Oh, wait. The devolution. Yeah. The devolution will totally be televised. The devolution willl be all over the socials. The devolution will be on your phones and watches and all up in your earbuds.

There will be pictures of ICE cubes knocking down your fellow humans on a seven-second loop.

There will be stories of brain-dead women carrying their babies to term in respected hospitals.

There will be slow-mos of fists pumping the air, of Confederate flags entering the U.S. Capitol.

There will be queerfolk being stripped of their humanity daily, hourly, by the minute, by the second, by the millisecond, by the microsecond, by the nanosecond, by the picosecond, by the femtosecond, by the attosecond.

There will be rooms packed with people nobody wants to see as people. Also hospitals. Also boats, planes, trucks, camps, tents, cages, jails, places of torture, places of death, places of death, places of death.

Money will flow up and up like single-use plastic bags carried by a strong wind. You’ll think they’re birds. They aren’t birds. They’re bills, and they’re yours, and there goes another one, into the sky, into the white, white sky that somehow has white hands, that somehow has white eyes and a white mouth and a white mind.

Brother, the revolution has already been televised and streamed and downloaded and bootlegged and AI’d and exported and framed and staged and played and played all the way out. It went down like a sport, a sport that required sacrifice.

Brother, it started long ago. In our home state. In our hometown. In our family. In our ancestry. In our lack of reckoning. In the balls of time click-clacking away on the desk while we’re in another room pretending today is yesterday and tomorrow will be another yesterday.

Brother, the devolution was live. You missed it. We’re already living inside it.

Brother, the devolution was live. We are already the living dead.

—

In homage to Gil Scott-Heron, who wrote the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”