Throughstone #18: Don't Forget ICE
Jan 24, 2026
In a sense, there are no words.
But silence will not suffice.
Even stumbling and mumbling contribute to the vibration of our vocal chords as our mouths try to shape gasping exhalations into some kind of meaning.
The words don’t meet the moment because they can’t. They can’t capture the unfolding horror in its fullness, nor can they honor appropriately the thousands of lives upended or the dozens snuffed out in full view by a hijacked government that was originally designed to care for its people and their rights.
The masked minions are symptoms of a cancer we allowed to metastasize, and now the path to survival and healing is much harder. The minions have proven that they will shoot you, at close range, in the face or in the back. Worse yet, their maskless puppeteers will quickly and clumsily work to disentangle the strings and pretend that marionettes are free to do the masters’ bidding, no strings attached. But at the end of this tumult and terror, the masters will leave their puppets to hang from the rafters of an abandoned stage.
In the meantime, we try to get beyond expletives and gather our barbed words into a coherent chorus that will sustain us through this deep and dark winter of a democracy we took for granted. We thought it would sustain itself, as if it had a heartbeat independent of ours. This independence of ours, it is a sacred and ungilded gift, dependent upon truth, rooted in justice.
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“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.
250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku.
Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.
More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: https://www.freerangeprof.com/blog
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