will they ask us what it is like?
what it is like to have lived through the first genocide
with surround sound & high definition
to carry the slaughter in our back pockets
like loose change & forgotten receipts
while we stood in Starbucks lines
debating oat milk versus almond
& whether Mercury was in retrograde again
listen
and i mean really listen because
this is the sound of a whole generation
that learned to swipe past mass graves
on the way to check our horoscopes,
that mastered the beautiful choreography
of care without consequence,
of loving humanity in the abstract
while humans died in full resolution
In a future where everyone loudly claims
they were against this from the beginning
but i was there in the great silence,
i watched us perfect the art
of righteous scrolling,
of changing profile pictures to watermelons
& calling it resistance while ordering
from Amazon & pretending
our convenience wasn’t complicit
in the machinery of erasure
Oh the almighty intimacy of it
watching children die over breakfast cereal,
seeing mothers scream into phone cameras
while we sat in artisan cafes
or listening to true crime podcasts,
the algorithm feeding us just enough horror
to keep us engaged but not enough
to make us dangerous to the profit line
you'd think we were monsters
but we were trained monkeys
dancing to a dopamine drumbeat,
taught that witnessing was action,
that sharing was solidarity,
that our thumbs were weapons
How our hearts were hashtags
That revolution would fit in 280 characters
or less
i remember the protests - such beautiful protests
where we chanted “never again”
while livestreaming the very “again”
happening in real time,
where we held signs about genocide
then went home to scroll through TikTok
& pretend our silence wasn’t consent,
our comfort wasn’t complicity
And here’s what breaks me open
like a piñata full of sharpened blades:
how normal it all became,
how quickly we adapted to carrying
the weight of dead children
in our notifications,
how we learned to love with one hand
while the other stayed numb
from overexposure to atrocity
and one day everyone would say
they were always against this
but where were you when the bombs fell
in vertical videos posted at Famine AM?
where were you when mothers
held their broken babies up to cameras
begging the world to remember their names?
you were there, we were all there,
watching through glass screens
& calling it bearing witness
you'll ask why we didn’t stop it
as if our hearts weren’t algorithms
programmed for comfortable distance,
as if we hadn’t been conditioned
to consume suffering like entertainment,
to rate the authenticity of grief
in comment sections,
to debate whether children’s screams
were worth missing our yoga class
& the worst part
the part that haunts my sleep
wasn’t the images of destruction
but how quickly they became wallpaper,
how we learned to multitask empathy,
to feel bad about genocide
while simultaneously worrying
about our credit scores, making rent
& whether that text was left on read
one day everyone will have been against this
from the very beginning,
will claim they knew it was wrong,
will build monuments to our collective shame
& pretend they weren’t part
of the great swipe-past,
the beautiful amnesia
that let us sleep through slaughter
but i remember the sound of silence
not the noble Simon, Garfunkl'ed kind,
the ugly kind that tastes like privilege
& sounds like notifications turned off,
like “it’s complicated” & “both sides”
& “what can one person do anyway?”
while children bled out in real time
While we debated whether their deaths
were worth disrupting our commute
so when your children ask
what we did during the livestreamed genocide,
don’t tell them we didn’t know
tell them we carried the evidence
in our pockets every day,
that we made their dying into content,
their mothers’ screams into shareable moments,
their blood into engagement metrics
that fed the same machine
we pretended to resist
somewhere in the digital graveyard
of expired stories & deleted posts,
their ghosts are still broadcasting,
still trying to break through
the static of our beautiful indifference,
still hoping we might look up
from our screens long enough
to remember that love
was supposed to be a verb,
not a hashtag trending
in the wrong direction..
Comments
Post a Comment