As the school day progressed, familiar sounds beckoned from every section of the classroom. A small scuffle over who raised their hand first at the teacher’s request. Two pencils careening to the ground. Moaning from two adjacent sections in the rear the teacher didn’t properly acknowledge. The dash to the front to prove their homework expertise on the whiteboard. Giggles after a minor misspoken word followed by a serenade of shushes to remind everyone that at some point every student will have to bravely stand in front of their peers.
While the adolescent scholars conjoined into groups to prepare for the next activity of the day, their teacher requested that they work quietly. She was using the time efficiently to solidify the lesson plan for the upcoming week. Parched, she took a deep swig of her water jug and then smirked to herself, admiring the sentences and questions that sprout from young minds.
Then a missile killed everyone inside the school. Every person. Dead.
What they were was all they were ever going to be. They were the collateral damage when diplomacy doesn’t move at the pace of armaments. Negotiation, slow. Bombs, expedient.
Humans die in war all the time. It’s just a matter of how high the casualties climb. Don’t worry, the numbers will spin and increase and yet there won’t come a renewed mandate to find common connection between the warring parties to halt bloodshed. A press conference will begin. Someone will let an uninformed and ignorant thought dribble from their mouths near phones, tape recorders, and microphones. One of the two, or three, or six of the parties will deflect consequential inquiries intended to uncover honesty, empathy, or a coherent message.
The person at the lectern will fail to accomplish all three while bloviating poetically about the harsh realities of armed operations. Completely oblivious about their part in them. Ignorant as to why a press with integrity digs for answers; hopeful that they can produce some for the public. An aide out of view blocks any future questions that will only serve to intensify the thirst for answers. Accountability.
“Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers,” will spill from the face of some suit that could’ve refrained from adding to the casualty docket.
It’s war. Everyone knows what it is. They’ve seen some version of it. Heard about it in the news or a podcast. The common result when men who have never served decide to talk tough with the lives of the children of their citizens; oftentimes, never their own. The ones primed to respond with their bombs destined to pour from the skies in a deluge of munitions.
Atop streets, homes, mosques, playgrounds, hospitals, universities, churches, temples, haphazardly constructed tent cities in the middle of arid and suffocating deserts when bordering nations close their eyes to the human ills at their door. Where has this record been played before?
Even talking all the oxygen out of a room loudly and bizarrely still moves much too slowly when people die by the thousands and it all could’ve been avoided. Yes, weapons meant to tear human flesh succeed akin to the way a butcher trims fatty beef until it’s lean and moves the scraps to the grinder when done, yes, tools of the war economy turn structures into powder.
Those structures can also be defined as schools. Full of children. Nearly 200 of them.
Laughing. Learning. Arguing over places to sit at lunchtime. Grooming each other’s hair at one table, punching one another in the arm at the other. Some, opening their books to study the lesson one final time before the test awaiting them once they go back to their classroom desks. Kids such as those die when war is fought between men that can’t come to an agreement when everyone is adorned in blazers. There’s no exam for the young souls that had their lives transformed into simple digits in the casualty report.
They’re dead. Every dream they aspired to touch, strive, ache, and work towards making into reality. Sometimes bombs hit schools. It’s war. Right?
Sending people to the next life. If there is one. They wanted to be here. It’s all that they knew for the brief time they had on Earth. Today, they’ll be mourned. Some of their loved ones will never recover from the loss.
It’s war, right?
When politicians grandstand on the merits of military action rarely do any of them recognize that their threats, declarations, and monologues setting the stage for war, indeed, have to be carried out by someone. A soldier will receive orders and be responsible for bringing action to buttress the talking points that the politician conveyed.
It’s war, right?
U.S. President Donald Trump can sway, tilt, grimace, and scowl his way to cheers at this state in America or the other. His supporters will deny their own eyes and ears to what their savoir promised along his campaign. Under his second term, he was to be a staunch isolationist. No business outside America until America gets itself straight.
He, casting himself, as the only person created in the history of humans that can accomplish the task. The signs were behind him. A cry to turn inwards towards parts of the country that needed his guidance. It was “America First” from his mouth. It was the slogan he mentioned right behind the other one that’s stitched to the red hats in the U.S. To reporters, podcasters, influencers, and politicians that once despised him to swiftly debase themselves to suckle at his…power.
Relentlessly belittling his predecessor for the manner in which the U.S. finally decamped from Afghanistan, he stayed on topic with his promise of no more foreign wars for the U.S. America was done policing the globe. Millions of his supporters loved it. Waved signs; created their own. Shirts were printed. His loyal subjects would break out chants of “No more war!” He’d raise his fist, smile, and play to their affection.
Then, he pulled it right back. Lying to them. One of a countless pile of fairytales – and his voters continue to accept him for joining the attack on Iran. He fibs about the money he illegally siphons while serving as the sitting president. He ignores the cries centered on grocery, gas, housing, etc., affordability. His government has cleared him of all links to Jeffrey Epstein while carefully redacting every morsel that could incriminate him further in the files that have been released thus far.
He blew past his promises to make the necessities of life affordable shortly after returning to the White House. It’s a “hoax.” All of it. It should be. Cost of living receipts don’t influence his life. They never have. Yet, the poor will not abandon him even as he rips away their healthcare, food benefits, Social Security, rural hospitals and eliminates unions. He signed the One Big Beautiful Bill which represents the largest transfer of wealth in the history of human beings…from poorest Americans to the wealthiest ones. Yet, they are loyally defiant in their adoration.
To be continued…
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