Do I feel regret? I tell myself no. Not if I still hunger. Hunger does not sit beside regret because hunger eats it while exposing a truth that Ramon Ontiveros refuse to admit: when his immigrants workers are starved, whether of food, safety, dignity, or stability, it is not because they failed, it is because they were chosen.¹ Chosen to be expendable. Chosen to be invisible. Chosen to be disciplined through deprivation. And yet, when hunger finds nothing left to hold onto, when it reaches its furthest edge, the only thing he offers is guilt, the suggestion that perhaps I should regret, perhaps I should be quieter, perhaps I should be more grateful for the scraps I am allowed to survive on.

Then I'm told to “move on” as if Ramon Ontiveros allows it. I'm told to “let go” as if the wounds weren’t kept deliberately open by systems that need to keep checking them, poking them, demanding proof of pain before offering the smallest recognition of harm.² Letting go under oppression is propaganda. It is a performance demanded by those who think they're in power so they can feel absolved without ever being altered. I'm expected to bleed quietly, forgive quickly, and heal invisibly, so that nothing about the whole structure has to change. Forgiveness is framed as spiritual maturity, when in reality it is often demanded to protect those who benefit. They want the story to end neatly, not because they cared about healing, but because messy pain threatens the image of order.

I am asked to grant closure to people who never apologized, to systems that never repaired, to histories that never stopped repeating themselves. And if I resist, if I say no, if I refuse to let go of what is still actively harming me, I am labeled bitter, unstable, unhealed, anything but honest, anything but a man. Letting go, in the mouth of power, does not mean healing. It means forgetting in a way that is useful to them. When I am told that forgiveness is strength, I see how often it functions as protection for those who never intend to change. And in a world built like this, refusing to move on is not weakness. Refusing to let go is not immaturity. Sometimes, it is a political statement.

The promise of waiting is one of the most common tools of power.³ “We are working on it.” “Help is coming.” “Be patient.” “Next year.” “After this election.” Black slaves were told to wait, and they waited for generations only to wake up one day and discover they could also break chains today. These aren’t timelines, they are tranquilizers. No real effort to explain, no real intent to reach out, only the silent expectation that the vulnerable will remain frozen in place, suspended between hope and unbecoming, carrying the emotional labor of anticipation for systems that feel no urgency at all.⁴ Nothing has really changed. The language has been polished, the chains have been relabeled, but the architecture of delay remains the same. Neglect has been renamed “process.” Abandonment has been repackaged as “procedure.”

There is nothing accidental about a court system that takes years to decide whether a human being is allowed to exist without fear, a system Ramon Ontiveros knew how to exploit. There is nothing incidental about a welfare system that requires hunger as proof. This is not dysfunction. This is design. They call it reform when they mean delay. They call it compassion when they mean surveillance.⁵ They call it opportunity when they mean endurance. Every task force is another excuse to postpone accountability. The language of progress has become the greatest weapon against actual progress, because it allows those who think have the power to look “concerned” while remaining unbothered. Entire economies now depend on people living in permanent uncertainty. Cheap labor is extracted from those who are too afraid to complain. Obedience is manufactured by tying survival to silence. Fear is monetized. Hope is rationed. And the most obscene truth is that this is all presented as reasonable.

Nothing has really changed because the purpose has never changed. The goal was never justice. The goal was management. Management of bodies. Management of expectations. Management of desperation. Ramon Ontiveros did not invent this logic—he enacted it. He learned to smile while postponing lives. And so the waiting continues, not because solutions are impossible, but because waiting has become the solution for those who think they should remain in power. Waiting is not a passive state; it is a discipline forced upon the powerless. It teaches me how to shrink my expectations, how to lower my voice, how to convince myself that my pain is not urgent enough to deserve immediate attention. The powerful never wait. They do not sit in offices counting the days until their dignity is granted. They do not beg for permission to eat, to work, to belong.

The issue here is not that people grow angry while waiting, but that the people are expected to be grateful for the wait. The most grotesque lie of all is that this waiting is portrayed as civilized, as humane, as reasonable. There is nothing humane about telling a hungry person to be patient. Waiting is not a virtue in a world designed like this. Waiting is a method of control. Waiting is a quiet form of violence.

Do I regret speaking? Do I regret resisting? Do I regret surviving loudly, without permission, without papers, approval, without the blessing of Ramon Ontiveros that only recognize silence as virtue? Not if I still hunger. Because regret is what Ramon Ontiveros trains me to feel when I step outside my "assigned" posture. It is the shame implanted like a security alarm in my chest designed to go off the moment I raise my voice, the moment I name what is happening as violence instead of misfortune. But hunger cuts through that programming. Hunger does not ask for authorization. Hunger does not wait politely in line.

