Watching him be marched off didn’t seem at all odd.  The sirens of the police car blared, threatening to pound out every thought in my head.  The soft crunch of loose gravel over my driveway seemed to seep into my ears.  The figure of the man hobbling away, dragged by two officers, it was like watching two ants take away a large crumb.

The crumb had a large tail, his skin riddled in scales.  He turns back scanning all the fellow residents.  His golden eyes pierced every person.  The swing of his head is followed by the horns protruding over his head.  Long and spiraled, they resembled a ram’s horn if it was to grow upwards.

His eyes land on me, the thin slits of his eyes getting ever smaller.  He digs his heels into the ground using the claws that protrude out of his shoes to turn himself.  He seemed to be shouting something, but the blaring sirens and gravel drowned him out.  I don’t react, I simply look, his tongue whips out, long and slit.  He grew more irate, his fangs gleaming against the siren lights.

The two officers struggle to hold onto him.  The man struggles, trying to run towards me.  A third officer steps out from the police car and takes out a small taser.  The man is too distracted to see, to hear.  The third officer clicks the taser and two small digits shoot into the man’s skin.  The thin wires bouncing between the officer and the man as electricity is pumped into the man.  He stops shouting and trembles for a few seconds before crumpling to the ground.

The three officers load him onto the car and drive off.  The man’s front door is still open, claw marks from his initial resistance still on display.  One of the neighbors starts to gossip to another holding out their phone.  I walk past them and take a peek.

“Local man arrested for killing 3 people”

The article had an image of the man attached.   Hornless, scaless, tailless.  I continue to walk and step over the neighbor’s tail.  I take care to avoid another’s horn.

No one can see.

What I wouldn't give to say is that we live through hope. How we work so hard so that we can create a bright and beautiful future. While I want to believe it and it may be true for some I have to say that we survive through complacency. Every day we are faced with the idea that we are 3 steps away from death and or total annihilation. Cruel systems, global environment deterioration, systematic oppression, and an unending amount of work to complete to survive.

We work in a system that is made so that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. We work tirelessly for years only for our money to be worth less yet not be paid more. We are expected to become a "well-rounded" person by the time we're 18 and pay mountains of money to enter a prestigious university for a piece of paper that says we meet the expectations to work in a "respectable" field. In the U.S. one of the richest countries in the world, you can go from a middle-class working family to a poverty-stricken charity case in days for something as small as a hospital bill. The amount of money it costs to receive healthcare should be a crime. Every little thing is counted and charged more often than not at a marked-up price. Taking an Uber to a hospital would be cheaper than an ambulance.

The police have become the new dystopian patrol guards, arresting and killing anyone who is unfortunate enough to cross them on a bad day. Minorities especially Black Americans have had to scream and shout just to be barely seen by the news, while hundreds of us are injured or killed for how we look, our stories being swept under the rug just because it makes cops look bad. How silly is that, the system that was put in place to stop "bad guys" and protect the common people, now has them running in fear, having to research cases on their own just to scrounge up any bit of evidence to even prosecute a cop.

Our rights are being taken one by one, just this summer Roe v. Wade was overturned, causing millions of Americans to lose their basic human rights in one day. Not even a century did we barely start to equal the seesaw of gender equality did we get it weighed down on one side yet again? Now there is talk about revoking LGBTQ+ rights, interracial marriage, and more. It is devasting how easily we can see these rights that we should have had since the beginning be taken away one by one.

Setting aside the social issues our country faces, our environment itself is falling apart. The ozone layer has started to come apart, the water is now poisoned, and the very air we breathe is a danger to our bodies. Environmentalists have not been silent but yet we still continue to contribute to its fall, not even a century from now we may see the end of the world.

I wouldn't say that we as humans are resilient. Rather I would argue that we are complacent. We see the world fall apart around us, and it is daunting to think about how we all compare to these issues on our own. Those that have left this world on their own accord are not pitiful, it is true that it is a sad occasion, but they cannot be entirely blamed for their conclusion. We simply do what we can. We live. We work. Those that can do what they can to try and help the majority. But we as a majority are simply complacent to move with the world as the world spins.