This is Not Strength

We’re living in a time that feels like an ugly, dangerous time loop.

We’ve watched this story play out in different colors, religions, and cultures. Across the boundaries of different nations and places.

But the pattern is the same.

Conquer. Collect. Push certain people to the margins. Make them bad. Make them evil. Call them criminals, parasites, or threats, and then deem them the cause of everything wrong in our personal world.

Normalize disappearance. Strip people of their rights. Dress up cruelty and call it safety.

We’ve seen this before in Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, the internment of Japanese Americans, Rwanda, and Argentina’s “Dirty War.” The details differ, but the mechanics are familiar.

It never starts with mass violence. It starts with language. With framing groups of people as dangerous, disposable, and deserving of harm. By the time the atrocities are undeniable, people have already been taught to look away.

The language is sharp. The lines are hard. People are disappearing from communities, families are living in fear, and the political divide no longer feels like disagreement so much as mutual dehumanization.

History has been invoked not as a warning we’re heeding, but as a mirror we’re afraid to look into.

I don’t write this from a place of certainty, but from grief. From disappointment. From anger.

We were supposed to be better than this, because we should know better.

For so many reasons.

One that I keep coming back to is simple.

The value and importance of people. All people. Regardless of race, religion, or creed.

When I look honestly at what breaks people at the end of life, of what they regret, what they cherish, what they reach for, it is never dominance. It is never being right. It is never what they owned or how they outperformed someone else.

It is people.

It is relationships that were nurtured or neglected. It is love that was given freely or withheld out of fear. It is whether we showed up for one another when it mattered.

And yet, we’re being asked over and over again to forget this.

To instead climb over one another as steps to reach a prize. To use one another as pawns or resources for more. To treat each other as competition for what we feel is rightly ours.

The grasping, the claiming, the staking of claim comes from fear and a desire for power to quiet that fear. Pure and simple.

We’re being taught to see neighbors as threats, difference as danger, and compassion as weakness. Just today I read someone claim that compassion has been weaponized. Instead, we’re told that cruelty is necessary, that harm is justified, and that if someone suffers it must somehow be deserved.

This is not strength. It is conditioning.

And the part that matters to me most is this, it is that beneath the noise, beneath the propaganda, beneath the fear-based narratives, most of us share the same core values.

We want our children to be safe. We want our families to be fed and housed. We want dignity in work, care when we are sick, and to believe that our lives matter beyond what we produce or earn. We want to love the people we love without fear, and to know that if something terrible happens, our community will not turn its back on us.

These ideas are not radical. They are human. Any movement that requires us to abandon compassion in order to belong has no moral center.

When societies fracture this deeply, the most dangerous thing isn’t disagreement it’s disconnection.

The moment we stop recognizing one another as human, history tells us exactly where this road leads.

Power, real power, has never come from fear, conquering, or claiming.

It comes from remembering who we are responsible to.

We are not meant to live in constant vigilance, scanning for enemies. We are meant to live in relationship. To care for children who are not ours. To protect the vulnerable even when it costs us something. To refuse to allow our hearts to harden, even when we think that would be safer.

Love is not passive. Care is not naïve. Choosing humanity in a time like this is courage.

If there is a “middle ground” worth standing in, it is not political compromise at the expense of people’s lives. It is the ground of shared humanity and the refusal to let fear make us forget that every person is someone’s child, someone’s love, someone’s loss.

They don’t need to look like us, sound like us, or act like us to be worthy of care.

They don’t have to make perfect decisions or choices to be worthy of love.

We will not be remembered for how well we argued.
We will be remembered for how we treated each other when it was hardest.

Always,
Your Trusted Friend ❤