Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, friends and family,

Tonight, I’m not just Erik Houdini standing before you. No, tonight I am speaking as the very spirit of Houdini himself. The spirit that, once bound in chains and cast into the depths, dared to claw his way back up. Not for fame, not for applause – but for something far greater. I am here to remind you, every one of you, that the time has come to shake off the shackles holding us down. To break the chains that bind.

Picture yourself, my friends, at the bottom of a river so cold it cuts to the bone. Chains clasped tight around your wrists, stones shackled to your ankles, pulling you deeper, into a world of pitch-black depth where even light refuses to reach. You can’t see the surface; you can’t tell which way is up or down. You feel only the icy grip of the water pressing in, tighter and tighter, the sting of it biting to the bone, until every part of you aches from the freezing pressure. You gasp for air, you struggle, but the chill seizes your lungs like iron, and you’re forced to confront one, singular, terrible truth: if you do not break free, if you do not act, you will drown here.

In that moment, you feel the weight of inaction—a weight far heavier than any chain or shackle, a weight that goes beyond your own wrists and ankles. It’s a weight you recognize. It’s the sorrow of a generation, a people made to bear witness to horrors each and every day, a world where fear and silence are shackles just as binding, where cruelty is allowed to flourish unchecked. The weight of watching and waiting, knowing all that is wrong, yet doing nothing because the world says, "Do not speak of the genocide, do not rise against the regime, stay where you are.”

And so, the water pulls you deeper, and you are struck by the faces of those before you who fell silent, who were swallowed by fear and darkness, who knew what was wrong and yet felt too small to fight it. You see them—those who were beaten down by a life of waiting, of wanting, of hoping someone else would stand in their place, break their chains, and lift them from the depths. You feel the grief of all those who were taught to accept what they saw, to witness pain and destruction as if it were the daily bread of life. And that grief, my friends, becomes a dead weight on your soul, as heavy as the stones around your ankles.

But then, something stirs. A flicker of rebellion. A spark of courage. And you realize you must fight, not just for yourself, but for every soul who has ever felt the weight of these chains. You must become a miracle, the miracle they said was impossible. In that freezing, suffocating darkness, with nothing but the thinnest thread of hope, you begin to strain against the bindings, to wrestle your hands free, to kick against the weight that holds you.

You realize, my friends, this is our moment to rise. Because if we fail to break these chains, if we choose the easy road, the way of silence, then we will stay here, forgotten in the depths. And not just us, but generations to come. If we do not rise, they, too, will be born with stones around their ankles, with iron on their wrists, with the weight of inaction as their inheritance. But if we act? If we rise from this icy river, if we shatter every lock and cast off every shackle, then we do something far greater than survive.

We become the miracle that the world said could never happen. We rise from the depths, unbreakable, unstoppable. We choose to act, to live, to break free. For ourselves, and for everyone who has ever felt the cold weight of silence. We may be bound, we may be shackled, but we are not powerless. We will break our chains. We will rise. We will breathe free. And the world will know that we did not falter, we did not drown.

So rise up, friends. Rise, and break free. For we – we will not fail.

From the River to the Sea,
Erik Houdini

10/31/24