How the Fuck Did We Get to 100 Days of Clarity?

A Former Marine's Awakening from the American Dream to Systemic Reality

I stand in the heart of our property, 100 days into a new world both radical and inevitable. Horses grind hay in the dimly lit barn, teeth crushing stalks in rhythmic waves that echo through night's stillness while somewhere, a child born a citizen is being deported, men who glamorize abuse rise to power, and women I once clicked wine glasses with celebrate it as progress. Redwoods loom black against a sky crowded with satellites, the same approach course I navigated as a Marine Corps pilot believing I defended freedom, not built infrastructure for the surveillance state I now question my role in creating.

I used to look up for coordinates. Now I look up to remember I am no longer lost. The satellites still blink above me, but this time, they’re not my mission. They’re my warning.

Evidence of transformation scatters everywhere: half-painted canvases against weathered barn boards replacing perfectly framed family photos that once hid our distress, tools buried in sand instead of backpacks discarded by doors holding our family's rhythm hostage. A 100-year-old farmhouse nestled in a 1000-year-old forest that witnessed empires rise and fall while we've stopped chasing new, even when the algorithm insists. We've stopped feeding machines that don't feed us back.

Ancient stars share space with a blinking surveillance grid that follows me even here. The space between who I was and who I am narrows daily, a ghost in uniform watching me dig roots in a life my ancestors would understand better than my former neighbors.

This life… homeschooling children, living sustainably… isn't Pinterest fantasy. It's the physical aftermath of burning everything down and standing in the ruins, asking: what's actually mine? What belongs to the system I built myself inside? What's worth salvaging when everything you've been trained to value has been weaponized against you?

In work boots caked with soil I steward, not combat boots dusted with foreign sands, I face the hardest truth: you don't just leave the system. It follows. It adapts. It waits. The empire I once served watches me through stars, listens behind closed doors, and analyzes these words as friend or foe.

To understand how I arrived here, trading uniformed certainty for muddy questions, we must return to when I still believed the system could be fixed from within.

2020 Was the Test, We Were the Subjects

We moved to suburbia in 2016, weeks before my first daughter was born. On election night, I held her with quiet confidence that she would wake to a woman president, even if it felt the lesser of two evils. Instead, she entered a country fracturing under wounds not yet fully understood, shifting our foundation to make us doubt ourselves before questioning the system.

We thought this was the American Dream: a house, a baby, a future we could build. But that dream came with fine print we hadn’t read yet; one where our identities were streamlined, our worth measured in property lines, and the system we served would soon ask us to stay quiet while it fractured around us.

After returning from 18 weeks of maternity leave (Read about how they were later reduced to 12 under the new administration), I became a sexual assault victims advocate in the Marine Corps, not by choice (as violence was a personal trigger) but because as a female officer, I was assigned a role others wouldn't perform with appropriate attention. I carried survivors' stories; women begging for dignity and justice while an abuser-in-chief smiled down from the chain of command photos behind my desk.

I compartmentalized. At home, I changed seasonal wreaths and coordinated HOA events, thinking being the "hostess with the mostess" would validate my worth as it disintegrated: as a mother trying to serve, as a citizen in an increasingly hostile community.

In 2019, I left active duty after someone I couldn't save died by suicide and leadership moved on like she never mattered. I spent months dissecting my own failures, searching for the moment I could have intervened differently, until I realized I wasn't fighting a system failure, I was fighting a system working exactly as designed.

They told me I could have it all, if I carried it alone. In uniform, I was a liability. In my neighborhood, an enigma. I smiled for the camera, but I was holding it all together while quietly falling apart.

With my DD-214 in hand (and pink hair), I enrolled in an MBA program while confirming my airline job date; the expected path for someone with my background. Then a pandemic changed everything. My mother was recovering from brain surgery as her business collapsed under China trade war tariffs. My parents faced losing their home, so we promised them space in ours.

