I work in addiction recovery, and recently I sat with a client whose emotional state was difficult to ignore. At first, I considered whether she might need a crisis intervention, but as I listened, I realized what she needed most was space to be heard. So I let her speak—angrily, urgently, and with trembling hands.
She’s a young African American woman originally from Alabama, though how she ended up here remains unclear. Her words came fast and heavy. She told me, with certainty and dread, that after April 20th, 2025, she would be enslaved again. That white police officers in Alabama were going to imprison her children. That Russia, China, and Iran were planning to overtake America—and that she had seen preparations while serving overseas. Seven ships, she said, were being readied in Africa, destined to come to America to "save the Black."
To an outside observer, these claims may sound delusional. But what struck me most was not the content of her beliefs—it was the raw emotion behind them. Her voice rose, shaking with a mixture of anger, desperation, and unrelenting fear. She wasn’t just talking. She was sounding an alarm only she could hear clearly. She had story after story, all strung together by deep, lived anxiety.
And as I sat there listening, I realized: I wasn’t afraid of her—I was afraid of the world she was describing. I was afraid of tomorrow.
I’m writing this not to dramatize or devalue her experience, but to reflect on the collective distress many people are carrying. Fear, whether grounded in fact or shaped by trauma, is real. It's loud. It moves through the body. And in some communities, it's become generational—etched into memory like code into DNA.
It hasn't even been 100 days. And already, the cracks are showing.
Imagine four years
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