It feels like it’s been a long forever, and I am very tired. The last few years of forever in particular have been an exercise in cruelty to scale. In Ukraine, the Russian bombs fall and the Russian drones buzz and lives are ended and upended. In Gaza, the bombs never seem to stop falling. Lives there, tenuous already from decades of conflict and subjugation, have somehow gotten so much more difficult. An almost unfathomable number of children have died in the last year at the hands of the Israeli military. So many families are broken. In neighboring Israel, people mourn the loss of their own children to the attacks by Hamas leadership on October 7, 2023. The recent ceasefire and hostage exchange between Hamas and Israel, which should have been cause for some relief, has led to a horrific display of inhumanity with Hamas parading children’s caskets before handing them over. More families broken. In Beirut, bent for decades but not fully broken, Israeli missiles hit apartment buildings, hit people’s lives, their homes. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the vultures are eagerly exploiting the resources of the land while the population is beset by war. In Sudan, a civil war has displaced tens of millions while killing thousands. In the US, families who have fought through so much to come here, to work here, to live here are uprooted with little warning and sent to camps in countries they do not know.
If you ask most people in the world if they want this shit, they’ll say they do not. People just want to live their lives. People want to be with friends and families. People want to laugh and share and eat and drink and have fun. Some people want to work and build and make music and art and cook and brew. Some people want to have their slice of life and be left mostly alone. That’s fine too. People just want to live.
People do not want to worry about drone attacks, about missiles hitting their homes, about their babies being kidnapped and tortured and killed, about going hungry because an army is stopping all food from coming into the area. People don’t want to worry about war encroaching on their daily lives. People don’t want that shit.
People do not want the world’s richest jerk who couldn’t design a paper bag to save his life telling them they’re fired. People do not want to be uprooted because they suddenly don’t have jobs. People don’t want to struggle to pay bills or figure out a place to live. People don’t want to work hard and then one day have ICE come and imprison them, and for what exactly? For daring to believe the American Dream is real and striving to make it so. People don’t want that shit either.
Unfortunately, there are a small number of people who do seem to just want to hurt other people. No real or rhyme or reason to it, they just seem to get their kicks in by kicking others, especially when they’re down. Vladmir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Hamas leadership, among others don’t seem to understand what most people want. They get what they want though and that is to hurt people. Most people don’t want that. They don’t want to hurt each other. Most people just want to fucking live. Why is it so hard for people like Putin and Trump and Netanyahu to understand this?
We are told that these people hate these other people, but really I think a few people in power hate a lot of other people and they just happen to target the ones easiest for them to kill. This is why I am always careful to blame government officials for atrocities they carry out instead of blaming an entire nation of people. I know, deep down, that most people in those nations don’t want this. They want to live.
We are here on this planet for only so long. Most people don’t want to measure time well spent in gallons of blood shed. Most people don’t want to accumulate more wealth than they can understand and then use that wealth to repeatedly break the spirits of people they don’t know. Because most people know these are not ways to live. These are ways to kill. And that’s not what most people want. Most people just want to live. Why then can’t we just let people live?