There are people on television right now, analyzing.
Graphs. Polling numbers. Strategic implications. The geopolitical chessboard. Words like “escalation” and “theater” and “optics” as though we are talking about anything other than children. As though somewhere in the distance, between the pundits and the green screen, there aren’t actual human beings waking up this morning not knowing if today is the day they die.
I watch them and I think: what the fuck would you know?
Not as an insult. As a genuine question. What do you actually know about waking up and wondering if the world sees you? If your life registers the same weight as the life of someone in a suburb somewhere, someone who will eat breakfast this morning and complain about traffic and never once have to wonder whether their child will make it to nightfall?
Close your eyes for a moment.
Not to pray. Not to think. Just to feel.
You are a child. You had parents. You had a home with a smell you didn’t notice until it was gone. You had a favorite place to sit. You had someone who called your name in a specific way that no one else ever did. And now you are in the rubble of all of that, and somewhere on the other side of the world, someone is analyzing whether the timing of what happened to you was politically advantageous.
We choose the leaders who decide this. That is not a comfortable sentence. It shouldn’t be.
No analysis will ever touch that. No argument will ever reach it. You can be right about every fact and still be completely untouched by the truth of it, and if you are untouched, you are useless to the people suffering. Worse than useless. You become part of the noise that drowns them out.
The only thing that has ever changed anything is when a human being stopped performing understanding and actually attempted it. Closed their eyes. Stepped out of their own life and into someone else’s. Really tried to feel what it would mean to wake up invisible. To exist in a world that debates your humanity like it’s a policy position.
If you can feel that, even for one second, then speak.
If you can’t, then please. Just stop talking.
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