The Painful Awakening 

The Painful Awakening   -   in Persian     بیداریِ دردناک 

By: John Kazerooni

Awakening is not sudden. It does not arrive with noise or force. It comes quietly—like light slipping through cracks long ignored.

On a distant world, far away in another galaxy, there was a place called Planet Z.  On Planet Z, people lived with many ways of seeing life. They held different ideologies, beliefs, faiths, doubts, and questions. Some were rigid and unmoving. Some were moderate and open. Some preferred no labels at all. Difference itself was not the problem. For a time, coexistence was possible.

Among them, however, arose one belief whose foundation was violence. From its very origin, power—not truth—was its purpose. To survive and expand, it conquered cities, seized countries, and massacred innocent lives. It named itself X2Believe.

Years passed. Blood dried. Ashes settled. Intellectuals appeared to reshape memory. They polished cruelty with words, buried crimes beneath interpretation, and allowed the ideology to shine while its victims disappeared from history. Truth was not denied outright—it was covered, softened, and delayed.

As power always does, X2Believe fractured from within. Two faces emerged. One called itself Conservative, rigid and loyal to the original foundations. The other called itself Reformer, softer in tone, gentler in promise. The Reformers spoke of change, patience, and progress. But their gentleness was calculated. They hid the truth long enough to gain control, only to return power to the Conservatives—or to become them themselves. It was the same force, wearing two masks.

This cycle repeated for centuries. Power shifted. Names changed. Promises evolved. But the outcome remained the same. Millions were erased in the name of faith. Entire lives vanished—reduced to silence, denial, or footnotes.

Anyone who spoke against X2Believe was captured, erased, or terrorized. Yet the most dangerous force was not the open cruelty of the Conservatives. It was the silence of the Reformers. Their refusal to reveal the truth allowed the machine to continue. People trusted them. People waited. People hoped. And while they waited, innocent lives kept disappearing.

Whenever people tried to stand for their rights, the Reformers intervened. “This is not the real X2Believe,” they said. “Give us time.” Time became a weapon. Truth was postponed. Justice was delayed. Suffering continued.

The deepest wound was this: anyone who spoke honestly, anyone who told the truth plainly, was labeled X2Believe-phobic. Truth itself became a crime. Society bent itself into impossible shapes to protect its identity—no matter the cost in innocent blood.

A society that silences truth because it feels threatened by it is a society asleep.

Ignorance kept the system alive. Many lacked education. Others were highly educated yet had never read a single honest page of X2Believe’s history. They believed without questioning. They defended without knowing. Protests rose, then faded. Complaints flared, then collapsed—extinguished by carefully crafted lies.

But time has its own quiet power.

People changed. Curiosity returned. Books were opened. History was read—not the polished version, but the buried one. Slowly, painfully, people discovered the truth. They learned that the Reformers had lied for centuries. They realized that twisting the truth carries the same weight as violence. Conservatives and Reformers were not enemies. They were partners—two actors performing the same script.

So the people chose a different path. Not violence. Not revenge. But distance.

They closed their eyes to the noise and opened their minds to history. They withdrew belief. They stopped feeding the system with obedience, fear, and hope built on lies. Day by day. Year by year. Century by century. Without war or slogans, they weakened the kingdom of X2Believe.

Awareness became their resistance. Silence became their shield—not the silence of fear, but the silence of refusal.

X2Believe still exists on Planet Z, as all ideologies do. But it is small now. Powerless. Stripped of illusion. Its decline was not caused by force, but by people who learned to read, question, and think for themselves.

No more lies. No more twisted truths. Only facts. Only history. Only judgment earned through understanding.

This is not a story of terror. This is not a fantasy. This is our story.

We believe without reading. We believe without questioning. We believe without thinking.

And when thousands of innocent lives are erased, we ask how it happened.

The answer is simple: because truth was painted over and buried beneath ashes—so that identities could survive without facing what they truly were.

We cry for the victims, but rarely ask what path led there.

We mourn outcomes, but avoid examining origins.

Somewhere beyond our ease, grief is being carved into the faces of innocent children and adults, and names are whispered so they are not erased. The brutal truth is this: cruelty began with one—and survived because silence chose comfort over life.

And so the questions remain—quiet, heavy, unavoidable:

Is it not our responsibility to reveal the truth?

Is ignorance a crime when it protects cruelty?

Is hiding truth an act of violence?

Who pays the price for erased lives—the criminal, the liar, or both?

And perhaps the hardest question of all:

When truth asks something of us, will we listen—or will we cover it again with ash?

This is how we awaken.

Not through anger or slogans, but through reading, remembering, and refusing to inherit lies. We awaken when we choose truth over comfort, history over illusion, and conscience over silence. Awakening begins the moment we open our eyes to what was hidden—and decide never to close them again.

Click on the link https://sites.google.com/view/johnkaz to explore Tapestry of My Thoughts

Medium Readers

Click on the link https://medium.com/@iselfschooling to explore Tapestry of My Thoughts