I remember the stress of selling their house, never expecting the housing market to remain artificially sustained by interest rates and corporate buyers using pandemic as acquisition opportunity (Read about how Blackrock bought the American Dream). Just as investors had bought the chicken farm before developers parceled it into our suburban paradise, freedoms were being purchased like discounted commodities.

When planes stopped flying in 2020, my airline offer vanished with the stability I'd counted on. Borders closed. Commercial aviation dropped by 95%. Fear ignited. It echoed 9/11, when TSA emerged from crisis and never left. In 2001, we surrendered shoes and privacy. In 2020, we surrendered movement, location data, and the illusion that freedom to travel was ever a right.

Military training taught adjustment. I pivoted to tech, running scrum teams while teaching my children the alphabet, managing a multigenerational household, writing grad papers after midnight, conducting standups by 7 a.m. I kept my camera on, even the day after my dog died after eleven months battling cancer, discussing product backlogs while my soul hemorrhaged.

Parenting through a pandemic, managing virtual kindergarten and elder care, while presenting product roadmaps to shareholders who didn’t care the cost. I wasn’t just working, I was proving I could perform under collapse.

When schools reopened, classrooms had become laboratories for social control. Children bullied each other based on parents' politics while overworked teachers looked away. Administrators punished symptoms instead of asking questions. Walls lined with "safe space" posters.

Safe for whom?

We pulled our daughters out, not to shelter them from reality, but to stop gaslighting them about what this world rewards. I refused to raise children who learn to shrink themselves to fit frameworks or believe rules ensure safety. I had followed every rule and was disintegrating, panic attacks, bloodwork revealing a body under siege.

I recognized the pattern from military operations. 2020 wasn't chaos. It was controlled experimentation testing.

The world reprogrammed while we complained about social distancing. I sanitized groceries, masked my children, downloaded contact tracing apps. I surrendered location data with a few taps, relieved to feel like I was contributing to safety. But it wasn't about flattening curves. It was about mapping compliance. We were studied for thresholds: how long we'd isolate, how much we'd obey, how easily fear could become unity.

The virus passed. The data remained. And the machine learned everything it needed.

Inside my home, I had become a performance. A productivity metric. An asset in a backlog. Watching our Capitol sieged by citizens with no recourse, I saw the experiment reveal its true purpose: we weren't citizens to be served or consumers to be satisfied. We were the product: tested, measured, and optimized for maximum yield.

I still can’t fathom how anyone saw this and shrugged. Or worse, cheered. January 6 wasn’t just an attack on a building. It was the mask slipping. A public beta test for authoritarianism. And too many people chose to look away.

What began as my daughter's birth into a nation I thought I understood became my realization that the system wasn't breaking… it was becoming visible.

100 Days Into the Operation

We didn't leave suburbia in protest. We left in clarity during another election cycle where another woman lost, another "lesser of two evils" crowned the illusion of choice. Something inside me cracked watching our street fracture like fault lines: houses glowing with blood-red Christmas lights in silent victory, Cybertrucks lined up like tanks, flags once hung upside down turned back over as if the disrespect never happened.

These same neighbors would have called it rigged had the outcome gone differently.

The segregation didn’t need signs or fences; it was lit in red. In the days after the election, houses like this claimed victory through holiday decor, while the rest of us sat behind closed blinds, stunned by what their celebration implied.

And then there were the rest of us, retreating inward, swallowing disbelief, asking: how the fuck did we get here?

I stopped waiting for a third option. We were the third option, or there wasn't one.

We walked away from a dream that functions only if you never name what it's built on, leaving the system to finally see it. And now, 100 days into this life, I do.

My daughters feed chickens while I drink coffee, cooling my nervous system to a temperature it never knew it could tolerate. I muck stalls with my mother, discussing healing, legacy, and the ghosts we carry from decades of survival. Our days revolve around intention, not sprint reviews or hollow rituals designed to extract until nothing remains but fatigue and fear.

Yet I still watch. I still listen. A decade in uniform trained me to recognize escalation's rhythm. I know the difference between background noise and the drumbeat of launch.

What I've witnessed these past 100 days is not drift or incompetence.

