Code 33: Silence Is Often Violence and My Verbal Siren Is Our Reckoning

Ten-Nine, Tinman.

Radio Silence: The Requisite Preamble

Code 33, particularly as it pertains to what is known as law enforcement, means an emergency with restricted radio traffic (radio silence for all except emergency broadcasts related to that incident). Code 33 is declared when a life threatening situation prevails where normal radio communication must cease so that the officers involved in the emergency have an open and clear channel to communicate with dispatch and responding units. Code 33 is often accompanied by a distinct tone on the radio channel to alert other officers.

Can you hear me now?

Essentially, and primarily, Code 33 is a tactical demand that all other radio users stop transmitting to allow critical emergency messages through. To be crudely blunt, it means shut the fuck up because in the grand scheme of things whatever you have to say, or have been saying, is irrelevant. Why?

Because some bad shit is going down requiring all of our attention.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, occurring domestically and internationally is a surprise to me. In fact, I have memorialized the proverbial Ghost of Yet to Come in many archival writings which are easily referenced. Nonetheless, even I am stricken by not only the rampant lunacy resultant of a society in which the inmates run the asylum but, most spectacularly, its suicidal nature.

Then again, one cannot commit suicide if one is already dead.

Today marks the first two weeks of the New Year, 2026 and I remember New Year’s 2020. That year, 2020, no one could imagine that people would see abandoned streets all over the “US” in the next 61 days. That your neighbors would get into fisticuffs over toilet paper in 61 days. That bleach, a common and cheap household cleaner, would be placed in safes and Lysol would sell for $20.00 per can. Though hindsight is allegedly “20/20.”

As I observe the first 336 hours of 2026 I have been no less than stupefied and though I write constantly nothing I have written has been worthy of anything more than the cutting room floor…until now. The sheer horror of what the “US” is about to experience has left me temporarily relegated to being mute, if not moot. But, rest assuredly, the “US” is about to face matters in the next year that are going to change the world in ways that no one reading this article might imagine. Ergo, my tactical silence will now yield to my deafening siren; for one begats the other.

And our violence, is our silence.

10-9?