Listen—I want to tell you about Mariamna Daydoff, and maybe
you’ll understand something about the world that most folks would rather not
think about. Something that keeps me up nights, actually, staring at the
ceiling while the house settles around me with those little creaks and groans
that might be nothing at all or might be everything.
Mariamna never knew the taste of stale bread. Not once.
Think about that for a minute—really think about it. Born in 1871, Russian
aristocracy, the whole nine yards. While peasants were breaking their backs in
fields that would never belong to them, Mariamna was learning to paint at the
Académie Julian in Paris. Watercolors. Expensive oils. The kind of thing that
costs more than a working family might see in a year.
She wrote it all down later, after everything went to hell. Memoirs
of a Russian Lady, she called it. A gift for her grandchildren, she said.
In it, she describes those days before the Revolution as “Lost Paradise.” And
you know what? I believe her. For her, it was paradise. Summer mornings
smelling of cut grass and possibility. Winter sleigh rides. Christmas feasts
that went on for days. All of it real, all of it true—for her.
The thing about paradise, though—and this is what keeps me
up nights—is that it’s always built on someone else’s hell.
1917 came like a freight train nobody saw coming (except, of
course, everybody saw it coming, they just didn’t want to look). The Bolsheviks
tore down the Russian Empire, and Mariamna fled in 1919, clutching what she
could carry. She ended up in Brittany with her sister, and what did she mourn
most? Her paintings. Her pretty watercolors.
Not the serfs. Not the starving. The paintings.
Now fast-forward—time’s a flat circle, or maybe it’s a noose
that keeps tightening, I can’t decide which—to August-September 2025. Indonesia
this time. Different country, same story, because there’s really only one
story, isn’t there? The haves and the have-nots, and what happens when the
have-nots finally say enough.
Cinta Kuya, daughter of some TV celebrity and legislator
named Uya Kuya, posted on Instagram about her missing cats. Pedigree cats, mind
you. The expensive kind. Worth millions of rupiahs apiece. The demonstrations
had turned ugly, as they do, and her family’s house got looted—symbolic rage
made flesh, made real, made finally into action.
And Cinta? She cried about her cats.
“I can only cry,” she wrote, editing photos for social media
while her country burned. “It feels unbearable.”
One of the cats had been sold for 1.2 million rupiahs. The
looter got arrested. Cinta wanted her cat back from the woman who’d taken it
in.
Here’s what gets me, what really digs under my skin like a
splinter you can’t quite reach: both women—Mariamna and Cinta, separated by a
century and half a world—they’re not lying. Their grief is real. When Cinta
cries over her cats, those are real tears. When Mariamna mourned her
watercolors, that was real loss.
But Jesus Christ, they don’t see it. They can’t see it.
“What Cinta doesn’t realize,” wrote one Instagram commenter
with the handle @kak.gan (and bless them for trying), “is that she’s positioned
on the side benefiting from an unjust system. On the other side are groups
venting their anger at that very system, one that has battered them for years.”
You remember Marie Antoinette? “Let them eat cake,”
she supposedly said when told the peasants had no bread. Didn’t matter that she
probably never said it—French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote those
words first. What mattered was that people believed she said it.
Believed it because it fit. Because it was true even if it wasn’t factual,
you understand?
October 16, 1793, her head came off under the guillotine’s
kiss. Ten months after her husband’s.
The pattern repeats. It always repeats. That’s the horror of
it—the real, bone-deep horror that makes this whole thing feel like a story I
shouldn’t be telling but can’t stop telling.
Take Elien Utrecht, Dutch girl born in the Dutch East Indies
in 1921. August 17, 1945, Indonesia declares independence, and Elien hears
crowds shouting “Merdeka!” Freedom. She doesn’t know what it means. Can’t
grasp it. The rage of the colonized—what the Dutch called the Bersiap Period—washed
over Europeans and anyone who looked like them or worked for them. No mercy.
And Elien stood there, confused, not understanding the language of liberation
because she’d only ever spoken the language of comfort.
Paul Mattick wrote about this in Anti-Bolshevik Communism—how
psychology and sociology became tools of the bourgeoisie to explain away the
inexplicable. Depression? That’s an individual problem, not a symptom of a sick
system. Alienation? Take a pill. Never mind the corruption, the colonialism,
the widening gap between those who eat cake and those who eat nothing at all.
“What for one side appears as ‘mass rape,’ ” Mattick wrote,
and God help me but he was right, “for the other becomes new
insight—systematized and integrated into the sciences of exploitation and
control.”
Pierre Bourdieu called it the “culture of nobility.” The
worldview of the upper classes, he said, is shaped by habits and tastes and
access that the lower classes will never know. So even when the elites try to
understand—really try, with genuine effort and good intentions—they can’t shed
that bourgeois lens. It’s welded to their faces like a mask they don’t know
they’re wearing.
You ever try to explain color to someone born blind? It’s
like that. The elite never stood in line for subsidized rice, so their
understanding of poverty remains abstract. A concept. A statistic. Never the
gnawing hunger that keeps you up at three in the morning, wondering if your
kids will eat tomorrow.
And here’s the kicker, the part that makes this whole thing
feel like a Stephen King story—like something I’d write if I was feeling
particularly dark: we can sympathize with them. With Mariamna and her
paintings, with Cinta and her cats. Their suffering is real. Human empathy
demands we acknowledge it.
But—and this is the but that matters—that sympathy doesn’t
erase cause and effect. Doesn’t change the fact that their losses happened
because the gap grew too wide, the pressure built too high, and something had
to give. The anger born of injustice isn’t random chaos. It’s an explosion with
a reason. With a thousand reasons. With centuries of reasons.
Two worlds sit side by side, and they’ll never understand
each other. Not really. It’s like that old story about the deer and the
tiger—the deer runs fast to avoid a foolish death, and the tiger pounces
swiftly to avoid starving. Both are doing what they must. Both are right, from
their own perspective.
But only one of them gets to survive.
That’s the thing about class warfare—and make no mistake,
that’s what this is, what it’s always been—there’s no happy ending. No
compromise where everybody walks away satisfied. The deer lives or the tiger
eats. The revolution comes or it doesn’t. The guillotine falls or it doesn’t.
And somewhere, in some grand house with paintings on the
walls and pedigree cats on the furniture, someone who’s never known hunger is
writing in their diary about paradise lost, genuinely grieving, genuinely
confused about why the peasants are so angry.
They don’t see the blood on their hands because they never
had to get their hands dirty in the first place.
That’s the real horror story. Not the one with monsters
under the bed or clowns in the sewer. The one where good people—and they are
good people, mostly—participate in systems of oppression without ever realizing
it. Where privilege is invisible to the privileged. Where the comfortable can’t
imagine the desperate because they’ve never been desperate, not really, not in
the bone-deep way that makes people do desperate things.
And the wheel keeps turning. The pattern keeps repeating.
Different countries, different centuries, same story.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re all just characters in a book
someone else is writing, hitting our marks, saying our lines, playing our
parts. The aristocrat fleeing with her paintings. The Instagram influencer
crying over her cats. The peasant with the pitchfork. The looter with the
stolen pet.
All of us trapped in a story that was written long before we
were born, heading toward an ending we can see coming but can’t seem to stop.
That’s what keeps me up nights.
That, and the sound of sharpening blades in the distance,
getting closer.
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