In Honor of Those Who Resist

Inspired by Imran Khan and Habib Jalib

I am not from Pakistan, but people like where I was born have been punished for it. Yet, I admire not its army, not its nuclear, not its tanks, not its power elites, but those who resist tyranny. It is a tribue to them.

Every age invents its own lamps—lamps that shine brightly, but only inside mansions. They illuminate marble halls while leaving entire streets in darkness. They are celebrated as symbols of progress, stability, and order, yet their light never reaches the hungry, the silenced, or the imprisoned. We are told to revere these lamps, to greet their glow with gratitude. But those who resist know better. A light that serves only a few is not illumination; it is exclusion, refined into ritual.

Resistance begins with refusal. It begins with the courage to say no— not loudly at first, but clearly. No to traditions that protect themselves by hiding beneath the shadow of self-interest. No to mornings declared bright while the majority wake in despair. No to inherited systems that demand reverence without justice. That dark morning, dressed in heritage and order, asks for our obedience. We refuse it. We do not greet it.

Power has always relied on fear— fear of prisons, fear of authority, fear of isolation. Yet those who resist are no longer afraid of the powers that be. They understand that fear is the final currency of unjust rule, and once it loses value, authority collapses inward. The walls of prisons, meant to terrify, stand powerlessly before a conscience that has already chosen truth over safety. Stone cannot silence what conviction has already liberated.

To resist is to recognize that oppression has a language and ignorance has a night. Oppression speaks fluently—through decrees, through headlines, through rehearsed assurances that everything is improving. Ignorance spreads like darkness, asking only that people stop asking questions. The resister refuses both. They refuse to defer to oppression’s grammar or acknowledge ignorance as destiny.

We are repeatedly told that the branches are full of flowers, that the thirsty have been given water, and that the wounds of the heart are finally being healed. But those who resist recognize the cruelty of such claims when spoken in a land of thirst, hunger, and unhealed grief. These declarations are not errors; they are deliberate lies. They are a plunder of reason itself—a theft that asks the suffering to doubt their own pain. Resistance is the insistence that reality matters more than official narratives.

For centuries, peace has been looted and renamed. What once belonged to all has been seized, regulated, and rationed, while the act of taking is disguised as governance. Silence is sold as stability. Endurance is mistaken for consent. But spells do not last forever. There comes a moment when language loses its magic, when promises no longer hypnotize, when people begin to see that those claiming to heal are often the source of the wound.

Resistance exposes this deception. It asks a simple, dangerous question: If you are healers, why does the pain persist? And when the answer is evasion, denial, or blame, the truth becomes unavoidable. You are no healer. You are the injury pretending to offer a cure.

Those who resist know they may stand alone. They know that many will agree with power, not because it is right, but because agreement feels safer than dissent. Still, resistance does not measure itself by numbers. It measures itself by integrity. Even if many accept the lie, the resister disagrees. Even if surrender is popular, the resister does not concede.

This cry of resistance is not merely anger—it is memory, conscience, and hope refusing erasure. It is the voice that says: we have seen enough to know better, and we have endured enough to refuse silence. We will not bow before injustice dressed as law. We will not call darkness light. We will not mistake fear for peace.

To resist, finally, is not to deny reality but to insist on it. It is to stand where truth is uncomfortable and say: this ends with us.