Eyes Open in the Dark

How I learned to see the machine, and how to walk out of it

I was 17 when Barack Obama was elected. My plane landed in Cairo that same night. The world was shifting beneath our feet, and I had a front-row seat with a camera in my hand. I just didn’t know what I was looking at yet.

I’d finished school early. My real education was about to begin. By eighteen I had an official press pass and a swanky apartment in the Middle East. My generation lived between two traumas.

We were kids on 9/11. We came of age under the promise of hope and change. I could feel the script flipping. The color revolutions, the new terror groups, the fractures being wired back home. I just didn’t have the words for it. I was a liberal kid from a liberal house. I believed what I was told.

But I wanted to be where history was raw. So I went.

THE FIRST LIE

The Arab Spring was a fever.

I was in the streets when the gates fell. I got detained so often I lost count.

I was the white guy with the camera, always in the way.

I ended up shaving my head. A simple trick. Change the silhouette.

Make it harder for the cops to pick me out of a crowd next time.

My girlfriend wasn’t thrilled, but I had to stay in the game.

My passport was stolen. I was called a spy.

The first lesson stuck: the story on the news is a ghost. The truth is in the smell of the street, the crack of a tear gas canister, the blank lie in an officer’s eyes as he pushes you into a truck.

I brought that sickness home to America. I knew the official story was wrong. But I was still a mostly-liberal kid. My new knowledge fought with my old programming. They didn’t fit.

THE FALSE SANCTUARY

Then 2016 happened. It didn’t shock me. It confirmed what I already knew.

I’d seen the script. The manufactured rage. The curated truth. I knew the scent of a captured movement. So I ran to the other side.

I found conservatism. I found Christianity. The relief was physical. My chest finally unclenched. Here was a team that saw the lies. A framework that explained the machine. I dove in. I learned the language. I built a life. I was no longer watching. I was a soldier. I was home.

It lasted for years.

Then I heard a familiar noise.

A low grind in the foundation. A Senator’s words bending for his undeclared obligations. A policy that helped donors, not people. Silence where there should have been a roar. The same patterns. The same fingerprints.

I tried to ignore it. These were my people. This was my sanctuary.

But you can’t unsee the machine.

And the machine doesn’t care what jersey you wear.

GARBAGE CITY: THE BLUEPRINT

To understand, you have to go back.

After the square, I lived in Manshiyat Naser. Garbage City. The Zabbaleen lived there, a Coptic Christian community that recycled 80% of Cairo’s waste. Their system was genius. The organic waste fed the pigs. The pigs were their livelihood.

Then came the decree. Swine flu.

Zero cases in Egypt. But every pig had to die.

I watched it happen. Police and soldiers arrived in the middle of the night. Families stood silent. The authorities wouldn’t let them slaughter their own animals. They took them, shot them, and sold the pork back to the community. No compensation. Just loss, then a bill for the corpse.

The sound stays with you.

The screaming chaos of the herds. Then the gunshots. Then a new sound. The silence of a missing ecosystem.

Then the flies. Then the rats.

At the school, the children drew pictures to cope. I held one. A cartoon pig waved. “Good-bye Mokattam. I’m not coming back.”

That was the blueprint. Not the riot. The cold, administrative violence that came after. Identify something vital. Call it a disease. Send in the bulldozers. Erase it. See what you can get away with.

They called it public health. Now we know it was a test run.

THE SAME PRISON

The day it clicked, I was in my car. Podcaster was defending a lie. His cadence was identical to the Egyptian official explaining the pig cull.

A cold wave hit me. I hadn’t escaped. I’d just moved to a different cell in the same prison.

TWO WINGS. SAME BIRD.

I’d already lost one world.

Now I was losing the one I built to replace it. What was left?

THE EXIT

The institutions were all rotted. The answer finally came when I stopped looking at them and went to the source.

Jesus.

Not the church. Not the religion built about him.

I found the man. The teacher who walked into occupied territory and told people they were already free. Who said the kingdom was inside them. Who showed that no priest, no system, stands between you and God.

I stopped consuming. I started practicing.

Silence, for the first time. Not the silence of the missing pigs, but a quiet inside my own head. The world shifted.

The people I’d dismissed as enemies now looked like family. They had the same Father. They were in the same maze, shouting from a different corridor.

THE ASCENT

I’m still climbing. I know that now. Every time I think I’ve reached the top, I find another ledge above me. More to shed. More to see. If you’re between layers right now, if something you trusted is crumbling, hear this:

You are not falling.

You are ascending.

The old certainty has to die for the new sight to be born. The pain is the labor.

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Ten months ago, I started publishing longform pieces here as EKO. A season of field notes from the maze.

What I just described is no longer just my story.

It’s happening on the main stage. Right now.

Same playbook, different actors.

Last month, I shared Tore Says’ deep documentation of federal employees planning a soft coup. They used their government IDs. They trained in regime-change tactics. They plotted to make governance impossible.

Seen this blueprint. Saw it in Garbage City.

Saw it when my own side was captured.

Now I see it here.

This is Part 1.

On Monday, I’ll show you what I mean. The test is in front of us.

America turns 250 next week.

It’s a good time to learn how to see.

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Thanks for reading. It’s hard to write about yourself, or at least it is for me.

I prefer to write about biblical people and events. The first two volumes are here, the reviews are great (more always help) and I just finished the final draft of volume III, which will be a tragic tale about Judas Iscariot.