Water Is Still Wet

Reluctant Concessions in a System Built to Consume and Destroy

I’ve returned to these places before—the ocean and the trees—and I am beginning to understand why. Some truths don’t need to be reinvented. They need to be revisited.

The ocean holds what I can’t. The trees offer silence without demand. Between them, I remember that resistance doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply refuses to disappear.

Lately, that refusal has felt quieter than outrage and heavier than hope. I’ve been moving through the world with a kind of watchfulness—present, but not rushing to the front of every line. Not absent. Not asleep. Just aware of where my body is welcomed, where it is expected, and where it has historically been used as evidence.

Not indifference, but discernment—the kind that comes from knowing when presence turns into performance.

I go to the ocean to visit my mother at Depoe Bay. I have the coordinates. She donated her body to science, which is the polite phrasing for a harder truth: she died in poverty, and we were not speaking at the end. Silence has a lineage. So does harm. I choose to believe that wherever she is now, she sees more clearly than she could here. That she understands the weight she carried, the damage she never had language for, the inheritance she left behind without meaning to.

The trees are different. I go to them for alliance. They do not read me. They do not require context or explanation. They do not turn me into symbol or lesson. They simply stand, having survived centuries of weather, fire, and human interference. Their resistance is not loud. It is uninterrupted.

This is where I begin to understand resistance not as spectacle, but as continuity. Not as a single act, but as a posture. A way of remaining intact when the world keeps asking you to fracture yourself for proof.

Because what has broken my heart lately is not just the violence itself—it’s the insistence that this is new. That this escalation is surprising. That if we just wait, just vote, just speak nicely enough, it will stop on its own.

And water is still wet, y’all. That’s not cynicism. It’s memory.

The system has always been willing to consume and destroy. Pretending otherwise has always been the luxury of those it protects.

And this—this moment, this pressure, this visibility—is not a deviation from history. It is the continuation of it.

Lucy Burns and the Mathematics of Cruelty

In 1917, the United States government decided that silence was a threat.

Lucy Burns was not arrested for violence. She was not accused of theft or sabotage. She was arrested for standing still. For holding a banner. For refusing to leave when told—politely at first, then forcefully—that her presence was inconvenient.

The women who stood with her were called the Silent Sentinels. They picketed the White House without chants, without riots, without spectacle. They asked President Wilson a single question: how could a nation claim democracy abroad while denying it at home?

The answer was not debate.
It was incarceration.

When arrests failed to stop the pickets, the sentences lengthened. When jail failed to break them, the state escalated. Burns and dozens of other women were transferred to the Occoquan Workhouse, a facility designed less for rehabilitation than for humiliation. What followed became known as the Night of Terror.

Lucy Burns was singled out not because she was weak, but because she was strong. She was educated. Unyielding. Organizing even from behind bars. The guards understood something fundamental about power: if you break the leader, you break the line.

So they hung her.

They shackled her wrists above her head and chained them to the cell door. Her feet barely touched the floor. The position forced her shoulders to bear her full weight for hours. It damaged her body permanently. This was not a loss of control. It was control, exercised with precision.

This is what consumption looks like.

The goal was not simply to punish Lucy Burns. It was to use her suffering as leverage—to drain resolve from the women who could hear her, to turn endurance into a warning. Her body became an instrument. Her pain became policy.

And still, she did not recant.

Occoquan workhouse c. 1917 by National Geographic

The state miscalculated. What it treated as disposable became evidence. News of the brutality escaped the walls of Occoquan. The public, unmoved by banners, recoiled at chains. Judges intervened. The women were released. Years later, the 19th Amendment was ratified.

This is often where the story is told as progress.

But that framing misses the point.

Lucy Burns did not win because the system evolved. The system conceded because exposure threatened its legitimacy. It did not stop consuming—it simply adjusted its tactics. Burns’ health never recovered. Her body paid a price that history rarely tallies when it celebrates outcomes.

This is the pattern.

The system extracts until resistance becomes too visible, too costly, too destabilizing to maintain as-is. Then it offers a concession—narrow, conditional, carefully controlled—and calls it change.

What Lucy Burns endured was not an anomaly. It was a rehearsal. A demonstration of how far the state is willing to go when challenged by people who refuse to disappear quietly.

And the lesson it taught was not mercy.

It was this:
when silence fails, the system reaches for the body.