It's happening again.
This country that taught itself to believe that we saved the world in 1945 is now adopting the same modes of operation that doomed it in the first place.
It's come full circle, to be fair. When we look to the past and ask how anyone could stand by and let such atrocities occur back then, we don't even realize it's ourselves we're questioning.
We point to WWII because it's the only example we seem able to hold, yet even there we misunderstand our role. How the groundwork was laid quietly, legally, and with broad public consent — not for extermination, but for exclusion, suspension of rights, and the erosion of due process — long before the consequences of those choices became impossible to deny.
There are countless other moments, historical and contemporary, where the horrendous consequences of our ways fell on people and places beyond our borders. Moments we never even metabolized because we refused to truly see them.
Now those same conditions are forming again, here at home. Homes are searched. People are "arrested" and "sentenced" without the processes we once insisted defined us. And while this unfolds beneath our feet, half of us record it on our phones, and the other half dismiss it as deserved because the people it happens to are no longer viewed as fully human.
This seems eerily familiar.
It's come full circle, to be fair. When we look to the past and ask how anyone could stand by and let such atrocities occur back then, we don't even realize it's ourselves we're questioning.
We point to WWII because it's the only example we seem able to hold, yet even there we misunderstand our role. How the groundwork was laid quietly, legally, and with broad public consent — not for extermination, but for exclusion, suspension of rights, and the erosion of due process — long before the consequences of those choices became impossible to deny.
There are countless other moments, historical and contemporary, where the horrendous consequences of our ways fell on people and places beyond our borders. Moments we never even metabolized because we refused to truly see them.
Now those same conditions are forming again, here at home. Homes are searched. People are "arrested" and "sentenced" without the processes we once insisted defined us. And while this unfolds beneath our feet, half of us record it on our phones, and the other half dismiss it as deserved because the people it happens to are no longer viewed as fully human.
This seems eerily familiar.
