The Edges of Progress

Here’s a wall. Here’s a fist on the wall. 

Here’s the echo it makes, dull as bone. 

Here’s the hand behind it: who built this? 

Not me, not you. Yet here we are, 

pacing the perimeter, shouting names 

across a divide too old to remember. 

Truth stands at the border, shrugging. 

She’s seen it all before: the flags, 

the fences, the careful way we stitch 

ourselves into tribes. What’s new 

is the silence after. The empty room. 

The brittle edge of what’s unsaid. 

Some things we call challenge, 

the steep hill, the storm, the heavy stone,

but this? This is theatre. A trick. 

A scaffold for power to climb. 

Listen. There’s a way through. 

A gap where words might go, 

if only we dared to speak them. 

Let the wall be a page, the fist a pen, 

the echo a voice that won’t be quiet. 

Here’s the truth: struggle isn’t the wound. 

It’s the scar. The mark of something healed, 

something whole. Here’s a hand, yours, 

mine. Take it. Push the wall.

This inspired the above poem something I wrote as a note and now it has its own poem (my thoughts had more thoughts because apparently that’s how minds work):

The notion that opposing political beliefs cannot coexist is a falsehood born of convenience, not necessity. It serves those who profit from division, for a divided populace is easier to manipulate, easier to distract from the true machinations of power. To insist that ideas must remain segregated, that opposing views cannot share the same space, is to surrender to intellectual stagnation and the slow decay of democracy itself. Truth is not born from agreement, but from struggle, an honest confrontation of perspectives. It is only in the mingling of opposites that we discover the sharp edges of our own beliefs, and in those edges, the possibility of progress.

As much as we detest the current political system, we must recognise that challenges, however uncomfortable, are essential to the growth of our thoughts and the advancement of both nations and humanity. A life without challenge is a life without motion—a stagnant existence where complacency replaces progress. Yet, not all obstacles are challenges in the truest sense. There are barriers, artificial constructs designed not to test us but to prevent us from moving forward. The Supreme Court ruling fall into this latter category, for they serve not as a spur to thought but as a wall against it. We must learn to distinguish between the trials that forge us and the barriers that confine us, for in that distinction lies the path to meaningful change.

With love and solidarity, 

Aspen Greenwood