After the Purge: Who Will Hold the Line for You Now?

In times of upheaval, we’re told it’s the strong who will lead us forward. But what happens when the strong have been driven out? When the very people holding our world together—nurses, teachers, midwives, code-switchers, caregivers—are erased from the story, what remains?

This piece is not a prediction. It is a mirror. It is what happens after the purge, when policy meets consequence, and the silence grows too loud to ignore.

Who will teach your children when the teachers are gone?
Who will clean your homes, care for your parents, change your linens, and bandage your wounds—
when the quiet, efficient hands you never noticed have vanished?

Who will make your coffee?
Who will fix your broadband?
Who will sit with your mother at 3am when she forgets who she is and screams your name down the hallway?

Who will design your software?
Run your emergency rooms?
De-escalate your unstable neighbors when the only people left
are the ones who already look and think like you?

Who will birth your babies when the midwives are gone?
When care providers flee states that criminalize their compassion—
when clinics close, and prisons fill—
who will remain to help the ones you swore to protect?

And when those babies are born—
who will raise them, when their mothers are dead, jailed, or disappeared?
When your systems demand life but refuse to sustain it?

Who will fill your armies, your fire stations, your disaster response crews—
when the trans kid who dreamed of service is erased by paperwork?
When the immigrant who ran toward the fire is turned away at the gate?

You’ve passed the bills.
You’ve redrawn the lines.
You’ve done what you said had to be done.

You said it was about protecting the innocent.
You said it was about safety, tradition, truth.

And maybe you believe that.
Maybe you believe the people you’ve pushed out were never meant to stay.

But you still eat the meals their grandmothers taught them to cook.
You still sing along to their music on the radio.
You still stream their films, wear their fashion, speak in slang they invented,
walk through buildings they designed, benefit from science they pioneered.
You still enjoy the beauty they created—while writing them out of your future.

But when the shelves stay empty—
When the waitlists grow—
When the grief gets louder, and the care gets scarcer—

What then?

Who will do the work?
Who will carry the weight?

When the day comes—and it will—
when your son’s life depends on someone you drove out,
when your daughter asks why her classroom sits empty,
when the storm hits and there’s no one on the front line—

Will you say this was God’s plan?
Will you still believe He will provide?

Let me ask you—
when did God choose you to carry the staff?
When did He whisper that you, above all others, should decide who stays and who goes?

Have you forgotten how the story goes?
The one where a ruler hardened his heart, over and over, even as his people suffered?
How he clung to power so tightly that it broke everything around him?

Do you not remember what followed?

When did He place the staff in your hand and say,
“Lead them—yes, you, the righteous one, the policy writer, the moral compass”?

Is it not written that pride is a deadly sin?
That humility walks before honor?

So tell me—
where is your humility when you strip away the rights of the meek and call it obedience?

Because when you finally kneel in your echoing sanctuary of laws, asking Him to send help, comfort, meaning—
Will He?

Or will He ask you, ever so gently,
"Where are the ones I already sent?"

And after the silence stretches,
after you realize the exodus cannot be undone—
will you still believe the flood won’t come for you?

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