The Writing on the Wall

“The human voice has a disarming quality—

(we are not single, we are one).”

Each of the writers in ROOM 6.25 has captured, in their own way, something of this extraordinary moment we are all living through. This is not easy. In his essay Why I Write, Thomas Ogden explains why. “Part of the difficulty of writing well lies in the fact that writing any sort of analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction is autobiographical,” Ogden writes; “I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark.” This unique issue of ROOM bears the mark of multitudes and holds the scars of generations.

In It Doesn't Start with Prisons: A Psychotherapist's Warning About Silence, Kissu Taffere writes, “Each act of political violence ripples through generations, leaving traces in both flesh and memory.” Born during Ethiopia's Derg “Red Terror,” Taffere has “seen blood on people before it's dried, seen evidence of torture laid out for documentation.” She is imploring us to see how “institutional erosion often starts with these small, seemingly insignificant acts of enforced conformity.” She knows. She has lived it.

Iris Fodor has also lived it. Red Scare at City College describes how, despite fears for herself and the real danger to her family, as vice president of the City College student council, Fodor helped mobilize support for a besieged faculty and prevent the administration from turning in lists of students to the government. Like Taffere, Fodor is writing to warn, “We have been here before.”

And we have. Centered at the very heart of this issue lies Richard Grose's seminal work entitled We Have Been Here Before: Reading the Declaration of Independence in 2025. It could not be clearer.

“The patterns were set long ago, and even as we try to do better, we continue to benefit at others' expense,” Elizabeth Cutter Evert reminds us in American Resistance: A Mayflower Meditation. Both Evert's essay and Thomas Cas