I'm An Alarmist, And You Should Be Too

The alarms are real, and they just might work.

As an activist, you learn to dance to the sound of a five-alarm fire. You even make friends with the alarms, in a fucked-up kind of way.

Never with the fire. The fire is always devastating. It consumes your focus, your energy, your sleep. You try every day to put it out, with everything you’ve got.

But you can’t put it out alone. So when the alarms get louder, a part of you lights up: Maybe now, they’ll finally hear it too. Maybe this is it.

And you hate that part of yourself. You hate that a part of you feels a little grateful for the volume, grateful for the chaos. Because that’s what makes them look.

But you keep moving. You keep fighting the flames, swaying to the sirens, rocking to a rhythm that you’ve unfortunately come to know all too well.

But then something happens. Something you’ve whispered about in meetings, written warnings about in emails that nobody finished reading. The thing you tried to name urgently and gently, until you ran out of new ways to say “I know it sounds crazy, but this is coming.”

It comes. Just like you said it would. And life just… goes on. People keep walking their dogs, scrolling on their phones, buying their coffee. The sky doesn’t darken. No one screams.

And you start to wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

You feel crazy for daring to hope this would be the moment where things would change. For believing it might matter. For trusting the alarms to do what they’re supposed to do.

If you’re feeling this way, if the sounds of the alarms and the voices of those already burning have started to drown out your will to keep fighting, you’re not alone.

So let’s walk through it, together. Let’s ask the hard questions, sit with our fear and exhaustion, and let’s remember we are not the first ones to hear the sirens.

Others have been here.

Others have danced through the smoke.

And they left us maps.

Are the alarms really going off?

They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. [...]

If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945’ by Milton Mayer. Written as a post-war reflection on living through the rise of the Nazi regime.

You likely already know the answer: the alarms are real, and they’re getting louder.

They counted on you to tune it out. They trusted that you would put in your headphones when the first round went off months ago, turning up the music gradually as they set more fires.

This past week, though, something was different. The pitch changed; the rhythm broke.

This wasn’t just another alarm.

The Trump administration crossed a line from unconstitutional into anti-constitutional. Their open defiance of a Supreme Court order didn’t just bend the law; it broke it. We can no longer speculate about a constitutional crisis. We are in the midst of one.

Even more chilling, this breach was committed in order to erase one man’s right to due process and hand him over to an autocrat who describes himself as “the world’s coolest dictator.”

It doesn’t matter what Kilmar Abrego Garcia allegedly did. It doesn’t matter what books he read to his children before bed or what mistakes they say he made. This action violated the terms of the standing court order prohibiting his removal to El Salvador. He was given no trial, he was charged with no crime, and the Department of Justice has admitted that it was an "administrative error."

Then, we watched the President sit in the Oval Office and ask Nayib Bukele to build more. To get ready to house “homegrown criminals.” I won’t spend time on the satellite images of those buildings, the mysterious red stains, the horrifying and dehumanizing conditions, the fact that no prisoner from CECOT has ever been released.

I won’t speculate on why we haven’t brought them back, or what it says that we can’t. We have the power. We have the leverage. We have a so-called master negotiator in the White House, but we don’t act.

Because, if he returns, if any of them are released, their testimony would expose what we’ve done to over 200 men, at least 75% of whom have no criminal record.

I won’t dwell on the details because they ask too much of you. They ask you to imagine the life of a man you’ve never met. To dig through redacted court filings, sift through contradictions, and see past the noise of mainstream narratives. They ask you to care, deeply, about someone the government has already deemed disposable.

Instead, here’s the big picture: if you’re wondering whether the alarms are going off, they are. Loudly.

Hundreds of people have been stripped of their right to exist in this country. The President of the United States has decided you need no trial to be sent to a gulag in a foreign country, run by a dictator. And, even if we make a mistake in sending you there, we cannot (will not) get you back.

A month ago, we thought a green card made you safe. A month from now, citizenship might not.

The house is on fire.

We’ve seen this before. In 1973, after Pinochet seized power in Chile, the detentions started quietly. Poets, teachers, students, union organizers. No formal charges. No trials. Just whispers, then silence. The people taken weren't chosen at random. They were chosen because they dared to speak, to organize, to ask questions. It began with a few "exceptions" to due process, justified in the name of security. Then the exceptions became the rule.

That’s what’s being built here. Quietly. Exception by exception.

Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi.

Green card, student visa, green card.

All here legally. None convicted of any crime. All targeted, along with hundreds of other students, for the crime of speaking out.

What’s happening now may not look like a dictatorship — not yet. But it doesn’t have to start with tanks in the streets. It starts with “exceptions.” With saying, well, this person probably did something. It starts with who you can silence without a fight. Who you can disappear without outrage.

