You're of No Use, No Good Dead
The grave is silence. The living are signal.
The system does not want martyrs. Martyrs inspire, they linger, they ignite. The system cannot risk that spark. What it wants instead are bodies reduced to paperwork, corpses it can classify, statistics it can bury, names it can scrub. It wants the ledger clean, the headlines forgotten, the story erased.
Dead, you are no good. You cannot witness, you cannot resist. You cannot call out their lies, cannot testify to their crimes, cannot remind others that the mask is cracking.
Alive, even limping, you are dangerous because the living can still speak, still testify, still signal. The living can still refuse. Every day alive is another day the illusion has not won. Survival itself is disruption.
The System
The machine. The spinning wheel. The circus. Whatever name it goes by, “The system” isn’t one thing. It’s a web.
Institutions of control
Laws and courts that punish the poor more harshly than the rich.
Police and surveillance that protect property more than people.
Healthcare and debt that extract money and discipline behavior.
Economic machinery
Corporations that buy influence through lobbying.
Billionaires who hoard education and resources to guard their own weakness.
A growth-at-all-costs model that feeds on crisis and scarcity.
Narrative management
Media spectacles that frame noise as strength.
Two-party theater that convinces us Tom and Jerry are mortal enemies when they are really partners in the same show.
Education stripped down to obedience, while real history and critical thought are fenced off.
Illusion of inevitability
The system survives not just on force but on belief: that nothing can change, that “this is just how it works,” that despair is the only rational response.
Weakness Misnamed Strength
Weak men lash out and burn fast, mistaking collapse for strength. They are quick to anger, quick to swing, quick to lose their temper. Reaction masquerades as power, but reaction burns itself out. Real power waits. Real power endures.
Reaction creates cracks. Every outburst opens a line for error, a chance to overreach, a trail of weakness for others to follow. Each flare-up is an opportunity for misstep, the kind of mistake that can undo a movement faster than any outside force. Reaction builds a false sense of confidence. The louder the shout, the more fragile the core.
Being right means nothing if it kills you. Dead, you are no good. You cannot resist. The living are dangerous because they can endure, they can measure, they can choose their moment. Real power is not proven by striking first, but by surviving long enough to strike last.
The system wants us to mirror weakness: to rage until we collapse, to react until we exhaust ourselves, to mistake noise for strength. That is not resistance. That is surrender disguised as defiance.
Response is different. Response is deliberate. It is not silence, it is strategy.
The system has the advantage because it is not alive. It cannot be exhausted. It cannot be embarrassed. It isn’t real in the way we are. It has no breath, no limit, no body to break. It is a bottomless pit and men keep hurling rocks into it, confident they are filling it up, mistaking the clatter of stones for progress. They look down and think they see the bottom, when in truth it only swallows more.
The trap is believing the system can be beaten with the same rage it feeds on. It is not a thing to burn out louder or faster than. It is an illusion to be unmasked, a machinery to be dismantled piece by piece, a pit to be sealed by refusing to keep throwing rocks inside.
So we say again.
The system wants us to mirror weakness: to rage until we collapse, to react until we exhaust ourselves, to mistake noise for strength. That is not resistance. That is surrender disguised as defiance.
Lessons From History
History shows how brittle even the strongest power becomes when illusions fail.
The 300 Spartans did not fall because of their lack of discipline. They fell because betrayal exposed their flank. Divide and rule, not raw strength, toppled them.
Native tribes were not conquered by sheer force of arms. They were turned against each other, promised survival in exchange for alliance, bled slowly by division until unity was impossible. Empire never had to conquer all at once; it only had to ensure its enemies did not stand together.
Even the greatest empires collapsed when inevitability cracked. Rome, the Soviet Union, colonial Britain, all looked immovable, until suddenly they weren’t. Their undoing was not the size of their armies but the erosion of belief in their permanence.
Where Strength Really Lives
The ruling class is not the strength of this nation. They are its weakness. They have the most to lose if the system stops working for them. That is why they hoard education and resources. That is why they prey on the weakest and dangle promises they could easily keep but never will. Scarcity keeps us obedient. Ignorance keeps us blind.
Every time education expands, their grip slips. Every time people connect the dots, their illusion thins. That is why they fight hardest to close schools, ban books, and cut off access to knowledge. They are not afraid of riots; they are afraid of literacy, of memory, of solidarity.
The Work of the Living
Staying alive is not passive. It is strategy.
Local wins matter. They decide who runs election boards, schools, courts, and labor rules. They are the sandbags at the flood line. Parallel systems matter, too. Mutual aid, unions, co-ops, strike funds, and community defense do not need permission slips. Education matters most of all, because every page turned is another crack in the walls of ignorance.
Each library kept open, each worker defended, each law challenged, each signal amplified is proof that the line still holds. It is proof that we are still alive.
The Real Protest
The highest protest is not despair. It is endurance. “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,” JFK said. But inevitability is not destiny. It is engineered. The first refusal is not to collapse.
The system wants corpses it can erase. Alive, you are of no use to them and that is precisely why staying alive is resistance. Survival is disruption. Refusal is defiance.
Life itself is rebellion.
TOW THE LINE
Survival is not surrender. Staying alive is strategy.
FROM THE ETHER
The dead are buried. The living are signal.