It's an operation. Coordinated. Accelerating. Executed on schedule.

The Operation in Motion

This administration didn't arrive with ideas but with marching orders, etched in doctrine while the public collapsed into the pre-packaged comfort. In military psychological operations, they taught us: break a prisoner by flooding their system, then offer a single source of relief. Control the relief, control the outcome.

The first term tested compliance. This one executes based on it.

The SAVE Act weaponizes fictional voter fraud into suppression doctrine, transforming mail-in ballots from military necessity into criminal suspicion, turning hyphenated names like mine into bureaucratic traps, converting ID requirements into disenfranchisement tools. Those who sat out elections in moral protest now watch rights dissolve, not realizing abstention was never neutrality but compliance, precisely the outcome engineered by those who designed the cracks.

I vote relentlessly, teaching my daughters democracy begins at home, not because I trust it to function, but because I won't surrender without resistance. Voting won't save us, but silence guarantees defeat.

I used this book to teach my daughters about civic duty, not as a script to memorize, but as a system to interrogate. They won’t grow up pledging loyalty. They’ll grow up asking who wrote the rules and why.

What they can't erase through ballots, they'll erase through biology. Reproductive surveillance has mutated from medical crisis to pre-criminal profiling. Texas' SB 1976 proposes using wastewater testing (technology developed during COVID btw) to detect hormones associated with birth control, abortion pills, and gender-affirming care. This transforms the body into evidence, healthcare decisions into data points for state monitoring. It's about mapping biological rhythms to identify threats to authority before choices are even made.

As a mother of two daughters, I need them to understand what I didn't: their bodies are not government terrain. Their biology is not data. Their fertility is not a national resource to be tracked, especially before algorithms dictate who they're allowed to become.

Over 4,200 books vanished from schools this year… methodically, not randomly. Teachers silenced. Pentagon students suing over curriculum erasure. Censorship now wears a badge promising efficiency and "parental rights" while systematically erasing marginalized voices. I read Fahrenheit 451 in high school as cautionary fiction; now I recognize it as tactical instruction. In 1933, they burned books by Jewish, socialist, and feminist authors. Today, they simply delete them from databases and terminate educators who resist.

Someday, I’m sure my book (in progress) will be in the pile.

This censorship flows directly into educational collapse. The Department of Education isn't being debated but deliberately abandoned; half its staff positions unfilled, funding withered, regulatory power evaporated while education is auctioned to the highest bidder. School boards have become battlegrounds where wealthy children receive critical thinking while everyone else gets compliance training. I grew up on free lunch before military service granted elite university access, only to discover both systems rigged: one producing workers, the other polishing power. Control the curriculum, control the command.

My daughters now learn through life, baking as chemistry, grocery shopping as math, dancing as PE. Because I won’t allow them to be taught to be less than what they are.

I went from free lunch to private university, both paid for in different currencies. One taught me how to show up. The other taught me who’s allowed to win. My degrees hang next to a flag I once saluted, but the fine print of both systems said the same thing: access isn’t earned, it’s bought.

The military, once framed as the great equalizer offering education, healthcare, and stability, has transformed into a pressure valve for desperation. Recruitment has collapsed, with the Army losing nearly a quarter of its recruits within two years. Today's 18-year-olds aren't apathetic; they're walking into a system that wants them desperate, not prepared.

Two female admirals my husband served under are gone, not for failure but ideology. Women and minorities are being told their service isn’t equal, their sacrifice isn’t enough, while the public cheers veteran benefits being cut and threatened to save. This isn't patriotism but coercion wrapped in a flag, with the Constitution barely mentioned.

This military crisis connects directly to global resource consolidation. Tariffs aren't just policy but weaponized chaos. A 10% universal tariff and 60% China-specific tariff weren't miscalculations but monetized opportunities; one defense contractor announcement netting insiders $70 million profit within 60 seconds. Meanwhile, ports are quietly acquired by investment giants using mortgage debt and retirement savings to convert public infrastructure into private portfolios. Resource-rich regions lose U.S. oversight as AFRICOM dissolves, creating perfect conditions for extraction under the guise of "partnership." We're gaslit into blaming supply chains while the real theft happens through interest rates funneling into firms buying farmland, water rights, and critical supply nodes.

