In normal times, our leaders would be working tirelessly to remind us of our common humanity. Reminding us that the people we see on the streets in this country are not the people making decisions about war and peace in others.

In normal times, our fellows would be sensitive enough to our situations that they could hold us in our moments of pain and our moments of fear. Sharing our sorrow; rendering us comfort; wishing us peace.

But in these times,
Trauma lies naked on trauma.
The raw meat of one sickly event sticking to the next, only separated by the gritty salt of our leaders’ words.
Pain leavened with fear;
baked in the heat of injustice;
outrage the eventual feast.

At that bitter table, too many of us succumb:

Empathy hides behind a stone façade
Our hearts shielded from the blows we visualize falling
from a thousand strangers’ hands.
Compassion is locked away
A danger to us when we see a world without innocents
Just Death,
Death…
death
Lurking behind every smiling face.

In this environment, so many of us become our lesser selves.
Seeing, not people, but the oases and obstacles of a desolate land.
Will you support my just crusade or hinder?
So many of us lose our ability to see nuance,
to seek connection,
to work towards mutual understanding….

(

Are we a generations lost?
forever scarred by whether we chose to support this innocent or that innocent in this moment, not quite able to support all innocents?

Or will we, on a scale of years, decades, the lifetime we yet have, be able to find our better selves again?
And in so doing, find each other?
To understand our friends’ concerns from a time long past.
To feel their pain and confusion and outrage and terror?
And to let go of our own pain and confusion and outrage and terror — to heal and find the stillness of peace when stillness is all that remains for us?

-Anonymous Badger, May 2025, Granite Bay