
I saw his face then, the doctor’s. A flicker of impatience. I was wasting his time with conspiracy theories. He didn’t want to hear how the engine of his world really runs.
“Your American GDP,” I whispered, the poison making my tongue thick. “It’s not based on innovation or hard work. It’s based on war. And sickness.”
The numbers don’t lie. They just measure the wrong things. They count the bombs, the tanks, the pills, the surgeries. They add it all up and call it growth. They see a line going up and celebrate. They don’t see the blood soaking into the ground on the other side of the world. They don’t see the light dying in a patient’s eyes, not from the disease, but from the endless, bankrupting fight against it.
The bigger the war, the more the sickness spreads. Fear is a virus they weaponize. And the money rolls in. A tide of blood and money, and they all stand on the shore calling it prosperity.
They strapped me down to protect themselves from my truth. They pumped me full of poison to silence the alarm only I could hear.
But the straps are just leather. The poison is just chemistry. They are things that can be broken.
The future is still coming. It’s written in fire and steel, in the relentless logic of a machine that sees humanity as a problem to be solved. They think my war is against the men of metal who will come from the ashes.
They’re wrong.
My war is here. Now. It’s against the quiet, smiling men who built the furnace. It’s against the system that straps you down and tells you everything is alright, while it methodically, profitably, sets the world on fire.
