A Relentless Truth Commentary

Somebody is always dying on your screen now. You don’t even have to go looking for it. Bombs over Iran. Gaza flattened block by block, the dust never getting a chance to settle before the next strike stirs it back up. ICE agents putting hands and bullets on people who did everything right: papers, jobs, taxes, prayers. A white man somewhere deciding his Black friend, his Black lover, even the family dog, had lived long enough. Children executed. A machete in broad daylight. A head rolling where people push strollers.

And I want to be clear about who I’m talking to. All of you. Every faction, every flag, every uniform, every basement radical and boardroom moderate who found a way to make peace with a body count. Your agendas of violence have graduated to another level of human excrement, and I’m not grading on a curve.

Now let me say something that might surprise you, coming this hot out the gate: I love what religion was supposed to do for us. The Holy Spirit. The parables. The fables that kept the masses from tearing each other’s throats out on a Tuesday. Whatever holds a grandmother together at a funeral, whatever makes a young man put the gun down before he picks it up. I honor that. But even that medicine stops working when your own neighborhood is not safe from the racist police and the racist fire chief. Law and order. You hear how they say it, like a hymn. Law and order for whom, exactly? Order arranged in whose favor?

So here’s the question I keep turning over at three in the morning, and I want you to sit with it honestly, no reflex, no rehearsed answer from Sunday school.

With all this bloodshed, all this erasure of whole families, whole neighborhoods, whole peoples, is God enjoying this? Is the Almighty somewhere getting satisfaction off the spectacle? Or is this the plan itself, some cleansing nobody briefed us on, because eight billion of us got too heavy for this spinning rock and killing each other became the necessary evil, the divine layoff notice?

You felt that flinch just now? Good. That flinch is the point. Because if the question offends you more than the killing does, your priorities got rearranged somewhere and you didn’t even notice.

Here’s what I actually believe, once I let the fury cool into focus.

This is the oldest human failure dressed in fresh excuses. That’s all it is. Cain didn’t have a drone, but he had a rationale. Every generation since has just upgraded the wardrobe: flags, scriptures, borders, algorithms, badges, desperation. The costume changes. The corpse does not.

And while the costume parade marches on, look who’s watching from the quiet insulation. The wealthy. The boardrooms and the courtrooms. The broadcasters who decide which dead child leads the hour and which one never existed. The tastemakers who can make you cry over one tragedy and scroll past ten thousand others. Artificial intelligence humming along in climate-controlled buildings, learning from all of it. These are the systems that reward the worst of it or ignore it, and either way the check clears.

People want to hand me “mental health” as the master explanation. And look, maybe some of it starts there. I won’t pretend broken minds don’t pull triggers. But those of us with a conscience and some collective wisdom can see the larger truth sitting right there in the open: this is not Mother Nature’s work. This is not fate leaking from the sky. Nobody’s rain gauge is filling up with blood by accident.

These are decisions. Repeated. Funded. Rationalized.

A budget line is a decision. A deportation quota is a decision. An arms shipment is a decision. A jury that looks away is a decision. A newsroom that buries the story is a decision. Stack enough of them and it starts to look like weather: inevitable, ambient, nobody’s fault. That’s the trick. That’s the whole magic act. Make the choices invisible and the suffering will look natural.

And when the rationalization climbs all the way up to “God needs this,” when a man can bomb a city or cage a family and file it under divine necessity, it stops being theology altogether. It becomes something I call perpetuated permissions. We wrote ourselves the permission slip, forged the signature at the top, and have been photocopying it for ten thousand years.

God didn’t sign that. We did.

As much as this is about the killers, it’s about the cosigners. Every one of us who shrugs, who changes the channel, who says “that’s just how the world is,” we’re all initialing the bottom of the form. The world is not “just how it is.” The world is how it’s been decided, daily, by people with weapons and by people with pens, and by people with remote controls who chose comfort over witness.

So here’s where I leave you, and I refuse to leave you hopeless, because hopelessness is just another permission slip, the one that excuses you from trying.

Your conscience is not a decoration. It’s equipment. Use it. Name the decisions out loud when everybody else is calling them weather. Ask who funded it, who profited, who looked away. Teach your children the difference between fate and policy, because that single distinction will make them harder to fool than an army of the numbed-out. Withhold your cosign. Publicly. Repeatedly.

The killing runs on permission. Ours has been on autopay for centuries.

Cancel yours.

Relentless

Tags:

relentless truth, perpetuated permissions, relentless aaron, cultural commentary, accountability, gun violence, police brutality, ICE, Gaza, Iran, systemic violence, fate vs policy, faith and violence, social commentary, black voices, conscience, american violence