It Is Futile to Search for the Innocence of the Past — That Innocence Has Long Since Died
RastinewsThroughout history, those who held power have always draped themselves in the shadow of the sacred to safeguard that power.
"The king is God's representative on earth," "the state is eternal," "the party holds the absolute truth," they said;
and so every error became a doctrine,
every silence became obedience,
every obedience became fate.
And the masses, wrapped in the spell of the sacred,
lifted power to the heavens.
Every power that claims immunity has, from the very start, been woven through with weakness.
Yet no order, no word, no belief is sacred.
Every authority that cloaks itself in sanctity demands that man overlook his own existence and his own responsibility.
It becomes the sole arbiter,
in its word every lie is dressed as truth,
every wrong stands in for reality.
Yet in every grand narrative to which history has granted sanctity, it has reduced those who went to their deaths for its sake to mere extras.
Our existence, our pain, our search for meaning are far more real than any order they ever built.
We paid the price of centuries of illusion in blood, in fire, and in silence.
It is futile to search for the innocence of the past; for that innocence has long since died.
Once we dreamed of a world where the sun never turned its back on the day, the day never quarreled with the night, the nightingale never abandoned the rose, and the rose never turned from the bud.
But everything turned its back on us…
For no innocence survives a war.
The history written in our tears is now nothing but a heavy ruin.
And we know that walking away without looking back at this ruin is more painful still than the tears we shed.
For only when a person stands before the ruin does he see himself laid bare — all his fragility, all his truth.
If we fail to own our own fate and flee from responsibility, one day every flight we have made will come back to us.
Only then do we understand that the return is far heavier than the going.
Because in time, a person becomes nothing but a prisoner of the ideals for which lives were sacrificed,
The day you come to realize this, begin to find yourself anew.
What you struggle to accept is your own truth.
Instead of clinging to the dust of the past, you must turn your face toward the present and the future.
It is hard to turn back from the road you carved out as your heart bled — its toll is a lost history, its toll is countless lost lives.
No order, no structure, no ideology is sacred.
To reject this sanctity is not to deny faith; it is to remember one's free will and one's responsibility for one's own fate.
Exactly where sanctity ends, the true obligation of being human begins.
The heavy but honorable responsibility of being human begins with facing the truth.
Truth sits on no throne, nor does it hide in the color of any flag.
Truth breathes only in the depths of a consciousness that dares to question.
No word that cannot be questioned is truth.
Perhaps free will is an illusion, who knows?
But even from within that illusion, we can find the courage to stand against our own fate.
True freedom is not denying our chains, but walking on regardless, fully aware of them.
Looking through the eyes of truth, we see this:
The ideals we clung to so tightly when we set out had already abandoned us while we were still fighting.
Accepting defeat is not surrender;
it is learning to look at our own truth, our own fragility, and our own responsibility.
And we know this:
It was not the ideals that abandoned us — we abandoned our ideals.
The only sanctity left now is finding within ourselves the strength to begin again.
Defeat can sometimes turn into an opportunity for rebirth. The only sanctity that remains is finding the strength to recover.
The views expressed here are the author's own; they may or may not coincide with the editorial line of Rastinews. Rastinews is a free platform open to differing views.