ArcaMax

I don't want to write today. There wasn't much to say after watching the horrors scrolling on my phone. Whatever I could try to shape into language feels inadequate against a video that rewires your nervous system.

It showed women and children waiting in line outside a clinic, and then they weren't. They were bombed. There was a bloody white dress and a dying mother asking after the already lost soul that she was only allowed to share the world with for four years.

There's no rescue from the truth once it's seen. The explosion was real. The people were real.

And here I sit, typing in a country where the power is still on, where my children are at school, where the grocery store down the street has a sale on blueberries. That gap between here and there, alive and obliterated, is almost too vast to bridge with reason.

Almost. The only thing separating me from that clinic line is geography and luck. It's not virtue, better decisions, no divine favor, but just the random, feral lottery of existence.

That's the unbearable part: the ordinariness of it. How thin the membrane is between safety and catastrophe, and how often the world pretends otherwise. We talk about resilience and preparation and personal responsibility, but none of that explains why a child born in Gaza is bombed in line for antibiotics, while mine gets a popsicle and sunscreen. It's not moral order; it's statistical chance. Or that's what we tell ourselves, because calling it luck keeps the knife from our own hands. But it's not luck alone. It's engineered disparity. It's the result of borders drawn with indifference, weapons funded with intention, and grief algorithmically hidden from view.

Part of the disorientation comes from the fact that our hearts may never have been meant to hold this much. The Dunbar number -- a theory that suggests we can only truly maintain about 150 relationships at a time -- was rooted in villages, tribes, places where you could look someone in the eye and know their children's names. Evolution didn't prepare us for the emotional shrapnel of watching entire apartment buildings fall in places we've never been, or to witness grief on a global scale every time we open a phone.

We're being asked to metabolize mass death as a regular feature of the news cycle, and if we're not numb, we're wrecked. There's no evolutionary roadmap for this kind of empathy. Only the decision, again and again, not to let our emotional limitations justify our moral ones.

I've spent years trying to make sense of senselessness, trying to write my way into something resembling coherence. But there are days when writing feels obscene, like explaining fire to someone already burning. What good is a column when the sky is falling on people who did nothing more than exist?

And yet I write. Maybe because I have no better offering. Maybe because silence, too, is a kind of violence -- especially when it's convenient. Maybe because the only dignity I can offer the dead is refusal: a refusal to look away, to normalize their erasure, to let comfort dilute clarity.

This isn't a plea for political consensus. I'm not interested in arguing with those who've calcified their empathy into ideology. I'm writing for the people who still flinch. The ones who see smoke and hear screaming and can't get on with their day.

Some days, all I want is for someone to explain how to raise children in a world like this. How to hand them tools for peace while knowing the machine around them runs on cruelty. How to speak of hope without insulting the dead. How to help them recognize their own immense, undeserved safety without letting it lull them into moral laziness.

I have no answers, only this sharp-edged awareness that I am alive while others are not. That disparity should haunt all of us. It should change us. It should press into our choices and conversations and votes and wallets until the weight of what we've seen finally outweighs the comfort of looking away.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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