ECW-18

From The Shade

During the elections, we must not sleep a wink. My eyes must be as wide, if not wider, as
the thickly outrageous faces that those candidates put on during their masquerades of uninviting
deceit. Not a single second must we waste on anything else. No matter how dark the night may
be, we must remain awake. Although I may not be able to vote, I am entirely aware of the
universally known fact that whatever result there may be would greatly affect the future we
could all foresee.
I have always been afraid of the dark with a burning passion, but that fire was never
enough, never too bright, to light the night away. At night, I lay restless. I toss and turn at the
thought of the monsters that could be hiding underneath my bed, at the whispers they try to get
through my head, and at the dangers that may lie ahead. Like presidential elections, darkness is
unpredictable, you could never truly know what there is to come.
When the dreariest of nights begins to fall, I wonder how on Earth could we find light,
how on Earth could we emerge, form this unforgiving shade when all forms light seem to have
gone completely missing. A power outage—the loss of power. Today, we lack power. Neither
the stars or moon could be found on the sky for us to heed, at such a time like this, there would
only ever be hogs dressed in suits to hide their obnoxiously large bellies that scream greed. I am
afraid of the dark, though when the blanket above begins to fall apart, there must be no room for
fear, for the only ones to stitch it back together are those who stand below. Our votes yield
overwhelmingly substantial influence upon the future we breed, the open-ended question as to
how or when we would succeed, and the people who could give us the answers to what we
genuinely plead.
No matter how dark the night may come to be, we must keep in mind that what lays in
our hands, our very thumb of identity, is the key—it is the key what could most probably set us
free from the hands that keep us down. It is the key to the bars than imprison us in the futility of
our own thoughtless decisions. We keep in mind that when justice begins to turn into something
unrecognizable, it is not truly what we have come to know as just is, but something that it
contradicts.
As a nation, we must be aware of the adversity that is before us. We must keep our eyes
relentlessly wide open, but when those who lead start to favor the Giant that Sleeps instead of
those in need, that is a red flag—a sign that there must be something wrong with the way things
are. When sand, and not rice, is the only thing we receive, there must be something wrong with
the way things are. When we are given metal bars instead of books, there must be something
wrong with the way things are. We are in the dark, no wonder our country has been asleep.
There are many red flags in our time today, but how longer are they here to stay? We are
still in the dark, and I am still afraid, but within our hearts and minds lies the future we trade.
Despite being engulfed in the darkness, I have somehow come to learn that the day we vote is the
moment we emerge from the shade, our hearts ignited with a burning passion, we must stand
unafraid of what is to come, for what lies ahead will be the dawn that breaks and not the dusk
that fakes. All this must be on the moment we emerge from the shade.