Leaves Fall and Secret Chats Leak

The Leaves Turn Digital.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Longmont, United States. Published on February 6, 2016. Canon, EOS REBEL T5.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the coming of the fall. The leaves change, and the air sharpens its teeth. The morning hum of rushed commuters and angsty schoolchildren carries the familiar symphony of eye-rolls, bus engines, and whispered gossip about dramas that will seem existential for a month until they’re not. It’s the season of rapid regrouping before the holidays creep around the corner so quickly it feels like one was sun-tanning in August just yesterday.

Fall is also a time of reconnection, of soft returns to family and friends before another year disappears into the archives. The older one gets, the shorter the year seems to become. Planning turns from seasonal sketches to annual trackers. The whisper of aging comes to the doorstep not as a shout but a steady knock. Time becomes this ambivalently majestic creature: part deity, part wraith, part sword of Damocles. Its ticking is radically fatal. A slow burn in one era of life, a quickening fuse in another.

And yet, time demands adaptation. It stretches and contracts according to the pace of our collective attention. There was a season not long ago when we watched the world in beats and headlines, refreshing the news as if checking the pulse of our body politic. Now, we check it less often —maybe monthly, sometimes quarterly —just waiting for the next crisis that truly shakes the soul rather than just our feeds.

Still, every so often, something breaks through the static. A leak. A chat. The private words of young leaders, once public, became proof that the rot never really went away; it only hid in plain sight. In one corner of the country, men not yet thirty spoke of others with a cruelty so ancient it felt rehearsed. Slurs, fantasies of violence, jokes meant to wound and impress. Their language wasn’t just the slip of youth; it was inheritance.

(Generative AI)

And yet, the public yawns. Commentators likely will shift the spotlight, calling it an aberration, as if racism and antisemitism were strange comets that occasionally pass by rather than the gravity that shapes the orbit itself.

Even now, as statements of condemnation are drafted and apologies rehearsed, the question remains: what does accountability mean when the rot runs so deep? Calls for reform echo through the same halls that once rewarded silence. How can we trust that cultural change will follow when the very forces that allowed this rhetoric to fester have seized the reins of the organization itself, sometimes through quiet coercion, other times with veiled threats of brute force?

When the former and current storytellers of that movement refuse to name the historical throughline that explains how such hatred seeded itself in the minds of the young, “accountability” becomes little more than theater. In 2025, after nearly a decade of backlash against social progress, the public’s trust has been worn thin, threadbare from promises that never quite materialized.

So we move forward. We pray. We eat. We travel. We seek information and remain curious. The gift of having a historically marginalized identity is to stand on the shoulders of silhouettes. Giants who carved their names into a history that too often pretends not to see them. But there is power in those shadows. They teach, they sing, they write, they build. They remind us that the world remade itself through their persistence, and that the work of remaking continues.

The year shortens, the light wanes, and we, too, adjust. We gather what warmth remains, not just in weathered hands and scarves, but in solidarity, in curiosity, in the daily stubborn act of paying attention. Time watches us, yes, but maybe it’s not a judge after all. Maybe it’s a witness, waiting for us to notice what has always been true: that every season demands a reckoning, and that every reckoning can become a renewal.