To maintain this operation, surveillance has expanded from border security to thought control. Homeland Security now explicitly defines ideological dissent as domestic risk, monitoring "grievance-based extremism" tied to race, gender, and perceived anti-government views. Veterans. Librarians. Teachers. Journalists. Question, become a threat. American-born children are deported alongside undocumented mothers, including a cancer patient and a toddler, while wealthy foreigners purchase expedited citizenship through a $5 million "gold card" visa. Borders aren't about belonging but profitability.

While cruelty is systematized, empathy remains our greatest form of resistance. This girl? She reminds me what humanity really looks like. We lose everything if we lose our capacity to care.

I wanted to protest but didn't, not from lack of conviction but knowing I'd be watched. Our private conversations already summon answers; I mention tortoises to my husband and Instagram responds before I search. So I teach my daughters the truth: privacy is myth, but courage isn't. The most dangerous act in a surveillance state isn't hiding, it's living with eyes open and speaking anyway.

This Is Not a Warning. This Is What It Looks Like.

We've been taught to see each threat in isolation: voting rights, reproductive access, censorship, militarization, education, as if they're parallel battles instead of coordinated fronts in the same war. But they are symptoms of the same design. A system not malfunctioning, but functioning exactly as repurposed.

The ballot box becomes performance art when voter access is filtered. Free speech becomes theater when truth is punished and curriculum is censored. Healthcare becomes surveillance when your hormones are tested by the state. Military service becomes coercion when desperation is the pipeline. Citizenship becomes a product when borders are determined by capital, not birthright or contribution.

This isn't political drift. This is systemic consolidation, the rewiring of institutions that once pretended to serve the people into infrastructures designed to extract from them: labor, data, fertility, belief, consent.

We used to ask: How do we fix a broken system? Everyone agreed it was broken… the debate was over solutions: which fix would minimize collateral damage, serve the greater good, create a world worth raising children in? But while they distracted us with headlines claiming a magic fix, what they didn't expect was for us to pay attention to what was really going on. They counted on us staying fractured. Distracted. Performance-optimized. Compassion-fatigued.

But we are paying attention now.

Waking up was the hardest part. Not because the dream was good, but because the truth was worse. I realized I couldn't unknow what I knew. And from then on, silence was no longer an option.

We see the pattern: crisis manufactured, fear leveraged, solutions privatized. We see how rights become privileges, how citizenship becomes conditional, how freedom becomes an upgraded subscription. We see the weaponized kindness that offers relief only after inflicting the wound. The monetized collapse that profits from disaster. The engineered nostalgia that promises safety in exchange for compliance.

And if you've read this far, you see it too.

So the question isn't when it will get bad. It's already happening.

The question is: How will you live now that you see it?

I'm standing in the grove, 100 days into a life they said couldn't exist, rooted in resistance, surrounded by living systems that can't be privatized, raising daughters who will never be easy to govern.

I look up at satellites blinking above redwoods, knowing they're listening. Mapping this page, this sentence, this word. But I've stopped living for instant gratification, stopped sacrificing myself to stay afloat in a system designed to drown me. They analyze my patterns. Track my rhythms. Try to sell me back a version of life I've already refused.

And still, I speak up. Still, I plant crops alongside my family's roots. Still, I live like we're worth saving, because we are.

Because someday soon, maybe tomorrow, maybe not until it's too late, this country will look up from the algorithm, from the bargains we made for comfort, and ask the only question that ever mattered:

How the fuck did we get here?

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About the Author

I’m Alisa Sieber; a writer, veteran, and relentless question-asker, exposing the patterns of power, control, and resistance that shape our world. My work blends personal reckoning with systemic critique, challenging the narratives we’ve been told and demanding we ask harder questions.

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