By Mə̂fò Nyàpgùŋ
“Every place where silence hardens is a question history never resolved.”
Today I walked again through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
For the second time.
Not as a tourist.
Not as a historian.
But as a witness.
A witness listening closely,
Trying to see what she may have missed the first time.
The place speaks.
Not with noise, but with echoes.
Not in facts, but in layers.
Every crack, every plaque, every photographed silence
whispers the same haunting question:
What really happened here?
On that day when a motorcade turned,
and history fractured in full daylight.
They call it a tragedy.
A national wound.
But what I saw today
was more than a moment frozen in time.
I saw a parable.
A metaphor.
A modern fable of democracy undone.
The plaza no longer belongs to 1963.
It reflects every year that followed—
every voice silenced,
every hope buried beneath ballots,
every people told that to vote was to be free.
My thoughts wandered.
They traveled to lives cut short, not by history,
but by habit.
Bullets no longer fired from grassy knolls,
but from classroom windows, shopping aisles,
living rooms once thought safe.
I thought of children
who will never have a second chance.
Of grieving mothers
watching the Second Amendment
guarded like sacred scripture.
And I whispered,
What have we learned?
Then, suddenly,
my thoughts crossed an ocean.
I found myself walking streets I know well—
where protest leads to prison,
where ideas are met with beatings,
where women are killed
for daring to live freely.
And their killers walk free.
There, democracy does not speak.
It watches.
It punishes.
It buries.
Too heavy.
Too much.
So I returned—
Returned to this plaza,
to this scar in the heart of Texas.
Here, once, the most powerful man in the “free world” fell.
Not just to bullets—
but to what those bullets meant:
Fear. Control.
The failure of a promise.
And I asked,
What is democracy?
A flag?
A building?
A ritual?
Or is it the right to speak and be heard?
To live without fear?
To resist without disappearing?
If that is democracy,
then I ask:
Where can I find it?
A real one.
A living one.
Not one built on marble and myth,
but on justice and shared humanity.
Dealey Plaza is not just a site of death.
It is a mirror.
A mirror held up to every nation
that calls itself free
but refuses to mourn its own silences.
And as long as democracy remains a mask,
we will keep walking.
Searching.
Asking.
And the plaza will keep whispering:
Look again.
Don’t miss it this time.