What Omar exposes is the unbearable truth that conviction does not guarantee purity, and that believing women does not hand you an unblemished path. It only insists that harm be seen clearly, even when every available option still carries its own damage. Her decision refuses the comfort of denial; she does not shrink the wound to make her vote feel better, nor does she pretend the landscape is anything but poisoned.
We are left with a democracy that demands we act while knowing our hands are not clean. The knot in the throat, the sick feeling in the gut, are not signs we have failed our principles, but that we are finally measuring their cost honestly. In that raw acknowledgment—unsatisfying, incomplete, and without heroes—accountability stops being a slogan and becomes a practice we drag, imperfectly, into the voting booth with us.
