Where Was Your Outrage Then?

I see so many people suffering now—visibly, loudly, righteously. I see posts about rage and grief, solidarity and silence. I see slogans and black squares, fists and flames, all of it circulating like borrowed ritual. I see declarations about justice and the need for change, read aloud in carefully modulated tones, as though we’ve only just discovered the violence sewn into the stitching of our public life.

And yet, I must confess: I feel something other than solidarity. I feel the sting of a deeper, older anger—one not directed at the injustices themselves, but at the timing of your attention to them.

Nothing has changed.

Or at least, nothing fundamental. Nothing structural. The world has not grown more unjust. It is merely that injustice, for a moment, became impossible to ignore. The image is clearer now. The blood more visible. The rhetoric more shrill. But the cruelty was always there, always pressing in around the edges, waiting to be noticed—if you were in a position to ignore it.

You are noticing now. And you are furious. But I must ask: where was your fury yesterday? Last month? Five years ago?

And I know already what some will say. They will point to this death, this outrage, this moment as if it were unique—an extraordinary breach in the already fractured order. But I do not believe that. I believe the opposite. I believe we are seeing, perhaps for the first time, the ordinary horrors as they are. Not more, not worse—just visible.

So if this moment feels intolerable to you, it is not because something unprecedented has occurred. It is because your tolerance was always conditional on your comfort. What has changed is not the world. It is your relationship to it.

And that, I admit, is hard to forgive.

Let me be precise. I am not scorning the capacity for moral growth. I have no quarrel with those who, once blind, now see. But there is a species of outrage that arrives not as the product of insight, but as the echo of consensus. There is a timing to moral awakening that is suspicious—not because it is too late to be meaningful, but because it arrives so neatly in step with the crowd. It wears the robes of righteousness but moves like choreography.

You were not outraged before, I suspect, because you did not have to be. Because nothing was taken from you. Because the injustice had not yet knocked on your door, or slaughtered someone on your timeline. Because the brutality remained—at least to your eyes—abstract, or tolerable, or someone else’s problem.

And now that it has become unmistakable, your outrage emerges not as a long-nursed conviction, but as a reflex. A flare. A flash of heat in response to a thing you can no longer avoid.

You may feel justified. You may feel noble. But I urge you to consider this: the delay in your outrage is not neutral. It is not incidental. It is part of the problem. It is what allows atrocities to persist unchallenged—until they are filmed. Until they go viral. Until the damage is irreversible and the perpetrators have moved on.

This is not a complaint about moral imperfection. It is a demand for moral honesty.

If you were outraged before—silently, helplessly, because you had no platform, or because grief left you wordless—then I understand. I count myself among you. There are many who suffer quietly, and sublimate their rage into something survivable. There are those for whom the cost of speaking is too high, and the only rebellion left is to keep going, head down, dignity intact. I hold no contempt for that silence. It is, sometimes, a form of endurance.

But if your comfort shielded you from this pain until now—if you were able to live unbothered by what others could not afford to ignore—then I ask you not to mistake your discomfort for revelation. You are not awakening. You are arriving late to a fire that has long since burned the foundations. You are not marching in at the start of the story. You are showing up during the funeral and asking to be seated at the front.

And perhaps that metaphor is too kind. Because the truth is, when people grieve, they do not want your speeches. They want you to say nothing, to sit quietly with what you did not prevent.

I have seen too much of this cycle to welcome it warmly. The moral panic. The cathartic hashtags. The brief flare of institutional remorse. The corporate apology tour. And then—quiet. The great forgetting. The return to business as usual. You call it change. I call it choreography.

And in the gaps between those flares, what persists is not your indignation, but the injustice itself. Still there. Still grinding people into silence. Still feeding on your inattention.

What I want—what I crave—is not outrage. It is commitment. I want the kind of moral attention that lasts longer than a news cycle. I want a politics that begins before the camera rolls and continues after the hashtags fade. I want you to remember what you see now when it becomes inconvenient to care.

Because there will come a time—there always does—when this moment recedes. When the urgency wanes. When the algorithms move on. And you will be offered again the seductions of comfort. The promise that things are not so bad. That you have done enough. That someone else will carry the burden.

And in that moment, your silence will again become a permission slip for cruelty. And history will repeat—not because the forces of oppression are invincible, but because they are patient, and they know you are not.

So I ask you now—if your rage is real, let it be useful. Let it be more than spectacle. Let it shape how you live, how you vote, how you speak when no one is watching. Let it make you harder to comfort. Let it make you impossible to distract. Let it be the beginning of something other than the next silence.

I know you probably don’t like this. I am struggling to care. Not because I don’t value you—but because I no longer trust the performance of feeling. What I trust is endurance. What I trust is principle that survives fashion. What I trust is the kind of moral seriousness that does not require applause.

You are welcome to prove me wrong. In fact, I hope you do.

But I will not praise you for arriving late. I will not pretend that fury is virtue. And I will not stand silent while you call this moment unprecedented, as if it did not come at the cost of thousands of days you chose not to look.

No. This is not new. This is only now visible to you. And the question that remains is not whether your rage is justified.

It is whether you are.