The Color of Our Conscience
From the Red Coat to the Pink Jacket
We've all surely heard this quote by now: "History does not repeat, but it rhymes with a haunting rhythm."
For those of us who spent our youth submerged in the archives of the 1930s, studying the psychological fracturing of a dictator’s upbringing or reading the visceral, skeletal prose of Elie Wiesel’s "Night," the present moment does not feel like a surprise.
It feels like a homecoming to a house we spent our lives trying to burn down.
In the eighth grade, the permission slip to watch 'Schindler’s List 'was more than a formality; it was a pact to look at the unthinkable.
We were taught to look for the "Girl in Red."
She was the visual anomaly that forced Oskar Schindler to realize that he was not just a cog in a machine, but a man witnessing a massacre.
Today, that anomaly is the " Lady in the Pink Jacket" on a street in Minneapolis.
When Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, was killed by federal agents on American soil, the footage captured by the woman in pink became our modern "Red Coat."
It is the splash of color that strips away the clinical language of "enforcement" and "operations," revealing the raw reality of a human life extinguished while exercising the very freedoms my grandfather bled for.
To see that pink jacket is to be forced out of the comfort of "allegiance" and into the crisis of "conscience."
My grandfather was a Purple Heart recipient.
He did not kill Nazis because he sought glory; he did it because he understood that fascism is a parasite that consumes the host of democracy from within.
He fought so that the "path of madness" explored in my mother’s thesis would never find fertile soil in the United States.
Yet, for a decade, many of us, including myself, have sounded the alarm. We pointed to the erosion of norms, the dehumanizing rhetoric, and the steady dismantling of constitutional protections. We were told we were "obsessed" or "alarmist."
But today, the patterns have completed their cycle. When innocent citizens are executed for exercising their First Amendment rights in a democratic republic, the "madness" is no longer a theory.
It is a headline.
I beseech you, to HEED The Call for the Modern Valkyrie:
This is an imploration to the Schindlers currently within the regime.
Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party.
Claus von Stauffenberg was a colonel in the Wehrmacht.
They were men who held the keys to the kingdom and chose to turn them in the lock. They realized that true loyalty to one’s country is not loyalty to the men in power, but to the humanity the country is supposed to protect.
To those serving in the federal agencies, the military, and the halls of government: The Constitution is your commanding officer.
When that constitution is trampled, when the blood of a nurse in a pink-jacketed witness's camera lens cries out from the ground, the "just following orders" defense is a ghost that will haunt you as it haunted those at Nuremberg.
The democratic republic is not a self-sustaining machine; it is a fragile agreement that is only sustained by the Consent of the Governed.
If we allow the state to execute its critics and its healers, we have surrendered the soil my grandfather fought for.
We must be Bold. We must be the witnesses. And for those within the system who see the "pink jacket" and feel their soul recoil: be the Schindler.
Break the line. Save the life.
Protect the Republic before the black-and-white film of history records our silence as complicity, and we are the only ones to blame before the entire world stage.
About the Creator
Sai Marie Johnson
A multi-genre author, poet, creative&creator. Resident of Oregon; where the flora, fauna, action & adventure that bred the Pioneer Spirit inspire, "Tantalizing, titillating and temptingly twisted" tales.
Pronouns: she/her
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I Left My Name in a Place That Forgot Me I left my name in a place that forgot me. Not all at once, not dramatically, but the way dust settles on furniture no one uses anymore—quiet, patient, inevitable. It happened in the city where I learned how to make myself smaller. At first, my name was spoken often. It lived on tongues, warm and familiar. It was called from doorways, written in notebooks, saved in phones with little symbols beside it—stars, hearts, inside jokes only we understood. My name meant something then. It meant me. But places, like people, have short memories. I noticed the forgetting in fragments. A pause before someone said my name, as if searching through a cluttered drawer. A smile that didn’t quite reach recognition. Conversations that continued smoothly whether I was present or not, like I was an optional detail in the background. I became excellent at standing still. The café on Seventh Street used to know me. 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Windows glowed with lives continuing, overlapping, moving forward. I wondered how many times I had walked past the same people without them noticing I had ever been there before. I wondered when I stopped being memorable. I left my name everywhere, hoping it would stick. In journals no one read. In messages left on “seen.” In photos where I stood at the edge, half-cropped, half-forgotten. I left it in apologies I didn’t owe and explanations no one asked for. I left it in rooms where I laughed at the right moments and nodded at the right times, performing presence like it was a role I could perfect if I tried hard enough. But the place kept forgetting me. There was a moment—there’s always a moment—when the forgetting became undeniable. A gathering. A familiar room. Familiar faces. Someone asked, “Do you remember when she used to come with you?” She. I was sitting right there. No correction followed. No embarrassment. Just a casual rewrite of my existence. I felt something tear, softly, inside my chest—not pain exactly, more like a thread snapping after being pulled too long. I realized then that I had been grieving myself without knowing it. Grief doesn’t always arrive with funerals and flowers. Sometimes it arrives when you understand that the version of you who mattered in a place no longer exists—and no one noticed when she left. I stopped trying after that. Not in a dramatic way. I didn’t announce my departure or burn bridges. I simply withdrew my name. I stopped offering it up like a fragile gift. I let conversations happen without inserting myself. I let silence sit where my voice used to fight for space. The strange thing about becoming invisible is that it teaches you how loud the world is without you. I watched people interrupt each other, compete, perform. I watched how quickly attention shifted, how easily affection was replaced. I learned that memory is not a measure of worth—it is a measure of convenience. 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