We were promised empathy. That’s what haunts me most—not the rise of cruelty itself, but the fact that it came wearing the robes of compassion. In corners of the internet once devoted to justice, art, and peace, something colder has taken root. A fury not directed at institutions or corporations or systems, but at people. Specifically, at people who use generative AI. Not to harm. Not to exploit. Just to explore. To play. To create. And suddenly, for that alone, they are decl

The world does not change because someone writes a list of rules. It changes when enough people decide that kindness no longer needs permission. I used to think ethics was a philosophy. Something you debated, defined, then filed away under “theory.” But theory doesn’t stop a hand from shaking when it has to choose whether to help or to look away. Theory doesn’t reach across a counter, or stand between a cruelty and its next excuse. Living with conscience isn’t an idea; it’

The ruins are always quieter than you expect. After the sirens, after the statements, after the footage has been looped until meaning bleeds out of it, there’s a hush no one knows what to do with. Broken glass has its own kind of silence. Smoke drifts like a thought that refuses to finish itself. You can hear your breath again, and that can feel like treason when the world is calibrated for rage. From the beginning, the story moved like this: a shot, then a script. A body, th

If cruelty can be organized, then compassion can be organized too. We already know how harm sustains itself: through laws, profits, and repetition. People have built entire systems around neglect. That means care can be structured the same way—it just hasn’t been made a priority. In The Hands That Mend, we talked about repair on a personal level: the small, quiet actions that rebuild trust and connection. But individual healing can only go so far when the systems we live in k

After every conflict, there’s a quiet period. It isn’t peaceful — just the silence that follows after anger, argument, or chaos. You’re left with the weight of everything that’s been said and done, wondering what to do next. In The Silence That Teaches, we learned how to pause — how to stop reacting and give space for reflection. But silence is only the first step. What comes next is harder: repair. Repair begins when things are calm again, but not yet healed. It’s when you f

In A Language of Mercy, we learned that words can harm just as much as actions — and that cruelty often continues through both what we say and what we avoid saying. So once you’ve learned to speak with care and stop repeating harm, what comes next? Silence. Not silence out of fear, exhaustion, or avoidance — but the kind that allows space to think, to listen, and to process before responding. Modern life doesn’t value that kind of silence. People are expected to react instant

After pain, there’s usually a period of silence. Eventually, people start talking again. But not every kind of speech helps. Words can hurt. You learn this quickly — how a careless sentence, even when spoken gently, can reopen emotional wounds. Cruelty often survives through the way people talk. It doesn’t always show up as violence; sometimes it spreads through language that teaches others to think or feel less compassion. Once you start to heal personally, you notice how mu

Healing doesn’t mean the pain goes away or that what happened stops mattering. It means learning to live with it — to understand it, care for it, and make it part of who you are without letting it control you. Some days you’ll feel peaceful and hopeful. Other days you’ll feel the weight of what happened all over again. That’s normal. Healing isn’t about forgetting or pretending things are fine. It’s about slowly finding stability and kindness toward yourself even when things

It’s easy to hate. It’s easy to call your hate justice. It’s easy to see what others have destroyed and promise you’ll never be like them—while holding your own weapon in hand. Anger feels clean. It makes the world simple. It makes you feel strong and right. But even justified anger can corrupt you if you hold onto it too long. It begins to whisper that harm can heal, that punishment can fix what’s broken, that hurting someone back will make things fair. If you listen long en

Someone did something terrible. You already know who comes to mind when you hear that. Maybe it’s one person, a group, or an ideology. You can recall what they did and how it made you feel — anger, disgust, a sense of injustice. You may have wanted them to feel what they caused: fear, guilt, loss. You wanted them to understand. Calling them monsters feels satisfying. It separates you from them. It creates order out of chaos and makes pain easier to hold. It feels righteous. Y

They did something terrible. You don’t need me to tell you what. You already know who they are. Their face formed in your mind the moment you read that first line. Maybe it’s one face. Maybe it’s a crowd. Maybe it’s an entire belief system that moves like smoke and sounds like power. You can see their hands — the ones that did the unforgivable thing. You can hear the words they used to justify it, the way they laughed, the way the world seemed to let them walk away untouched.

We trace the patterns. That’s what we do. Not because we want to be prophets, or martyrs, or right. But because we’re scared. Because we’ve seen this before. Because somewhere beneath the noise and the slogans and the calls for blood, we remember what it means to be human. This is the tenth post in a series I wish I never had to write. I thought maybe one piece would be enough. One scream. One warning. One grief made public. But the world kept moving. The machine kept turnin

It starts with a shrug. A cough dismissed. A mask pocketed. A headline scrolled past. The quiet normalization of risk. The idea that “everyone will get it eventually.” That some people just won’t make it, and that’s fine. That’s the price of moving on. But that’s how political violence begins — not with spectacle, but with consent. With the slow erosion of empathy, the bureaucratization of suffering, the dulling of outrage until neglect becomes policy. The body count turns in

It didn’t happen all at once. That’s what makes it so terrifying. There was no singular law passed, no dystopian regime, no camera drilled into the center of every ceiling. What happened instead was slower. Quieter. Cultural. Algorithmic. We turned ourselves into witnesses, into judges, into brands. We learned to perform—and then forgot we were performing. And somewhere along the way, the surveillance state didn’t need to grow stronger. It just needed us to keep watching each

A dream that shouldn’t have to be a dream (and what we can build right now) If you removed the budget caps. If you lifted the policies...

The words are out in the open now. Not whispered in think tank reports, not hidden in policy drafts, not implied between lines of speeches — spoken plainly, with applause in the halls of Quantico. The new banner is raised: defense is dead. Defense is no longer. War has taken its place. We are told peace is not the mission. War is. We are told pacifism is not caution. It is “naive and dangerous.” We are told lethality is not a grim necessity but a calling card. And we are

It was never going to take long. The gunfire was still echoing, the grief still raw, and already the script was waiting. Not from the fringes this time, not from anonymous accounts stitching lies together in the dark corners of the internet, but from the podium of the White House itself. A statement polished to a blade: blame named, enemy chosen, cause declared. “Unhinged crusade.” That’s the phrase they use. Not grief, not inquiry, not even hesitation—just crusade. As if cri

It starts quietly, like so much else in this country now. An order slips across the wires, sudden and absolute: every general, every admiral, every senior commander above a certain rank must be in Virginia. Not a request. A command. Rearrange your missions, reroute your flights, leave your posts. The world will wait. And they come. Hundreds of them. Veterans of old wars, survivors of deployments that stretched decades, men and women who have buried soldiers under too many fla

It keeps happening. We’ve seen another shooting. This time, two ICE detainees are critically injured, with one dead, in Dallas. And already, the same war machine is turning: press conferences, buzzwords, declarations of war. A shell casing marked “ANTI-ICE” becomes the proof of an ideology. A name. A face. A photo. A post. That’s all it takes. The script is ready. But dig even slightly beneath the surface and it slips. As Ken Klippenstein has uncovered , Joshua Jahn, the shoo

They’re not curing autism. They’re trying to erase it. The Trump administration just took a dangerous step: they’ve officially endorsed...