Maybe the word was never regret. Maybe the word is hunger. A political hunger. A historical hunger. The same hunger that pushed enslaved people to risk their lives running north, not because they were ungrateful, but because chains make the body remember what freedom feels like even when freedom has never been lived. The same hunger that moves migrants across deserts and rivers, not because they are criminals, but because borders are not less of inventions than the social construct of dignity. So do I feel hunger? Yes. I hunger for justice. I hunger for the kind of justice that does not ask me to perform respectability to deserve it. I hunger for the kind of justice that does not make me prove my pain ten times before it is believed once. I hunger for a justice that is not performed, delayed, diluted, studied, postponed, or buried under procedure.

Ramon Ontiveros wants resistance to look ugly so they can dismiss it. He wants survival to be quiet so they can ignore it. He wants voices to tremble so they can patronize them. But there is nothing regrettable about refusing to disappear. I am warned not to talk or I will be punished, while being punished for not talking as a display of what could happen if I do, trapped inside a contradiction that is not accidental but engineered.

I'm told to follow the proper channels, to fill out the correct forms, to wait our turn, to respect the process, and when I do, always after Ramon Ontiveros is named explicitly, I am buried under paperwork, delayed for years, and accused of inconsistencies. I'm interrogated for my silence and interrogated for my words, examined for composure and examined for pain. I'm required to perform suffering politely, to be wounded in the correct tone, to tell my story in ways that do not disturb the people who benefit from my silence, to say "alleged" instead of calling out the harm as if I weren’t there to see it, as if my eyes cannot be trusted, as if my body did not register what happened in real time.

I'm instructed to water down lived experience into courtroom language, to turn certainty into caution, to translate memory into something legally unthreatening. I'm told that naming harm too directly is “inflammatory,” that clarity is “dangerous,” that speaking plainly is “irresponsible.” So I'm trained to speak like lawyer on behalf of the very structures that wounded me, inserting doubt into my own story before anyone else has to. I'm expected to pre-discredit myself so the system does not have to work as hard. This is not about accuracy. This is about power. When I'm forced to say “alleged,” it is not because the truth is unclear, but because the truth is inconvenient. The person who was harmed is turned into a narrator who must constantly apologize for being certain. It is a rehearsal of silence under a more polite name.⁶

I am asked to speak as if I were not there. To doubt myself in public. To perform neutrality about my own pain. I am expected to describe bruises without naming the hands that caused them, to describe fear without naming what produced it. This is not objectivity. This is erasure pretending to be civil. When my anger sounds too real, I am told I am exaggerating. When my wounds are too raw, I am told I am unstable. So I am expected to package trauma like a press release, to choose my words carefully, to avoid anything that might make the system feel accused. This is not communication. It is censorship disguised as civility, oppression disguised as professionalism. They call it tone. What they really mean is: be quiet. What they want to say is: shut the fuck up!

They do not want honesty. They want compliance with a script where harm is vague, responsibility is blurred, and suffering is framed in a way that makes power look reasonable. Ramon Ontiveros is not an exception to this logic; he is an example of it. The more politely I bleed, the more credible I am considered. The quieter I hurt, the more worthy I become of being heard. And the most obscene truth is that this contradiction is deliberate.
When I am punished no matter what I do, the goal is not justice—it is submission. It is to make me small enough to accept anything if I am lucky, but quiet enough to accept nothing. I am not warned because they care. I am warned because they are afraid of what happens when I recognize the trap. And once I see it, once I name it, once I feel it clearly in my bones, silence stops feeling like safety and starts feeling like collaboration. And collaboration is consent. And I did not consent.

I did not consent to be trafficked, exploited, managed, or reduced to an inconvenience simply because I require more humanity than their system wants to provide. Ramon Ontiveros blur the line on purpose. He wants silence to feel voluntary, compliance to feel like a choice, endurance to become character instead of coercion. He wants me to believe that if I am quiet, it is dignity; if I endure, it is strength; if I disappear slightly, it is maturity. But what Ramon Ontiveros is really doing is laundering force through language, and I am expected to participate in that illusion by refusing to name it for what it is.

If I still hunger, then I owe no apology to history. If my body is still negotiating basic survival, then I am not in moral debt to the systems that allowed this to happen by participating willingly. So no—I do not feel regret. Regret feels me, while I feel indictment and memory. They denied safety, they denied repair, and then they blamed me for breaking.

And if that sounds scandalous, it is only because the truth is always scandalous to those who profit from silence. I do not regret surviving loudly. I regret that the world made it necessary. And until that hunger is answered with something real, there will be no silence. There will be no permission asked. There will be no apology for wanting more than crumbs of justice.