Small Rules, Big Crimes: The Reckoning Is Coming

I’m sitting in the plaza, smoking.

It’s an ordinary afternoon. Brick. Benches. A fountain trying to sound serene. I’m not bothering anyone. I’m just there.

A park ranger walks up.

“You can’t smoke here.”

There was a time when that would have landed normally.

Oh. Okay. Didn’t know. Makes sense. Public space. Public rules. We all follow them so things work.

But that was before.

Now when he says it, something detonates inside me.

I can’t smoke in the plaza—but you can be complicit in a system that allowed my kidnapping. My torture. My exploitation. My obliteration. My unimaginable loss.

You can enforce this rule with confidence while the worst crimes against me dissolved into paperwork and shrugs. Oh gee, that’s too bad.

You can tell me where I’m allowed to stand with a cigarette, but no one can tell anyone where they are allowed to stand while I’m screaming for help—for law enforcement, for law at all—over and over and over again.

That is the emotional reality.

Outwardly, I say what civilization requires.

“Oh. Okay.”

I stand up. I walk away.

But inside, the contract is shattered.

Because here’s the fracture: the rules are enforced downward. The small infractions are policed with precision. The massive ones—when they implicate power, money, reputation, institutions—become fog.

So I litter. I leave behind an empty box of crackers.

Petty. Intentional.

Not because I think littering is noble. Not because I want a dirtier world. But because something in me refuses, in that moment, to keep performing moral compliance for a structure that did not protect me.

You want me to uphold the rules of civilization? Show me civilization.

Now imagine this multiplied.

Imagine every woman who has had the same dawning realization: that she was told the law is neutral, the system is fair, the rules apply to everyone—only to discover the rules apply meticulously to her and loosely, if at all, to the people who harmed her.

Imagine the quiet recalibration happening in a million nervous systems.

The moment where “Oh, okay” is still said aloud—

—but inside, something withdraws.

Civic faith.
Institutional loyalty.
Automatic cooperation.

We are just at the beginning of that shift.

Most women still follow the rules. We pay taxes. We recycle. We vote. We smile politely at park rangers. We correct our behavior when told to.

But the innocence is gone.

Right now, many women are in the plaza.

Still saying, “Oh, okay.”
Still walking away.

But something fundamental has shifted.

This wasn’t random.

What happened to me was criminal.
What has happened to millions of women is criminal.

Not misunderstandings.
Not bad luck.
Not isolated incidents.

Criminal.

And systems that repeatedly shield perpetrators while policing women’s behavior are not neutral. They are structured.

You can enforce small rules while ignoring large crimes for only so long.

There will be a reckoning.

Not chaos.
Not revenge.

Accountability.

And once enough women stop believing the rules were ever mutual, the system doesn’t get to pretend anymore.

They’ll be getting the memo—if they haven’t already.