You don’t remember his name—only the tremor in his voice. He said the line would be crossed quietly, almost politely, and that no one would notice because they’d be too busy debating who to fault. He spoke about outrage turning into entertainment, about facts becoming flexible, about loyalty to teams replacing loyalty to truth. At the time, it felt dramatic—like a monologue delivered a little too intensely for the room.
Years later, the tone feels less theatrical and more archival. The phrases he warned about echo daily: “unprecedented,” “deeply divided,” “at risk.” They appear in headlines, panel discussions, and group chats that spiral before breakfast. The cycle repeats with familiar choreography—shock, commentary, rebuttal, distraction. We scroll, we react, we pick a side. And somewhere between notifications and noise, nuance thins out.
He predicted something subtler than chaos. He predicted fatigue. A slow normalization of extremes. A point where disagreement becomes identity and conversation becomes performance. It isn’t that conflict suddenly erupts; it’s that it seeps into everything, until even silence feels like a stance. The loudest voices set the pace, and the rest of us adjust to keep up.
The hardest part of his warning wasn’t about politics or headlines—it was about reflection. He said that when clarity finally arrives, we’ll search for someone to hold responsible, anyone but ourselves. Not because we caused it alone, but because participation can be passive. Attention is currency. Indifference is permission. And sometimes the line isn’t crossed by force—it’s crossed while we’re busy arguing about who stepped first.