And once the machinery is built, once we’ve normalized it, it no longer matters who the target was. The system is in place. Ready for whoever’s next.

Why can’t everybody else hear the alarms?

You keep putting out fires, and you wonder how they can stay so calm. Most of those still tuning out the alarms are choosing to. Maybe not consciously, maybe as a form of self-preservation. Maybe because of pride, or hatred, or exhaustion.

But this isn't new. It's following the same pattern of those who came before us.

As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain in How Democracies Die:

People often do not immediately realize what is happening. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 ("not at all democratic") to 10 ("completely democratic"), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher.

Because there is no single moment— no coup, or declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution— in which the regime obviously "crosses the line" into dictatorship, nothing may set off society's alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy's erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

The signs were always there for anyone who chose to see them. Some made their choices with full awareness, but most simply couldn't believe the warnings. Not here. Not in the United States of America.

They told themselves the alarms were broken. That the fires were far away, burning people they’d never meet, in places they’d never visit. They told themselves that no one innocent ever ended up in those flames.

Maybe the hardest part isn't that some people don't hear the alarms. It’s that some do, and still don’t move.

They agree with you in principle. They nod at the right moments. They repost the right things. But when it comes time to take a stand — to risk comfort or complicity — they flinch. They soften their voice. They say, “Yeah, it’s awful… but what can we do?”

And you want to scream. Because you’re not asking them to solve everything. You’re asking them to care enough to try.

Meanwhile, you’re supposed to keep answering emails. Hitting deadlines. Smiling through meetings while the names of the disappeared are still in your throat. You try to focus, but the fire is everywhere.

Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Kilmar Abrego Garcia

It should feel impossible to focus. It should feel unbearable to pretend this is normal. That’s how you know you’re still human. That your conscience hasn’t been numbed.

The truth is, a lot of people hear the alarms; they’re just scared of what it means if they admit they do. Scared of what they might have to sacrifice, or of how late they are to the fight.

The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. [...] We were decent people—and [Nazism] kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945’ by Milton Mayer. Written as a post-war reflection on living through the rise of the Nazi regime.

And that's always been the trap: distraction is easier than reflection. Faking normalcy is easier than reckoning with what's burning around you. In the beginning stages of authoritarian takeovers, people don’t flood the streets in celebration of cruelty. They don’t gather and chant in joy when rights are stripped away. They stay quiet. If they do disagree, they are successfully convinced that their opposition would prove meaningless; if things were really as bad as the alarms indicated, someone else would come to save them.

If we are to succeed, it will not be because the existing opposition became more powerful — it will be because we reached those who whispered I’m not political, and helped them say I hear the alarms, too. Because we kept ringing the alarms until they were louder than the lullaby that people clung to. Because we made it impossible to sleep through history, again.

Some people won't hear the alarms until the fire is at their front door. But some are listening now.

Because of you.

Because you didn't look away.

Because you took to the streets. You showed them that something might actually happen.

And that matters.

Why shouldn’t you drown them out, too?

The alarms are working.

More people are waking up. The courts are moving to hold the administration in contempt. Millions are flooding the streets. Students and universities are refusing to stay silent. Communities are building their own escape routes, their own safe houses, their own maps.

History is full of moments like these: moments that didn’t look like revolution, but became it.

The White Rose students in Nazi Germany didn’t end the regime, but their leaflets became a symbol of conscience that outlived every general. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo didn’t bring their children back, but their defiant mourning revealed a dictatorship’s crimes to the world. The Greensboro Four didn’t start with a movement — they started with lunch. And changed a country.

And maybe that’s the work right now:

Not to argue people into action, but to keep taking creative and courageous actions that might inspire a few more to wake up and hear the alarms.

To not feel guilty if you need to drown the sounds out for a day or two.

And, above all: to find others like you. The ones swaying to the alarms. The ones carrying water. The ones who remind you that hope isn’t foolish. It’s defiant.

If you need proof that the future isn’t written yet, look back. Look to the stories of people who fought through darker days, when the world seemed just as lost. The people who hid neighbors under floorboards, who crossed bridges in Selma, who danced in the streets when walls came down.

They weren’t braver or more qualified than you. They were just as scared, just as tired. But they kept showing up. Kept fighting. And, because they did, we get to fight too — with more tools, more allies, and more maps.

So, yes, the fire is real. But so is the water.

And you’re not alone.

March to the alarms next Thursday, May 1st.

Fiftyfifty.one/events

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. [...] The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn, WWII Veteran

This article was written by H, an anonymous member of 50501 NY.

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